Adam Bodnar is a Professor of Law at SWPS University in Warsaw, heading the Department for Rule of Law and Human Rights. He is also a Senator of the Republic of Poland, elected in October 2023, and a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. He previously served as Minister of Justice (December 2023–July 2025) and as Ombudsman of Po…

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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is In the Realm of the Last Man. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column at Persuasion.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama discuss why human nature has been so central to Fukuyama’s political thought, what modern evolutionary biology and anthropology tell us about the myth of primordial individualism, and whether human beings are best understood as fundamentally social creatures or fundamentally self-interested ones.

Enjoying this discussion? In an event exclusively for readers of American Purpose and Persuasion, Yascha Mounk will be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about his life and thought at 5pm on Sunday, September 6 at The Abbey Centre, London. Find out more and get tickets here. Paying subscribers of Persuasion and American Purpose can access a code for a free ticket here.

We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.

This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, features content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: What we want to talk about for this part of a conversation relates specifically to two of your books, but also to themes that really pervade every part of your work, which is the role that human nature plays in understanding the social world. To start off with, I think that there is something somewhat unusual about a major social theorist of the late 20th, early 21st century putting so much emphasis on human nature in the first place. A lot of social theory in the 20th century started from the premise that there really is not such a thing as human nature and that any appeal to human nature is at best misguided and at worst dangerous. Why do you think that in reflecting about the kinds of politics we can have and should aspire to, we need to root ourselves in an account of human nature?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, I think there are several answers to that question. Historically you cannot understand the development of modern political theories about what a just society looks like without reference to human nature, because many philosophers in the past based their theories on a substantive theory of human nature. The other one is kind of commonsensical: there are certain human faculties and capabilities that strike me as not just uniquely human, but at the core of what we regard as our humanity, and the attempt to deny the existence of that core of capacities just strikes me as a little bit crazy. I think that is actually something only academics could convince themselves of, that everything is simply socially constructed. I am struck by many arguments where people will simply default to just saying, well, that is just human nature, somebody is greedy or violent or something. I think that is the default assumption of most people, that we live in a world that is framed by a certain set of characteristics that we call human nature.

Mounk: So that is a case for why we have to have an account of human nature. How then do we go about constructing that account? Obviously, people made claims about human nature in the past that turned out to be very wrong. They might have said, for example, that women are by their nature caregiving in ways that make women incapable of intellectual work. That has thankfully turned out to be wrong. How do we talk about human nature in ways that are true to human biology, true to the biological creatures that we are, but without actually ending up sanctifying the particular cultural assumptions of a time and saying that is just natural and unchanging and therefore we must assume that it goes to the heart of who we are as a species?

Fukuyama: Well, here I think modern natural science actually is a big help, because we know a whole lot more about what could be the basis for human nature than we did a hundred years ago, beginning with the understanding of the role of the genome, of DNA, in encoding certain characteristics in every species that exists, including the human species. That has actually served to debunk certain more naive theories about human nature that were typically held by conservatives. The realm of gender is the most clear case of this, where there were very firm beliefs about the roles of women and of men and what women could and could not do that were based on a kind of implicit theory of human nature, and I think we have gotten a lot more empirical information, most of which goes to debunk those theories. It is pretty hard to go from an understanding of DNA to actual behavior. What we have instead are a whole bunch of empirical studies that come from a variety of fields, of human psychology, of comparative anthropology. We understand, for example, a lot of human behaviors actually have roots in primate behavior, and we know a lot more about that now, where we posit that there must be some continuity in the evolutionary path by which some creatures became chimpanzees and others became human beings. That is all based on a common ancestor that had certain characteristics that are shared by modern humans and modern chimpanzees. So there are a lot of sources of our knowledge about what might be natural and what is simply socially constructed or cultural.

Mounk: So we can look at some of our close animal ancestors and see what we appear to have in common with other primates. We can look at what seems to be constant in humans across the historical record or across many different societies today. We can look at evolution as a kind of guide to what kind of faculties we may have developed over time. If we take those three things together, what is your account of human nature? What do you think stands at the core of who we are as a creature? In what ways does that give us great versatility? Clearly, one of the striking things about humans is how versatile they have been across different climates, across different arrangements of living, having adopted vastly different forms of political self-organization, economic self-organization, and adopted vastly different values at different times. What do you think is constant across all of that variation, actually remains the same throughout?

Fukuyama: Well, rather than try to answer a question as gigantic as that, let me try to do it in pieces, and provide a little bit of the historical intellectual history of these concepts. One of the biggest controversies in political theory is about individualism. Do human beings by nature start out as individuals largely concerned with their individual well being, or are they more socially oriented creatures who by nature want to be in communities and share norms and behave in social groups? This was one of the big divisions in politics, because early liberals like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke or Jean Jacques Rousseau posited an early state of nature, by which they meant human nature. The state of nature in this narrative is simply a metaphor for human nature. They are trying to uncover what is customary and what is by nature. These early liberal theorists postulated that the deepest characteristics of humans were individual, that you looked after your own material well being, maybe a little bit after your family. With Locke, even the family was kind of derivative of people wanting to maximize their own self interest.

Mounk: They obviously had huge disagreements between themselves about what that human nature was. Most importantly, somebody like Thomas Hobbes really thought that the individual desire to survive most of all, but also to strive after a form of glory, is what drove the state of nature. That is why, quite quickly, without anybody being evil, it led to a life that is nasty, brutish, and short, because it put us in competition with each other and we needed the state in order to manage that competition and create a kind of social peace. Whereas for someone like Jean Jacques Rousseau it was the opposite. Before civilization, before society, before politics, human beings were actually altruistic in a certain kind of way, and it is all of the evils of society that corrupted our nature further down the line.

Fukuyama: Well, that was even more true of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who felt that by nature individuals were solitary, timid, and happy, and that it was only when they first came together in society that they began to compare themselves, feel envy, and then make themselves terribly unhappy. They have very different views of what human nature is, but what they do share is this belief in individualism, that you need to study individual motives. This is also embedded in modern neoclassical economics, because a fundamental premise of the economic models that are taught in your Econ 101 microeconomics course is that human beings are rational utility maximizers, meaning they think primarily about their own utility—utility meaning for the most part material interest and not altruistic aspirations. Human nature comes back in all sorts of ways that we think about the contemporary world. The point I was on my way to making really had to do with primordial individualism. You are right that Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau all have very different accounts of what those individuals were like, but they all began with this assumption that we start out as individuals and come to society only over time, and that society is a kind of artificial construct, a social contract that people arrive at because they want to figure out how to get out of the state of nature.

Mounk: I see what you are getting at. That is actually against what the historical record suggests.

Fukuyama: Yeah, I think that is completely wrong, in retrospect. Here there are a lot of different fields that have contributed to this: comparative anthropology, primatology, where you discover that there never was a period of primordial individualism. Certainly not anything like what Rousseau described. Human beings always lived in groups and they always had very strong natural faculties for dealing with life in society. The whole field of evolutionary psychology is really a kind of evolutionary account of how these faculties got embedded into the human genome because of the need to cooperate, way before there were modern human beings. You still had this natural superiority that was conferred by your ability to cooperate with other members of your same species, and that is very deeply embedded. When you ask me what my account of human nature is, I would say, in my view, something like modern individualism is in fact historically contingent. It is not true of most societies, either today or historically. It is something that kind of evolves over time in a certain part of the world under certain conditions, but that kind of individualism is not natural, and that has a lot of political implications, because a lot of libertarians and people on the right are very invested in that individualistic story, and a lot of people on the left believe in the social version of it. But even there, there are disagreements, because you can believe that the social human is a state-centered member of a big society, or you can believe that they are basically much more socially oriented towards friends and families. I think those are all things that modern anthropology can tell you a lot about.

Mounk: There is an interesting argument by a biologist that humans are by nature kind of semi-monogamous. When you look at the monogamous species in the world and you look at the much larger number of species in the world that are non-monogamous, and you look at a whole set of physical characteristics they have, humans fall somewhere in the middle. That might explain why the theme of monogamy or non-monogamy, the theme of love and romance and marriage and betrayal, is so central to human literature. Could you by analogy say that humans are a semi-individualist species? You go back to the very earliest myths and stories about humanity—The Odyssey is on people’s minds at the moment because of a new movie—they very often have to do with the struggle of the individual with and against society. Antigone is obviously the most salient case. We evolved in bands of people, our membership in groups has always been a huge part of both our social reality and what made us successful. If you were incapable of cooperating with others, you probably were not able to survive and procreate. But there is also always a form of individuality and individualism that certainly distinguishes us from sheep or lemmings.

Fukuyama: Yeah, I think that one of the things you quickly discover when you start thinking seriously about the empirics of human nature is that it is very complicated, and to say that human beings have deeply embedded social instincts is only part of the story. I think you are right that human beings also are individuals that have individual, as economists would say, individual preferences for one thing over another. There is also within every human being a tension between that kind of individual selfishness and the desire to conform in social groups. But I think in general that the idea that we are deeply, fundamentally individuals is hard to support simply by the history of the evolution of human societies.

On the question of monogamy, that is a complicated one where you get into dangerous territory very quickly, because a lot of evolutionary psychologists have argued that male and female reproductive strategies are very different. This is a good example of where I think you have new sources of information. The basic argument that evolutionary psychologists began making in the nineteen seventies and eighties was that males just tended to be more promiscuous than females, because everybody is trying to maximize the chances of getting their genes into the next generation. For a male, the easiest way to do this was to have sex with a lot of women. For women, the path to doing this was by nurturing her own offspring, which required a lot of time and effort, much more so than in other species. Therefore women had to be much more selective about the partners that they chose, because they needed help in raising their offspring.

It turns out I was just speaking to a biologist friend of mine who pointed out that this is a pattern that exists in virtually all sexually reproducing species, with a couple of exceptions, and the exceptions are cases in which the male has actually evolved to spend much more of its time taking care of offspring than the female. Sure enough, the roles are reversed, so in that species the males are much more selective about their partners, and the females are much less selective. It just seems to me—that does not actually fully prove the theory, but it does suggest that if something is invariant across a lot of different types of creatures, there must be something biological going on there, because presumably these kinds of simple multicellular creatures are not making individualistic choices for themselves.

Mounk: I am struck by your skepticism about the idea that human beings are individualist, or at least by your skepticism about some of the ways in which theorists have thought of human beings as individualists. As you have pointed out, it is often the case that philosophical liberals emphasize individualism, and it is the critics of philosophical liberalism who say that really that is an abstract, wrong-headed notion and that we are really constituted by the communities of which we are part. That is, in fact, one of the interesting things that post-liberal critics on the right and the left have in common.

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When you think of Zohran Mamdani in his inaugural speech in New York talking about the joys of collectivism, or when you talk about somebody like Sohrab Ahmari on a previous episode of his podcast, claiming that liberals are obsessed with autonomy and that is a problem with them and we should value community much more—how do you reconcile those two things? Why is it that liberalism is the right governing philosophy for humans, even though we are not by nature individualists in the kind of way that people, from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls, may have thought?

Fukuyama: Well, one answer to that is that another part of human nature is to be very plastic or very adaptable. Even though something may be an inclination that is given to you by your genes and your biology, human beings can also overcome that, and we do that in all sorts of ways. That is why we have culture: the raw material of human nature often leads to very bad outcomes. The most obvious one is violence.

The early liberals were correct in a certain sense about the social contract, that one of the things that happens in human societies is you tend to develop cultural rules that constrain certain kinds of very dangerous behaviors on the part of the individuals making up the group. The thing about individualism is that it turns out it is very useful for economic development. If you allow individuals to make choices about what to buy, what to make, what kind of company to start, it turns out that you end up a lot richer than if everything is mired in a kind of collectivism.

There are societies that are based on what anthropologists call segmentary lineages, what other people somewhat inaccurately describe as tribes, where you cannot sell anything except to a kinsperson. If you are looking at a store and your cousin owns a store next door and you buy from the other store because they offer a lower price than your cousin does, your whole kin group is going to get mad at you and put a lot of social pressure on you to buy things.

Modern market economies really do depend on a kind of individualism in terms of economic decision making, where you have to get beyond the family and family ties. It turns out that if you want to run a bureaucracy and you stuff it all with your kinspeople, your brother-in-law and your son-in-law, and all the diplomats are kind of relatives of yours, you are not going to have a successful country, as opposed to picking people on the basis of a somewhat unnatural principle that merit ought to be rewarded. That is one of the tensions in modern politics, that good governance actually depends on meritocracy and the breaking of these social bonds, choosing the qualified individual over your relative or your friend, and yet there is a strong human desire to stick with family and friends.

That is one of the tensions I talk about in my Political Order books, where the material needs of a modern society run counter to some very basic human inclinations that we have. But because humans are adaptable, we can say, okay, I am going to pick the most qualified person and not my cousin.

Mounk: That is a great cliffhanger to a future episode of Francis Fukuyama’s Eras Tour, because I want to make sure that we devote a real conversation to the Political Order two-volume series.

Your account here is really interesting. A lot of the time we think that liberals have an anthropology, a view of human nature that says we are really by nature individuals and we are individuals before we entered political society, and therefore those political societies should respect and honor our individualistic natures by giving us the right to speak as we please and worship as we please and assemble with whomever we please and so on.

You are in a way saying something much more interesting, which is that human beings are not by nature individualistic, but that has some very bad consequences. If we think about everything in terms of our clan, that makes it much harder to have economic development, because you are not going to buy the better, cheaper product, you are going to buy the product of your second cousin twice removed, and otherwise you are going to be ostracized. You are not going to have an impersonal state bureaucracy that gives people services or locks them up depending on what they have done and how they have followed the rules, but on the basis of whether or not they are related. That is going to make it very hard to have a rule of law and all the institutions that have huge benefits. So we need an individualistic order in some ways to hedge against the negative elements of our collective natures.

There is a different way of putting that same point that I associate with Jonathan Haidt, but that I think has a much deeper tradition, which is to say that we are by nature tribal people, and that has the potential for political violence within it. We are often courageous and even altruistic in dealing with people who we think of as part of the in-group, but we can very often be cruel, unfair, even violent towards anybody who we think of as a member of the out-group. Part of the aspiration of a decent society, whether that takes the form of individual rights that are protected by the state, or even a form of liberal nationalism that tries to expand the circle of who counts as part of the in-group, is precisely to go against that nature. Is that a different way of rendering what you said? Is that a third element to what you said, or do you disagree with Haidt and that tradition?

Fukuyama: There are a couple of different aspects to the social nature of man. The one that I emphasized in my Political Order books had to do with friends and family, and there is a specific tradition within biology. William Hamilton was the scientist that articulated the idea of inclusive fitness, that we are altruistic in proportion to the number of genes that we share with other people, which explains nepotism basically, that we favor genetic relatives. Robert Trivers, who just passed away fairly recently, developed a theory about reciprocal altruism, that human beings have evolved a capacity to develop reciprocal relationships with other human beings based on gift giving and experience of mutual support. That basically tells you that friends and family is a very natural form of human sociability.

It is absolutely the case that if everything has to depend on friends and family, you are going to have a very limited society. That works in hunter-gatherer societies and certain forms of tribal societies, but if you want to have a state or anything that goes beyond just a circle of people that you know are related to, it becomes a big liability, and therefore you have to create impersonal institutions. This is one of the biggest themes that cuts across several of my books, beginning with my book Trust, but continuing through the Political Order books: if you want to develop a modern society, you have to get beyond the family, or this friends and family circle that is natural to us. In a way, all political orders are in a certain sense unnatural, because they require us to hire the most competent individual or the best general, rather than somebody that is an old drinking buddy of ours. That is one aspect.

The other aspect of human sociability that is more, in a way, dangerous has to do with this idea of norm following in much larger groups, where we actually want to defer to the authority of a single leader, and that we find safety and security in doing that. That goes beyond the family. That is really the basis of modern nationalism or ethnicity. Ethnicity is kind of a fake familialism, because people in the same ethnic group may have been related to each other a hundred generations ago, but they actually really are not genetic relatives. They think that they are part of a larger, homogeneous group, and they are perfectly willing to defer to the authority of people that will lead that large group.

Both on a small scale with friends and family and on a large scale with phenomena like nationalism, you do have this human instinct to conform with social norms that are created at a variety of different levels, and that becomes both the strength of the human species—if you say why did the human species end up being so dominant in the world, it is because of this ability to cooperate socially—and why it has also become very dysfunctional, in terms of leading to wars and destruction and racism and all sorts of things. Again, it is because we have these natural characteristics that tend us towards certain forms of sociability.

Mounk: Okay, let us get into some of the controversies. One concern with not having an account of human nature is that it might lead you, in some senses, in too libertarian a direction, making you think that human beings are really by nature individuals that need to be protected from the threats of community.

Another way that you might think about the dangers of having too individualistic a view of human nature is that it might make you think that you can completely change human nature. That is obviously the problem with some deeply collectivist regimes. I spent some time in Cambodia, and when you look at the way in which Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge wanted to transform their society in denial of basic, I would say, individualistic aspects of human nature, that helps to explain what, on a per capita basis, was probably the worst regime in human history.

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But it might, in a totally different way, also be true of much more understandable aspirations that people within our own society have to remake or refashion themselves from scratch. Do you think that an understanding of human nature should in some way limit our ambitions, whether that is to create a collective utopia or to completely refashion who we are as individuals?

Fukuyama: That is absolutely right. The communists in the Soviet Union wanted to create a new Soviet man who would not be interested in kinship, would devote themselves entirely to the state, and that proved to be not just a failure practically, but also a moral failure, because it meant that people had to be wrenched away from their families and their deepest personal commitments.

Let me give you one example of how a wrong theory of human nature leads to a lot of unhappiness. There is an Italian journalist named Alexander Stille who wrote a book called The Sullivanians. This is a very strange cult that occurred on the Upper West Side of Manhattan back in the nineteen sixties. It was formed by a couple of individuals, one of whom was a licensed psychologist, but it was premised on the idea, which was shared by a number of people on the left, that the evils of capitalism were deeply rooted in the family, and especially in the kind of monogamous heterosexual family.

What they tried to implement in these very nice apartments in Manhattan was a collective system that did not allow couples to bond over time and did not allow the mother of a child to raise that child. The children were ripped away from their biological parents almost from birth and given to somebody else in the little commune. It is a very hard story to read, because it created such a lot of personal suffering, both on the part of the parents that wanted to raise their own children and on the part of the children that wanted to have a mother and father. Instead they were put in this little collective thing that was driven by a couple of ideologues who somehow believed that they would solve the injustices of capitalism by raising children in this fashion.

Mounk: I experienced a much milder version of this when I was growing up, rooted in the same historical period and some of the same ideas, I think, which is that many of the friends and acquaintances of my mother when I was growing up had been students in the sixties or perhaps the early seventies, and they really disliked the idea of lifelong monogamous partnership.

They also had found partners that, despite all of their struggles, they seemed to like and wanted to stick with. The term that really was standard was that they introduced the partner as my Lebensabschnittsgefährte, my life segment partner, to somehow deal with the embarrassing fact that they seemed to be in a monogamous relationship, but emphasizing that this is really a temporary phenomenon. Of course, some of them split up or got divorced, but by and large, the Lebensabschnittsgefährte, the life segment partner, turned out to be the partner for all of the segments of their lives.

Fukuyama: There is a Latin poet, Horace, who wrote a poem that contains the line “tamen usque recurret.” It means “it always comes running back.” In the context, in the previous line it said: you can try to throw human nature out with a pitchfork, but it always comes running back. I think these are examples of that.

Mounk: The other striking thing is that Nicholas Christakis talks about this in one of his books, that every commune ends up going wrong in the same way. You have attempted communes in lots of different contexts, and when we go beyond just having roommates or something quite thin, when it really is trying to create this collective life, there are different stages of it, and the stages of decay they follow end up being remarkably similar across different contexts, because they are trying to do something that seems incompatible with human nature, and so therefore human nature takes its revenge in remarkably similar ways.

What about some of the areas in which what we assume about human nature does seem to have changed a lot? Very intelligent thinkers and writers made assumptions about women for centuries that turned out to be very wrong. Of course there were people even before the advent of natural science who recognized the folly of that. John Stuart Mill pointed out that it may be true that women up until that point in history had not accumulated great achievements in many areas of human endeavor, but that was because they were excluded from full participation in society in remarkably similar ways across all those contexts. Mill made the argument that we really do not yet know what women are truly capable of when those disabilities are removed from them, and he rightly anticipated that women in fact would come to have great achievements once they were allowed and encouraged to do that.

At the same time, there are clearly some biological differences between men and women, not just because women bear children in a way that men do not, but also because we are creatures driven in part by our genetics, and people who have two X chromosomes have a different set of genes from people with an X and a Y chromosome. How should we think about human nature in relation to gender differences?

Fukuyama: Well, actually, before we get into gender, there is a broader issue that also applies to things like race and ethnicity. People at one point believed that there was a natural hierarchy in the different races of human beings around the world, and that white Europeans, white northern Europeans, stood at the top of that hierarchy, and black people of various sorts and brown people were at lower rungs. That was used—there was a whole school of what is now called scientific racism that developed after Darwin published The Origin of Species, that then tried to apply this very crude, I think ultimately misunderstood, version of Darwinism to human racial stratification, and argued for, for example, European colonialism on the grounds that the colonized people were less human or lacked intelligence or other characteristics that Europeans had, and that justified their being held in bondage. So it really is much broader than just prejudices against women.

With regard to scientific racism, again, this is where I think the scientific method actually gets very useful. One figure in this movement was Franz Boas, who is really the founder of modern cultural anthropology. There had been this argument that, during the great period of immigration into the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led tens of millions of people, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, to come to the United States, a lot of the racists at the time argued that these people were not as intelligent as Europeans, and they actually did this by measuring the head size of different racial groups.

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The thing that Boas did was use the data: the army was measuring the head sizes of recruits when they processed people into the army for World War One, and Boas continued to measure, he did a longitudinal survey of what the children of these people were like, and it turned out that there was a convergence in head size once people started eating an American diet. It turned out that this supposed racial difference was simply a matter of environment, and that once these immigrants fed their children American food in enough quantities, their intelligence, head sizes, everything else began to converge with that of native-born Americans. This was one pretty clear case where actually the scientific method is very useful in clearing up something that is simply prejudice.

Now in the case of male-female differences, I think we have seen something very comparable to that, where a lot of people believed that women could not occupy—well, it begins with the mind. In the nineteenth century it was very common to hear men say that women are not rational enough to vote, and I think time has just proven that this is really ridiculous. Women actually have different preferences in what they vote for, but they certainly are absolutely qualified to exercise that kind of choice.

This is a problem that our current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has, in that he also believes women are not suited to combat positions. Empirically, again, that has been proven to be wrong, that you have a lot of female war fighters these days. As a group, in the aggregate, they may not be quite as good at lugging forty-pound packs of ammunition up big mountains, but there is no question that they can be just as tough and vicious in combat as men. So there has been a lot of disconfirmation of these earlier ideas.

The problem is that there are certain domains in which, despite the effort to equalize outcomes and equalize the environmental conditions for young boys and girls, there still remain differences in the aggregate. People have a hard time thinking about this because the truth is that any characteristic held by either men or women is distributed naturally. There is a normal distribution where you have got a center and then two tails of the distribution. It is the case that there will always be women that are stronger, faster, have more upper body strength than men on average, but the two normal curves overlap, and the tails are different, and there are certain areas where the average performance will be different. That, I think, kind of points to the irreducible nature of human nature. There still remain certain characteristics that will persist, and it shows up today, for example, in labor markets.

Mounk: These particular questions of gender are also related to structural changes in the economy that then went to follow on changes in society at large that you wrote about in the 1990s in your book, The Great Disruption.

Fukuyama: My least-read book was one I published in 1999 called The Great Disruption. I did not intend to do it when I started out on this project, but I ended up writing a book about gender. One of the arguments that I convinced myself of, and I think is still correct, is that the rise of feminism and the movement of hundreds of millions of women into the paid labor force beginning in the 1960s was not a kind of autonomous ideological event where suddenly people said, women really are equal, it is morally a terrible violation to treat them differently. I think it was really driven by technology.

At that moment you were making a big transition from an industrial society into an information society, in which the vast majority of workers were now working in a service economy which involved sitting in front of a computer screen all day. Many fewer people were involved in moving heavy objects or lifting things or working with gigantic machines that required a lot of upper body strength. As a result, women just had a much more natural place.

If you want to think about what are the remaining male-female differences that are very hard to explain except by biology, you think about characteristics like risk taking and crime, which are, I think, unfortunately heavily correlated. It is the case that the vast majority of crimes are committed by young men, let us say between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. This is invariant. It is invariant across different cultures, it is invariant over time, across different levels of human development. That is the case.

One of the reasons that women are outperforming men, especially in low-skill occupations in today’s economy, is that women are just better at working in a service economy where you have to sit patiently behind a computer screen and the boss wants you to turn up reliably for work. Women will just do that much better than men. I do not think that that is necessarily a socially constructed difference. I think that is related to a more fundamental difference between the sexes.

Mounk: One important way in which questions about human nature show up in politics is not about the foundation of politics, it is about what kind of interventions in human nature we should allow. You started to think about that going back to the big debates about bioethics in the early 2000s, and have continued to reflect on it. Today we are capable of choosing certain traits for the children we have. We can have a lot of embryos and then test them for polygenic scores, and with some amount of likelihood select the embryo that is most likely to have a high IQ or most likely to be very athletic. We can of course select for particular diseases that we want our offspring to avoid. We are increasingly able, and will soon be able, to edit our genes to say that perhaps we have some character trait that is driven by or correlated with certain genes we have, and perhaps we can just edit those to change them.

How should you think about which of these treatments to allow and which of these treatments not to allow? There is an obvious tension between the enormous good that some of these kinds of treatments might make—when you are thinking, for example, about having some horrible hereditary disease that you want to make sure your child does not inherit—but also some real risks if you imagine a society in which half or a third or a tenth of society is genetically enhanced and much smarter and faster and so on than everybody else, and the rest of society is considered in some way a second-class, non-altered human. It is easy to imagine the kind of dystopian sci-fi scenarios.

Fukuyama: Well, in the early 2000s I was a member of President George W. Bush’s bioethics council for several years.

Mounk: As, I believe, was my doctoral advisor, Michael Sandel.

Fukuyama: Yeah, that is right. He was on that council as well. James Q. Wilson, a lot of very notable people. I also wrote a book called Our Posthuman Future, because I take a pretty conservative view on this type of biological intervention. If you talk about CRISPR-Cas9 and germline editing, you are talking about altering not just the behavior of a currently existing individual, but all of that individual’s subsequent descendants. The potential for doing something that has unintended consequences is, I think, much greater.

The other argument that I made—to answer your question about what I came to conclude as being legitimate and non-legitimate—is that, obviously, we have been intervening in our biological bodies for years and years. I had cataract surgery last year, so I have got these artificial lenses in my eyes and I do not need glasses anymore. I can hardly say that that is something illegitimate. What I had argued back then was that we ought to be open to enhancement technologies, or technologies that correct—sickle cell anemia is biologically rooted, and if you can select against that, or can actually edit someone’s genome to get rid of that horrible disease, there is no reason you should not do that. But we need to be especially cautious about enhancement technologies.

I had a very specific reason for worrying about that, because I think that people have these fundamental disagreements and also misunderstandings about what makes a human being a human being. I talked about there being a certain factor X that is what people historically have thought gave human beings dignity. It has something to do with the ability to choose, to make moral choices, to be morally autonomous. But I think it also has to do with the way we relate emotionally to the outside world, that we feel pain, we have consciousness that allows us to sympathize or empathize with other people, that drives our altruism and a lot of factors that allow us to live in society.

You do not want to monkey with those things that might impinge on that factor X, because fundamentally it is related to our view of human rights. You see this most clearly in the case of something like intelligence. If we could actually locate genetically where high intelligence resides and manipulate people to be smarter, I think that is going to be a disaster, because who is going to take advantage of this first? It is obviously elites that have the ability to—they are already putting their kids into private schools and giving them tutors and giving them a leg up in the race of life. If you can then also make sure from the time they are embryos that they are going to be smarter than other people, genetically smarter, that is going to create a tiered society where those advantages are going to be passed down to descendants, and that is a nightmare. Aldous Huxley talks about alphas, betas, and gammas in Brave New World, and that is exactly the kind of society that we would be heading towards.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Francis discuss trans rights, what artificial intelligence teaches us about being human, and why Silicon Valley’s focus on life extension is a bad idea. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Jewish Americans have historically been among the most principled defenders of free speech. When a group of neo-Nazis planned to march through the town of Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors, it was a Jewish attorney who stood up for their right of assembly. David Goldberger, then the legal director of the ACLU of Illinois, was no self-hating Jew, and he certainly harbored no sympathy for the National Socialist Party of America. But he realized that “the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press would be meaningless if the government could pick and choose the persons to whom they apply.”

Goldberger’s position might read as the credo of a universalist Jew who prioritizes abstract principles over the interests of his group. But there was a deeper and less self-abnegating logic to his position. Like me, Goldberger was convinced that these universal principles are in the long-term interest of all ethnic and religious minorities, including Jews.

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Minorities often have good reasons to feel threatened. One understandable response to this feeling is to look to the powerful for protection. But whenever you look to the powerful for protection, you become dependent on their whims.

This is a story that the Jews of the old world knew all too well. For a few decades, they would thrive under some tolerant monarch who gave them relative freedom to go about their lives with relatively little harassment. But when that monarch changed his mind, or was succeeded by a less tolerant heir, all those precious liberties would evaporate just as quickly. In fact, that pattern is literally as old as the Old Testament: As Exodus 1:8 notes, “a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph,” setting off the chain of events that led to the enslavement (and eventual liberation) of the Israelites. American Jews have historically put their trust in a less precarious promise: that of constitutional principles which deprive the powerful of their ability to play favorites—even if the price consisted of neo-Nazis giving speeches in a community of Holocaust survivors.

This preference for free speech has been sorely tested over the past years. Social media has brought the poison of antisemitism, largely relegated to the fringes of public debate in the second half of the twentieth century, into much wider circulation. From Tucker Carlson to Candace Owens, Hasan Piker to Jackson Hinkle, some of the people with the largest followings on social media now delight their audiences with a litany of antisemitic tropes. From coy insinuations that the Jews have once again grown too powerful to outright conspiracy theories painting Jews as the dark forces behind just about every tragedy or social failure, hateful ideas are now being streamed to millions on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms.

Tragically, the rise and dissemination of detestable speech has coincided with a steep increase in physical violence against Jews, from the deadly shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 to the vehicular attack on a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, earlier this year. I have come to consider the rise of physical violence against Jewish communities around the country, and its psychological impact, as the Europeanization of American Jewry. When, as a teenager growing up in Germany, I first visited America, I was struck by how little protection Jewish institutions needed in the new world; now, it is nearly as easy to spot a Jewish kindergarten in New York as it long has been in Paris or Berlin: both are marked by the presence of security guards. Back then, I marveled at how much less beleaguered Jews in America seemed to feel; now, the same unceasing sense of fear and vigilance is taking hold of Jewish life in the United States.

It is little wonder that a growing number of Jews are desperate for any form of protection, and even that a growing share are willing to discard their long-held commitment to free speech in exchange for promises that things might somehow go back to normal. And as it happens, Jews are hardly alone in responding to the rise of social media with a desire to censor its contents: many Gentiles are similarly growing tempted to drain the poison out of our politics by embracing new forms of censorship. As many politicians and political commentators are quick to claim, the principal reason for the scary times we are now living through is the omnipresence of “misinformation.” If only we could find the right way to “regulate” social media, they say, things would finally go back to normal.

I understand the temptation. If it were possible to preserve all the advantages of new communication technologies, which make access to information so much more ample and painless, while banishing from the public sphere all the narcissistic influencers and psychopathic politicians using these tools to advance their own interests, the offer would be compelling. But I worry that the world they imagine simply doesn’t exist.

Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that we grow sufficiently convinced of the unsustainability of the current situation that we become willing to “creatively reinterpret” the First Amendment. One question to ask about this is whether the trade-off would prove to be worthwhile: Would we want a manicured public sphere that hands the powerful the ability to enforce their own views even if it did drain some of the poison of antisemitism? But thinking of this choice as a trade-off presumes that the promised recompense, the establishment of a more sane and rational public sphere, would actually materialize. And I very much doubt that it would.

The case for believing that such regulations of social media would help to bring about a better public sphere rests on three tacit premises:

• The people who make decisions about what speech is allowed and what speech is verboten will be reasonable and rational.

• The reasonable and rational people who make such decisions will be able to enforce their preferences without making the censored content more popular than it was before.

• The underlying reasons that bad ideas have flourished in recent years are rooted in a lack of appropriate regulation, and increasing regulation can therefore eradicate such ideas.

The first assumption is simply that the people who are in some way empowered to make decisions about what should or should not be censored will in fact make good decisions. At a time when mainstream institutions were deeply shaped by a stable political consensus centered around a number of broadly shared ideals, such an idealized view of the world might have been tempting. But America today is more polarized than it has been at any point in recent memory. Those who advocate for points of view that, until a few years ago, would have been considered disqualifyingly extreme are no longer on the margins; they hold the reins of formal political power and enjoy some of the biggest platforms anybody could wish for. Under these circumstances, it is deeply naive to think that “letting the government pick and choose” who enjoys the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution would be a good idea.

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The smartest case for free speech has never turned on denying that some utterances are so vile that all of us would be better off if they somehow disappeared from the public sphere. Rather, it was always based on skepticism that any institution, private or public, would consistently make these determinations in a reasonable and selfless manner. The growing influence of extreme views and the immense power that extreme political movements now hold should be a reason to double down on, not to discard, that insight.

The second assumption is that attempts to censor speech are likely to succeed in reducing the salience of terrible ideas. There is some superficial plausibility to this. While it is always important to pay attention to the ways in which political actions can backfire, the presumption should be that, most of the time, political actors aren’t so ignorant or incompetent as to harm their own cause with their efforts.

But in the case of free speech, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that—unless repression is, as in some dictatorships, extremely severe and wide-ranging—attempts at censorship usually fail. The appeal of the forbidden fruit is so strong that many of the most successful idea entrepreneurs are forever drawn towards portraying themselves as censored even when, by any objective standard, they are not. Indeed, it is sometimes hard to know what accounts for the success of some of today’s most vile media personalities if not for this appeal; a substantial portion of the audience for people such as Nick Fuentes is as attracted to the frisson they derive from breaking the biggest possible taboos as they are to the actual claims that they make.

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Both the idea that we can trust the would-be censors and the idea that their efforts would be effective are in a sense downstream from the third key assumption: the belief that institutional changes, rather than technological realities, stand at the root of the problem.

There may have been a time when the structure of mass communication made it possible to exclude certain ideas from broad circulation. Back in an era when reaching a mass audience took both enormous financial investment and required the cooperation of a large number of highly-trained professionals, an ethos widely shared between journalists and the owners of big television networks could, porously and imperfectly, restrict the scope of public debate.

But those days are long gone. Nowadays, the costs of production and dissemination are negligible. Anybody can put together a near-professional studio in their own home for a few hundred dollars. The ability to reach a mass audience has been radically democratized. Established media outlets, while still influential, have lost their capacity to gatekeep. Today, a single episode of the Joe Rogan Experience draws a vastly larger number of viewers than the nightly audiences of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News combined.

These technological changes are the real cause of our transformed public sphere. Attempts to turn back the clock by introducing strict regulations are unlikely to rein in the conspiracy theories that have so quickly proliferated on social media. Indeed, many countries in Europe have all along had in place the kinds of guardrails for which Americans wishing to curtail the First Amendment so fervently wish. They criminalize all kinds of political speech, from denial of the Holocaust to anything that might be thought liable to incite racial hatred. They routinely compel social media platforms to delete any posts that could even remotely be considered illegal. Countries such as the United Kingdom even arrest thousands of people for violating these rules every year.

And yet, none of these practices have marginalized the extremists or restored the placid discourse of an earlier era. Jews are no safer in Europe than they are in America. And while extremists still remain in the opposition in most countries in Western Europe, polls suggest that they may be only one election away from storming the gates of power. The reason should, by now, be obvious: the problem is not political but structural. The nature of communication in the age of social media has allowed previously fringe ideas to flood the mainstream. Short of the extreme censorship practiced by some of the world’s most repressive dictatorships, regulation can’t bring back the past.

None of this is to say that all forms of regulation are in principle inadmissible. There are some strong reasons for (as well as some real reasons against) banning the use of social media for children, for example. And I have long believed that those social media companies that effectively do act like publishers, by favoring some content on the basis of the views expressed, should also be treated as such—which would make them much more liable for the content they amplify. But any attempt to regulate social media must conform with the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment.

It isn’t hard to see why many Jewish leaders and organizations have lately grown less supportive of free speech. But anyone who gives in to these understandable temptations neglects a crucial historical lesson: Any power that can arbitrarily grant us rights (such as being protected from the offensive chants of antisemites) can just as arbitrarily deprive us of those same rights (such as decreeing that advocacy in support of our own causes and concerns constitutes offensive speech that must be silenced).

Jews have historically thrived in free societies that grant rights to all of their members without regard to the groups into which they happen to be born. Free speech is among the most fundamental of these rights. Jews must remain among its most ardent defenders.

This article was originally published in SAPIR journal.

Daron Acemoglu is an economist at MIT and a recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics. His latest book is What Happened to Liberal Democracy?

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Daron Acemoglu discuss why liberal democracy’s post-war formula for shared prosperity broke down, how the rise of a college-educated professional class produced a cultural backlash against “social engineering,” and how to shape the future of artificial intelligence.

We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.

This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, features content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: We started talking about many things the last time we were on the podcast, but we started talking a little bit about your thoughts on liberalism, which you had already published an article about. Now you have come out with an incredibly ambitious work on the subject that tries to unify approaches to the question from economics, from political theory, from public policy, from history, and I look forward to touching on many different aspects of this question. I promise you that we can geek out about political theory as much as you wish in this conversation. Part of what you have to do when you try to fix liberalism is to come up with a diagnosis. I think that is probably the aspect of this question that has been most debated over the last ten years, and it is probably most difficult to say something new about. In your diagnosis, why is it that after liberalism’s remarkable triumph for half a century, we now seem to be in this genuine moment of crisis for this set of ideas?

Daron Acemoglu: Well, I think that is the heart of it. In fact, despite the fact that there is a lot said about this, I still think we are far from a holistic understanding, which requires both a recognition of the proximate causes of the crisis, but also the ultimate or the fundamental causes that underpin those proximate causes. That is what I try to do. But first, as just a little preface, I think the success of liberalism is truly remarkable. The kind of freedoms, access to public services, political participation, and broadly shared prosperity, despite the very high inequality that we are experiencing today, that all of these things that we enjoy today, in at least the Western world, but also in many parts of the emerging world, would have been unimaginable to somebody who lived three hundred years ago, however enlightened they were. And that is all coming from the aspirations articulated by liberal ideas and their implementation in the context of liberal democratic institutions. That makes it all the more jarring that liberal democracy plunged itself into crisis.

In a nutshell, I think this has two reasons. One is that the world changed, in particular from an industrial era to a post-industrial age, and liberal democracy did not adjust to it. Second, liberal democracy became, to an extent, a victim of its own success. These two are complementary, they are related, but they are also distinct. Let us start with the first. I think shared prosperity is truly axiomatic to liberal democracy. If you are an absolutist king or a dictator, your regime can survive for a long time without true legitimacy, without the support of the people.

Mounk: You need to have certain insiders who are willing to impose the rules, and they need to be doing relatively well, but as long as you pay the courtiers and the soldiers enough, you probably survive.

Acemoglu: That is right. Every regime seeks legitimacy, and every regime obtains some type of legitimacy, at least for certain periods of time. But for liberal democracy, that is really critical. Unless people really support it, unless people participate, liberal democracy cannot survive. Shared prosperity, meaning economic growth from which every social group benefits, is really important for that. The big success of liberal democracy, starting in the twentieth century—in some parts of the world in a sporadic way also in the nineteenth century, but very, very consistently in the three and a half, four decades following World War II—was really very important for liberal democracy’s success.

The formula for that, simplifying it quite a bit, is to say businesses invested and expanded, and in doing so, under the framework created by democratic governments, trade unions, and other labor market institutions, they had to pay higher wages to workers because they needed workers. They could not coerce them, they could not cheat them. That is where the institutional framework was important. But crucially, in order to expand, to produce more cars, more fridges, more T-shirts, they needed more workers.

Mounk: That meant the scarcity of human labor and the competition for those workers, which actually created the middle class.

Acemoglu: One hundred percent. And that generated wage growth, that generated job creation and employment growth. That is, in my assessment, simplifying it again to some extent, but that is the only formula for creating shared prosperity. I know of no society in history that has been able to create shared prosperity for a sustained period of time that is not based on wage growth and employment.

So that was the formula. That formula started coming apart with the digital age, with the digital technologies that induced a transition from industrial economics to post-industrial economics, whereby, first of all, educated, more skilled workers became more valuable because they were needed for management, services dealing with data, dealing with these other functions, as well as using the technologies that were first skill-biased. But even more importantly, with digital automation—meaning that using digital technologies with advanced tools, software systems, robotics, and now AI—we are substituting machines and algorithms for tasks previously performed by humans. That severs the link between business growth, innovation, and profits and wages, because now we can expand production tremendously without employing many workers. Even worse, you can expand while laying off workers because you are automating your production processes.

Mounk: How would you describe, just in descriptive terms, what stage we are at? I am a little torn on how to interpret the current state of affairs. On the one hand, in the United States today, we are close to full employment. There is not a big structural problem of unemployment. In some regions of the country, people are really struggling to find workers. This is not Marrakesh ten years ago, or West Germany thirty years ago. You do have quite a lot of affluence in society. America is one of the richest countries in the history of the world, certainly if you exclude small oil states and other kinds of aberrations. But what does seem to have happened is something where the returns to having a college degree and being a knowledge worker are outsized. Perhaps the real injury, I guess I am unsure whether the real injury is economic or whether it is cultural.

Acemoglu: Well, it is both. It is both, and I am going to come to the cultural one. Things do not work with the nice linear structure of our models. The irony, in some sense, is that the big period in which pre-AI automation had a big impact really came to an end in the mid-2000s. The period that best illustrates my argument is from the late 1970s or 1980 to 2015 or 2014. It is during that period where wage inequality, the gap between college-educated or postgraduate workers and those without a college degree, skyrocketed. It is the period during which, almost consistently, real wages, inflation-adjusted wages of workers with a high school degree or less than a high school degree, especially men with a high school degree, fell consistently almost every year from 1980 to 2014. It is that period during which the non-employment rate of workers without a college degree increased quite tremendously. People essentially dropped out of the labor force. That is why unemployment statistics are not the ones that I am that interested in. I much prefer to look at discouraged workers as well, which means looking at employment-to-population ratios.

Mounk: Just to explain that for people who are not economists, the unemployment rate is the share of people who are looking for work relative to the workforce. But there may be people who drop out of the workforce altogether, and there is a real concern, for example, about so-called NEETs, which is to say, people, often young people, who are not in some form of employment, education, or training for a job. If a twenty-year-old is living in the basement of a parent’s home, is not actively looking for work, is not being trained in any way, that is obviously a very worrying case, but they may not show up in the unemployment statistics.

Acemoglu: Absolutely, one hundred percent. The unemployment rate, strictly speaking, is the number of unemployed people who do not have a job among those who say they are seeking a job. The Current Population Survey, for example, one of the key survey instruments in the United States, and there are similar ones in other countries, asks people, are you actively seeking work? If the answer to that is no, you are out of the labor force. What happened, for example, when people in the auto industry or in steel or other industries, with automation or with imports from China, lost their jobs, many people just dropped out of the labor force. They stopped looking and they stopped answering that question, yes, I am looking for a job.

The other thing is just household income inequality that has skyrocketed. The remarkable thing is that real wages, inflation-adjusted wages, that used to grow faster than productivity, especially for workers without a college degree, because they were critical for industrial employment in the late ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, early ’70s, those wages did not exactly stagnate, but came close to stagnating from 1980 to around 2014. That was the collapse of shared prosperity. The post-industrial age required a different way of managing the economy, a different way of mobilizing and creating jobs for workers without a college degree, using technology differently, and none of that happened. That is the failure of liberal democratic institutions adjusting to their age.

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But the cultural aspect that you mentioned is also very, very important. This coincided with another social change that happened as a consequence of the post-industrial economy, which is that the number of workers with a college degree increased tremendously. They became much more important to the production process, earned more, and gained more social status. In the process, they concentrated in major urban cities. They surrounded themselves with other people like themselves. They created their own subculture. They severed often their links to communities that consisted of people with different levels of skills and different diverse skills. They became more cosmopolitan and more convinced of their values. Together with that, they became politically more influential, but also disinterested first in the plight of the less educated groups. You can see that in the Democratic Party, for example, or in other center-left parties in Europe, where these parties that were essentially working-class parties, as many of their names suggested, became completely dominated by the college-educated, and they changed their programs away from the kinds of policies that working classes favored, more towards policies and priorities that the college-educated favored. The college-educated at that point, becoming more convinced of their values, started what I call a social engineering agenda, which is trying to improve society by imposing values on the rest of society. That is very, very important to the cultural backlash that you were hinting at, Yascha.

Mounk: Your analysis of the social engineering mechanism is really very interesting and distinctive and novel, I think. To stick with the analysis for a moment, and I want to make sure that we get to that in a later stage of the conversation, part of what is interesting about this current political realignment is that, traditionally, if you were relatively affluent, you had a college degree, you were probably a Republican. There are obviously always exceptions, but statistically speaking. And if you were working class and did not have a college degree, you were probably a Democrat. You could say the same thing about the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats in Germany, or Labour and the Conservatives in the United Kingdom, and so on. Today, it is starting to reverse.

Acemoglu: It is not just that it has weakened, it is reversed.

Mounk: Right. But these parties still have not fully understood that in their rhetoric and how they are talking. The strange thing, in particular, about the Democratic Party is that it thinks of itself naturally as a party of the working class, and is definitely searching for working-class candidates. I think often it has so little sense of what is working class that it picks candidates who sound like the working class to highly college-educated people.

Acemoglu: One hundred percent. You got it completely right. First of all, any social change of this sort is often perceived somewhat later than it should be. But moreover, that perception was also delayed because the right still remained opposed to trade unions. Trade unions continued to be strong in many countries, the UK, the United States, Germany especially, and they continued, for a while at least, and they still do to some extent, to give their support to the center-left parties. But take the Labour Party in the UK—now that trade unions are less able to garner that support, they are just coming apart. These parties became parties of postgraduates, but were still able to keep some portion of the working class through the trade union movement.

There are some interesting papers on this, for example, by Nicolas Longuet-Marx, Suresh Naidu, and Ilyana Kuziemko, that illustrate how the preferences over economic policy of working classes in the United States, lower-education workers in the United States, have remained very consistent. And those of the Democratic Party started changing and diverging quite significantly from those of the working classes. In particular, the Democratic Party has always remained somewhat committed to redistribution, but they favored redistribution via fiscal policies without unions, without minimum wages, without trade protection, without job programs, without any kind of intervention in the market system. Whereas workers wanted all of these things. They wanted minimum wages. They wanted active job programs. They wanted unions. That is what the Democratic Party turned its back on. Then, of course, came the cultural policies and cultural stances that you mentioned.

Mounk: That is very interesting. Even on the economic policies now, when you think about some of the most popular economic slogans of the Democratic Party, sometimes it is raising the minimum wage, but a lot of it is free college or cancel student debt, which may or may not be good policies, but which clearly are directed towards what, according to polls, is actually the strongest Democratic electorate at the moment, which is people with high levels of education but lower levels of income. The person who is most likely to vote for Democrats is a person with a postgraduate degree who makes quite little money, whereas the person who is most likely to vote Republican is the person with a high school degree who is making quite a lot of money—the plumber, and so on.

Acemoglu: One hundred percent. The complication there is that the person with a postgraduate degree making little money is often somebody who will make more money in the future, and also comes from a family with greater wealth and access. Democrats have done better lately in mobilizing that group. Mamdani, who is an amazing politician, has articulated some very important themes, but is really speaking to that group. Still, I think Democrats are not appealing to the working classes, who have more culturally conservative values and other concerns. That is a very big problem, because I think liberal democracy needs that broad coalition.

The image I have in my mind of an iconic coalition to support liberal democracy is FDR’s coalition, which consisted of progressive educated people, his brain trust; it consisted of manual workers, the trade union movement; and it included the Southern Democrats, business owners, people with more conservative values but difficult economic conditions, but very conservative values as well. FDR’s genius was to keep them together. But it is not just unique to FDR. Look at Scandinavia. Look at Germany, you had the same things there as well. That kind of coalition looks much harder to form today, and that is what I think is the future of liberal democracy. We need to reform that kind of coalition.

Mounk: How do we reform that kind of coalition? It strikes me that you are saying that one root of this crisis is that we transitioned from an industrial to a post-industrial society, and philosophical liberals, as well as, in their market sense, political liberals on the left, do not seem to have dealt with that transition the appropriate way. When you look back through history and think about other moments when liberalism was truly in crisis, the rise of fascism and communism in the first half of the twentieth century was one such period. But the middle of the nineteenth century, when liberals had to think about how to adapt their ideology to the rise of industrial society, to the factories in Manchester and so on, was another. There is this complicated way in which liberalism has certain ideas about the economy. I think it is basically a political philosophy whose main idea is about the nature of governance and the rule of law and separation of powers, but not directly economic, though it obviously intersects with the economy. As you are saying, it is rooted in certain economic facts about society. When those economic facts in society radically change, liberalism needs to adapt to that, and it has trouble doing that. Should we think of this as an echo of the mid-nineteenth century, or of other moments in which there was this economic kind of transition, and how is it that the ideology can respond to those new economic facts by changing and adapting, but without giving up what is actually at its core?

Acemoglu: I think those are excellent questions, and your instinct is one hundred percent right that we have to learn from history. Indeed, there were historical difficulties. But I would say, despite the fact that if you look back, there are many mistakes and conceited arrogance in some liberal thinkers throughout the ages, the adaptation in the middle of the nineteenth century, I think, was better than what we have done today. I think the iconic case for that would be John Stuart Mill. He was very influenced by his father, James Mill, an economist and also a liberal in some way. But John Stuart Mill’s liberalism is much more adapted to the industrial age, much less arrogant than his father’s, which was very elitist. Essentially, it became the iconic left liberalism that I can identify with many aspects of the later social democratic ideas. John Stuart Mill was a staunch defender of individual freedoms, but also understood that you needed to provide opportunities and means for people to realize those freedoms. He was very open to democratization, including of women, lower classes, in social life and in the political process. That was the adaptation to industrial society.

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Today, I think the adaptation is not necessarily harder, but we are not doing as well. That adaptation, as you have started articulating it, really has two parts. One is economic and technological: how do we use existing technologies and redirect them if necessary, especially in AI, so that we can recreate the foundations of shared prosperity. The other, at the same time, is how do we create the aspirations of liberalism—that is what I call working-class liberalism. It comes with articulating a new governing philosophy with a broad coalition around it. I would say perhaps the latter has to come first, because if we have the right aspirations, redirecting and using technology the right way will become easier as well. Today, it is a failure of governance and institutions that we have the largest and most powerful corporations in the world that are not regulated at all. But it is also part of our governing philosophy. We do not have a governing philosophy today that can stand up to the power of tech. For such a long time, we have given a complete pass to tech companies to do whatever they wanted, because we just did not have that sort of governing philosophy.

Mounk: One question that I ask myself is, assuming that fifty years from now we look back at this period and we think liberalism was really in trouble in the beginning of the twenty-first century, but thankfully we figured it out, and today liberalism is doing great, what is the story that we are going to be telling about that rescue operation? There are three different ways we might be talking about it at that point, two of which are intellectually in competition with each other but somewhat hopeful, and one of which is a much darker timeline, but perhaps the one that is most realistic.

The first is that the ideas of liberalism, the basic political theory behind it, the basic formulation of what liberalism is, had become complacent, had become stuck in one kind of set of assumptions about the world, and we needed some people, like Daron Acemoglu, or more broadly, all the people we are trying to gather in Persuasion, to rethink the liberal tradition. Thankfully, X and Y and Z people managed to do that during that period, and that really allowed us, or gave us, the intellectual tools we needed for liberals to confront this new kind of period.

A second story is: forget about all of that, that is just a distraction and high-falutin word games. Really, what we needed is a set of clever policies, or charismatic political leaders, or election strategists who figured out how to stand up to populists, just engaging in political battle and change. What we need is a really smart idea about how to hold Google accountable, or the people who really figured out how to take the fight to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in the 2028 elections, or whatever.

The third kind of timeline that we might be thinking about fifty years from now is, things look bad in 2026, but they got worse. There was a ten-year period like the Emergency in India in the 1970s, of real abrogation of democratic rule, or the horrible war between the United States and Canada, whoever, and people saw what the world looks like without liberalism, and then they remembered the liberal virtues, and that is when liberalism reconstituted itself, which is the story of the middle of the twentieth century, of course. That is the story of how liberalism roared back after the horrors of World War II and the Third Reich and the Soviet Union and the Holocaust and all of those kinds of things.

Which story are we going to tell, and in particular, how important do you think that first piece, the most intellectual piece of this, is going to be relative to the other two?

Acemoglu: Well, look, I think there are very good historians who think the only good ever comes out of crises. I am not one of them. Of course, your third scenario is a scary one, and I cannot rule it out. I hope it is not that one. There are instances in the past where we have gotten our act together against challenges, in the face of challenges, but without everything hitting crisis proportions. The progressive era was a challenging time, but it was not a crisis in which people started killing each other. Of course there was poverty, but it was not much worse than it was in the nineteenth century. It was somewhat getting worse. But we got our act together. We formed a broad coalition, or not we, but people there, and they laid foundations for a much better set of institutions, doing things that are unimaginable today: several amendments to the Constitution, introducing the federal income tax, introducing new laws for antitrust, creating new political movements and parties and ideas, and stopping the corrupt election of senators, going to direct election of senators. There were tremendous changes. So we are capable of doing those things.

I, for one, am a big believer in the importance of ideas—not my own. If I can play a tiny role in this, I will be very happy. But ideas matter a lot. That is why I do emphasize in the book the need for a new governing philosophy. In fact, charismatic leaders, of course, are important, but I cannot think of a charismatic leader who has had beneficial effects unless he or she could piggyback on or articulate an inspiring idea. That is why Mamdani is a fantastically charismatic and skilled politician, but I do not think he has the right governing philosophy. That is why I do not think he is going to be transformative for the United States. He may, as yet, develop it. He is a very, very skilled person. But we really need new, aspiring, inspiring ideas, and those that will bring broad coalitions together and that will really energize liberal democratic institutions.

Mounk: Thank you very much for giving this justification for what I want to do in the next part of the conversation, which is to geek out about the political theory in your book. You defend liberalism, you make a philosophical case for liberalism, but as part of that defense, you also attack some of the big traditions that have historically justified liberalism. In particular, you think that we have overindexed on the social contract tradition, starting with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but it extends all the way through John Rawls and the influence that he has had on our thinking. Describe briefly what the social contract tradition really consists in, for readers who may be less read up on that, and why is it that you think that has in some ways pushed us in the wrong direction? Why, in order to do that work of renewing liberalism, do we need to critically rethink how we are justifying the philosophy?

Acemoglu: The social contract tradition came out of a very necessary point at a time when most of the world was not just governed by kingdoms and sultans, but philosophically believed and legitimized things like the divine right of kings, where certain people were put on this earth to rule over others. Social contract theories instead started articulating ideas related to we the people somehow giving our consent. It is very clear, for example, in John Locke’s work. But a very important part of that, which we can see, for example, in Immanuel Kant’s majestic work, is this effort to find what is right that we can somehow ex ante specify, either procedurally, as in Locke, or substantively, as in Kant, what is ethical action, what is the right organization of society. The extreme version of that, in my mind, is in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where there is a general will that is always right, and we have no choice but to obey that general will.

Mounk: Where, of course, the famous phrase comes from, that if the individual does not agree with the general will, then the general will should be imposed on them. This is not unusual—there might be a law, and even if you disagree with the law, we are going to force you to obey it—but with a dangerous addition: that this is not restricting your freedom, it is in fact forcing you to be free.

Acemoglu: Exactly. To be free we need to have the general will imposed on us so that we can be free. What is wrong with that, in my opinion, is that what is most positive for us is to agree from the bottom up on what should be done. So what I call a social compact rather than a social contract. What I mean by that is that there is not any formula for the right behavior that we should impose on others. Of course, we have to impose laws on others and ourselves, but we have to agree to them to the extent possible. Liberalism, again, was the one philosophy that cultivated that.

Today I believe we need that more than ever. We need shared moral values, communication, community, so that we can develop ways of reaching those compromises, and that is where bigger coalitions come in. We should move away from this notion that somehow some of us, or some political process, has the solution to all the problems. I think the social engineering agenda that we talked about briefly, Yascha, is very related to that. It comes out of the belief—by the way, when liberals used that, it was trying to solve real problems: problems of ignorance, intolerance, rejection of others in our society, in our midst. Those were real, serious problems. I do sympathize very strongly with the liberal agenda there. But I think the way to deal with that, saying that we know the answer and we have to impose that on diverse communities, is the wrong way to approach it. The moment you do that, first of all, you are betraying, I think, liberal ideas and all the pluralism that is so essential, and all the self-government aspirations that are so essential to liberalism. But also you are bound to create backlash, as we have done, instead of finding the common moral grounds and trying to make gradual progress on these things, which, again, liberalism has done brilliantly for two and a half centuries. Gradually, but brilliantly.

Mounk: Spell out the connection to me. How do you get from Thomas Hobbes to the modern campus bureaucracy for imposing DEI on, say, a department of political science?

Acemoglu: This is actually a fascinating area. I am very interested in that, which is the genealogy of ideas.

Mounk: When you say that there is a connection between the contractualist tradition and the kind of high-modernist project of social engineering, of which you take the DEI bureaucracy to be a part, what is the connection?

Acemoglu: Right, that is where I am going. Is Thomas Hobbes critical for that? I think he is, to some extent, because he introduced the most modern version of social contract ideas, but together with a very firm belief that you also needed the Leviathan, and the iron fist of the Leviathan, to keep order and to impose the right things. From there it is a very protracted evolution to Rousseau. I do not want to say that people from the right criticize Rousseau too much; there are some brilliant things in Rousseau. But I think he is also the epitomization of this kind of thinking, that once we know what is right in the general will, that should be imposed.

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I think the key is that none of these ideas, except for that brief period during the French Revolution, were really applied as liberal ideas. Liberalism was in opposition. It influenced things by changing hearts and minds and convincing conservatives, and later socialists, to come on board with its ideals. It is only in the decades that follow World War II that liberalism becomes the establishment. That is also the period where, throughout Western Europe and the United States, some of the problems that liberalism itself did not have any solutions to—such as how do you deal with the intolerant, how do you deal with ignorance, how do you integrate people into society when they come from very different backgrounds and there is discrimination and rejection—all of these problems came to the fore, because these are very heterogeneous societies, and they were modernizing in some aspects, both economically but also ideologically. That is where you see this urban, educated middle class gaining more and more progressive ideas, very cosmopolitan, very inclusive ideas in some sense. But other parts of it are still culturally very different. So how do you deal with these problems? The solution gradually became more and more, we know the truth, we are going to impose it on others. That is what I think is a problem.

Mounk: So the connection is that in the contractualist tradition, there is a kind of distinction between the right and the good—I am now broadly channeling John Rawls, though there are different formulations of it at different stages of the tradition. Broadly speaking, when it comes to how you want to lead your life, the state is meant to be neutral between different conceptions of the good that people have. I might be very secular and think that the good life is to spend my time chatting to interesting people on my podcast. Other people might be very religious and think that the good life consists in being a nun and spending all of their days in prayer. The state is not going to favor one of those things over the other. But in the realm of the right, in the realm of the basic rules the state is going to enforce, there is a kind of objective truth, and that objective truth has to do with how we can actually live together in a society under diverse circumstances. It means, in particular, that I am not allowed to impose my views on you. I cannot say, I am religious and you should also be religious, and if you are not going to be religious, then I am going to physically attack you, and so on.

Acemoglu: I think that is a little more complicated, in my opinion, because I think that is never fully the case. There are things you have to protect about individual liberties. But also, because I think what you describe, which sometimes goes under the name of pluralism, is accepted, sometimes, at the individual level, but my justification for liberalism and liberal ideas also says we have to accept it at the community level as well. Most of the things that we do are not just at the individual level but at the group level. You need to allow for some amount of community-level experimentation and community-level self-government. That is really difficult, because communities, of course, are cages of norms, as I also called them in my previous work with James Robinson, The Narrow Corridor. They impose their values and they take other people’s freedoms. That is why this is a very grey area. But there is no social contract, there is no formula. We have to work through these edge cases ourselves, as a global community, as a national community, as people who share certain moral values. This is why it is very important that we at the same time enshrine basic individual freedoms—freedom of thought, freedom of religion, association, speech—at the same time as we recognize community-level pluralism. I think that is what social contract theories do not fully do. John Rawls is an exception; it is a complicated case.

Mounk: Let me push you on that a little bit. I find the concept of a cage of norms very generative and helpful, and I draw on it in my book, The Great Experiment. When James Robinson came on the podcast to talk about The Narrow Corridor, which is a fantastic book, we debated that. If you want to go four or five years back in the archive of the podcast, you can find a great conversation about that. It is interesting to me that, on this particular point, I think you echo a post-liberal critique from the right, which I think actually has some real meat to it, some real justification, which is to say: these liberals claim that they are neutral between different conceptions of the good—you can be deeply religious, or you can be secular, you can do this, you can do that—but in practice that is not the case. In theory, the university claims, we are a diverse community and you can have all kinds of political views. But in practice, the deeply conservative religious student is going to feel a lot less comfortable on campus at MIT or at Johns Hopkins than the kind of secular Theater kid. I guess the question is, why is that? It seems to me that you are drawing a line here from the contractual tradition and saying, well, because the contractual tradition has this idea of a right and they want to impose it. I would say it is different, actually. I would say that conception should protect those students. The problem is precisely that we are not acting as philosophical liberals, that we are imposing an idea of the good on people, saying this is how you should live and not this other way. That is precisely a violation of what liberal principles are, whether or not they are cashed out as part of a contractual position or not.

Acemoglu: Let me try to say it this way. First of all, I am definitely not a post-liberal. But you are right, that critique is right. What I would say is that liberalism is the best way of dealing with that critique. That is where we have to recognize these grey areas and say we have to create these basic individual freedoms, but still allow for community-level self-government and pluralism. There is no hard and fast rule. In particular, when a community starts discriminating against a particular group, there often are going to be grey areas. If they take that group’s or that individual’s basic rights very strongly, that is where we have to stop it. But where that line is, I think we have to negotiate as a society, based on moral principles. That is why I do not think there is a social contract—if there was a social contract, we would know where that line is, in some sense. That line becomes much more inspiring to draw if we agree around it.

For example, on gay marriage, there are two very different paths to allowing gay marriage, and we have pursued both of them in the United States. In one of them, the process of debate, information sharing, campaigns, and referendums convinced people from very different walks of life, with very different values, that two people of the same sex wanting to get married was also a good thing. If you could put yourself in their shoes, you would realize why that was so important. Empathy was a very important part of building that tradition. A second path was, we know this is right, your community may be against it, but we are going to impose it on you. I think there is a big difference between these two. I fully support same-sex marriage, but I do not want the second path to be the one, because it is going to backfire, and it is actually not consistent with ultimate liberal values. I want that first path, which actually worked quite well for quite a while, to be the one to achieve that. If you are a social contractarian, I do not think you can reject that second path.

Mounk: Why not? I do not fully understand.

Acemoglu: Because it says that there is a social contract, and that social contract says, regardless of your sexual orientation, you should have the rights that opposite-sex couples have. If that is not the case, we are going to impose that. That is the social contract.

Mounk: I think there are many steps from going from something like Rawls’s original position to, say, whether, in a deeply conservative society, some form of protection for same-sex couples that falls short of marriage is acceptable. Or you could take a libertarian point of view, which I think is perfectly compatible with the social contract tradition in this specific circumstance, which is to say, well, the state should get out of the business of marriage. Marriage is something that has deep religious significance; different traditions are going to interpret it very differently. Why should the state be in the business of drawing the lines about what is an acceptable marriage and what is not?

Acemoglu: But the state needs to be there. I do not agree with the libertarian tradition either. If you did that, then it would also be okay for a community to say, well, we do not believe in the secular education system, so we are going to not send our children to school, we are going to drop them out of school at the age of seven, and I think that is wrong as well.

Mounk: But I think the liberal tradition has many more resources for answering some of those questions. The answer for children is that children cannot make decisions for themselves. Liberals think that you need to be able to make decisions for yourself, as long as you are not harming other people. But that presumes that you are capable of making decisions for yourself. A seven-year-old is not capable of making decisions for himself, so who should make decisions for the seven-year-old? The answer is a cooperative project between the parents and the state.

Acemoglu: Just a little tangent: yes, but it is not just the seven-year-olds. I gave that example, but let me give you another. If you are a libertarian and you are against the state, what do you do if a local, self-governing community forces people who are homosexual to go through conversion therapy because they think homosexuality is wrong? That is where the state needs to step in and say, no, that the local community cannot do that. So we do need the state.

Mounk: Sure. But that goes back to the discussion about community and how distinctive the level of a community is. I am not sure whether we disagree about what should govern those communities within liberalism.

Acemoglu: One thing that might help—and this might be a bit too much of a tangent—John Rawls is actually super interesting, because there are two very distinct ways of reading him, and I think he is not clear on which one should be the right way. One is the veil of ignorance, which I think is just very classic social contractarian: behind a veil of ignorance, we agree on the right thing, and then when we come out, when we are no longer behind the veil, we should still follow it. But there is another way, which is that this is an argumentation method. I can try to say to you, Yascha, put yourself in my shoes. You could have, in an alternative life, been me, and you would have seen things differently. That is a way of convincing you. It is the latter Rawls that is completely consistent with what I am saying, and it is the former Rawls that is very opposed to it, because I do not believe we can reach just and fair rules, rules that are going to form a broad coalition, behind a veil of ignorance, and then impose them.

Mounk : I agree with that. I also find A Theory of Justice not all that fruitful for debates today, but Political Liberalism much more helpful, and that is a similar distinction. But I actually want to get to the substantive question about what role the community should have. Here is roughly the position that, in part by engaging with the idea of the cage of norms and so on, I develop in The Great Experiment: the first misunderstanding about liberalism is that liberals do not value community. I think that is wrong. Historically it is wrong, because the very origin of liberalism was, how can we have Catholics and Protestants in the same state? It is not that we did not think those religious communities were important, but it is precisely because they were so important that they led to 150 years of war. We are trying to figure out how we can honor them without continually having war and civil war. When you think about what the basic liberal freedoms are—the freedom of worship, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of speech, freedom of conscience—they precisely come from an understanding that community and religion are incredibly important to most human beings.

Acemoglu: One hundred percent, and that is very important. You are one of those who has emphasized that. Helena Rosenblatt is another person who has emphasized that. I think that is a very important thing, and many important works of the liberal tradition, like, for example, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, come out of that—trying to say, how can we create communities in which people care for each other and understand each other?

Mounk: If you are saying that communities do not have enough pride of place in liberal theory at the moment, and perhaps not in our societies, because we impose upon them too much when we feel that they have run afoul of this social engineering project, what role should they have? To me, the liberal stance would be: communities have deep value, we want to have many communities in our society, and we have to respect the fact that they may hold views which I, as a secular liberal, may find offensive, and that is acceptable. But they have value derivatively from the choice of individuals to be part of them. This choice is not an idealized thing where I am imagining that at eighteen, I sit down and think, which community do I want to join. Most members of a community are going to be born into it and continue to be a part of it. But what we do have to leave is the possibility of exit. If you are raised within a community that you do not like, you need to be able to leave it. That is a fundamental feature of a community. The reason why we respect communities is that they have members who are free to leave but have not left. That is why they are worthy of our respect.

Acemoglu: One hundred percent, you got it exactly right. But let me push you on the next one. Should there be a right to entry?

Mounk: Not necessarily. I do not have to invite you for dinner. That is part of freedom of association.

Acemoglu: That is it. But that is exactly where we are now seeing the grey areas. Should a community today in the United States that is conservative say, immigrants are not welcome in our community? We cannot prevent them, but they are not welcome in our community.

Mounk: It depends on what you mean by a community here. If it is a residential area, then the answer is no. But if it is a social club for people who all have to be native-born citizens, that is not something I would like, it is not something I would join, but I think we should absolutely allow that.

Acemoglu: Exactly. When it is a residential area, for them to do so by any coercive means, or by any means that is inconsistent with the market system, is not allowed. But they may say, we, as a community, want to practice our religion, and we do not want your religion, and you can come and live here but we are not going to adapt to you. I think we have to allow that too, again subject to basic liberal principles, which is that they cannot restrict the freedom of association, speech, or mobility of those people. But they can have stances, they can have policies, they can have collective arrangements that are not as welcoming to immigrants, and other communities can have more. Those are the kind of grey areas, and I do not know the answer to where that line should be. I am proud of not knowing where that line should be, because I think that line should be something we decide together, based on shared communication and moral understanding.

Mounk: This also gets to a thought I have about the nature of hard cases. I think sometimes people want to point to the fact that there are hard cases as a way to suggest that therefore the underlying theory must be wrong, and I think that is a mistake.

Acemoglu: Absolutely. I think liberalism always has to be a work in progress.

Mounk: Any moral system is always going to have multiple normative commitments, and there are going to be some cases where those commitments butt up against each other.

Acemoglu: Yeah, absolutely. But any good moral system has to have that. There are many bad systems: theocracy does not have that, the divine right of kings does not have that, Sharia law does not have that. That is why they are bad systems.

Mounk: Right. But then I think the question is, in those hard cases, can you explain in a coherent way what the different considerations are and why this is a hard case? As long as each of those considerations has real normative pull, I do not think it is a problem. I want to get to your analysis of social engineering, because you draw both on history and on economics in order to help us understand it. You compare, for example, the DEI bureaucracy today to the clergy of the medieval church. What on earth do those two have in common?

Acemoglu: Any analogy there is dangerous and provocative, and I do not want to overstate it. But I think whenever you form a system where some people have the means to impose their practices or values on others, it has several elements. One is ideological power. That is very important to human beings, because it gives them power over others, and individuals, to some extent, seek power. It does that in a way that is consistent with their values. It also creates employment. It also further unites you with the people who share your values. Those are the dynamics that we saw with the clergy, and those are the dynamics that we see when you look at—and it is not just the DEI bureaucracy, it is the whole post-industrial system. Look at high schools. There is great diversity, so any generalization is going to be false, but there are certain currents in high school teaching that are very common across places, and they do impose a lot of values in some ways. Now, I sympathize with many of those values, but I still think we should encourage people into critical thinking rather than imposing those values. That is the sense in which this sort of thing starts spreading in concentric circles. That is what is problematic, and it does not leave enough room for consensus to emerge through shared moral understanding and communication, and it creates the possibility of backlash.

Mounk: One of the structural similarities you see across many historical examples is that, originally, people are recruited into the bureaucracy to serve a purpose that the principal—the president of a university, the pope, the king—has, but over time it is actually the bureaucracy that is assembled. Tell us about that mechanism, and how it helps illustrate both those historical cases and the challenge we face today.

Acemoglu: I think you summarize it quite well. I would say it is really remarkable that the dynamics of indoctrination in medieval Europe were very much a local matter. The Inquisition and all of these things are the apex of that, but they were very much local zeal—people who had other positions and other jobs really jumping in, surpassing each other in terms of how zealous they were going to be. If you look at where the head of the spear is in the progressive imposition of values in the recent past, it is again people who are there for other positions—human resource departments, or people who are in teaching positions, not everybody obviously—playing this role of, well, it is our job to impose what we think or what we believe are the correct values on others, if necessary, by not allowing them to speak counter thoughts.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Daron discuss the meaning of working-class liberalism, the potential economic impact of artificial intelligence, and how to shape a better way forward for AI. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is In the Realm of the Last Man. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column at Persuasion.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama discuss the true meaning of “the end of history,” why the struggle for recognition—rather than material interest—is the engine of historical progress, and how his thesis holds up 35 years on.

Enjoying this discussion? In an event exclusively for readers of American Purpose and Persuasion, Yascha Mounk will be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about his life and thought at 5pm on Sunday, September 6 at The Abbey Centre, London. Find out more and get tickets here. Paying subscribers of Persuasion and American Purpose can access a code for a free ticket here.

We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.

This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, features content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: This is the first substantive episode in our series on the eras of Francis Fukuyama. We started with a wonderful biographical conversation about your life and your family, but this is the first episode in which we really grapple with one of your major works, which is of course your most famous work, We’ll get to “the last man,” which is very important, but I want to start with the first substantive word in that title, which is “the end.” I think the first misunderstanding that people often have is that they understandably think about the end in terms of a closing, in terms of something being over, but of course the end is a kind of pun because it also means something like the purpose of history. So help us understand those four words: the end of history.

Francis Fukuyama: Sure. It’s not just the word “end” that’s problematic, it’s the word “history.” So let me explain both of them. The end of history really does refer to end in the sense of objective or target or direction. And the word history, I think today you would use words like modernization or development, because that’s the underlying concept: that there’s a broader pattern to history, that it unfolds over hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and that it has a certain coherence and direction. So the question of the end of history really has to do with that arrow. Where is that arrow pointing as we progress through historical time, and where does it look like it’s going to end up?

Mounk: To understand what you mean by end and what you mean by history, you need to go back to the thought of two philosophers, Hegel, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, and Kojève, the twentieth-century French philosopher. Let’s start with Hegel. There’s an old joke that a German scholar calls up his English colleague, and he’s well into his eighties at this point. He asks, Stephen, can you tell me a good English teacher? And Stephen says, well, why at your age do you now decide that you really want to improve your English? And he says, because I finally want to understand Hegel, because it’s often easier to read in translation than the original. Give us the one on Hegel.

Fukuyama: Sure. This may be a little bit more detailed than our listeners really want, but the idea of a progressive history has a lot of precedents. One of them actually is in Christianity, because history has a beginning in the Garden of Eden when God creates the world, and it has an end: the final revelation and the calling back of humanity to Christ and to God.

But in more recent times, I think it’s actually Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, who talked about perfectibility. In the late eighteenth century, when he was writing, the Europeans had discovered that there were all these primitive peoples living in North America and other parts of the world, and it made Europeans aware—they were aware that there was China and India and all these other foreign civilizations, but the idea that there’s actually a big difference between the indigenous tribes inhabiting North America and where they stood as Frenchmen was really quite enormous. Rousseau was really the first philosopher, in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, to provide a kind of long-term account of how early human beings evolved into modern human beings. He really kicks this idea off, and Hegel systematizes it as only a German can.

He’s the first historicist philosopher who argues that you can’t really understand any particular line of thought, ideology, or social condition except historically, because things evolve, things change over time. Just to take one obvious example: there is a time when virtually everybody in the world accepted the legitimacy of monarchy, because all states were ruled by kings or queens. There’s a time when many cultures took slavery as a kind of natural institution and they practiced it and didn’t see that there was anything wrong with it. Today we hold no king’s rallies, because we don’t believe that any monarch—except for constitutional ones—actually holds their position legitimately, and we certainly don’t believe in the legitimacy of slavery. This is an example of how, after Hegel, people began to say, well, that was right for their time, but we’ve moved on since then, and human thought has developed, and we no longer believe in those sorts of things. That’s what historicism means: there’s a general progress of human civilization that unfolds over time, and you can’t understand it without understanding that time dimension.

Mounk: That obviously raises the question of what it is that drives that historical process. Part of what drives it for Hegel, and part of what particularly drives it in Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, is the struggle for recognition. You have the master-slave dialectic that Hegel talks about, but that Kojève then interprets in a way that is even more central to that philosophy of history. Why is it that the struggle for recognition is such an important driver of this historical process?

Fukuyama: Perhaps before we get to that definition of recognition, we need to talk a little bit about Alexandre Kojève, because there was a time when everybody knew who he was in France. He was extremely influential in the middle of the twentieth century. He was a Russian émigré who settled in Paris and taught a very influential seminar on Hegel. They codified the notes of that seminar in a book, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, which is now available in English.

Mounk: Since France is a tiny country and everybody goes to the same one and a half schools, every great luminary—who may be a bigger household name today than Kojève himself—took that seminar, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Raymond Aron and many others.

Fukuyama: That’s right. Yes, he was extremely central to French intellectual life in the 1940s, ’50s, and onwards, and his particular take on Hegel really made central the problem of recognition. Karl Marx was another Hegelian. Marx took Hegel’s idea that history is progressive, but he said it’s really driven by human material interests, the means of production, what technologies produce wealth, and in the current era it was being produced by the bourgeoisie, and it was up to the proletariat to rise up in a proletarian revolution and take control of the means of production. That was a completely materialistic understanding of what drove history.

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Kojève, following, I think, legitimately on Hegel, but with much greater emphasis, said, no, actually it’s not material desire that is the driver, it’s really the struggle for recognition. That had to do with his understanding of human beings: unlike every other natural creature in the world driven by material interests, only human beings could struggle for dignity. He says only a human being will die for a flag or for glory, and that’s what made human beings different. For Kojève, history begins in a postulated bloody battle in which two early human beings struggle not over women or territory or resources—they struggle over recognition. Who is going to be recognized as dominant?

This is the central issue that he said lay behind, for example, the French Revolution. It wasn’t simply over the poverty of peasants in France. It really had to do with the fact that the monarchy did not recognize non-aristocrats as human beings. An aristocrat could treat a peasant in a purely material way, like he would treat a horse or a farm implement. Hegel, through the voice of Kojève, argued, no, in fact, this is a struggle over recognition, the recognition of dignity. The problem, according to Kojève, was that in these bloody battles for dominance, nobody ended up satisfied in the end, because the master won the victory over the slave, but he was only being recognized by a slave who was somehow less than human, and therefore his recognition wasn’t sufficient—and of course the slave wasn’t getting recognized at all.

What Kojève argued the French Revolution did was, for the first time, enshrine the principle of equal and reciprocal recognition of all human beings as the central principle underlying the new political order. To translate that into more understandable modern language, it meant universal human rights. A doctrine of universal human rights was articulated in the French Revolution. It was not implemented in most places around the world, but the idea was finally spoken in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. You could say the American Revolution did something very similar, in proclaiming a Bill of Rights that governments had to respect. That was the central innovation—this mutual respect and mutual recognition of dignity that, for Kojève, was really the culmination of this long historical struggle for recognition.

Mounk: Some people think that you were premature in declaring the end of history in 1989, when the article version came out. Kojève located the end of history in 1806, when Napoleon beats the Prussians, therefore universalizing, in a certain way, the principles of the French Revolution in 1806 at Auerstedt. That’s an even more ambitious dating.

Fukuyama: Yes, that’s true. I think it kind of gives you a hint about how to interpret Kojève, because Kojève did say history ended at the Battle of Jena. He was doing his seminar in the late 1930s, as Hitler was gaining steam, Stalin was still ruling Russia, and you were on the verge of the Holocaust, the Second World War. After the Second World War—decolonization, the rise of the United States, the Cold War—all of these things were still in the future, and yet Kojève calmly said, no, actually history ended in 1806. I think anybody reading that would have to realize that he was being playful. He was saying that the principles of the French Revolution—and you might say the French and American Revolution—were articulated then, and the defeat of the old Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena signified the spread of these liberal, modern ideas to the rest of old Europe.

There’s a passage that I quote in my memoir where he says it starts in the metropolis and spreads to the periphery. Many parts of the world hadn’t woken up to the news of the equality of rights, the equality of recognition, but it was only a matter of time before the provinces caught up with the metropole and this idea spread. I have to say that it’s not a crazy idea. If you go around the world and ask how many societies do not accept the idea of the essential equality of human beings, it’s very hard to find any. They don’t practice it, but the People’s Republic of China—the name of the country is the People’s Republic—they understand that somehow legitimacy comes from the people and their interests. That’s the sense in which I think you could say Kojève had a certain point: that this idea of universal human equality was an extremely powerful one, and it’s one that has spread relentlessly since then.

Mounk: So the struggle for recognition gets formulated in the vocabulary of Hegel and then Kojève. But as you point out, that distinctive feature of the human soul is both something you believe in, something that you take to be part of human nature, and something that writers and philosophers have recognized much earlier. Often when you talk about it, you use the vocabulary introduced by Plato, of thymos. Why is it that liberal democracy is somehow better able to honor that demand for recognition, or to allow people to live in accordance with that thymos—for that thymos to have a place in their lives and in the way in which they’re treated in society—in liberal democracy? Because that, I think, is really at the heart of your claim that the end of history is liberal democracy.

Fukuyama: Sure. Again, we have to go back a little bit in time and explicate some of these terms. In the Republic, which is Plato’s book about justice, he asks the question—Socrates, the philosopher, through his mouth Plato raises the question of what justice is. Socrates asks his two young Athenian interlocutors: what are the different parts of the soul? The soul is psyche in Greek, from which our word “psychology” comes. I would say that when you ask what are the parts of the soul, he’s basically asking the same question about human psychology: what constitutes a human mind? They say, well, there’s desire for food and drink, there’s reason—these are two distinct parts of the soul. And Socrates says, isn’t there a third part, that he labels thymos, a Greek word that still exists in modern Greek? It often means anger or spiritedness, that is also something independent of either reason or desire. That is this desire for respect or for recognition—that in addition to their material needs, human beings want to be recognized as human.

Now, I argued in the book that there’s actually two different versions of thymos. The first is isothymia. This is a Greek word that I made up myself, meaning equal recognition. All people really hate it when they are disrespected, when they’re treated differently from other people, and they want to be treated equally. They say, I’m a person too—why did you ignore me and go to this person? Isothymia is really the Hegelian idea, or the Kojèvian idea, of universal recognition. We actually enshrine that in modern law. We have a Bill of Rights in the United States, we have a Declaration of Independence—whose two hundred fiftieth anniversary we just celebrated—that begins the second paragraph with “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” This doesn’t make them materially equal, but it states that all—well, at least all Americans—are entitled to the same kind of respect and rights, and we enshrine that in a Bill of Rights where we say that Americans have the right to speech, to association, to belief, to a whole set of things that we believe make us essentially human, and the state recognizes that humanity by protecting and enshrining those rights.

I would say virtually every modern country now has a similar kind of construct, where you have a legal structure that seeks to protect the equal rights of human beings. This is not in fulfillment of any kind of material demand—you could call it a spiritual demand, that we want the state to say, yes, you are a human being the same way as other human beings, and we’re not going to treat you as a second-class citizen.

Now the problem in modern societies is that there’s other demands for recognition—what I call megalothymia, meaning the demand for superior recognition—that many people, not everybody, but a certain group of people, want to be recognized as being superior. This obviously causes trouble in a democratic society that is committed to the equal rights of citizens, because certain people want dominance—they don’t want to be just treated like everyone else. This is a kind of essential tension that exists in every modern democratic society that, following Kojève and Hegel, grants universal and equal recognition to its citizens: you somehow have to deal with those that aren’t satisfied with simply equal recognition but want something more than that.

Mounk: That’s a little preview of a trouble we get to in The Last Man, and why it is that not everybody is satisfied with that. But to stick with isothymia for a moment, do you take that just to be an essential part of human nature, and perhaps even primate nature? I’m thinking here of the famous examples of giving two apes a reward for some kind of behavior—they’re very happy to get a grape for that behavior. But then when they see that you suddenly start giving the other ape a banana for that behavior, and they continue to just get a grape, some kind of inferior reward, they get incredibly angry. Should we—is that just a basic demand for fairness? It’s clearly not just that they think they need to get this amount of food for the behavior, so it’s something beyond that. But have we violated the isothymia of that ape? Is that what’s going on there?

Fukuyama: No, I think that’s absolutely right. There’s a lot of evidence from the primate world that other primates worry about recognition and this kind of equal recognition. Economists don’t think about thymos naturally—they think just about reason and desire. But there’s actually a lot of experimental evidence like the dictator game where you give both players a material reward, but you give more to one person than the other, and the difference starts increasing, and what economists have found is that if the difference is relatively small, people will say, I want the reward, I’m interested in the material outcome. But when it falls below a certain point, people will just say, I don’t want it. You’re disrespecting me by giving the other player so much instead of me.

Mounk: So the idea is: somebody gives me a hundred dollars to distribute. Now, in principle, I get to split the money however I want between the two of us. In principle, I could say, I give one cent to Frank and I keep $99.99, and you should be able to accept that, because one cent is more than zero cents. Why would you reject it? But what we find empirically is that in many cases, when what I’m giving you falls too low, when the split becomes too unfair, people say, I’d rather forgo ten dollars than accept a humiliation of you keeping ninety dollars for yourself and only giving ten dollars to me.

Fukuyama: That’s right. If you want another, more concrete contemporary example, look at the question of gay marriage. The demand for gay marriage appeared—you could have solved that issue in other ways. You have gay couples that have adopted children, and you have these questions of survivorship and inheritance and so forth. One argument for gay marriage is that you want a legal structure by which you can transmit property to descendants. But you could do that through a civil union. There are other legal forms, other than marriage, that would permit that, if you’re only interested in the material consequences of a gay or lesbian union. But the demand from gays and lesbians was not for civil unions. They wanted marriage. I think it’s a completely recognition-based demand: they wanted their unions, their love for each other, to be recognized as having the same dignity as that between a man and a woman. That was the essential issue. They didn’t want to be told, no, your union, your love for each other, is on a lower plane than it is between a heterosexual couple.

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You can see manifestations of this demand for recognition all over the place. I forget whether this book was written in the 1950s or ’60s, but there was an African American author, Ralph Ellison, who wrote a very popular book at the time called Invisible Man. It was really about African Americans moving from the South up to northern cities, where you didn’t have legal segregation, back in the mid-twentieth century. His point was that there were indignities that were equally demeaning in the North, because people simply—even if you didn’t have legal segregation—you had a prejudice that made a Black man invisible to his white counterparts. That was the origin of the title, Invisible Man—that the indignity was something different from material prejudice or discrimination. It really had to do with the fact that white people simply didn’t see Black people as their equals.

Mounk: So being rende2red invisible in this way was a violation of isothymia. Let us get into the heart of the argument. We’re in 1989. We’ve seen a century in which there was a genuine fight between different kinds of ideologies. You go back to the 1920s, 1930s—there are people who are convinced that communism is the best way to rule the world, there are people who are convinced that fascism is the best way to rule the world. Those are genuine ideological competitors to liberal democracy. By 1989, you argue that that is no longer the case—that it is now evident that those ideological competitors have been discredited, even though at the time the Soviet Union was very much still a going concern.

Liberal democracy is the last ideology standing, in part because it is better able to offer isothymia than those other competitors, because it is able to accommodate the demand for recognition in a way that those other ideologies were not. Why is that? We’ve assembled the ingredients—now it’s time for you to cook.

Fukuyama: Well, I think it really does have to do with the question of rights—that communist regimes were dictatorships. They worked very, very hard to provide the material basis for their societies, and they did not do as well as their capitalist competitors in high technology and other areas, but they were developed societies. They were relatively rich societies where you could actually have a job, a guaranteed income, health care—a lot of things that satisfied the material side of your personality. But what they didn’t allow people to do was to be human beings in the deepest sense—to be able to express moral choice, and particularly in the question of their own self-government. Every individual governs himself or herself and their family, maybe, but a full human will also want to have a share of the governance of the broader society. This is something that communist dictatorships simply did not permit. You had a small elite in the Communist Party that made all of the important decisions. Nobody could disagree, nobody could criticize, nobody could complain. I think it was that absence of just a baseline of human ability to express agency in the face of a very powerful state that was really the single thing that people resented the most about dictatorship.

Mounk: That relates to how you define liberal democracy in your work, which is that it really is the combination of individual freedom and collective self-determination. Those obviously are two basic elements of a democratic system. But in the context of what you just said, part of why you define it in that way is that it is those two things in combination that are needed for people to feel like they have recognition.

Fukuyama: Well, I suspect we’re going to get into a discussion later in this podcast series about some of what ails contemporary liberalism, but there is definitely a conception of liberalism that has very old roots, way before the American Revolution, that says that freedom is not purely an individual thing. It’s not simply my ability to choose my occupation, my spouse, where I live—it’s also being able to have a share in collective self-government, and being able to participate politically to make the big decisions for the community as a whole. This is something, obviously, that communism simply never provided. You could make small decisions about yourself and your family quite freely in most communist societies—what you couldn’t do is participate in the larger structure of political self-governance. I think this has always been an important component of what we mean by the liberal part of liberal—well, the democratic part as well. It means exercising agency at all levels.

Mounk: Kojève says in his lectures, decades before you, that the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt is really where history, in a certain sense, ends. He’s obviously aware that there are historical events afterwards. You say, in the 1989 article version of “The End of History?” that history has ended—but you say something, I’m quoting this from memory, but I often teach the text to students, so I have it pretty exactly right—I think that the annual chronicle of events in the back of Foreign Affairs, which no longer exists, I think, will continue to list all kinds of historical events. But at this point, the battle for ideological supremacy has in some ways ended.

I guess there’s two different ways we can evaluate that. One is: what are all of the historical events that happen after? That is the way in which people often use that article as a kind of, I think, rather silly gotcha, or punching back, because they really haven’t understood what the article argues. There’s another challenge that I think is more serious, whether or not it succeeds—which is not that, but what about 9/11, and what about the Iraq War, and what about the current war in Iran? It’s very, very clear, from the first time that you give this lecture and publish the article and then write the book, that you expect those kinds of historical events to continue happening. So that’s not a real rejoinder to any sophisticated understanding of your article.

But there’s another rejoinder, which is: well, it turns out that liberal democracy has all kinds of internal problems, that it’s not able to resolve contradictions within its system as well as we might have thought a few decades ago. Look at all of its ideological competitors—look at Islamic theocracy, that is going strong in Iran, look at whatever exactly you want to describe the system as that has been very successful in China, and is the operating system of a country that is now a genuine geopolitical rival to the United States.

So, addressing that challenge: do you think that in 2026 there is a more serious ideological rival to liberal democracy than there appeared to be in 1989?

Fukuyama: Well, a lot of the answer to that question depends on your definition of “ideological.” I think that there are obviously many societies that continue to be non-liberal and non-democratic, like China, like Saudi Arabia, like Iran, and they’re based on different principles. For me, the question has always been: in the long run, over a period of time, are they likely to be more satisfying to the people that live under them than living in modern Europe or North America? There I think you can still raise a serious question. In many ways you have had a big Islamic revival among almost every majority-Muslim country in the world, but is that actually going to be a model that extends into the future? Can they actually make use of modern technology? The liberal Enlightenment encompassed not just a set of political ideas, it also encompassed an approach to modern natural science, to empirical inquiry, and the like. Although clearly the Iranian regime can adopt technology, it’s not clear that the complete absence of freedom in that kind of society will allow it to sustain itself in terms of pushing that frontier backwards.

Right from the beginning I felt that China was a much more plausible competitor. They clearly have a very different system. They have a certain amount of economic freedom, but they are a dictatorship and they don’t accept the principle of democratic accountability in anything like the way that Western countries do. They’ve been extremely successful, and in fact, in terms of their economic development, they’ve done everything much more quickly than any Western democracy has done in terms of raising living standards and so forth.

As you noted, my original “End of History” article had a question mark at the end, and I take that question mark seriously. I didn’t know in 1989, and I don’t know in 2026, whether any of these alternatives is going to end up superior. I would say, in terms of China, I’m not ready to come to the conclusion that they’ve discovered an alternative formula, because first of all, I don’t think the Chinese system is exportable, except within a kind of pre-existing Confucian cultural area. It requires too many things that are kind of culturally unique to Chinese civilization. Even in material terms, I’m not sure that this Chinese growth model is going to be sustainable, because it’s got a lot of problems right now that I’m not sure it’s able to solve. But I’m completely open to the fact that in another fifty years, or even less than that, another generation—I’m not going to be around anymore—it’ll turn out that the United States will have really decayed into a kind of messy anarchy, and China continues to be a world leader, and at that point I would say, yeah, I was wrong, there’s an alternative model out there.

Mounk: Let’s stay with China for a moment, because I agree with you that it is the most serious ideological competitor, in part because the appeal of Islamic theocracy is by definition limited to the part of the world that is Muslim. I can see two different kinds of challenges to China being a genuine ideological alternative. The first is about its ability to deal with its own internal contradictions. In a dictatorship, it’s very hard to know to what extent people actually are content. Relatedly, you might think that societies tend to do very well at a moment of rapid economic expansion—that when they go through that first flush of people going from being peasants to being industrial laborers to rising into the middle class, a lot of challenges and problems within the system are a little bit hidden. You see the strengths of the system, and the weaknesses are a little bit less visible. The real challenges for every kind of society start when they have economically matured, when they’ve been developed for a generation or so, when people are less content, because they can’t say, well, I may be unhappy about all kinds of things, but my parents had to use an outhouse, and my grandparents were lucky if they ate meat once a week. By comparison to that, I’m doing extremely well. Once that bottom-line-output legitimacy is no longer available to people, because they’ve been raised with higher expectations, the fault lines of the society become much more evident. I don’t think that China has quite reached that point yet.

The second challenge to China being a real ideological alternative speaks to the exportability that you touched on. I sometimes make the quip that China works pretty well in practice, but it’s a mess in theory. What I mean by that is that it is a society that has clearly been phenomenally successful over the last decades compared to other parts of the world, but also just compared to other periods of Chinese history. But it is a supposedly Marxist-Leninist state that is in practice a form of state capitalism with actually quite a limited welfare state. In some ways, it is a more extremely capitalist system than anywhere in the West, built atop a very long history of Confucian values and a meritocratic civil service. If you live in a poor country in other parts of the world—if you live in Zimbabwe or in Nigeria—and somebody asks you, would you want to have Chinese-style governance if we could assure you the same nature and quality of governance, perhaps the answer is yes. But if an elite in your country comes to you and says, I want to build the Chinese model here, are you going to trust me to do that? I think the answer is always going to be no, because how on earth are you going to do that in that very, very different context?

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Do you think there’s a way in which China might overcome those limitations, and as it becomes potentially the most powerful country in the world, other countries are going to start imitating it? Or do you think that those limitations will always constrain the extent to which it can challenge the ideological supremacy of liberal democracy?

Fukuyama: Well, I obviously don’t know the answer to that question. I think it remains open. I would say that there is one argument I made in the 1991 book which I think has simply been disproven, which is some version of modernization theory. In the 1960s, up through the 1960s, there was a belief in American social science that development or modernization was a kind of unified process in which people would get richer, more educated, they would start to earn property, you’d develop a middle class, an urban middle class, their values would start changing, and they would be much more open to liberal democracy. That seemed to be playing itself out in other parts of Asia that were democratic, like South Korea or Japan, where they had hit a certain level of income and in fact established pretty successful modern democracies.

China has really blown that theory apart. I think it passed that level of transition into a middle-class society actually now quite a few years ago, and I don’t see any great demand on the part of middle-class Chinese to open the system up. Maybe it exists and it’s simply being repressed—that’s entirely possible. But it certainly doesn’t look like South Korea, or Japan, or Taiwan.

I do think that there are other aspects that will play out in the future which have to do with individual freedom and, in a certain way, with culture. China is really good in material terms, in providing living standards, employment—I mean, we’re seeing problems in those areas now, but so far it’s been pretty good. What’s not clear is that the other things that make up a modern life, that seem to be more dependent on individual freedom, are kind of missing in China. That has to do with culture. It’s very remarkable—both Japan and South Korea are successful liberal democracies that have very high standards of living, and among the things they’ve been able to create is not just semiconductors and computers and this sort of thing, it’s also culture. Both of those countries have exported cultural products that have been wildly popular all over the world. We just had a BTS concert here at Stanford, and it was unbelievable—the number of young Americans that flock to hear a Korean boy band. China does not export culture. They export almost everything else. The Chinese way of life—I think, if you live in North Korea it looks pretty good, but the Chinese way of life is not something that I think appeals to a lot of people. It certainly doesn’t appeal to people who understand and have enjoyed Western individual freedom.

That’s one respect in which I’m not sure that China is actually, in the long run, going to be satisfactory to its own population. But you’re right, I think the immediate transition to a very rich and successful country is really what explains the support for the regime as it seems to exist right now.

Mounk: That, I do think, is going to be one of the fault lines within China. When you talk to young Chinese people, I think they certainly have an aspiration for a lot of individual freedom, a lot of self-determination in terms of what their life looks like—which doesn’t mean that they want democracy, and doesn’t mean that they’re liberals, and it doesn’t necessarily even mean that they have a negative view of the Communist Party. But it does mean that they have a sense that the life they are being offered is extremely restrictive. This includes a lot of executives in China who are my age complaining about the young employees no longer being ambitious, because they feel that all they’re being offered is incredibly hard work for relatively little reward.

There’s a trend in China towards seeking what people call putong shenghuo. Putonghua is the common man’s language; putong shenghuo is the common man’s life. People who might be able to make a career in Beijing and Shanghai are saying, no, I’m going to go back to my hometown. It’s easier to find an apartment where perhaps my parents speculated with property and have an apartment they can give me. I’m going to take a job running a local post office or something like that, and that’s going to be a more decent life than really being part of the rat race in Beijing or Shanghai. I think there’s something very interesting about that development.

But that gets me back to the end of history. I wrote an article in the Journal of Democracy to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the article version of “The End of History,” in which I roughly argued that you were right about the ideological competitors to liberal democracy continuing to be absent, for the reasons that we’ve been going through and discussing—Iran and a significant question mark on China—but that the internal contradictions of liberal democracy have turned out to be much more significant than we might have anticipated. Why is it, insofar as you agree with that—and perhaps you completely disagree with that—that liberal democracies are in much more turmoil than we might have predicted a few decades ago? How is that related to the idea not of isothymia, but of megalothymia, as well as the boredom at the end of history?

Fukuyama: Well, this does get into some of the discussion of The Last Man, but you’re right that the internal contradictions of liberalism, if they prove to be very powerful and decisive, that’s the real counterargument to what I was saying back in 1989 or 1991. That argument is much more plausible today, when the American system does not seem to be working terribly well. I think that most people who analyze modern democracy would say that you need basically a social consensus behind certain ideas, and there is a certain liberal culture that needs to take hold if those kinds of systems are going to work. This is probably one of the more serious anti-liberal comments: that liberalism itself depends on a pre-existing culture that was not created by liberalism, and we’re living kind of off of the surviving borrowed capital from that earlier culture—but we’re spending it, and it’s disappearing.

There’s something to be said for that. This is something Samuel Huntington argued: that a lot of the success of democracy actually depends on Protestantism. It was Protestantism that created the idea of the individual—individual choice was sanctified—and the particular form it took in the United States actually turned out to be very productive, because it was not unified under a single state church, it was diverse and permitted a lot of experimentation and competition and so forth. But it is a wasting asset. It’s something that we can’t necessarily take for granted. In many ways, certain interpretations of Protestantism have either just disintegrated—like liberal Protestantism, which was the church that my father was part of—or taken a decidedly authoritarian bent in terms of Christian nationalism. Therefore, that capital really is not something that’s available for us to spend in the current generation.

I think one of the most disappointing things, that I wouldn’t have thought back when I wrote The End of History, was that the United States itself could make the kinds of political choices—I had always thought that one of the good things about the United States was that even in the depths of the Great Depression, you didn’t get a serious authoritarian demagogue arising, as you did in Germany or Italy or other parts of Europe, that would take advantage of that kind of economic distress to argue for an authoritarian regime. Yet what we’re seeing in the United States today is actually—no big crisis. We’re really not in such terrible shape. In fact, you could argue, along with Steven Pinker, that things have never been better materially today, and yet you have a deep unhappiness of people who want to reject the ideas that have created that material comfort. I do think that there is something internal to liberal democracy that is quite problematic. If you open the literature about the crisis of liberalism, there’s seven different competing theories as to why liberalism is in crisis.

Mounk: There’s people who talk about the economic roots of the crisis, there’s people who talk about the cultural and demographic transformations of the last decades, there’s people who give a technological account rooted in the rise of the internet and of social media, there’s people who talk about elite failure—either simply because of a series of shocking events from 9/11 to the Great Recession to the pandemic, or more broadly because they feel that a kind of cadre of highly educated people have gotten to the top of the institutions and are using them to impose their values on society in a way that alienates people. You can have any set of explanations for it. What do we gain by thinking about the origins of these social contradictions through the conceptual machinery that you laid out in your work? I assume you don’t disagree, in particular—certainly not with all of them, perhaps not with any of these competing explanations, they may not even be competing—but how is it that thinking about the struggle for isothymia and the struggle for megalothymia helps us better understand why liberal societies now struggle with keeping their citizens satisfied?

Fukuyama: Well, one distinction I think you need to make is a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic challenges to our current liberal democracy. An extrinsic challenge is something that simply appears on the outside, that’s very threatening—like a pandemic, or a foreign invasion, or global warming—and it’s not really clear that this problem is either solvable by an alternative regime or even by a liberal democracy, but that’s not a problem of liberal democracy itself. An intrinsic problem is the sort of thing that we were just talking about, where the problem arises from the very concept of liberalism itself—it’s an internal contradiction. In Hegel’s theory, that was one of the big motors of human progress: that every prior political system had an internal contradiction that it couldn’t solve, and therefore led to a crisis that produced a synthesis that was an effort to overcome that contradiction, and that’s really what produced progress in the past.

I think it’s very important to try to determine for ourselves which of these explanations for the current turmoil in politics is intrinsic to the very idea of liberalism. If it is, that means that we need to think about alternatives—what’s beyond the end of history, is there an alternative social order that we need to move towards? Or is it just an extrinsic problem—we’re not handling it very well, but through somewhat different policies maybe you could deal with financial crises or pandemics or some other thing. That’s why I think the framework in The End of History is still useful in understanding where we are, but more importantly, how we get out of our current situation.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Francis discuss how the concept of the last man is deeply relevant today, the two possible futures for America—and whether Francis would change the title of The End of History. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Katja Hoyer is a visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her latest book is Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Katja Hoyer discuss why the Weimar comparison is so tempting (and so often misleading), what genuine enthusiasm for democracy in 1919 Germany can teach us about how democracies fail, and whether political fragmentation or economic crisis was the more decisive factor in Weimar’s collapse.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Katja, we recorded a really interesting episode about the long run of German history a few weeks ago. You kindly agreed to come back for an extra little chat given the horrible events in Berlin this past weekend. Tell us what happened.

Katja Hoyer: There was a terrorist attack, from what we know now, on a pride event in Berlin at the weekend. A man drove a van into crowds. At the moment, we have one victim that was killed and several dozens that were injured. He’s also supposed to have gotten out of the car and conducted a knife attack on the crowds as well.

Police have since found out who it was and chased him down, and the man was shot dead in the process of the police confronting him. So that’s where we currently are with this, and now all sorts of questions are being asked about how this was allowed to happen, what we already know about the perpetrator, and what Germany should do now, if there should be any political consequences to this.

Mounk: There’s been a series of Islamist attacks in all of Europe, including in Germany, a large number of them over the last 10 or 15 years. One of the things that makes this story quite remarkable is that this wasn’t an unknown perpetrator. His radicalism, his extremism wasn’t unknown to the German authorities. In fact, the German authorities brought him back from Lebanon because he had tried to join ISIS. What do we know about the history of this particular perpetrator, and any potential failings of the German state in averting this attack?

Hoyer: He is an interesting case in that he actually holds German citizenship, was born in Germany to Lebanese parents, and therefore is perhaps a little bit different in his background. He didn’t come to Germany himself as a refugee or as an immigrant, but actually grew up in Germany himself. This begs all sorts of questions about spotting radicalism early. He would have grown up in Germany, gone to school there, would have seen GPs, people around him, teachers and so on. He was, as you say, known to the authorities as a radicalized young person for a long time, in that he already tried to make his way to Syria to join ISIS, and then was also convicted of planning an attack against the state and against people in Germany and got a very light sentence. Many people feel that the sentence was actually suspended, and he was allowed to go about his daily life again, and therefore was in a position to conduct this attack rather than being in prison or being under the very careful watch of the authorities.

Mounk: Some of the details about this are really quite striking, and honestly horrifying. He had traveled to Lebanon to try and join ISIS in Syria. He was in jail in Lebanon when German authorities decided to bring him back to Germany in order to put him on trial. Somewhat understandable. But that trial then resulted in him being sentenced under youth guidelines, even though he was older than 18 years old, and all he got was a suspended sentence, which meant that he wouldn’t see a day in jail. A couple of days after the attack—today, as we’re recording—he was meant to have a chat with some German social workers about his extremism, and that was the extent of the punishment that he was facing. And then you add some of the really absurd details to how the German authorities are treating these circumstances, like the fact that I at first thought this must be fake news, but I looked at the actual Twitter account, that the police in Berlin shared a link to the photograph of a perpetrator, but not a photograph directly on the platform, because that, they explained, was not permissible according to German data protection laws.

Hoyer: I think it is tricky, because all of these laws and rules and regulations have got their purpose. You can always explain where they came from, why people introduced them in the first place. For example, the fact that youth sentences are quite light in Germany, comes from the whole idea that you don’t want to mess up a young person’s life forever just because they made a mistake when they were still relatively young. You can see the idea behind that if it’s something like delinquency, or things that a young person might do because they went on the wrong path at some point. But of course, once you are dealing with somebody who’s extremely dangerous, because he’s deeply ideologically convinced that he needs to follow down this path, and you’re not going to change that with a chat or two in a de-radicalization program, and people were at the time aware of how extreme his views were, then of course this entire system, that isn’t really set up to deal with these cases, begins to look rather absurd and bizarre when applied to a case like him. It’s easy, I think, in hindsight, to see where all of the problems are, but I don’t think there’s an easy way of remedying all the bits that make it quite easy for perpetrators in Germany to exist and to exert their freedoms, or use their freedoms, in the way that anybody else might be able to.

Mounk: A first step might be stopping the denial about some of the basic realities of what is happening. One of the things that I found striking in the aftermath of the attack is that there’s a number of these strange bureaucrats in Germany who are responsible for fighting against discrimination against all kinds of various groups. A worthy cause, but it’s not always the most capable individuals who are in those roles, and a number of people who are charged with fighting against real discrimination against the LGBTQ community were pressed on what the threats are for that community. When you speak to members of that community, it’s quite clear that unfortunately a lot of the time when they experience hostility in the public sphere across Europe at this point, and certainly when there are attacks as well, that often is from people with an Islamist background, who have extreme theological views, and the animus that is sometimes inspired by that. We’ve seen that also repeatedly with some terrorist attacks, including in that nightclub in the United States a number of years ago. And yet a lot of these bureaucrats were saying, well, the danger is from the right and from conservatives and so on, and there may certainly be some threats from neo-Nazis and others as well, but they really weren’t willing to name the nature of the attackers as Islamist, and the fact that it is that ideology which often targets those groups, which helps to explain to some extent the otherwise very strange and striking fact that the share of gays and lesbians in Europe that now vote for the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen in France, or for the AfD in Germany, is rapidly growing.

Hoyer: I think people often see this as a zero-sum game. It can’t be that there are several threats to a community. It has to be either or, this competition around which is the biggest threat. If there are far-right threats, that doesn’t mean that the Islamist threat isn’t real. But there’s always this moment now, I think, and this is quite telling as to where we are in terms of our debate here, when an attack like this happens, and then people hope for the perpetrator to be of a certain ethnicity or background or ideological persuasion.

Mounk: I don’t know whether you’re alluding to that, but there was somebody who was holding a speech at Christopher Street Day, informing the crowds of what had happened, who literally said this: “I was hoping”—and it was a strange choice of terms—“it wasn’t a Kanake,” which is a derogative term. I think the person was themselves not white. A Kanake is a kind of self-claimed politicized term about a non-German, in the way that perhaps “queer” has become in reference to the gay community in the United States. So “I was hoping that it wouldn’t be a Kanake, but sadly it has turned out to be one. I was hoping that it would be a white cis person who made this attack.” It’s a very strange thing to express in that moment.

Hoyer: It is, and it’s also utterly callous. It leads a million miles away from thoughts about the victims, about the people that this happened to, about the general situation, that people just don’t feel particularly safe anymore at these sorts of events. And it’s not just political or social events like this one. People say the same about Christmas markets, or about concerts, or about any other public events. We’ve had several attacks even on very small kinds of village fête type things, where people were attacked when they attended something in their local village or small town, or beer festivals and things like that. That just leads to a general perception, I think, that people just don’t feel safer anymore. If you move away from discussing that, and what that means and what to do about it, towards who’s the perpetrator and is it somebody that I can blame, then that becomes a very politicized and ideological debate that isn’t really constructive in terms of actually improving the situation.

Mounk: Towards the end of our substantive conversation about the history of Weimar, as well as present-day Germany, we talked about some of the upcoming state elections in East Germany, in which the far-right AfD was already projected to do very well. We talked in particular about the fact that perhaps in Saxony-Anhalt they may win an outright majority. What impact do you think these attacks are going to have on those elections, and how do you think ordinary Germans are going to react to them?

Hoyer: It’s clearly inflamed passions quite a bit. I’ve lived in Britain for a long time now, but I’ve still got many friends and family members in Germany, and speaking to them over the last few days, it’s really affected them. I know many people in Berlin where this attack happened. People were telling me that their friends or siblings attended this Pride event and were deeply shocked by what happened. They’re going to go away with a different view of how they go about their lives, and I think that is bound to have a political impact as well. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we immediately see a surge of the far right. I think in general, maybe some people may decide not to vote anymore, because they don’t know who to vote for, because they don’t trust any political party to deal with this. We may see an entrenchment on the left, saying now especially we need to fight the far right, so they may be able to mobilize people.

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But I do feel that this is quite a big political thing, because it’s not an isolated event. It came on what some now actually call a bloody summer, because there have been so many events where people were attacked in different contexts. There was a student, for example, who just randomly became the victim of another attack, where I think it was an Afghan individual who basically just killed him on the street during the day. He was completely random, a random victim, they didn’t know one another. There were several of these incidents now over the summer where it involved basically people who had either come to Germany or had a migrant background of some description. I feel that this accumulation is building up. You have people on the left saying, why is this happening now, when we’ve got elections coming up?

Mounk: The conspiracy theory about false flag attacks and all of those kinds of things. It used to be the right that claimed those kinds of false flags in the United States, but it’s also a very tempting idea on parts of the left. Let me sharpen my question perhaps a little bit. The basic claim of parties like the AfD in Germany is that the institutions are failing. The people who are in charge don’t know what they’re doing. They’re too captured in the ideology to take seriously the threats to our safety and well-being. And only we can fix it. I disagree with that in two ways. I disagree that the institutions are as disastrous as these parties say. I think we’re very attuned to the failings of our societies and we tend not to see the things that are working well. Even for Germany, it isn’t quite that bad a situation at the moment, where many things work very well in the country compared to most other places in the world. And secondly, I don’t believe for a moment that the AfD, for example, would do a better job at dealing with these problems, for all kinds of reasons we could go into. Having said that, stepping back a little bit, it’s not surprising if people look at, in particular, the failures of the police, of the court system, of the entire setup, down to this absurdity about not sharing the picture of a perpetrator on social media because that would violate his personality rights, and say, who’s in charge here? Why should we trust them? That, I guess, makes me afraid for the country’s future and the future of other countries where there are similar problems.

Hoyer: I think you’re right to be afraid, because the figures have shown over the last few years that trust in public institutions—and this goes all the way from parliament, as an institution in the abstract, all the way down to things like the police, public civil servants, that kind of thing—has been eroded over the years. This is something that extremist parties can always use as a way of saying we need to stop tweaking things because the system itself isn’t working, so we need radical solutions, and more and more people begin to believe that that is the case, and so you see the political changes happening there. This is a particularly stark case where there are so many little things along the way that kind of went wrong to get to this point, all the way from how he was allowed to grow up with this sort of mindset in the first place without any intervention as such, all the way to the way, as you say, this was dealt with once the incident had happened.

All that people see is politicians coming out with phrases that may have come out of AI. It’s virtually as if you typed into AI, “give me a speech by a politician after a major incident like this has happened.” We won’t have them destroy our way of life. Let’s carry on living the way that we do. We must stick together. All they want to do is divide us. All these clichés, they don’t help. They make things worse. People feel that politicians don’t have any answers to this, and once they feel that, what’s the point in voting for the same politicians again? That’s going to be the next question they ask, and so they vote for parties that have not been in power yet, because they feel they might as well roll the dice and give it a go.

Mounk: Weimar is a topic which has salience beyond the relatively short period during which the Weimar Republic lasted. One of the reasons for it is that people love to use it as a historical metaphor for other political periods, and that’s obviously something that has been very fashionable in the last years, with the rise of the far right and other elements of our politics, like increasing partisan fragmentation in many countries. People are saying we’re back in Weimar. You think that that is a really unhelpful way of thinking about things. Why should we banish the Weimar metaphor?

Hoyer: I wouldn’t outright banish it, but just use it constructively and a bit more cautiously, I think. I certainly get the feeling it’s used mostly now as a bit of a tool for expressing emotions like fear and anxiety about what’s currently going on, and it doesn’t tend to go beyond that most of the time. We’ve just had the Bavarian Minister-President, for example, in Germany, one of the key conservative politicians, saying that Germany is on a Weimar path. That sounds quite daunting without actually saying anything useful or helpful as to what the situation actually is and what we can do to solve it. I feel the same goes for things like Hitler comparisons, calling people fascists, that kind of thing, is usually done not necessarily with a direct look to history, but more out of a sense of fear that history might be repeating itself. So I’m not saying let’s banish the whole thing. I wouldn’t be a historian if I didn’t think that we could learn something from history. But at the same time it’s got to be done in a way that is actually helpful and forward looking.

Mounk: Why is this metaphor so tempting? Obviously the Third Reich is the great catastrophe of modernity, and Weimar is the thing that led up to the Third Reich. There’s a kind of very straightforward answer to that, but different parts of the political spectrum seem to see different things in the Weimar comparison. It’s interesting that you used as your example Markus Söder, the Prime Minister of Bavaria, and Bavaria has been ruled since the end of World War II by a very conservative sister party of the Christian Democrats nationally. A lot of the time when people use the Weimar comparison, it tends to come from the left. It’s like everybody on the right is fascists, and these populists particularly are fascists, and if we don’t stand up to them, then we’ll end up back there. So there is this way in which this metaphor is appealing across the political spectrum.

Hoyer: I think there’s now a sense, certainly I can say that for Germany, where the center parties, people who see themselves as the old, established party spectrum, both left and right of the center, seem to rally together against the emergent parties, particularly on the far right, but also on the far left. There’s now a sense that if that doesn’t get stopped, then the center will erode. I think that’s why the center-right, the conservatives, are also now beginning to use this as a metaphor to warn against political fragmentation and extremism. I feel that the appeal of that is quite stark now because, first of all, I think it is genuinely the most terrifying example of a collapsed democracy that we’ve got in Western history, given where it ended and what we know happened afterwards. So it’s kind of the most extreme example to grasp if you want to make a point about saving democracy. Perhaps more speaking to the last ten years or so, I think there’s a sense, particularly in Germany but across the West, that the established postwar order is beginning to look less certain and more fragile than it perhaps did ten or twenty years ago. In terms of issues like migration, the economy, the economic system, the way that we see the voter spectrum fragmenting into smaller bits, all of that points to big political changes, and people are looking to the past, I think, to find explanations for why that is. In terms of Germany, you’re looking back to the last failed example of a democracy, and that is the Weimar Republic.

Mounk: The other thing that’s interesting is that the Weimar comparison has historically been made a lot in Europe, and particularly in Germany, but it sort of jumped across the Atlantic. Niall Ferguson has talked about “Weimar America,” and it seems to me that for the left, the idea of Weimar is really the idea about what happened at the end of Weimar. When you’re making Weimar comparisons, it’s really about the rise of the Nazis, including the fact that there wasn’t a cross-partisan enough rejection of the Nazis early on, that there were conservatives who thought they could make deals with the Nazis. So when there’s a question about whether you should go into governing coalitions with right-populist parties, the Weimar comparison is a way of saying what you’re going to end up with is the Nazis. For the right, when they talk about Weimar—I didn’t see that quote by Markus Söder, so I don’t know in what context he used it—but certainly when somebody like Niall Ferguson uses it, I think they mean something more about dysfunction. They’re less focused on the end of the Weimar Republic and the catastrophe it led to, than on the fact that Weimar itself was deeply dysfunctional in all kinds of ways. They’re saying our country today is becoming as dysfunctional as Weimar, obviously also with the frisson of what terrible things that might lead to in the background. But I think the emphasis is slightly different.

Hoyer: Yes, and certainly also more on economics, I would say. There’s certainly a look towards the fact that in Germany in particular, its current economic model doesn’t seem to be functioning properly anymore. It’s the last really deep crisis to look at if you want to exclude the oil crises and the bit of unemployment there was in West Germany in the 1980s. Apart from that, you’ve got to go back before the war and before Nazism to find comparisons. This kind of idea that you were seeing a deep economic crisis off the scale of the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression that followed is, I think, a bigger scare factor on the right than it is on the left, where the focus tends to be about combating fascism and the far right. But there’s appeal in that for everybody, because I think it’s perhaps the one example in modern history where everyone can agree that this was bad. So you get the right and the left saying we need to avoid this, but drawing different conclusions from it.

Mounk: In a way we’ve jumped into one of the things that makes the topic so interesting to contemporary readers, that it’s used as this metaphor all of the time. I think it’s really hard to think about a period of time—the Weimar Republic lasted for what, fifteen years between 1918 and 1933, or perhaps it’s really born in 1919, so even a little bit less long than that—in one country, but obviously a significant country in the world, one of many countries. It’s very hard to think of another period of rule that is that brief that people have that much cultural fluency in. That’s really interesting. But at the same time, of course, Weimar is therefore reduced to some of the stereotypes: economic mess, political dysfunction, it all led to the Nazis. That’s the three things that every educated person knows. Then there’s probably a lot of things that a lot of educated people, certainly even within Germany, but certainly beyond Germany, don’t know. So let’s go back to the heart of your new book and your latest work. In what ways is Weimar like the kind of shorthand that educated people are going to have for it, and in what ways is that shorthand really misleading about what that short but important period in German history was like?

Hoyer: I think we have a tendency, as we always do, to look at past events through the benefit or the disadvantage of hindsight, depending on your perspective. We look at the Weimar Republic from its endpoint, from where it led to. I think that we often forget that actually there was a lot of enthusiasm for democracy to start with, and there are some lessons to be learned from that too. If you look at 1919, you see just how keen people are to go voting. Women in particular get given the vote for the first time in Germany after the First World War, and they go out to these political education evenings. I got really quite surprised, researching for my new book, which takes the whole thing down to street level.

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I’m looking at Weimar itself, which is the town that the Republic was born in and named after. Once you zoom in that far and you look at individual people’s diaries, for example, you’ll find that women, for example, were actually going to these evenings where all the different political parties were telling them what their programs were, and they go in to listen to old male professors telling them what voting is and what their duties as active citizens are going to be like. But there was genuine enthusiasm. Turnout was very high, in the sort of eighty-odd percent, in 1919. The idea that this mattered, that you wanted to go and decide on the future of your country, was very much there. The fact that that declines later on is in itself worth looking at and is often forgotten, I think, as a lesson, because there is this cliché that Germans just weren’t used to democracy, ergo they didn’t really value it, and therefore they were more prone to give it up. I don’t think that was the case. I think people did take it very seriously to start with, and it’s the disillusionment with the malfunction of it, with the idea that it didn’t deliver, that later on drove them away from it.

Mounk: That’s something where I think the experience, for example, of post-Soviet transitions should also teach us a lot. In the first elections after the fall of communism in Poland and the Czech Republic and Hungary and so on, you obviously had a lot of people participating in voting because you were able to participate in a meaningful election for the first time ever, or for the first time in many decades. But by the third, fourth, fifth parliamentary elections, particularly in countries that at the time felt that a lot of things weren’t going as well as they had hoped, participation in the election had really dropped off. So actually, I think we can now recognize this as a pattern that’s not really that specific to that time and place, but that tends to happen in new democracies.

Now, as you’re saying, one of the reasons why people then became disengaged in the Weimar case is that the political system that was established was very fractious. It looked to people, truthfully or not, that it was not capable of actually delivering results. Why is that? Some of the main explanations that people give for that are that there wasn’t a deep democratic history. Of course, most Germans had voted in some form of election before 1918, so it generally wasn’t for bodies that were as powerful as parliaments are in full democracies, or at least most German men had done so before. So one explanation is lack of democratic experience.

A second explanation is that there’s just too much ideological fragmentation, that you just weren’t able to have some kind of stable governing majority because there were the communists and the Social Democrats and the various centrist parties and the conservative nationalists, and eventually the Nazi Party that rose. Another explanation is the humiliation of defeat in World War One and the Versailles Treaty and the pretty onerous terms of that, and so any government had to agree to things that were humiliating, and therefore any government would immediately become unpopular. Then, of course, there was the economic crisis that was partially a result of that, and then obviously aggravated after Black Friday, after the stock market crash of 1929. I’m sure I’ve missed out some explanations, but is that roughly the list? Is there something missing? Which of these do you think is more decisive than others? Are there misconceptions that people have about this?

Hoyer: That is a good list, and it already goes to show just how complex this whole thing is. We can’t just write this off and say that Germans just didn’t really know what democracy was or weren’t really used to it, because I think that’s the same fallacy that people applied to the post-Soviet system, where they were saying there was just no democratic culture and therefore people didn’t get it. I don’t think that is it. I think it’s almost the opposite. People who come to democracy as a relatively new thing have got very high expectations of it. They’re initially quite enthusiastic, but they expect what you vote for on the ballot paper to actually make a difference. When that doesn’t happen, when it seems to be the case that you get the same situation again after you just voted, be that either a completely dysfunctional result or the same kind of block of parties just putting themselves together in a slightly different coalition, but ultimately you get the same multi-party government, those kinds of things end up frustrating people, I think, and that’s a big factor in the Weimar Republic as well.

Interestingly, I think in the middle years it leads more to a sense of malaise, just a well, I won’t bother today. So you see the turnout drop, but you don’t see an increase straight away in extremist voting. This is quite interesting. In those middle years that seem relatively stable, because of American investment largely, and loans being given to Germany, you do see the turnout drop. Fewer people go out; they say I might do something else with my Sunday—elections are always on Sunday in Germany, always have been. Quite often people, I saw this in people’s diaries, they’d go, it’s a nice Sunday, I’d rather be somewhere else, and they just don’t bother. They don’t go and vote for Nazis and communists straight away. This is really important, because even in 1928, the last election before the Wall Street crash, the Nazi Party still only gets 2.6 percent of the vote. All the other factors are in place—the multi-party coalitions, the things not really moving forward, Hitler is already there and doing his election campaigning—all the other factors that people attribute to the rise of the Nazis are there.

What isn’t there is absolute economic devastation. So I always think that is a factor that is vastly underestimated in today’s political discourse, that this is often the biggest driver. People just want to have stable lives where they can have an economic future for themselves, for their children, for their grandchildren. The moment they stop believing that things will at least stabilize, if not get better, that’s when people turn to quite extremist options, and when they give up on ideals of democracy, I think. So out of this whole bundle of factors that you mentioned, that would be the biggest one for me.

Mounk: Tell us a little bit about that economic devastation. Listeners will be familiar with the Great Depression in the context of the United States as well. That crisis is even deeper in Germany, in part because of the element of hyperinflation.

Hoyer: Most people will be familiar with those images of children playing with banknotes and the wheelbarrows being wheeled into shops and things like that. But I think, once you break it down to street level, when I looked at people’s diaries at the time and letters and things, you really begin to realize what that does psychologically to people when money is just not worth anything anymore.

The main guy in my book is a guy called Carl Weirich, who’s a bookbinder by trade and runs a little stationery shop in the town of Weimar. Initially he’s joking about it in his diary with a sense of gallows humor. He says that he buys a bicycle, a used bicycle, for two million marks, even though his wife can’t even ride a bicycle. But he says himself that if he’d waited another few months he would have been able to buy an egg or a loaf of bread for the same money. So initially there’s this gallows humor, but then very quickly—he’s running a shop, he doesn’t really know where to get the wares from, how to get things like typewriters, because he can’t pay for them. Once he’s got them in, he’s asking customers to pay millions, billions for them—pay six billion today and take it home, offers like that.

Later on he wrote, I don’t even know how I reported those figures to the tax authorities. I think that does something to society, because ultimately the image that it conveys is that nothing is certain. Something like this can just happen out of the blue. That does something, I think, long term, because people just don’t really trust the system, themselves, the situation that they’re in, to ever last. That’s really quite a dangerous kind of political hedonism, I would say, that sits in there, where people go, I might as well roll the dice. Then things stabilize when they get a grip on that, but that psychological experience doesn’t go away.

Mounk: It’s kind of a double whammy, where the first experience is that a lot of people’s life savings disappear. One thing about hyperinflation is that any sense that you could have stable plans for the future disappears. But perhaps some people remained in employment, and then suddenly in 1929, not always the same people, sometimes the same people, then experienced mass unemployment. So the first economic disaster teaches you that you really can’t have stable plans for your own future. You might be very materially comfortable today, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be materially comfortable tomorrow. You might think, well, as long as I have a stable ongoing source of income, that allows me to deal with that, and then suddenly you have mass unemployment to boot. That really undermines the preconditions for any trust and stability.

Hoyer: Yes, I think so. Also the fact that they came out of the First World War, and there was already that crisis to deal with in 1919. It was already bad. Even in 1919, 1920, you get inflation, just not hyperinflation, but it’s already bad, with prices for bread and things like that doubling and tripling every few months. By then this is an experience that’s lasted several years, and it’s entirely associated with this post-World War One era, because people weren’t used to that. They can remember the times before 1914 when it wasn’t like that, and a sense of nostalgia is then beginning to set in, and people think, well, actually maybe we were quite unhappy before 1914 because we wanted political change, but at the same time it was stable, you could depend on things, you trusted the government, and even the Kaiser, most people were happy enough with the system, implicitly. There weren’t extremist parties then. That really only happened during the First World War. This nostalgia is also quite dangerous, and again we’re seeing that again today. The idea that “making America great again” implies that there was once a time when it was great, and that in itself is something that political parties can always work with—the idea that it was once better than it is today. That’s also something that’s deeply associated with the way that political parties play on the current sense of uncertainty.

Mounk: Incidentally, a lot of people today say, how can I have kids? Look at how uncertain the world is and how much change there is within it. I think the argument for that is reasonable, and there have been a lot of important political events, including some genuine disasters, over the last decades. Artificial intelligence is totally changing some of the foundations of our world.

But when you think about what somebody who was born in 1890 would have experienced by the time that they’re, say, thirty-five—you have the outbreak of World War I, you have the collapse, in Germany but many other European countries as well, of a system of monarchy that had been there for centuries, or for decades depending on the context. You have the Spanish flu, which is an incredibly deadly and destabilizing event. Then in Germany you have hyperinflation, you have obviously a huge change in the territory of the country, then you have a Great Depression, and then you have something like the rise of the Nazis. The number of extreme political events that aren’t just out in the world, but that have a very direct influence on the lives of individuals within those societies, within thirty-five or forty years, is really hard to fathom.

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I think that teams up my next question. There’s a historical journal whose title nicely expresses one of the key questions that historians always ask themselves, which is “continuity or change?” You have a very straightforward and brilliant idea of approaching the history of the Weimar Republic by looking at the city of Weimar and at the lives of people in that city. How much did their lives change relative to the past, in 1920, in 1930? Are all of these events we’ve talked about immediately legible in their lives in such a way that it feels to them like they live in a completely different world? Are there elements of the culture that actually have deep elements of continuity, where perhaps in the everyday life of the local Kegelverein, the local bowling association, or the local Singverein, the local choir, it actually doesn’t feel that different from a few decades before? How should we think about the actual daily life and environment?

Hoyer: That’s what I was wondering too. That’s why I thought it makes sense to pick one place and a particular group of people and follow them throughout this whole time frame, because I think we have a tendency to just look at this history top-down, looking at the big things that change. But it’s hard to tell with individual people what this actually means to them and how they actually perceive that. To go back to Carl the bookbinder, he was born in 1885. He is that person that you just described. He’s gone through a lot of the tail end of the German Empire, then the First World War happened, and then he’s suddenly finding himself in Weimar. He moved to Weimar in 1914, just before the First World War, and set up his shop there. He’s not a particularly political person, so in a way he’s a good barometer for when politics and economics become so central that he’s starting to talk about it in his diary.

To give you an example, in 1924 there were two elections. I wanted to know how Carl had voted, so I went to look. Instead of the election results, I found that he’d gone up a local hill on a Sunday for a hike. I’m sure he voted anyway, because most people did, but it’s just not important enough for him to mention. If you think about even the situation today, most people think of family reunions, events in their own life, graduation—those are the big events in people’s lives. When politics becomes so big, however, that it has an impact on what you do, whether you want it to or not, that’s when he starts mentioning it.

So suddenly, in 1933, you find for the first time really an outright commentary on politics, when he writes in his diary, “And now we’re putting all of our hopes in this new young chancellor called A. Hitler.” I was completely taken aback by that. There was absolutely no sign up until then that he was politically active or that he was even mentally engaged with all of that stuff, because he’s a fairly ordinary, quite likable, ordinary guy who just gets on with his life. But the situation does get so desperate. He can’t pay his mortgage anymore. There’s a point after the Great Depression hits when he’s about to lose everything, his house, where the shop is and where he also lives above with his small family. Previously, in the First World War, the poverty and everything had gotten so bad that he’d basically lost his first family. His child and wife both die of disease, because there’s malnutrition, and, as you said, there’s the Spanish flu, there’s also a huge tuberculosis crisis going on. To him all of that is so uncertain, and all that the government has got to offer is basically an austerity program under Heinrich Brüning in 1930. Brüning actually goes on the radio and says to them, this is kind of your own fault—if anybody expected that life would get better after this war that we fought, think again.

When actually Hitler then comes in and says, give me four years, I’ll sort out unemployment, I’ll make sure the economy gets going again, nobody needs to worry about their livelihood, that’s tempting to people like Carl, and he starts mentioning that. As for the continuity, that’s interesting too, because Carl is very much, as I say, born in 1885. He comes from that old world, pre-1914 world, when he spent his youth. He’s, for instance, still extremely religious. He’s a Protestant, and that’s very important to him. This is also a continuity factor that stays with him throughout his entire life, where you see him refer to the Bible, or certain phrases that people used at the time, which are rooted in religion, and that remains his main reference point for his morals as well. For example, despite the fact that he early on puts his hope in Hitler, he’s shocked by the antisemitism and by the violence that ensues afterward. He actually writes in his diary in 1938, when Kristallnacht, the November pogroms against the Jews happen, that he feels that this is blasphemy. It’s kind of the strongest moral condemnation that he can reach for, in his religious vocabulary, if you will, to say that he thinks that this is deeply wrong, and this is going to come back on Germany and the Germans themselves, because it’s not right. So in many ways there is this constant strand of identity, of a backdrop of what Germany was beforehand and what it stayed to some extent as well.

Mounk: The other thing that’s just striking about that phrase that you cited from the diary is “a young chancellor called A. Hitler.”

Hoyer: It’s almost like he just looked it up right in the newspaper again, because it’s so formal still. It’s clearly not a name that he’s used very often at this point.

Mounk: Exactly. It shows how hard it is to inhabit the mind of people who don’t yet understand the significance of some event that’s about to come. In his mind, Hitler might be there and deliver on his hopes, or he might prove a dud, and it might be that a year from now you never hear of him again. Whereas obviously to us, we understand that he goes on to be this disastrous and central figure in world history that, until today, probably has worldwide name recognition above, I don’t know, eighty percent. Probably a child in India today is more likely to be able to produce that name at the tip of their tongue than this person who apparently voted for him and helped him take power. So that’s really striking. What about the culture of Weimar? Weimar itself is obviously a storied town in Germany, because it is associated with a lot of the historic thinkers and philosophers who were based there. But we also have these images of the Weimar Republic that come from things like the movie Cabaret and so on, as this kind of place of extreme experimentation and artistic freedom to create. In the everyday culture of somebody like this bookbinder, does it feel totally different from the time of the Kaiser? When he goes to his church, does it feel like there’s a lot of continuity with the time before World War One? How should we think about the cultural moment in Weimar?

Hoyer: What makes Weimar intriguing is, as you say, it’s got this kind of almost fabled status in the German imagination as a culture capital. It’s where important poets like Goethe and Schiller lived and worked, who, if people aren’t familiar with them, have got the sort of status of, I would say, Shakespeare in the English-speaking world—that’s what they are to the German language. You can’t go to school in Germany and not recite some Goethe at some point. He’s very deeply associated with that town. So are composers like Liszt and Bach, who spent years there. Nietzsche died there. It’s really a who’s who of German culture. Yet when we think of the Weimar Republic, as you say, we think of cultural experimentation, cabaret, film, that kind of stuff, which is very, very Berlin. Not even other big German cities like Munich or Hamburg or Cologne have got that sort of very experimental nature of modern art, and Weimar is actually establishing itself as a bit of a counterpole to that. It’s where a lot of conservatives are drawn, because they believe that this new culture is a threat to their way of life and to Germanness itself. Increasingly they intertwine that with racial or racist ideas of what it means to be German.

They’re saying that this new form of art is internationalist, is Jewish, is left-leaning, is not German. Those people quite often rally in Weimar, because they see it as the hub of old German high culture. So interestingly enough, what we associate with Weimar when we hear that term today is actually very un-Weimar in lots of ways. The one exception to that is the Bauhaus movement, which became hugely influential, especially after it was driven out of Germany by Hitler in 1933. But that was set up in Weimar, in 1919, in the town. I think deliberately, because the architect Walter Gropius, who’s behind it, is a Berliner. He could have stayed in Berlin, where he’s got all of his connections, but I think he deliberately wanted to set the cat amongst the pigeons a bit with that. The way he phrased it was that he wants to poke the hornet’s nest of German conservatism, and it’s probably not a coincidence that he moves to Weimar with his merry band of proto-hippies. They’re walking around with these long coats that they call Russenkittel, or Russian coats, and sandals and long hair, and they go skinny-dipping in the river Ilm in Weimar. The conservatives are not exactly happy with this bunch of students living in communes, and I think that was deliberate.

But it just goes to show that Weimar is very much not what we associate with Weimar culture. In fact, the term “Weimar Republic” itself was coined by Hitler, in 1928, who uses it almost sneeringly, to say this isn’t a German thing, this is a Weimar Republic. It’s actually still called the Deutsches Reich, or the German Empire, as it was beforehand, and Hitler uses that term first. It’s interesting how that’s morphed over time.

Mounk: It’s interesting that that has just become the standard neutral term, given its provenance, and I bet that most people don’t know that. A certain young chancellor by the name of A. Hitler took over in 1933. How do the characters in your book then perceive the changes that ensue in Germany over the next six years, and in Weimar itself, which is right next to one of the most important concentration camps, Buchenwald?

Hoyer: Weimar itself became what was called a Gau capital at the time. Gaue are the sort of districts that the Nazis divide Germany into, like administrative districts, and Weimar is basically a local district capital and therefore it’s supposed to become a Nazi model town. That’s how the local Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel terms it. If the name rings a bell with people, that’s because he’s one of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials after the war, because he’s later on in charge of forced labor during the Second World War. But at the time he’s the Gauleiter of Thuringia. His seat is in Weimar, and he wants that city to become Nazified, to look like a Nazi model town. Weimar, for example, is the only Gau capital out of all of them that actually gets what they call a Gauforum. This is a big Nazi party complex, a U-shaped set of buildings with a great big people’s hall, which is supposed to have room for sixty thousand people in it, to listen to speeches and parades and things. There’s a parade square in the middle. It’s a really giant building. When you think Weimar is a town of just thirty-five thousand people, it’s tiny, a sort of nice cobbled streets, timber-framed houses kind of place. Then suddenly you put this giant set of Nazi buildings, neoclassical, straight lines, this huge thing, into the middle of it. A lot of Weimarians hated it, despite the fact that Nazi support was actually higher in Weimar than average across the country. At the same time, they don’t want their town to be radically altered in the way that it was.

Mounk: NIMBYism is the only political force that can win even against Nazism.

Hoyer: I guess that is what it is. Carl himself is interesting in this, because at one point Nazi officials turn up at his house, where his shop is and he lives in a flat above the shop, and they just turn up and tell him, well, sorry, we need to tear your house down, because this is supposed to become part of a kind of Nazi arcade, and we’ll just need to rebuild all of this, and they give him just a token amount of money to say this is your compensation, deal with it. At that moment he’s shocked by the lawlessness of the whole thing. This is the late 1930s.

At that point there have been concentration camps, not obviously off the scale of Auschwitz, that comes later, but there have been concentration camps. Everybody knows that they sit outside the law, because they’re run by the SS, and the SS is explicitly not a state institution, it’s an arm of the Nazi Party. So people know all of that. All of a sudden Carl sits there and writes in his diary, can this be? This is Germany, it’s an ordered state, it’s got laws. He actually goes to a lawyer to try and see if he can get this stopped. Just this utter disbelief, when it suddenly hits him—when it’s already hit all of the political opponents, racial enemies of the state—he becomes personally affected by it. He’s beginning to question the lawlessness of the whole thing. This is one of the things that really struck me, because he’s not, as I say, a bad person inherently, but he’s clearly able to push all of the injustices away out of his mind, to carry on with his life.

Mounk: He’s sort of aware of these injustices going on around him, but he doesn’t have a stake in them. The moment that it comes home to roost, he’s outraged by the thing for which he made excuses when it affected others.

Hoyer: That’s exactly right. Even later on, when you look at the story, after the war, he does look back on this. I start the book actually in Buchenwald—you mentioned this concentration camp, which is built right on the outskirts of Weimar, in 1937, and becomes actually the largest on German soil. Never a death camp, so there’s never an industrial attempt to kill people, but many people, over fifty thousand people, do die there of the terrible conditions in it. Carl is actually one of the people whom the Americans, once they liberate Buchenwald, take up there—they take a group of civilians up there, and Carl is among them, to show them what they’d lived next to. Carl doesn’t push that responsibility away from himself. He doesn’t sit and write in his diary that this is outrageous and he bets they made it all up. He does actually write that he’s “ashamed and disgusted by our German downfall.” That’s the phrase that he uses, including himself in that. But he never goes a step further and says, what was my personal responsibility here, could I have done something differently. The moment he goes there, even slightly, in his diary, on occasion you see him tempted, but he immediately draws that door down again and says, no, what could I have done, I’m just an individual, it’s the system that did this, I was helpless, I was powerless as an individual. That, I think, is the same feeling in the 1930s: when he sees stuff that he doesn’t like, he tends to choose to look away or to withdraw himself from that situation rather than confront it. To give you one extreme example: when they do the laying of the foundation stone for that Gauforum, it’s a huge ceremony. Forty thousand Nazi supporters are being taken into Weimar to celebrate the whole thing. What does Carl do on that day? He gets on a train early in the morning and leaves the town to go on a hike with his family, and only comes back once the whole circus is gone.

Mounk: This is not a form of political rebellion or skepticism, it’s just that he likes hikes.

Hoyer : He wants to get away from this. He wants to be able to not see it, to be able to tell himself—or at least that’s my interpretation of it—to be able to tell himself that this isn’t actually happening, or to shut it out psychologically. He knows it’s going on, and he knows he should be there, because all the Weimarians have been asked to go there, but he doesn’t want to see it, because he hates the way that the town is transformed by what he calls “monstrous”—I think he uses the term “hubris” as well—in terms of the way that these building projects are totally oversized and ridiculous for the small market town that Weimar is, even at the time. There’s an interesting psychological dimension here. He still carries on walking and hiking on the hill where the concentration camp is, knowing it’s there. You still find him in his diary saying he’s been up there with his son in January, hiking and sledging, and two kilometers away from there is the camp.

Mounk: There are dark jokes about the concentration camp going around the town quite early on. People are aware, not necessarily of the details of what’s happening there, but certainly that something very nefarious is happening.

Hoyer: That’s an important distinction, I think. People do know that there’s a camp. The Nazis don’t make a secret out of that at all. It’s part of their terror apparatus. They basically say, we have concentration camps—they even use the term “concentration camp.” I found, for example, a mention in the local newspaper where there was a German-American group that came over from, I want to say, Michigan or somewhere. They came over on a Germany tour in the 1930s. I saw their tour program, and they basically had tea at the Hotel Elephant in Weimar and then were taken on a bus up the hill to tour the concentration camp itself.

In the Nazi jargon, the report on it said that now they can see for themselves that these are camps used for order and discipline, and not, as the “Jewish lying world press” would have it, kind of really bad hygiene and so on. So they’re even showing people these camps. This is not something that is a secret, but I think, equally, I certainly find this for Carl in his diary: when he goes there, and when he’s taken there in 1945, and they’re confronted with the piles of bodies, the evidence of torture, the medical experimentation, the sheer horror of the whole thing, people are genuinely horrified by that. I think this is, once again, because they’re able to draw that line in their heads and just say, I’m not going there mentally. I know this is bad, I know lots of people die there.

They see the coffins come down, because initially the SS isn’t allowed to run its own crematorium up there, so they’re using the town crematorium. People can see the transports of bodies up and down, they can see the black plumes coming out of the crematorium, they know this is bad. There’s even a rumor going round at the time that one of the lorries is supposed to have tipped over on the street and the bodies all came tumbling out. Whether that’s true or not, the fact that people were telling themselves these stories tells us that they had a good awareness of what’s going on. I found evidence of children taunting each other, saying if you don’t behave you’ll end up in Buchenwald. It’s that commonly known that this camp exists, and that nothing good is happening there.

Mounk: You interpret this similarly, that he is aware of this, perhaps queasy about it, but chooses to look the other way.

Hoyer: That’s the case for him, but you find very different responses from all sorts of people. There are people who wholeheartedly agree, who say that it’s the right people who get imprisoned there—this is for communists and for Jews—and the idea that you extract, for instance, Jewish money and value from them that they wouldn’t give up otherwise. There are people who agree with that and who come down to the train station—the people arrive at Weimar train station, right in the town, and then they’re taken up, so people can always see Jews being rounded up and being beaten onto transport buses and things like that. Some people go there to gawp, because they think, finally somebody’s doing something about this. A lot of people are very uneasy, choose to look away, and say, what were we supposed to have done about this?

Then yet other people actually try to resist. I have got somebody in the book called Kurt Nehrling, who’s a worker and joins the SPD, the Social Democratic Party, as a very young man after the First World War, and he fights to the bitter end, because he thinks this is so wrong that it’s even worth risking his own life and his own family. He’s got two small kids, and he carries on fighting. So you get the whole range. But I think, to explain why the majority of ordinary people—I mean, you can’t really argue that an entire society is evil, I don’t think it was—but when the middle tips over and allows the extremists to do what they do, I think you’ve got to ask the question of how that’s possible. I think it is a mixture of fear, consent, and people just allowing these things to happen because they feel helpless and don’t know what else to do, and so they decide to look away. I think that critical bit in the middle is the bit that we can perhaps draw some lessons from.

Mounk: Your book goes year by year from 1914 to 1939. Bridge the gap to the present day for us, very briefly—it’s not mostly what the book is about—but just for listeners who are not aware of where Weimar is exactly geographically: which side of the Iron Curtain does it end up on, what happens after 1989, and how do we get to the present day? Give us eighty years of history in three minutes or less.

Hoyer: Weimar is right in the center of Germany—that’s part of its appeal, and also part of the reason why everybody gets drawn to it, because it’s almost exactly in the center, halfway between Munich and Berlin, Munich and Hamburg. It ends up being first bombed and then liberated by the Americans, hence they’re dragging the people up there to show them Buchenwald. Then, as part of the renegotiations over Berlin—mostly because they want to divide Berlin into four occupation zones, even though the Soviets get there first—the Americans agree to hand Thuringia—this is the state around Weimar, Weimar is the capital of Thuringia, and Saxony, those two states—over to the Soviets, as part of the postwar deal, to have in their zone of occupation.

It wasn’t really supposed to matter, because Germany wasn’t supposed to be divided into two states—the idea was just that everybody gets to run their zone to start with. So this ends up being taken over by the Soviets, with grave consequences for Carl, by the way. He’s still wondering later on whether, if he’d maybe moved to Nuremberg, where his wife was from, maybe he could have avoided being occupied by the Soviets, but he ends up basically in that zone. They actually reuse Buchenwald as a so-called special camp, where they imprison political opponents—again with grave consequences, about a third or so of them die in Buchenwald, in that special camp, after it had been liberated and then reused.

Then it ends up in East Germany, Weimar, with Buchenwald actually becoming its national memorial and museum, and then it stays in the East up until reunification. Interestingly, this whole history was raked through a little bit in, I think it was 1999, when Weimar was named Culture City of the Year, and it became a focal point of its own history, but also of it as German history too, because so much of it happened there. If you go to Weimar today, it’s still a touristy place. If you stopped any tourist on the street and asked them why they’re here, most people will still tell you what they would have told you in 1914, namely that they’re here for Goethe and Schiller and the other cultural dignitaries. Only second, sometimes—there’s a really stark moment when you’re standing in the middle of Weimar, on the central square, looking at the loveliness of Weimar, its cobbled streets and everything, and then this bus comes down and it just says “Buchenwald concentration camp and memorial” on it, and it takes you up the hill once an hour, and it takes tourists up there too. So it’s still part of that legacy, I would say, but Weimar itself still sees itself as a cultural place rather than a place of the twentieth century.

Mounk: A couple of reflections and then a question. It’s interesting that Germany goes through these very different phases in the twentieth century. You have the old Kaiserreich, then World War I, what we now call the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, then you have the divided Germany, which takes one form of the Communist East, which Weimar ends up being situated in because of the deal you’re talking about. There’s also a very distinctive period of West Germany, which you could call the Bonn Republic. As it happens, I just came back late last night from a trip to Bonn, for a rather strange conference that happened to take place in the old parliament building in Bonn. I was actually standing at the lectern that Helmut Kohl and Willy Brandt and Konrad Adenauer and all of the most influential people of German politics, from the late 1940s until the mid-1990s, made their home. That’s a very strange kind of Germany as well, because, in a way, like Weimar—which was obviously not where the parliament was located in the same way at the time—it’s even more than Weimar, a provincial town, not a huge capital. There’s something quite odd about that period of West Germany, but I think it’s afraid of its own shadow in all kinds of ways. When you’re in Bonn, it’s really very strange to think that this used to be the center of a major nation. Then you enter the Berlin Republic. The Berlin Republic is after reunification, when East Germany and West Germany come together again—East Germany gets in some ways subsumed into West Germany, and we talked a little bit about that in our last conversation as well.

Let’s think through the reasons why people might disagree with you and say perhaps there is something to the metaphor that today Germany has certain similarities to the Weimar Republic—we started to evoke them at the beginning. One of the huge problems in the Weimar Republic was that it was incredibly difficult to cobble together a stable governing majority, because so many different political parties simply would not go into government with each other. The communists wouldn’t even go into government with the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats and the conservative nationalists had huge distrust between them. Then, of course, after the rise of the Nazis, quite rightly the parties at least left of center were not willing to go into coalition with them. Are we very similar to that situation again in Germany today? Already, each of the last two governments were kind of ideologically incoherent, because you had a mix of left-leaning and right-leaning parties who have a whole bunch of points of agreement, but also a lot of important points of disagreement. Even though the leaders of the last government and the leaders of the current government are quite different, even though the last government became quite unpopular and people changed their voting behavior to vote it out, in terms of the policies pursued, the government led by Social Democrats, with the Green Party as a major coalition partner and the more center-right so-called Liberal Party in Germany as a third member, is not so different from the policies that the government now pursues, when you have Christian democrats in the lead with Social Democrats as the minor coalition partner. There’s not a lot of overlap in terms of personnel, but because it’s this kind of cross-ideological coalition, it doesn’t end up having such a big change, and most likely that’s going to be the case from now on.

The next Bundestag election, if you look at the polls, you’re probably going to have to have even more moderate parties from the left and the right governing together to cobble together any kind of majority. When I look particularly at the state of Thuringia, the situation is especially dramatic. When you look at the state of Thuringia, that Weimar is obviously located in, according to the latest poll, the AfD is at 39% of the vote, the Left Party is at 14% of the vote. Between them they have a majority, but they’re very unlikely to rule with each other. This basically means that, because the Christian Democrats don’t really want to be in a coalition with the Left, and the Left doesn’t want to be in a coalition with the Christian Democrats, there’s no real governing majority. Possibly the AfD might somehow get a majority. Perhaps they’re going to go together with the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, which is a party that comes from the left but is very friendly to Russia, and it is imaginable that they might go into a coalition with the AfD. It’s really totally unclear how they’re going to govern together. You have a deep fragmentation, because you have so many different party families that simply do not accept each other as legitimate. The prospect for effecting political change is very low because of this coalitional math, unless you vote for the extremists. I’m not comparing the AfD to the Nazis—I think that’s a facile comparison—but in terms of the level of fragmentation, you might say, well, this does look like Weimar.

Hoyer: I agree. What I’m objecting to isn’t the idea that there aren’t similarities. As I say, I wouldn’t be a historian if I didn’t think that there was something to be taken from the past. What I disagree with is just throwing that word in there as a scare word and then leaving it there, because I don’t think that is particularly helpful. My point is exactly what you just said: we can look at the details and then try to draw some individual lessons from this, rather than just saying this is like Weimar, therefore we must all be frightened now, because I don’t think that’s helpful. That was my point, not to say that there aren’t any similarities—there are loads.

This is why I wrote the book in the first place, because I do think, sitting here basically writing, as I often do, about Germany today, and then suddenly in the afternoon you’re writing in your book about 1926, something that may actually look quite similar to 2026, a hundred years later. So that’s certainly the case, and I do think we can learn from that history. It’s just about being constructive about it. If you look at the political fragmentation, for example, and you just mentioned the idea that people compare the AfD to the Nazis, to just say to voters, look, we did this before in 1933, therefore you mustn’t vote for the AfD now, isn’t going to get a single voter back from the AfD. This is my bone of contention here, this is what I’m saying. It’s identifying the issues, why people vote the way that they do, and they aren’t exactly the same today as they were in the 1920s, just as the Nazis aren’t the same as the AfD. So it’s worth looking at why this stuff happens, to identify the reasons why people are discontented with the status quo and with the moderate politicians. That, I would say, is more helpful in a constructive way than just to say to people—you see these placards in Germany when people walk around, and they say, “Voting AfD is so 1933”—that’s not going to make a single person sit there and think, maybe I need to go back to the SPD or to the CDU.

Mounk: That’s a way to signal that you’re one of the good guys and get some kind of points in an internal moral status economy. It’s not an attempt to persuade anybody on the other side who might be tempted by the other side. So what are the reasons? In a sense, I understand the extent of discontent in Germany at the moment, and in a way I don’t understand the extent of discontent. Let me steel-man each of those arguments. On the surface of it, there’s just no analogy at all.

We’ve gone through some of the things that some of the characters in your book had experienced by 1933: World War One, the collapse of an old regime, the terrible pandemic, huge loss of territory, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, constant political dysfunction. That’s a lot. You can understand why that would delegitimize a system. What’s happened in Germany for the last sixty, seventy years? Well, the country has become one of the most affluent in the world, with one of the highest standards of living. East Germany specifically has gone from being very poor in 1989—certainly by today’s standards—to being much more affluent, much more vibrant. It’s really striking to look at videos of Leipzig, for example, from 1989, taken just after the fall of the wall, and you still see parts of a city basically in ruins from World War II that had never been built up. You see other big parts of a city that are just completely run down because nobody’s renovating these quite beautiful buildings in the center of town and so on. Today you go to Leipzig and it looks like a very pleasant modern city with a high standard—yeah, exactly. Leipzig is a particular example in that sense, but you go to a small town anywhere in East Germany, and it just looks a lot better.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Katja discuss why voters are turning to the AfD and how Germany can respond. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is In the Realm of the Last Man. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column at Persuasion.

We have a treat for you today! To mark the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s memoir In the Realm of the Last Man, we’re launching a multi-part series about h…

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Claude Steele is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. His latest book is Churn: The Absurd Abyss of Race in America.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Claude Steele discuss why diversity produces psychological tension even in the absence of explicit prejudice, whether American schools are truly as racially segregated today as they were in the 1950s, and how the fear of being stereotyped affects both minority and majority group members in integrated settings.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: In your last book, you suggest something that is somewhat surprising for a scholar who is focused on other things, about social justice and making progress in relationships that white and black people and other ethnicities within the United States have historically had. That is that environments of diversity—where people, particularly from different races, but also from different kinds of identity groups, really have to deal with each other in a concerted way in workspaces or perhaps in college campuses—can often produce this feeling of unease and stress, which you call churn. What do you mean by that? Why should we be focusing on that negative aspect, or what seems at first like a negative aspect of diversity?

Claude Steele: Yeah, I guess you could say I’m certainly a diversity advocate. Does that sound right? These days I don’t know—in America that could be a loaded statement, but I’ve been fascinated by this for much of my career, and it comes from observations of a personal sort, and findings that grow out of the research literature in social psychology.

When we’re in a diverse setting, we can feel a certain apprehension about how our identities will be judged and treated there. When we’re in a sort of homogeneous group and we all share an identity, it can be relaxed. We’re not worried about being seen in terms of negative stereotypes about that identity. We know everybody else there has roughly the same identity, so we’re probably not likely to be stereotyped based on that identity. But when we’re in a diverse setting, that security can go away, can erode, and we can worry a bit—sometimes quite seriously. Will I—will somebody of my identity be treated fairly here, seen fairly? Will people invest in my development in this setting? Will they want to be associated with me?

Those kinds of concerns can arise, and the more important the setting, the more intense they’re going to be felt. It can be quite a factor in a person’s life. It can, for example, affect my decisions about what career path to follow. Will someone of my identity be comfortable following that career path? Will I be judged fairly? Will I be seen as somebody who’s promising?

It can seem a little Delphic, a little abstract, but down on the ground in everyday life—especially in the settings of our lives: schools, workplaces, doctors’ offices, lawyers’ offices, basketball teams—this kind of emotion, this kind of reaction, can be a real factor there, and sometimes it can be noxious enough that we want to avoid the setting altogether, just to feel comfortable. We don’t feel comfortable in that setting. So I wanted to draw that out and then begin to think about how to fix that. I think it’s something different from prejudice. We tend to think of the main problem with diversity as being prejudice, in the sense that if we could eliminate that entirely, maybe there’d be no problem there. But I think you can see from the logic here that it’s independent, it’s something different than prejudice. I don’t want to diminish the importance of prejudice, but this is different. It’s just a social pressure that is tied to the experience of diversity.

Mounk: That’s a really interesting concept, and I want to kind of fillet it a little bit. Perhaps we can start by thinking about how prevalent it really is, then think about why it is that people feel that so strongly, what the best explanation for that is—which is, I think, going to inform our discussion of what to do about it—then finally turn to what the right solutions to it might be.

To start off with, doesn’t the idea that it is so uncomfortable to be in this diverse setting presume, in part because we’re just not used to that, a kind of background vision of a society that doesn’t really exist anymore for most people? You go back to the 1950s and 1960s, and it certainly was the case that the huge majority of schools in the United States were predominantly white or predominantly or exclusively black, and perhaps there were a few Asian Americans in your high school if you were in San Francisco, or a few Puerto Ricans in your school if you were in New York. But by and large you really did grow up in this very homogeneous environment that then perhaps didn’t experience that kind of strength. At that point, if for the first time in your life you then joined a corporation in the ’70s or ’80s that actually had some amount of real diversity—my god, I’m not used to this, right?

Today there’s obviously still quite a lot of housing segregation in the United States, some very deep problems. But for the vast majority of Americans who are fifteen years old, they now go to high schools that actually are pretty diverse—that probably have representatives of just about every racial group, very differently in different parts of the country. Probably predominantly white in North Dakota, probably very heavily Asian in San Francisco, probably with a lot of black kids in Atlanta. But with the exception of a number of schools that still continue to be predominantly black, and which obviously are a result of a deep history of racial injustice and present a real problem, the meeting experience for young people in America today, I think, is to actually grow up in environments where, from preschool through middle and high school to college, they’ve sort of always been in these diverse environments.

Steele: Well, our schools are still as racially segregated today as they were in 1954, when the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in our schools. As an outgrowth of segregated housing and segregated communities, the schools in them tend to be predominantly of the ethnicity or the race of the community. So there still is a considerable—I hate to use the word segregation because that has so much baggage tied to it and it sounds like it’s an intentional discrimination, but this is still an outgrowth of how our society has been organized around race. I think maybe that’s the better term to use: historically, even though the legal basis of segregation has been done away with for the most part in the legislation of the ’60s, what’s lingered is the degree to which our communities are still substantially organized around racial identity.

So there is still that, but I think you’re correct that in many schools they’re much less segregated than they used to be, even though, as I just pointed out, they still are when you look at the whole picture of American society—we have as much racial segregation in our schooling today as we did then. It pains me to acknowledge that fact, but it is a fact.

So when we come together in colleges, let’s say, in the workplace, let’s say, in the military, in other aspects of life, we’re still aware of those identities, and there are still stereotypes out there about those identities that could come into play. I don’t know for sure that I’m going to be seen, let’s say, as a person integrating one of these situations. I don’t know for sure that I’m going to be seen in terms of the negative stereotypes about my identity, but I’m not sure I won’t be. And if the situation is important, it can be a quite impactful experience.

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I begin the book with an example of a parent-teacher conference in a junior high school in the United States. This involves an African American student—a young African American seventh grader—and his parents are preparing to go to a conference with his teacher about his progress. The teacher is white. So the parents and the student are African American, the teacher is white. That’s inherently a diverse interaction. As the parents get into their car to go to this conference, they’re saying, well, what kind of teacher is this? They know how their student could be seen in American society—that maybe the school wouldn’t be as set to see him as having promising abilities as some other students. Maybe they would see him as having some aggressive tendencies, and interpret some things as indications of that. So they want very much not to have their child seen in terms of these stereotypes. This is their occasion to help the school and the teacher not see their child that way. So this is an important setting, and they go into it with some tension. They go into it with this kind of vigilance. They don’t know for sure that their child would be seen that way, but they know he could be.

Mounk: I hear this claim that American schools are as segregated today as they were in the 1950s and 1960s a lot, but my understanding is that that is based on one very specific way of calculating segregation, which actually goes up mechanically as the share of white students in the overall population goes down. By any metric that actually captures the changing racial dynamics, I think it’s very clear that that is not the case. In the 1950s and 1960s, a clear majority of black students would have been in schools that were 90-plus percent black. That was the nature of segregation. Today that number is actually down to 17%. Only 17% of black students today go to a school that is 90-plus percent black.

The same is true vice versa about white students. Clearly, in the 1950s and 1960s, America was a predominantly white society—85-plus percent of the American population at the time was white. So it’s true mechanically that most white students went to schools that were overwhelmingly white. But it was also obviously even more true because of the prevalence of explicit, straight-up segregation. Today the number of white students who attend a school where 90-plus percent of the student body is white is actually down to 26%. So three-quarters of white students have at least a significant portion of non-white students in their class from the get-go. So can we really say that schools today are as segregated as they were in the 1950s and 1960s?

Steele: Well, if you adjust that percentage from ninety down to eighty, you get a different picture of things. Or if you adjust it down to seventy, you get a further different picture of things. I wouldn’t want to get too distracted in this conversation over that. I’m willing to concede the heart of your point—that indeed African American students and white students have, in schools, much more exposure to each other than they did in that earlier era, even though numerically schools still are predominantly one group or another group. That feature of American schools still holds, even though it depends on if it’s going to be ninety percent—well, then the segregation, there’s been a big inroad—but if it’s going to be eighty percent, if it’s going to be seventy percent of their group, there are a lot of schools like that.

But I think the larger point that this argument stresses is that there are nonetheless stereotypes about each group that are in play and that come into play in integrated situations like that. African American students know the stereotypes about their group and their group’s abilities. Every fall there’s probably newspaper articles in their community that talk about the racial achievement gap and the like—that’s openly debated throughout society. White students know how they could be seen as racist, and in interaction with black students they’re going to feel some threat of possibly being seen that way. That’s the tension I’m trying to get at.

Let me finish that story about the parent-teacher conference. I described the tension that the parents might feel, but there’s also an equally powerful form of identity threat that the teacher’s going to feel, because she knows that she could be seen in negative terms, in terms of negative stereotypes about her identity as a white person. She feels she’s really committed to her students and maybe especially sensitive to the needs of minority students, but she knows that if she says something even slightly negative, she could be seen—she doesn’t know that she will be, but she could be seen—as racist, and something she would hate.

It’s that tension, that worry in an integrated situation that you’re going to be seen, that you could be seen, in terms of some of the worst stereotypes of your group, and that your work, your promise, your abilities can be seen in terms of those stereotypes. You don’t know. That reaction, that psychological tension, is what I mean by churn.

Another way of putting it is that it is a tension a person has between remembering and forgetting. When I come into a diverse situation, do I remember how my group has been seen and continues to be seen to some degree in the larger society, and use that memory to interpret what’s happening to me in that setting? Or do I just forget that and trust that I won’t be seen that way, that I’ll be seen fairly? That’s the tension. That’s the heart of the matter. And that’s the whole central point of the book: that particular tension makes it difficult for us to just automatically trust each other, to just relax and say, no, I don’t have to worry about that here.

Mounk: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I guess the reason why I think the two questions are related is that it’s important to think about what the baseline is. I think you may agree that in some of these conversations, there’s a baseline of: when you come to college, you’re going to have all of these black kids who’ve only ever been around black kids, and all these white kids who’ve only been around white kids, and they’re totally unfamiliar with each other. How do we facilitate an environment where these alien species are going to be able to talk to each other?

And I worry that that misunderstands both the actual situation these students come from, and could then lead to messaging that’s actually not very conducive to solving the real sources of churn. So perhaps that allows us to go into those different accounts of what is driving churn. You’ve, in the conversation so far, I think, implied two slightly different views of what might cause it. They can be complementary, and they can be dominant among different groups. One is perhaps the fear about how I am going to be perceived—particularly when you come from a community that’s historically been marginalized, you might think, are my classmates going to have negative stereotypes about me just because I come from this or that ethnic group?

The other is perhaps the one that might be more on the minds of people who are in some way seen as being dominant or privileged, or whatever word you want to use—which is, I’d love to hang out with my classmates from these other backgrounds, but I worry that perhaps if I somehow say the wrong word or make the wrong joke—even though I’m very well-meaning, I’m not trying to be mean or controversial—if somehow I put myself in an infelicitous way, perhaps somebody’s going to accuse me of being terrible and prejudiced and sort of socially ostracize me. Do you think those are at play at the same time for different groups? Is one of these more important than the other? How should we think about—are we missing other kinds of sources of churn? Why does this kind of churn arise?

Steele: Yeah, it’s a general phenomenon to worry, to some degree, about how other people—especially important other people, and especially in important situations—might judge us, and whether something about us is going to disadvantage us in some way. That’s the heart of churn. What I’m arguing is that when you bring people of different backgrounds together—the examples in the book have all kinds of different identities being brought together—you can worry that in a diverse setting like that you might be seen in terms of the negative stereotypes about your group. So the black parents, they could worry about that. And the white teacher, she’s got a version of that too. Churn is the experience that is actually common to the two groups. It has different sources, it’s originating from different stereotypes about the two groups, but actually both groups are experiencing this tension when they come together. Both of them are worried about whether they’re going to be seen in terms of their racial identity and disadvantaged, treated unfairly, because of it. They don’t know that they will be, but they know that they could be.

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Churn is an attempt to say, look, both sides of this thing have the same emotion. Actually, my churn can help me understand your churn, that you’re in that situation. This opens up a new road to how to make diverse situations work more effectively. At base, what it does—this churn—it’s about not being able to trust the situation. When I’m in a more homogeneous group, when I’m in the white teacher’s lounge and most of the teachers—I trust that they’re not going to see me as a racist, because they’ve got the same identity I do. Diversity problematizes that trust.

Mounk: I’m not sure about that, by the way. If you think about some of the places in which the most absurd stories of cancellation played out in 2020, it often was very left-leaning, homogeneous environments. One of the strange things about American life today is that, generally speaking, fellow workers at McDonald’s, which tend to be very diverse, tend to get along pretty well with each other, whereas often very progressive NGOs that are predominantly white and college educated end up having huge meltdowns over allegations of racism.

So it’s not actually clear to me that this fear of being uncharitably interpreted and being called racist is monotonically increasing with the diversity of your environment. I think often in genuinely diverse environments, people are far more familiar with each other and have far less formal ways of dealing with each other, and have far higher trust with each other, than in environments that have a mixture of actually quite a lot of homogeneity—racially, but also socioeconomically and ideologically—and where perhaps an invented or exaggerated accusation like that can fly a lot better than in an environment where people have real things to deal with.

Steele: Well, I’d agree with you. I think you can feel churn from that in that context too. It doesn’t always originate in the same way. But if I happen to know I’m in a group—let’s say I’m the white teacher and everybody in that teacher’s lounge I know has certain tendencies to cancel people, or very progressive ideas about that, and my ideas are a little different—I’m going to be in pretty intense churn there. It isn’t a racial diversity, but it’s perhaps ideological diversity, and it’s quite the same kind of thing. I’m in that setting worried about how I’m going to be judged, and I can’t trust it. I feel very uncomfortable there, and I can’t function in relation to it. I may react quite defensively or problematically.

So I think if we think of the construct, the experience of churn, we shouldn’t think of it as only happening between certain groups or between certain identities. It’s something that can happen within groups too. Somebody announces, I can’t tolerate anybody saying X or Y or Z, yet I believe X or Y or Z—I’m going to feel that tension. I’m trying to point to what I think is a relatively common kind of tension in diverse settings. It’s not that it never happens in a more homogeneous setting; it certainly can. But when you go up to twenty thousand feet and look at society—I’m a man of a certain age. I can feel it: when I’m talking in the morning in my coffee shop with other men of my age, I feel pretty secure about not being seen in terms of age stereotypes, because we’re all old. I may be—I think it may be a delusion—but I feel less vulnerable to those stereotypes in that kind of group. But if somebody young joins the group, I may have great affection for them, but I may also worry, to some degree, that I’m more vulnerable to age stereotypes, that my attitudes are a little antiquated, that my grasp of technology is inadequate.

That’s the phenomenon I’m talking about. As we integrate across these identities, we bring in this tension to some degree. It’s not something that, if we’re on the subway—and it’s a very diverse, but not an important situation—we don’t care, it doesn’t bother us. But when it’s in a workplace, or in a place that affects my future, an academic setting or something of that sort, that tension can be distracting, and it can interfere with people’s performance in the immediate situation, and can even make me feel uncomfortable enough that I wouldn’t want to have a career in that area. I can give you some examples of that from the research literature.

Mounk: I want to understand some other elements of this first. You have two principal routes to churn: one is that you’re worried about your group being negatively stereotyped, and another is that you’re worried that perhaps people might accuse you of having the wrong attitudes. Perhaps we can dive into each of them in a little more detail and understand them better.

I had an experience about a year ago that I thought was really interesting. I went into a USPS post office in a rural area, and the lady who was working there, who was white, was just extremely hostile—off the bat, for no good reason. Perhaps actually that was due to my identity in some kind of way—perhaps she’s prejudiced against people with beards, or against people with European accents, or something like that. But since I’m white and she’s white, I assumed that it’s just that she was a very unpleasant person, or she was having a very bad day, she hated her job. I didn’t make it about myself.

I realized in that situation that in some ways—and I don’t love to use that word in general, but I think in this particular context it makes sense—there was a form of privilege in that situation, in that if I had gone into that post office and I was Latino, or I was black, or some other group where you might have a reasonable suspicion that some people in society are going to be prejudiced against you, I would have most likely concluded that this woman was a racist, because she was so unreasonably aggressive out of the blue. What on earth could bring this on? It’s so irrational—it’s got to be that. Now, in fact, I presume that she treats the black people who walk into that post office just as badly as she treated me, and I presume that they very reasonably conclude that they’ve been the victim not just of a dysfunctional employee, but of racism in this instance.

Steele: They probably start to worry that they’re dealing with somebody racist. I’m not sure they’re convinced yet that the person is racist, but they start to worry, and that’s what churn is. They go to churn.

Mounk: Well, you didn’t see how extreme that woman was. But no, I agree with you.

Steele: You’re often in those situations where they’re ambiguous and yet important, and so they push you into churn. That’s what I want this term to try to capture: the way you felt about it. I’m not sure it requires actually believing that she is racist for sure. It’s certainly possible, and that possibility is what I’m concerned about.

Mounk: I agree. I guess what I’m trying to get at is: what is your advice to individuals, but also what is your advice to institutions, for how to deal with that? This is one of the sources of churn: sometimes in life you’re going to have unpleasant experiences, and if you’re a member of a minority group, you often won’t know what the source of that is. I think there are two kinds of attitudes you can have toward that, and both can have downsides. One attitude is to say, well, she didn’t call me a racial slur, I’m just going to assume she’s having a bad day, I’m going to assume that it’s nothing to do with race. Perhaps that is empowering in a certain kind of way, but it also raises the risk that you’re systematically misdiagnosing situations, giving people a pass when you shouldn’t, that you’re naive about some of the challenges you face in society. On the other hand, you might say—and arguably our culture veered toward that in the last few years—well, every time you have that kind of experience, you must assume that that is white supremacy at play, because given everything about American history, that is the most natural explanation, and so you should jump to that conclusion. That obviously also has downsides, because it’s much less damaging to your self-perception, to your ease in moving in society, to think, as I do, that woman was weird, I don’t know what she was on about, than to think: I had this—in the grand scheme of things actually minor, but real and hurtful—racial injustice that just happened to me.

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So you don’t want to jump to that wrong conclusion, because that might be damaging. So how should people maneuver between those poles, and how should institutions signal to people? When people come into college, there’s all kinds of administrative programming about all kinds of things—you can probably send a message from an institution, to some extent, that influences how people are predisposed to approach a situation like that. If you’re welcoming a freshman class to Stanford, what would you tell them about how they should feel in a situation like that? How should we try to make sense of it?

Steele: The whole book tries to pick up exactly those kinds of questions. How do you reduce it at the level of individuals? How would you do it in a larger setting like a classroom or a workplace? How do whole institutions function in ways that reduce churn and build trust? This is the thing that sort of excited me about this line of thinking, and the evidence that I could find on its behalf, is that it points to a new road, a new way of thinking about diverse settings. The new way is not so much to worry that everything has to do with prejudice. Again, I always point out, I’m not trying to diminish the importance of human prejudice in human affairs—it’s very profoundly important. But this is something else.

In addition to that, it is a question that I just can’t quite trust the situation. I can’t quite trust you. You couldn’t quite trust that woman. She gave you enough cues there to raise the possibility that she was going to be biased against you. You didn’t know that she would be. You don’t have to conclude for sure that she’s a racist in order to worry. But the way forward has to recognize that in diverse settings, perhaps the chief goal is building trust. That’s the heart of the case. That’s the heart of the argument here: that this is a dimension of intergroup relations that we just haven’t understood and recognized the importance of. It’s not so much about me worrying about changing your prejudice, or you worrying about changing mine, as it is: I need to know I can trust you, that you’re going to see my full humanity—that’s what I—and my full potential, not have that obscured by stereotypes about my identity or anything. I need to trust that you’re going to see me.

This is where some examples, I think, are especially helpful in maybe giving the audience a concrete image of what I’m talking about here. Jeff Cohen, Lee Ross, and I some years ago did an experiment where we asked a question like that: how does a white professor give critical feedback to a black student and have that feedback be trusted? We brought in Stanford students, white and black, and had them write an essay about their favorite teacher. We told them that if the essay was good, we might publish it in a new magazine we were starting on campus on teaching. So they should put their best foot forward, come back in two days, and they would get feedback on that essay. That was our question: how much did they trust that feedback? What we varied was how we gave the feedback, looking for a way to establish trust of the sort that I’m talking about.

Mounk: What kind of feedback worked and what kind of feedback didn’t work?

Steele: In the first two conditions of the experiment, we gave the feedback straightforwardly—read your essay, here’s the feedback. In the other condition we said something really nice about them, sort of an ad hominem compliment: you bring great energy to my class, and here’s the feedback. Interestingly, and this is sort of at the heart of the whole argument, white students trusted that. They’re not in that situation under a group stereotype in society about their abilities, about their abilities maybe not being adequate. They’re not under that stereotype. Black students, however, are under that stereotype in American society. Reflecting that, they didn’t trust the feedback. It’s a pretty dramatic finding, because these are very talented students—they’re Stanford students. Why wouldn’t they trust the feedback? Well, when you think about it, there’s an ambiguity for them. They don’t know whether the feedback is coming from their essay, or whether it’s coming from the feedback giver’s opinions of their group’s abilities. They just don’t know for sure.

Mounk: That was true when the comments at the beginning were positive, right? Obviously if you made negative comments about a student’s personality, it doesn’t seem like you’re trying very hard, and you seem like an unpleasant person—that obviously wouldn’t work very well. But here you’re saying, you bring such a great personality to my class, you’re so wonderful, and having praised them, here’s my feedback. When the students say, look, this feels like this teacher is not being sincere, is it that they then feel that they’re just being perceived in terms of their identity? Is it that they feel like this teacher’s not going to be straight with them?

Steele: Yeah, that they can’t quite trust the feedback because they don’t know whether it’s coming from the real work they did, or from the feedback giver’s opinion about my group’s abilities. What’s going on here? So even when the feedback is positive, I don’t really know how much I can trust it. Now, importantly, that’s the feedback probably most common in everyday life, but that’s the feedback that didn’t work. There is a form of feedback that did work, and it’s very simple, and it will sound very familiar. In that condition, the feedback giver said, look, we use high standards in evaluating these essays because we might publish them in this new journal we’re running. But I’ve read your essay, and I think you can meet those standards. Here’s the feedback.

When that happened, the black students trusted the feedback more than any other group of participants in the experiment. They were ready to trust this situation. What they needed was some signal that they weren’t being seen in terms of negative stereotypes about their group. He gave them those signals. He said, look, we’re using high standards, and I think you can meet those standards. That’s really powerful evidence, right there in the moment, that this feedback doesn’t reflect that he thinks black students don’t have the same ability, or something of that sort—because if he did, he wouldn’t have treated them that way.

So that’s a good example of where this book goes in terms of how to function in a diverse environment. What’s critical, often, is simple evidence that you can trust the situation. Trust is a game—I want to stress this in case I don’t get to it later—it’s a game that’s played on the ground between people. It’s who listens to you, who tries to figure out what is really happening to you, what your circumstances really are, and tries to help you deal with them. When somebody does that, you trust them, and you don’t care whether you share an identity or have a vastly different identity. We’ve all had experiences like that. That is the kind of hopefulness, that’s the direction I think in diverse settings that we can go down, which will produce a lot better outcomes than trying to reduce everybody’s prejudices. As psychologists, we know how difficult that can be. But trust can be built between people, and it can be built very straightforwardly. I hope that’s a good example.

Mounk: It is a great example. Let me—obviously I’m a teacher as well, so I reflect a lot about these issues—draw out the implications of this, or ask you to help us draw out the implications of this. Let me give you a couple of examples. One example is that my attitude was, and I would say remains, that I should treat every student with the same standards and the same grace and the same expectations, irrespective of the kind of identity they have. Now, that doesn’t obviously mean that, in an essay about their favorite teacher, they might not bring in their identity in all kinds of ways—the community they’re from, the experiences they’ve had, is obviously going to be reflected in that essay, and that’s going to be one of its strengths, and that’s a wonderful thing. It doesn’t mean that if a student has a disability, you shouldn’t make sure to accommodate that. But they need to have the same performance to get an A, and I try to encourage them in the same way. I hope to communicate to them with grace that they have room for improvement when we’re not doing great work, irrespective of the kind of racial background they have.

When I was starting to apply for faculty jobs, around 2015, 2016, it already was the custom that we should write teaching statements or diversity statements for a lot of those jobs. I was advised in very strong terms that anything like what I just said to you was unacceptable—that that would immediately be taken as advocating for a kind of race blindness, which is the very opposite of what you should do in the classroom. That in fact you need to use words like “culturally sensitive,” and how you’ve worked with students on particular experiences, that you’re going to see each student in terms of the structural challenges they’ve faced throughout their lives, and so on and so forth.

So do you think that the need to write these kinds of statements, and the particular culture about what’s expected to be in those statements, will actually systematically encourage teachers to give the kind of feedback that might not work—which is to start with, how wonderful that you come from this vibrant cultural Dominican background, it is so wonderful to have this element of diversity in my class, and now let me give you feedback—which sounds like exactly the kind of thing that, according to your study, is going to quite understandably make the student think, hang on a second, I don’t think I’m being seen in my own personality here. I think this teacher just sees me as a representative of some kind of group, or perhaps is afraid of how I’m going to judge them if they give me negative feedback. I’m not going to trust what they say to me.

Steele: That’s bullshit advice, I think everybody knows. I think people with very good intentions might have given that advice. But I’m trying to point to the fact that I’m not on either side of the sort of political, progressive-conservative war on this thing. I’m trying to find something underneath this that gives us a new road forward. That new road forward, I think, is accessible to all of us, which is to build trust. It’s impossible for me to know every aspect of your culture and fit my language into it, and it just makes me self-conscious and unbelievable.

Here’s another example. This comes from the work of Erving Goffman in the 1950s. He did an ethnography of gay life in San Francisco, and he found that gay men had a word for straight people that they liked and could trust. The word for it was “wise”—in the sense of, hey man, he’s wise, he gets us. What they mean, basically, is that he sees their full humanity, despite the stereotype and the stigma that those men, especially in that era, had to endure. The people they considered wise saw their full humanity and treated them accordingly. They could trust them.

That’s the kind of circumstance that I think we’re shooting for here. That’s the kind of advice I would have given you—that you want to try to be able to see full humanity and full potential in difference, and you want to respond accordingly. That’s often facilitated by taking a kind of learning mindset toward students and toward people of different backgrounds. To be strictly colorblind—I’m not going to see anything about your background, I’m going to ignore all that—it’s hard for me to trust that, because I’m not sure, first, that you can do that, and second, my background is important to me. I have had life experiences because of that identity, and if you’re just going to upfront ignore them, then I’m not sure I can trust what you say and how you behave going forward.

Either way, I think that advice is misguided, and that an evolutionary step forward in how to handle diverse situations is to focus more on the down-on-the-ground things that build trust: being responsive to people, seeing their humanity, asking them what they think, asking them what they’re going through, trying to understand what their experiences really are, and then, to the best of your ability in a situation, trying to facilitate their development, in the workplace or in the classroom. Try to understand who they actually are. It’s so much simpler that sometimes people can’t appreciate it.

I’m trying to underline that here. That experiment, I think, holds a really important narrative. If you just looked at the first two conditions of the experiment, where the feedback was given straightforwardly, you’d think black students just don’t give a damn, that they’re not motivated—why would they mistrust these well-meaning people would be your whole take on it. But as soon as you see that when the feedback giver gives them the slightest signal that they don’t have to worry about being seen in terms of that ability stereotype, they’re free of that. They trust like crazy. It becomes a completely different experience for them. I think this even points to some of the tragedies that can otherwise happen.

In those first two conditions, they’re isolated from the value of the feedback. They don’t trust the feedback, so they’re not getting the full value out of it, and they’re going through school like that. That’s not just something that happens once in an experiment—it’s a condition of life for them in that kind of situation. So it really stresses the importance of being wise, of building that trust, and recognizing that that’s what you have to do as a teacher. That’s the thing to focus on—not necessarily to repress every prejudicial thought you have, but to just treat them in a way that builds trust with them, be responsive to them, ask them what they experience, and trust what they say. When you grant trust, you get trust.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Claude discuss how to put this advice into practice. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk, Francis Fukuyama, Linda Chavez, and Rachel Janfaza explore whether Gen Z’s political instincts are genuinely liberal, what a renewed liberalism needs to reclaim from the republican tradition, and how to rebuild a culture of public-spiritedness in an age of anti-establishment politics.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University and the founder of American Purpose. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents.

Linda Chavez is the Vice Chair of the Renew Democracy Initiative, founded by Garry Kasparov. She previously served in the Reagan administration and has been a syndicated columnist and political commentator for decades.

Rachel Janfaza is the founder of Up and Up, where she researches and writes about the political beliefs and cultural attitudes of Gen Z.

This conversation was recorded at the ⁠Liberalism for the 21st Century⁠ conference in Washington, D.C., which is organized by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Welcome to this live episode of The Good Fight coming to you from the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. I am joined today by Rachel Janfaza to my right. She is the founder of Up and Up.

I’m joined by my good friend and colleague Francis Fukuyama, who is of course the founder of our co-conspirator American Purpose, among many, many other things. Welcome, Frank.

And I’m joined by Linda Chavez, who is the vice chair of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which was founded by our good friend Garry Kasparov. Welcome.

So we have serious things to talk about today, but before we get to those serious things, Linda, you told me that you just ran into somebody interesting in the lobby of what I will remind listeners is the Watergate Hotel.

Linda Chavez; The Watergate Hotel, and who did I run into but Roger Stone. Now, Roger Stone and I go back many, many years because, as you know, I was a Republican and served in the Reagan administration. But when I was younger, in my twenties, I actually worked here at the Watergate for the Democratic National Committee, which was headquartered here. And I think it was my birthday in 1972. I actually ran into the Watergate burglars in the afternoon when they were trying to tape open the doorway up to Larry O’Brien’s office, which they were going to go into and steal secrets from later in the day. I didn’t know it until I opened the papers, I think it was a Sunday morning, and saw the fellow I had run into, who looked very shocked when he saw me.

So I told Roger that story, but I also reminded him that he was at CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President. He was, you know, the bad boy for Richard Nixon. And among my nefarious deeds as a young person, I stole the plaque from CREEP off the offices. Unfortunately I was not able to keep it. It probably would be quite valuable today. Someone stole it from me. So I reminded him of that, and we said hello to each other.

Mounk: Was it cordial?

Chavez: Yes, Cordial. He knows I’m an anti-Trumper, but he also remembers me from the Reagan years, probably.

Mounk: I love that Washington, D.C. is obsessed with these acronyms—the SAVE Act, the USA Act, whatever. I like that the Committee to Re-Elect the President is CREEP.

Chavez: Very appropriately named.

Mounk: Well, thank you for reminding us at the beginning of this conversation that threats to the rules and norms of liberal democracy are not entirely new in this town. But today I want us to think about what the nature of the threats to liberalism are today and, more importantly, how liberalism can try to refound itself.

Liberalism from its inception was always a radical ideology. Liberals wanted to abolish the Corn Laws, to fight against discrimination against so many groups in society, to fight for the equality of women. They had a vision of society that was radically at odds with the society in which they lived. And in large part liberals succeeded. The world we live in today is not perfectly liberal, but it has very deep liberal elements which help to explain some of the things that are good about our society.

But I think that also creates a danger—the danger that we become too invested in the status quo, where we try to keep everything as it is rather than continuing to have that mission of making the world align more closely with the ideals we have. And so we want to talk today a little bit about areas from culture to immigration to AI, and envisage what a radical liberal agenda, a philosophical liberal agenda, might look like.

Let’s start with culture. Rachel, I’m wondering how you’re seeing this. You are a little younger than the rest of us on the panel. More importantly, you work a lot with young people, trying to understand the political opinions of members of Gen Z. Is Gen Z horribly illiberal, and do we have to be very grouchy and afraid of the future, or can you bring us some good news?

Rachel Janfaza: Well, first of all, Yascha, thank you so much for having me. And it’s an honor to be here with you, Linda and Francis. No, I don’t think that there is grave cause for concern, and that might be controversial compared to some of the headlines that we read about young people and their political beliefs. But when I look at it on the whole, and I hold focus groups with Gen Zers across the country, they reject labels altogether. They’re a very ideologically independent group of young people.

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When it comes to the question of liberalism, if you look at the core values that matter to young people in this country—and I think this really started to bubble up during the pandemic—it’s things like freedom of speech, individual rights and autonomy and agency, and those are all liberal ideas, liberal values. And so the jargon might go one way or another in the words that we use to describe it, but on the whole, this generation is rejecting those labels outright and really just is honing in on what they believe. And I think ultimately I’m hearing a lot recently that they want to live in a society where it is okay to hold some parts of one party’s platform to be true and at the same time other parts of the other party’s platform. And they reject the fact that that has not been the norm for their entire adult life. So I think it actually is in the culture of Gen Z to be liberal, lowercase-L liberal.

Mounk: So when you get the impression that half of young people are fans of democratic socialists and the other half are fans of men’s rights activists and so on, is that a complete misunderstanding of where most young people are? Is this just a small section of very political people? Is it that they sometimes like quite extreme people, but it’s because those people come across in positive ways that aren’t ultimately related back to those ideologies? Not to compare Zohran Mamdani to the people we just talked about, but when a lot of them like Zohran Mamdani, is it that he’s a very committed democratic socialist, or is it that they just think, you know, he seems honest and seems charismatic and seems like he’s trying to do something good, and they don’t actually buy into the ideology that may in fact be driving him?

Janfaza: So I’ve been asking this very question over the past few weeks in focus groups. First of all, I’ve been asking, who’s a candidate who you think is doing a good job in the country right now? Young people from across the country will name Zohran Mamdani as someone. And then I ask, what is it about him? They say things like hope, change—he is bringing a fresh take. The anti-establishment sentiment is real, but it’s not that they are socialists. So then I ask, how many of you consider yourself to be a democratic socialist? I have not yet found one person who considers themselves to be a democratic socialist. And I have taken a step further and said, can you tell me what it means to be a democratic socialist? I think part of the reason why they’re rejecting this is because they reject labels outright, going back to my earlier point, but they appreciate what he has brought: the energy, this sort of hope-maxing vibe that he campaigned on and is now serving with, and the fact that he campaigned on a vision and is governing with a vision at a time when so many politicians are all about being the opposite of someone else. So I think that is what is resonating from these democratic socialist candidates across the country. It’s in a vacuum of vision from other types of leaders. They are able to share what they do stand for, and not only what they stand against.

Mounk: Frank, what does it take to build a sufficiently liberal culture for democratic norms to persist? If young people have, as Rachel is saying, basically liberal instincts without necessarily having the language to articulate it, if they might be drawn to some politicians who may not be fully liberal but for reasons that aren’t deeply illiberal—how concerning is this? What kind of understanding of liberalism do we actually need to anchor in the wider culture for liberalism to persist through this day?

You could think about two very different positions on this. You might say: if people don’t have a genuine understanding of the logic of our institutions, they’re not going to be able to defend them, and we’re going to abandon them. Or you could say: perhaps it’s fine that people don’t really understand what it is, but as long as they have the instinct that if something is illiberal, if something seems unfair to them, that’s not right—that may be enough to preserve that culture and those institutions.

Francis Fukuyama: Well, I think that there’s an important cultural change that needs to take place, which has to do with the question of virtue. Liberalism is built around a theory that there’s no overarching dominant idea of virtue or the good life—as you’ve explained to Curtis Yarvin and characters like that. This arose out of the wars of religion in early modern Europe, and the fact that people couldn’t agree on what virtue or the good life was, and so you settle for life itself—that we should be able to live in peace and tolerate other people.

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But this creates a kind of vacuum that has been felt by many people. Your liberal society tells you to be endlessly tolerant, don’t be judgmental. If you say something’s better than others, or you criticize somebody on moral grounds, you’ll find some liberal scold saying, don’t be like that. What makes you think you’re so important or great that you can actually judge people? And I think that that is a misunderstanding of liberalism, because liberalism does not require that you abandon all of your moral priors. And in fact, a healthy liberal society is built around people who do have moral priors. They may not be the same, defined, let’s say, in religious terms—you tolerate people who differ from you, but you don’t say, well, anything goes, I’m just fine with anything.

But it still leaves a kind of hole for people, because they really want something to believe in, and some core that can be the source of community for them. I think that there is an older tradition, older actually than liberalism, that influenced the Founding Fathers quite strongly, which is the tradition of small-r republicanism. Our friend J.G.A. Pocock wrote a whole book about how this idea in a way begins with Machiavelli, and it develops in Europe in early modern times and then crosses the Atlantic and affects the American founding fathers.

What a small-r republican, as opposed to a liberal, believes is that there is such a thing as virtue, and that virtue is public-spiritedness—that you have to be oriented towards the public good, and that your life is not going to be fulfilling if all you care about is your friends and family and your little closed-in world. And it seems to me we’ve kind of lost that sense. I certainly see it in my students—very few of them actually want to go into public service, although that may be changing. I think that could be changing just in the past couple of years. Really, since the 1980s, they’ve been told that the government is terrible, it’s corrupt, it’s captured, and so they want to stay away from it. If they’re publicly oriented, they’ll go to work for an NGO or a public interest law firm and spend their lives suing the government to stop it from doing bad stuff.

I think that in a way we need to recapture a different kind of culture, where public service is actually seen as a virtue. For the generation that brought about the New Deal and then went on to win World War II, that was a very strong feeling. You had all these very public-spirited people who created the basic institutions that then persisted into the postwar period, and you have very few of them right now. So one of the things that a reconstructed liberalism needs to do is to reorient people towards the idea that there is a greater good. People are always complaining: I’m pursuing this life as a consultant with Arthur Andersen or whatever company, working for OpenAI, but my life doesn’t have any meaning—it’s a good career, my parents are happy that I’ve got a job, but what’s the greater purpose?

I think that one of the ways to reinstill a sense of purpose and meaning is to reimbue people with the idea that we are in a common political project. What a liberal democracy is, is not just having the government leave you alone to do whatever you want. It’s also a public project where we want to actually do things in common. That leads in all sorts of different directions. I’m a big fan of abundance. I think that we ought to have a government that can build things—we ought to have high-speed rail in California. But it’s still related to culture, because I think the idea of building public things is really about reorienting people towards that public-facing orientation, where they’re not just trying to figure out how to maximize their incomes, but they’re saying: what is the public good that we are trying to do? How do I participate in the formulation of these projects? How do I help to implement them?

So I do think that culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum where it’s just a bunch of ideas that float around in the air and one of them lands on your head and all of a sudden you have different ideas. I don’t think you build a spirit of public-spiritedness unless you actually are active in public affairs.

Mounk: One of the really striking things when you look at polling of young people—and perhaps you’ll correct me in a moment—is that the values that they have have really changed. For example, we are now at the absolute top of how much young people care about making money and having not just professional success, but really financial success. And they give relatively less importance to things like personal relationships or making a contribution to a community, and so on. That’s a really striking change that we’ve seen over the last decades.

Now, I think there’s a kind of post-liberal critique, which I think you’re sort of implicitly responding to, Frank, which is saying that perhaps liberalism has always been parasitic on a deeper set of virtues—that liberalism was a response to a very traditional society, and perhaps it had some good contributions to make, but it worked because there was that older set of virtues of duty and of caring about the common good, and that it slowly has eroded them. Now we’re left without any of them, and that’s why liberalism goes so terribly wrong. I don’t believe that. I don’t think anybody on this panel believes that. But what is the response to that, Linda? Is there a way of talking about public-spiritedness, about virtue, about, as John F. Kennedy would have put it, “ask not what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” that still respects the limits on liberalism—which is that the state shouldn’t tell you how to live, and shouldn’t tell you what moral virtues to have, and shouldn’t tell you what religious convictions to have?

Chavez: Well, I actually do believe that for a functioning democracy, you have to be steeped in certain civic virtues. You do have to believe in a sense of duty or loyalty. You have to believe that there is objective truth. You have to be able to feel compassion. A society doesn’t work without people who do not just think in selfish terms.

And when you think back about our society—I’m not a political philosopher, I didn’t even study political philosophy in school—but when I think about our founding, or even liberalism writ large, I think about my own sense that free market economies have produced more benefit, more good, for greater numbers of people than any other. I think back to Adam Smith, but I remember that Adam Smith didn’t think Wealth of Nations was his most important book. He thought The Theory of Moral Sentiments was his more important book.

And I do think that you need that kind of basis, and I think we’ve lost that. It began to unravel, I think, in the sixties, and certainly progressed all the way through to the present. It’s not taught in school anymore. It isn’t just that we don’t teach basic civics—how the government operates, what branches there are, the Constitution, the Declaration. Those things depend on certain moral sentiments. And we’re loath to do that. I think liberals in particular are loath to do that, because they don’t want to acknowledge that there is at least a universal set of moral sentiments or values that are conducive to liberal democracy, and that without those, you don’t have the building blocks.

Mounk: Rachel, I’m struck by the debate that we had ten or so years ago when Jordan Peterson became a huge shooting star and attracted a lot of young followers, and was vilified in all kinds of ways for it. It always struck me that, in a sense, his rise—which I did see with some concern—was broadly our fault, the fault of us liberals, because he was speaking to young people, giving them a vision of how to lead their lives, which is not my vision, but which was a substantive vision, which made a real offer to them. And I think a lot of people who are more moderate, a lot of people who are philosophical liberals, didn’t do that. We didn’t say: here is a really deep, meaningful, ambitious way to lead your life, formulated from that kind of liberal perspective.

So do you think that young people have models for how to lead their lives that are in tune with the kind of liberal virtues that Linda just spoke to, or do they have to look to looks-maxxers or various other interesting figures, to have some kind of vision of how to lead their lives?

Janfaza: That’s a great question. I think the reality is that the social media ecosystem is so saturated that there is no one visionary leader for anybody, because there are just too many people whom someone can listen to. Micro-influencers who don’t have many followers might be the most followed person by one individual, and so it’s very messy. But I think when I ask young people, who do you most look up to and respect when it comes to values and who you want to build your life based off of, most of the time they say someone who they have an intimate relationship with—whether it’s a teacher, professor, a parent, a grandparent, a friend, someone in their community.

I think there’s a real opportunity there to make that more mainstream, that those are the people who young people are looking up to. I think we tend to sensationalize and focus on the fact that yes, there are very popular social media content creators, streamers, influencers who have very loud voices and very big followings, but even if they do have a huge following, they are not followed by all young people, and yet every young person does have someone in their life whom they have modeled themselves off of. So when it comes to the values that are most important, and where young people are getting their inspiration from, I just think it’s not monolithic. There is no one clear answer right now, in part because their entire childhood and adult lives have been shaped by so many different voices. There’s no one source of information, and Linda mentioned the need for objective truth, and that is really hard to find right now.

Mounk: Frank, if I locked you into a room and forced you to write a book called Twelve Rules for Liberal Life, that was meant to give young people guidance about how to lead a meaningful life, written from a broadly philosophically liberal perspective, what would you tell them?

Fukuyama: Well, the first thing they’ve got to do is figure out how to get out of that room.

Mounk: Well, you’re in the room, they’re not in the room. You’re in the room until you’ve given them that advice.

Fukuyama: I don’t know about twelve virtues. I do think that there’s a particular problem with young men right now, and it is really true that they don’t have appropriate role models. I think those exist in the literature. Harvey Mansfield, who was my teacher at Harvard, wrote a book on manliness. And it was widely derided by the usual suspects as being a kind of celebration of a bad kind of masculinity. But it wasn’t. It really derives from Machiavelli’s understanding of virtù, which Machiavelli himself understood as a masculine virtue, but it was very, very different from the kind of toxic masculinity that is out there on the internet right now, because it had to do with ideas of virtue, of service, of nobility, of the ability to be courageous and use your strength, but to use it for public purposes—because Machiavelli was indeed one of the founders of the theory of modern republicanism.

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I think that if there is a way of reviving that understanding among young men about how to be both male but also virtuous in that Machiavellian sense, I think that would be very good. Take something like risk-taking. This is something I wrote about—my least-read book, called The Great Disruption, which I published in 1999, is actually all about gender relations. I didn’t realize it at the time how important this was. There are substantial differences between men and women. For example, young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five commit eighty percent of all the crimes in the world. And this is culturally invariant, right, so it does seem to be rooted in biology, where young men are programmed to take risks. If you think about human evolutionary history, there’s probably a good reason for that—if you’re hunting mastodons or saber-toothed tigers or whatever, you’re going to have to take certain kinds of risks that women are not going to have to take, raising young people. And you can’t have a society in which you don’t have people who are willing to do that kind of risk-taking.

So you don’t want to breed it out of human beings, but you have to orient that risk-taking towards things that are actually socially constructive. I think that articulating what a model of that would look like is important. The traditional understanding, for example, of a citizen soldier embodies something like that—that you would take up arms and risk your life on behalf of the whole community, but it was a very pro-socially oriented kind of thing, and we have somehow lost any sense that that’s a virtuous kind of life to live. Now, how you recover that, I think, is difficult, because you’ve got a lot of competing gods out there. But at least as a model of what you would want a virtuous person in a liberal republic to look like, I think that would be something like it—at least for part of the population.

Mounk: Linda, shifting the ground somewhat—we’ve been talking, in a sense, about who we should be at the deepest level, in terms of how we identify ourselves, what our values are, what we might have in common in a society that is meant to be deeply fragmented and diverse in terms of our ideas and our religions and our origins, but that perhaps could be united by some kind of common virtue. The other question is about who we are in a more literal sense—who is here in this country, who should be here in this country, who should not be here in this country. How should we treat people who have been here for a long time, who perhaps make real contributions to the country but who don’t have a legal title to be here?

So how should we think about reaching a settlement on this question of who we are, on this question of immigration, at a moment when we seem to be more divided about it than ever?

Chavez: Well, I think this has been a big divide for a while now. Immigration clearly is the driving factor in populism, not just here but around the world. I think immigration as an issue is quite different in the United States than it is in Europe. First of all, we are very fundamentally an immigrant nation, more than any other country I can think of. There are a few other examples—Argentina, Israel in a certain sense, where it’s an ingathering that creates the nation—but this has defined us from the beginning. And we did quite well for 150 years with open borders. We basically let anybody come, and we were eager to expand territorially and to create a sense of nation. We were willing to welcome all comers.

We didn’t really start seeing pushback until first against Asians, specifically the Chinese, but then in the early twentieth century, a push against Southern and Eastern Europeans. And that’s when we began to restrict immigration. So in 1965, we dramatically loosened the laws that had been put into place in the early twentieth century, and we became much more welcoming again.

But because the numbers of people we were bringing in were fixed and pretty static—they were based on family reunification, so they expanded a little bit—it wasn’t a rational system in the sense that we didn’t look at the country’s needs. There are times when you need more people, times when you need less, and we didn’t have to really deal with that, because there was a kind of flow of people that met the market but came illegally, that didn’t go through the system of legally immigrating to the United States, mostly from Latin America. Obviously, we share this big border with Mexico, and it worked for quite a while.

But starting really in the 1990s, we started to see a kind of nativism rising up again against this flow of mostly Latin Americans. And it was driven, as all of these periods have been, toward restriction, by the fear that these people were not really going to become Americans. I love to talk to audiences and hear people say, well, my grandparents came from Italy the right way. And they came before 1924, and the right way was: we had open borders. People don’t understand that. They were all Sicilian peasants, and the gap between them and the population at the time was actually greater than that of Mexican immigrants who came. So the point is, we had a market, and it worked because of illegal immigration.

Some of us, including myself, thought, well, we really need a revised legal immigration reform. We need to revise our law, make it more rational, look at skills in addition to family reunification. But unfortunately the nativist antagonism that built up—and these weren’t nativists in the sense of people who trace their family back to Jamestown or Plymouth Rock, these were people who came in the early twentieth century, but they were very fearful.

And then I think what dramatically affected this was the Biden years. I remind people that in 2015, when Donald Trump descended the escalator and talked about rapists and murderers, all these bad people coming in from Mexico, “not sending its best,” we were actually at a 50-year low in illegal immigration. The flow was not great at that time. It actually got much worse later. But I think a lot of liberals, including myself, underestimated the fear that the chaos at the border, which occurred particularly during the Biden presidency, generated. And that gave Donald Trump his opening. Sure, the economy was a big factor, and people were hoping they’d see an economy like that of 2017, 2018, the pre-pandemic economy. But fear about immigration was a large driver in this election.

So now we’re at a point where we have to make a decision, we have to do something. Trump got elected saying he was going to deport people, deport everybody. And basically what we’re seeing now is people being shot in the streets—people who are here legally, US citizens, being shot by ICE. I think there’s a kind of revulsion at that. But we still haven’t seen, out of Congress, which is where this has to happen, Democrats who are willing to sit down with Republicans—because they’re fearful too—and come up with a rational immigration policy that takes a look at what our needs are. Because we’re heading into a birth dearth—we have a birth dearth already, but by 2056 the US population would begin to shrink in absolute terms, and this is going to be dramatically bad for the people who live here now.

Fukuyama: Linda, tell me if I’m wrong, but another thing that happened in that decade of the 2010s was that a lot of the people coming into the country discovered the asylum law.

Chavez: Yes, absolutely. I had sort of hoped that in the last year of the Biden administration we could see some fixes on asylum law, because it was being exploited. People were coming for economic reasons, and that’s a perfectly good and valid reason—we need to figure out a way to legally admit those people—but it’s not what the asylum laws were made for. I initially thought that the way Biden handled it—let’s take all of these asylum seekers, give them a path to come in, have their interview, and then wait their turn for their immigration court hearing—that that would work. But it didn’t. What it did is that Governor Abbott and others, shipping all of these asylum seekers to cities like Chicago and Denver and New York, was brilliant. It made even liberals and liberal politicians say, wait a second, we can’t deal with this.

Mounk: So we talked about the United States and immigration in a way where the case should be somewhat easier in the United States, because the country has such a long history of immigration. I do think that most Americans recognize at some level that immigration is in the country’s DNA. The case that immigration is the key driver of the rise of populism is probably even stronger in countries in Western Europe, for example, where that really is at the very top of the political agenda.

One of the strange things is that there’s a lot of cycling in political and public opinion about immigration. You see in the United States that in 2015 there is a strong anti-immigrant mood, and that’s part of what gives Donald Trump the opportunity for his political rise. When he comes into office, you have the kind of thermostatic counter-reaction to that, and opinions become more pro-immigration. The Biden administration goes in and hugely misunderstands that mandate, loosens rules in such a way that you’re going to have an unprecedented number of people coming across the border, and then opinion swings right back. And now, going back to that liberal instinct, seeing the way ICE is operating in American cities, with agents that don’t identify themselves, that carry out often arbitrary stops and in many tragic cases end up killing people, you see opinion become very pro-immigration again.

One way I think about this, Frank, is that perhaps what most citizens want is something that is very reasonable. I think what large majorities of democratic citizens want is often reasonable, but it’s just impossible for governments to deliver. They want real control of a border, they don’t want illegal immigration, they want us to be able to set the rules for who comes in when, which is a perfectly legitimate set of aspirations to have for your country. And at the same time, they don’t want state cruelty. They don’t want to see people in Maine or in Texas or in other parts of the United States shot by ICE agents. They don’t want little children to wash up on the European shores of the Mediterranean because they were trying to come across. And it’s very hard to do both of those things at the same time. So when governments are overly lenient, they say, hang on a second, look at this chaos, we don’t want that. And when governments crack down, whether in the gratuitously cruel way of a Trump administration or even in a smarter, more targeted way, they say, well, look at all these cases of injustice, that doesn’t seem fair, let’s loosen up. That’s why we keep going back and forth. Is there some kind of principled solution to this?

Fukuyama: Look, as Linda knows well, there was a principled solution to it. It involved a trade where you would exert real control over the borders so that people could not simply come illegally. You really had to do that with a national ID card of some sort, because so many of the undocumented people actually weren’t crossing the border—they were visa overstayers—and you had to have a way of catching them. So on the one hand, you have real control over the border, but for the people who had come in earlier years and had built families and were not criminals and were hard-working people, you had to give them a path to citizenship. I think every major comprehensive immigration reform proposal over the past several decades has involved that trade: you really control the border, but you also have a path to citizenship. And the path to citizenship was just an absolute no-go for Republicans.

Chavez: I think that’s correct. By the way, even though philosophically I’m opposed to the idea of having a class of people who are not able to become citizens, I think as a one-time compromise, if it was what was needed in order to get real, serious immigration reform and give legal status to the people here, that’s something that ought to be at least debated.

Give people legal status. I would not want to see this be an ongoing process. I would want to see it much like the ’86 amnesty was a one-time deal—that if the price of getting Republicans to go along with giving legal status is that you’ve been here a certain number of years, and a majority of people who are undocumented in the United States have lived here more than a decade... The guy who was killed in Texas last week had lived in the United States for thirty-five years. And that’s not unusual. That’s actually quite common. There is a concept in the law of desuetude, where a law that is not enforced and is ignored for many, many years should pass away and become ineffective. That’s sort of where we were with legal immigration. We’ve known for decades how many people we had here, more or less, and how long they’ve been here, and we did nothing about it. So this idea that suddenly, in one year, we’re going to start deporting people, rounding up two thousand people a day, which is Stephen Miller’s quota—and, you know, as a former Republican who was opposed to quotas, I’m fascinated that quotas are the big thing in this administration, all sorts of quotas, including quotas for deporting people. So that would be one compromise that I think liberals have to at least consider, if it could be an honest deal that would give people some sense that we could have a path for legalization, if not citizenship.

Mounk: Rachel, is there any more agreement among Gen Z Americans about immigration than there is among older Americans? And how do you think we can talk in a broader sense about what borders mean in a country, and how to treat people who are in this country, in a way that might be able to forge some kind of consensus?

Janfaza: I think part of why we saw young people swing to the right in 2024 was because of immigration, and young men in particular—that was a top issue, along with the economy. The way this is manifesting as a political issue for young people, it is an economic issue, because young people are scared of one thing, and it’s not having a job. So for them it’s very much—there was very much a buy-in to the fear-mongering around the idea that immigrants are taking jobs that would be yours otherwise. I think this is very much related to the conversation around AI too, and how that is now an anxiety-producing issue, because it goes back to the same idea of jobs.

So I think the issue is intersectional with a lot of other political issues for young people. But then again, Yascha, you brought up before that there has been this action, reaction, culture, counterculture that has brewed throughout history, but especially in the past ten years, very quickly, back and forth.

Mounk: Do you think social media is speeding that?

Janfaza: That’s exactly where I was about to go with that—young people move at the speed of the internet, and nothing stays a trend for more than literally twenty-four hours or less. That is translating into their politics. I think it’s why this generation is as swingy as it’s shaping up to be. The immigration conversation is a part of that too, because we saw this movement to the right in 2024, and many of the young men who voted for Trump, with immigration as a core concern, saw what happened in Minnesota with ICE shooting American citizens and said, hey, that’s not what I voted for. When did that become okay? That’s part of the reason why they’ve retracted and are moving away from him.

Mounk: Just to stay on that theme for a moment—imagining that Democrats win in 2028, and perhaps they even have a trifecta—do you think there’s a danger that an incoming Democratic administration, both in immigration and more broadly, is going to overstate its mandate, is going to think, look, we’ve always thought that young people are naturally progressive, and there was a weird moment in 2024 when they helped elect Donald Trump, and perhaps we’ll deny and ignore that a little bit, but now they’ve swung back to being progressive, and whatever we do, they’re going to be on our side. Then, by the summer of 2029, they’re going to be swinging back to the other side.

Janfaza: Well, I don’t think that defection away from Trump is automatically a swing towards Democrats from young people. Democrats are not doing well with young people right now, and even if young people aren’t in favor of Trump, it does not mean they’re suddenly progressive again.

Mounk: But I think a lot of Democratic consultants believe that, even if you’re rightly pointing out that it’s not the case.

Janfaza: Yes. When it comes to the mandate that a 2028 candidate needs to govern with, but also needs to campaign on, it’s just more practicality, more willingness to actually work with the other party. Part of the frustration and the distrust in government from young people right now is because they don’t see any meaningful action. Where we see glimmers of hope and trust in elected officials is at the local level, where young people can feel the intimate effect of actions being taken, whether it’s regarding city infrastructure or housing policy or education. This might sound totally out of tune with the trope about young people, but this is what I’m hearing, and it’s where they’re actually able to see effective government. So I think there’s a lesson there that any candidate in 2028 needs to learn from, and this is actually something young people are asking for: to make their life meaningfully better, to make it feel like there’s progress happening. They just don’t see that happening right now at the national level.

In the rest of this conversation, Linda, Francis, Rachel, and Yascha discuss how artificial intelligence will impact employment, how AI is influencing young people, and how to fight for a philosophically liberal culture. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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John Samuel Harpham is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and Letters and Wick Cary Assistant Professor at the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and John Harpham discuss why the standard racial account of slavery’s origins misses the earliest justifications for the practice, how Aristotelian and Roman conceptions of freedom and slavery shaped the intellectual world of the first English colonists, and what this history means for our understanding of slavery today.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: You’ve written a really interesting book that is based on a dissertation that you did in the same department where I did my dissertation a few years before you. We knew each other a little bit in graduate school for a good few years apart about the history of slavery in the United States and the historical justifications for slavery. Probably most people who think about this subject assume that the story is relatively simple, that these were white colonists who thought of themselves in some important way as white and had a scheme of racial classification in their minds that perhaps wasn’t fully modern but resembles ours in some key respects. They thought these black people in Africa come from, in some sense, a kind of lower race, and therefore we can be justified in enslaving them. What’s wrong about the standard story that is told about this?

John Harpham: In some sense, the standard story is very powerful and very correct and applies very well to some aspects and some periods in the history of slavery, the history of American slavery. But it is a particularly American story, a peculiarly American story about the history of slavery. It owes many of its points of reference and historical support to the nineteenth century, which is the period that as Americans we tend to think about when we think about the history of slavery. It is less prepared to explain what I want to explain in my book, which is the origins of American slavery.

The premise of the book is that if we’re going to understand the origins of American slavery, we have to move back into an earlier time period and a broader geographical space than as Americans we’re accustomed to thinking about the history of slavery, in order to understand where American slavery came from. You have to move out into a different set of contexts. That’s what I’ve tried to do in my book. I think in the course of that expansion, expansion of the timeframe, expansion of the geographical scope, we immerse ourselves in a different history with a different set of parameters, a different set of ideological references, a different set of classical examples, different understandings of slavery, and indeed different understandings of what we would call race. That new context is what I’ve tried to explore much more than I think has been done so far.

Mounk: I imagine there’s two elements of the standard story that start to look a little askew when you go back earlier in the history of justification of slavery, looking not at what slave owners were saying during the debates about the abolition of slavery to justify continuing the practice, but rather at what people were thinking, saying, and writing at the time in which the American institution of slavery was invented. The first is that presumably there is a kind of notion of race at some point, a kind of pseudoscientific theory of race that develops in the nineteenth and later in the twentieth century, that just didn’t exist in the same way in the seventeenth century. The second, I suppose, and I wonder if that’s what you mean also by the geographic focus, is that from today’s perspective, what we want to understand is how a country that claims to be rooted in liberty, to have those ideals of self-determination, could have tolerated as apparent and as tyrannical an institution as slavery. But when you go back to the incipient moments of this practice in the United States, slavery was in some way normal around the world. There were a lot of parts of the world that were engaging in forms of explicit slavery or in forms of feudal serfdom and so on that have very important distinctions but that lie in a continuum with slavery as well. Are those two things that you have in mind here?

Harpham: Look, I think from the start it’s important to say that this is a very complex field. This is a field that touches upon not only the history of American slavery—it carries great weight and implications for understanding the nature and the character and the development of the American Republic. The story of the origins of American slavery has always been understood to be freighted with contemporary implications. But it’s a story that reaches back into more obscure tenets of early modern intellectual history and the history of the Atlantic world, of Europe and Africa and Asia as well. It forces us to expand our sense of the history of slavery into fields that are unfamiliar for many Americans living today and even for many American historians and historians of American slavery. It’s a very complex field that I think needs to be treated with the care and seriousness that it deserves.

I will also say that I’ve dedicated so far my career to the writing of this book—the full ten years of work to researching and writing this manuscript. But my conviction that I would work on the history of slavery comes from, I think, a familiar place for many Americans now, which is that I was born and raised in New Orleans, the center of the antebellum domestic slave trade. Until I came to Harvard for graduate school and met you and all of our colleagues, Yascha, I had never lived outside of the American South. That’s a part of the world and a part of the country, I think, where you can’t avoid the obvious fact that the past shapes the present and that in part we live in a nation that slavery made. And yet in the field of political theory, and we can talk about this, that history of slavery is not often thought to play a major role. The field of political theory for the most part has taken shape as a field interested in conceptions of freedom and the implications of those conceptions of freedom.

Coming from the background that I came from, I wanted to see if the tools of political theory, the sophisticated tools and methods of political theory, could be turned toward the study of the history of slavery—a topic that had not often been seen to be central to the field of political theory. Obviously one of the insights of the field of political theory is the second point that you point to here, not the first point that you made about race, which we can come back to, but the second point that you made about freedom. In the early modern period, the central tenet of early modern political thought is that all people are by nature free. But that carries with it the implication that the natural freedom of all humankind does not exclude the enslavement of some people who are born free. Indeed, it’s through the mechanisms by which we define freedom, in the case of natural rights in particular, that slavery is said to arise. That is one of the really unusual features of the early modern world and early modern thought that set the background for the origins of American slavery.

Mounk: To understand really what the justification of slavery was in the early years, we need to do this very important detour of understanding how the early colonists would have thought about questions like freedom. What you’re saying here is that those conceptions of freedom in some important way coexisted with, and perhaps even prepared the ground for, justification of slavery. This justification for slavery would not have been in the first instance a racial conception—it wouldn’t have been that white people are born to be free but black people are not capable of self-government and therefore should be slaves, or something like that. It is rooted in an Aristotelian tradition, which had one kind of set of justifications for slavery, and then a Roman tradition, which had a subtly distinct set of justifications for slavery. Tell us about what sort of ancient thinkers these eighteenth century colonists would have been drawing on when they reflect on a question like slavery.

Harpham: There’s more than enough time in the history of American slavery for racialized conceptions of freedom and slavery to develop. My book is planned as the first of three volumes in a series, and I intend to follow that history very closely into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But this book, conceived as the first of three volumes in the series, is focused on the period from 1550 to 1700—the vast Atlantic context around 1619, a date now familiar to many Americans as the date when the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English American colonies. From 1550 to 1700, roughly seen as the early modern period in the history of political thought, there were essentially two conceptions of slavery, and of the relationship between freedom and slavery, that were well understood and widely shared.

The first was drawn from the Politics of Aristotle, which held that nature itself marked a distinction within the human species. Aristotle says that within any composite whole composed of parts, those parts arrange themselves into a hierarchical order. According to Aristotle, this has taken place within the human species itself, such that some are by nature meant to be slaves and others are marked out by nature to be their masters. The two parts are intimately related, and so the inequality that slavery inscribes on human life is inherent within the nature of the persons that make up the human species.

The second conception of slavery, the second broad tradition of thinking about slavery, is very different and is drawn not from the authoritative text of Aristotle’s Politics but rather from the Corpus Iuris, the essential texts of Roman law. Roman law starts from a point almost diametrically opposed to the Aristotelian, which is that there are several sources of law, and the original one is the law of nature. Freedom and equality are the rule within the law of nature. According to the law of nature, all people are free and all are equal to each other in that sense. Slavery comes in over time as a result of accident and misfortune, not as an outcome of the different natures to which human beings are assigned, but rather as a result, most often, of the wars that emerge between states, and slavery comes in as a status assigned as an alternative to death for people who are taken captive in war. In other words, on the Roman conception, freedom is the rule for all humankind, and in principle anyone might come to be enslaved.

Both the Aristotelian and the Roman conceptions were well known in the early modern period, the critical period for the origins of American slavery. But over this period, as the Aristotelian conception of slavery almost always universally came to be rejected, especially in English culture, the Roman conception of slavery was received and adapted and became the basis for the ideas about slavery that would have been on offer in the period when American slavery began.

Mounk: The Aristotelian conception does have an idea of natural slavery, that some people are somehow naturally adapted to being slaves, but it’s not one where it’s because you’re born into a particular racial group that you’re naturally adapted to slavery. It can either be because of personal characteristics, or sometimes perhaps because you didn’t grow up in liberty, because you weren’t able to cultivate the virtues of liberty due to a condition you’ve been in from the past. The Roman conception more explicitly talks about circumstance and happenstance—if you are taken as prisoner in war in certain circumstances, that justifies your condition of slavery. There’s nothing that predestined you to fall into that state, but it is legitimate as a result of you losing in a particular battle, for example. You’re saying that it’s really that conception which was more alive in the minds of colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. How do they apply that to the incipient transatlantic slave trade? How is it that they take these ideas developed in the context of ancient Athens, in the context of the ancient Roman Republic and perhaps the early Roman Empire, and apply this to what seems like quite a different situation? When I think about the Romans, a lot of the time we are talking about the Punic Wars and Romans at war with Carthage, for example, and in this military contest they’re able to take some prisoners. Then they say, well, here’s the justification for why these prisoners now become people who we can use as slaves. That seems very different from: we are over here in North America, and why don’t we start seafaring to these parts of West Africa and paying locals to go and capture a bunch of people, and then bind them, put them in terrible conditions, and ship them across the ocean. It doesn’t really seem like an analogous situation.

Harpham: We can take some time to unpack this, because as I said, these are very complicated issues. We have to pay attention not only to change over time but also to difference across space and parts of the Atlantic world. What you just said, Yascha, quite correctly, is that it doesn’t seem that the institution of American slavery neatly fits with any conception of slavery developed on the Roman model. The idea and the institution seem so radically different from each other that it seems impossible for the one to have drawn support from the other—for the institution of American slavery, the origins of American slavery, to have emerged from a world saturated in Roman ideas.

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As I said, these are complicated issues. In order to understand the origins of American slavery, we have to first move beyond the borders of present-day America, North America even, the Caribbean even, and move back across the Atlantic—not to the new world, but rather to the old—and understand the complex process by which American slavery, a radically new institution, a new form of human evil which departed in many respects from any ancient precedent that there was for the institution of slavery, came from the old, from old ideas about slavery, ancient societies that understood themselves to be rooted in customs of slavery that went back as far as the classical past. That is the project of my book. It’s not a neat story. It’s not a unidirectional story, and in many ways I think it’s a surprising story for those of us who come from a background of knowing about the history of American slavery.

Two points in response to your question. The first is that the Aristotelian understanding of slavery has to be realized to have been unusual even in the ancient world. Aristotle posed his conception of natural slavery in opposition to the dominant understandings of the time, which more or less corresponded to the Roman ideas about slavery, in which slavery arose not from nature but rather convention most often—the convention that captives taken in war were enslaved. This convention was not a local custom. It wasn’t applied in small corners of the world in short periods of time.

When slavery entered Roman law, it entered not by means of the law of nature, which established freedom and equality as the rule in human relations. It entered through a separate source of law known as the law of nations. What was the law of nations in Roman law? It was thought to be a collection of the customs common to all the peoples of the world—not only to the Romans, but to their imperial rivals, and also to the ancient Israelites, and the customs of slavery described in the law of nations, at least to some extent, describe the laws on slavery set out in the Hebrew Bible. Slavery is understood to be legitimate under the law of nations not because it is just or good for the person who is enslaved, but because it is one of the common customs of the world.

Still in the early modern period, even if the English colonists and their metropolitan supporters didn’t understand themselves to be living in the legacies of the old Roman Empire, they did understand that the law of nations, best described and captured in Roman law, still adequately encapsulated the common customs of the world, slavery included.

Mounk: To what extent was that a fiction all along? To what extent did that law of nations systematize something that really existed? To what extent was that always the Roman imagination?

Harpham: Of course, my primary interest as a scholar is in imaginations and conceptions. But I can say that in the early modern world, across vast swaths of the Atlantic world, the law of nations’ understanding of slavery—most often a status assigned as an alternative to death for captives taken in wars—continued as the common practice of most of the nations of the world. This is the same period in time, 1550 to 1700, when the English became acutely aware that slavery and its later descendant, villainage in particular, had ended within the borders of the realm. They believed that their nation marked an exception to the common customs of the world, in particular with respect to the practices of slavery. Europeans did not take slaves of one another in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even when taking captives in war. They would kill each other, they would torture each other. Some observers, such as Alberico Gentili, said that wars between European nations would be less brutal if slavery persisted as a custom between them. But by the early modern period, the nations of Europe had decided not to enslave one another even when taken captive in war. We can talk about the sources and implications of that cultural consensus. But across the vast stretch of the nations of the world, you find this very clearly stated in all the surveys of the world and atlases from the time—slavery as a status assigned to captives in war persisted well into the early modern period. There’s no question.

Mounk: In some ways Europeans at this point think that they’re exceptional in that slavery did not play a big role in those societies, at least in that they didn’t enslave each other. What did the American colonists think about this? They think of themselves as English at that period, I assume. They identify with the intellectual heritage of the old world to a very large extent. How is it that they base themselves on the general world of sixteenth, seventeenth century English thought, but then say under our circumstances in the new world, when it comes to dealing with people from the African continent, slavery somehow is justified, or natural, or whatever it is that they would have said?

Harpham: Of course, as scholarship in the last twenty years has shown in a lot of detail, the enslavement of Native Americans is as important a part of the early English colonies, and particularly the early English North American colonies, as the enslavement of African Americans. We can discuss the way those stories fit together, and I think they are parts of a single complex story.

I’ll render the cultural consensus of early modern Europe in more precise terms than I just did. Europeans had believed that they had come to a consensus never to enslave one another, even when taken captives in war. But they stated that consensus not in terms of geography, in terms of the continent of Europe, but rather in terms of their membership in a religious community, which was Christendom. They believed that they had come to a consensus never to practice slavery against other peoples who lay within the borders of Christendom. For the purposes of war, for the purpose of the treatment of captives taken in war, slaves or captives taken within wars within Christendom were treated as captives in civil wars had always been, and captives in civil wars had never been enslaved, despite the obvious and well-known brutality of civil war. That said, outside of the borders of Christendom, the common law of nations’ customs of slavery continued in effect, which is to say that Europeans believed that when the Roman conditions were met, peoples who came from outside of the borders of Christendom might legitimately be enslaved, and that they might legitimately enslave them, but only when those conditions were met.

In the early modern period, those Roman customs, the Roman description of the common customs of the world, had had one exception made to it, which was within the borders of Christendom. The law of nations continued in effect in the rest of the world. In the American colonies, this was the ideological structure for ideas about slavery—even though English servants and servants from the British Isles were notoriously treated horrifically in the early British colonies, and worked alongside enslaved Africans and enslaved Native Americans, and their treatment was widely said to be more or less the same on a daily basis, the distinction between the servitude of people from the British Isles and the enslavement of Native Americans and African Americans continued in effect, drawing on this older cultural consensus that Christians would not enslave one another.

Mounk: That was an important guardrail that limited who could be enslaved in this kind of way. But what was then the justification for saying that, when you’re dealing with Native Americans, when you’re dealing with Africans that you go and search out across the sea, that is a legitimate activity? How does that constrain the treatment of people who convert to Christianity? Presumably, prima facie, you might think that if you cannot enslave Christians, then one way that an enslaved person should be able to escape their condition is to convert to Christianity. That obviously is not how the institution of chattel slavery ends up working in the United States.

Harpham: Yes, of course. This is a very important part of the story, because so many of the debates in the early English Atlantic colonies were debates not so much about slavery as such as they were debates about the implications of conversion. For background here, the most important English American colonies before 1700 were not the North American colonies—not Massachusetts, not Virginia, not even Carolina. The development of slavery and servitude, parallel developments of slavery and servitude in those colonies, have been well examined by historians and examined in minute detail. The canonical treatments of the origins of American slavery are treatments that deal with Virginia, that see slavery developing over the seventeenth century within Virginia, or Massachusetts in more recent years, or in Carolina. But in this period, the early period for the origins of the English Atlantic Empire, the most populous and richest colony in the English Atlantic world wasn’t Virginia—it was Barbados, and soon, in the second half of the seventeenth century, it was Jamaica that came to the fore. These were the sugar colonies, rather than colonies founded upon the production of other staple crops, tobacco or cotton, for example.

Anyhow, the debates about slavery in these English American colonies, as I said, were most often debates about conversion, and they sprang from the set of convictions that we have just introduced: if it is taken to be the case that Christendom makes an exception to the common customs of the world, that Christians will not take one another as slaves even when taken captives in war, what happens when certain people who have been enslaved are converted to Christ and brought within the Christian fold? Many of the metropolitan supporters of the English colonies, including the Crown—this was always the position of the Crown—believed that the conversion of people who were enslaved in the colonies was a seriously important project.

Mounk: You wanted to convert people because you have a religious obligation to spread the good word about Jesus and you want to save people’s souls. But this comes with a very big practical problem, which is that you’re suddenly encouraging the conversion of people on whom you’re relying for your economic production of sugar and other crops to be enslaved. If carrying out this religious obligation means that you’re eating into your own workforce, well, you have a problem.

Harpham: Exactly. Not just a problem, but a problem with explosive implications, which is that if it was the case that enslaved people in the American colonies were converted to Christ and could no longer be held as slaves, then it could no longer be said that the border between slave and free corresponded to the border between Christian and heathen, or Christian and outside the Christian realm. The border between slave and free had to be stated in other terms.

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With all the perverse inventiveness that characterized so much of the development of the English Atlantic Empire, the early English colonists, especially in Barbados and Jamaica and to some extent also in Virginia, said that as a result of the success of the project of conversion, the border between slave and free was not between Christian and other, it was between black and white. It’s out of this set of developments and debates, rooted in this very distinctive early modern world, that the English and English colonists first started to state the distinction between slave and free in terms of the distinction between black and white.

Mounk: How close are we here to a racial justification of slavery? As I take it, the point is: how are you allowed to take a slave? This is part of the law of nations. It’s always been the case, nothing that remarkable about it. But it would obviously be totally inappropriate to take a Christian as a slave. So you’ve taken these various people as slaves, and some of them have now converted to Christianity. How can you justify continuing to keep them as slaves, and continuing, in the case of chattel slavery, to keep as slaves people who are born as Christians, the children of those enslaved people? Is the answer here: yes, but they’re black? Is it as straightforward as that? Does it at that point just morph into a straight-up racial justification of slavery, or is it more complicated?

Harpham: We’re dealing not simply with change over time, we’re also going to have to deal with differences across space. But if we zero in for now on the English American colonies, the colonists and the planters, famously, were not interested in the project of conversion. This is especially true on Barbados and Jamaica. The Crown and the metropolitan English authorities were always convinced of the importance of conversion, but the planters themselves were notoriously not interested in any ideas at all. As one early observer said, they had made Mammon their God, the sole deity on the island of Barbados.

There were differences that emerged between the discourses about slavery in the metropole and the colonies, but let’s just focus on the colonies for now. You ask how close we are to a paradigmatic racial justification for slavery. I think the answer is we’re very close already at this point, and this is the point to which I come toward the end of the book, in the final decades of the seventeenth century. In the course of these debates about the borders set down around the practice of slavery, between slave and free, attention was fixed upon the difference between black and white as the dividing line. Some of the early colonists had started to realize that the borders around the practice of slavery could be made into a justification for enslavement themselves—that it was not only the case that the distinction between slave and free corresponded to the distinction between black and white, it could also be said to be the case that people who were black were essentially meant for slavery, that those who were white could never be enslaved themselves, that freedom was their proper condition.

But still, these are debates and a series of horrific insights drawn in small corners of the Atlantic world, in remote, mostly island communities such as Barbados and Jamaica, where some planters were starting to realize what ideas would be required from them in order to defend and justify not only the origins of slavery as an institution, but its persistence over time on a racial basis.

Mounk: In a way, this is obviously the point that is striking to us moderns about the institution as a whole—the answer is also question-begging. What is it about the fact that this person, the colonist, is white, and this person, the enslaved, is black, that justifies it? Over time, different kinds of accounts of racial superiority and inferiority have been offered. One common one is to say that members of a white race are capable of rational self-governance in a way that other ethnic or racial groups are not. What was the justification that one of those planters in Barbados would have made if we were able to travel back in time and ask: okay, well, you had this justification about Christians and non-Christians, that has a set of religious justifications. Now you’re suddenly saying it’s not about that at all, it’s about the fact that you’re white and these people you’re enslaving are black. What is it about you being white and them being black which justifies this dominion?

Harpham: Yes, and as I said, these are complex and very nuanced issues. It’s not so much a matter of, over the course of my book—I try to put it in these terms—it’s not so much a matter of there was one idea and not another idea, this idea was prevalent and that idea was never present. It’s more a matter of the balancing, the way in which you construct the relative priority of ideas that were competing with one another, that were coexisting with one another, that existed within a complex sphere of discussion and debate, that differed over time from author to author and from place to place.

As this small number of American colonists in these remote island communities, operating and innovating in a radically new plantation complex that was created over a short period of time, rapidly, and on the basis of new discoveries and innovations in the cultivation of sugar, started to formulate new ideas that would justify the novel institutions they were just then developing, they did draw upon ideas from the past that had always been available, that had always been perhaps more minor strands in the discourse about slavery. One of them is that the colonists, the planters, and their defenders started to articulate the Aristotelian doctrine that nature makes a distinction between slave and free, that the peoples of Africa are essentially slaves, and that white people, or the English, are essentially free. They also picked up on another ancient justification for enslavement and hierarchy, not from the world of classical philosophy but from the text of the Hebrew Bible, which had come to be known as the Curse of Ham. Some of the early colonists and their supporters started to say that the peoples of Africa in the present were drawn from the descendants of the person who had received the old curse pronounced upon the son of Ham, Canaan, in Genesis.

Mounk: For those listeners who are not up on the Bible, remind us what the curse of Ham is.

Harpham: I’ve laid out a debate about slavery that there was in the classical world between Aristotle and Roman law. But there was also another set of ideas about slavery available in the early modern period, drawn from the ancient world, not from texts of classical philosophy but from the Bible, from the Hebrew Bible in particular. The first mention of slavery in the Hebrew Bible takes place in Genesis, after the flood, after Noah has planted a vineyard and lies drunken in his tent, having drunk from the products of the vine. One of Noah’s sons, Ham, walks into his tent and sees him in his nakedness. When he awoke, Noah knew what Ham had done, according to the text, and pronounced upon him a curse: “a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren,” Shem and Japheth. This was often taken in the early modern period to be a curse of slavery, that Ham and his descendants had been cursed to slavery. This is the first mention of slavery in the Bible, because, as in Roman law, in the text of the Hebrew Bible freedom is the original condition of the species. Freedom is the rule at the start, in the Garden of Eden, as it was in Roman law, and slavery comes in over time. But here in the Bible it comes in not as a result of captivity taken in war, but rather as the product of punishment for a wrong act.

Mounk: So these are different ways of starting to say: there’s this curse in the Bible, and now the people we want to enslave so happen to be—isn’t it useful—the descendants of a person on whom this curse was pronounced. How do I put this? What is the evidence for that, I suppose? Is it just a free-floating idea? Is there meant to be some attribute that Ham and his descendants have that you can look out into the world and see in these people? How much substance is there to this idea, other than this kind of reference that one can grasp in a way that makes it feel logically useful to somebody who wants to claim to be a Christian and also practice slavery?

Harpham: Well, of course, Ham and his descendants were always associated with sin. They were associated with the violation of proper order. Sin has always been associated with slavery. This is a point made by one of the great scholars of the history of slavery and antislavery, David Brion Davis, that in the Christian tradition, ideas about slavery were always intimately associated with ideas about sin. Slavery, in a sense, was the result of sin because, like so many other features of the modern world, slavery was a product of the fall. Freedom was the rule in the Garden of Eden. So to tell a story about the origins of slavery, you had to go back to the original act of the fall, which was the source of all forms of hierarchy and subordination, and labor, and property as well. So Ham was associated with sin, and sin was associated with slavery.

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At the same time, you and I, Yascha, were both, in a sense, trained by, and at least exposed to, practitioners of what’s called the Cambridge School in the history of political thought. Over the course of my book I make a move that will be well known to practitioners of the Cambridge School but I think less well known to historians of American slavery. It’s a common move in intellectual history: in order to understand the history of an idea, you should first try to grasp as much as possible the context in which that idea was understood, and try to understand the question it seemed to answer. Reconstruct the questions around that idea, and then try to understand the answer that idea seemed to present. Practitioners of the Cambridge School have done this extensively with respect to ideas about liberty, and I try to do it with respect to ideas about slavery.

Now, in the early modern period, in English culture and in European culture in general, the Curse of Ham was available, and was well known. But it was used as an answer to a variety of different questions, most often not an answer to questions about how to justify contemporary practices of slavery. Rather, especially in English discourse, the Curse of Ham most often came up in response to another related question, which was the origins of black skin. Englishmen by this time took for granted that white was the natural or original color of the human species, that people were originally white like themselves, and that blackness was innate and permanent as a skin color among many of the peoples of the world. In order to explain this distinction, in order to explain the origins of black skin over time, there are many answers on offer. One of them, a well-known but almost always rejected, notorious answer, had been put forward by an author from 1578 named George Best. Best said that blackness arose among peoples who lived south of the Sahara Desert as a legacy of the original curse in the Bible—that the curse was associated not in this instance with slavery but rather with blackness, with black skin color, and emerged as a possible answer to the problem for the English of blackness.

This is an ominous development. From an early period in the English American colonies, when the colonists wanted to justify the enslavement of people who were black and the freedom of people who were white like themselves, this curse, which had been most often associated with blackness, was fastened upon as an explanation now for enslavement.

Mounk: That’s interesting, and we can see how that’s both very different from modern conceptions of race and can strangely serve some of the same purposes. Modern racism might say something like: there are genetic differences between groups of people, and this group is in this and that way superior, and that group is in this and that way inferior, and that warrants the superior group treating members of the inferior group in particular ways. Whereas here there’s this kind of quasi, semi-racial and semi-theological justification, which is something like: there’s a group of people in the world who are subject to this curse because they and their descendants are in some way sinful, and black skin is just a mark of having that curse. In a way, it’s epiphenomenal. It might be a useful sign that allows you to determine who is a member of that group, but it’s not the black skin that either causes sinfulness or straightforwardly justifies being enslaved. It’s simply a hallmark of being a member of a group that has those attributes.

Harpham: At the same time, the English in this period never doubted that being white like themselves was a peculiar privilege, and that being black in color was a mark of ugliness and inferiority as well. Not just a mark—in their view, blackness was often taken to be the opposite of beauty, and whiteness was taken to be the ultimate measure of beauty. From this early period, blackness was used as a kind of mark to draw together a variety of different strands of ideas and statuses and practices, and was fastened upon not only as a kind of ancient sign that had come from a curse, but also, in the contemporary world, as a mark used to visibly divide slave from free.

This was all in the service of the aim of the English colonists with respect to the origins of American slavery: to answer the question of why an entire order of persons who had been enslaved far away, thousands of miles off in the distance, in circumstances no one wanted to inquire into, and perhaps long ago as well, could never come to be free. What they wanted to establish was the permanence and heritability of slavery over time. In order to do so, they grounded their conceptions of slavery in what you start to describe as a racial conception—slavery built into the permanent and heritable features of an entire order of persons, into a race. But this is an idea about slavery that comes together in the English colonies. In Africa, by contrast, at the sources of slavery across the Atlantic world, the set of ideas used to describe and justify slavery were actually very different. So now we’ve started to lay out the set of ideas associated with the origins of slavery as an institution in the American colonies. But as we said from the start, a very important piece of the book is to describe the earlier world of ideas from which that set of ideas came.

Mounk: I know you have a three-volume masterpiece in the works, with two more volumes to write. Give us a little preview of how those ideas then change and transmute later on. How is it that the people in the American South who were resisting the abolition of slavery drew upon the ideas we’ve been talking about, and I’m sure changed and transformed them, in order to make a case for why that institution should be preserved? How much continuity is there between those ideas and the kind of racial thinking in which some people engage today?

Harpham: Change over time is such an important factor in describing the history of American slavery. Historians have long recognized this, but it’s a difficult point to keep at the front of our minds—that, like any human institution, the history of slavery marks dramatic changes across space and across time. The aim of this book is to describe origins, and in particular to describe a set of debates about the sources of slavery, drawn from the precedents of Roman law and used to understand the sources of the slave trade in Africa. The sources of slavery refer to those dramatic, calamitous transformations of people who are naturally free into those who are enslaved.

Already by the time of the development of slavery in the early English colonies, a different question needed to be answered with respect to slavery: why an entire order of persons who had been enslaved could never become free—the continuation of slavery over time. Into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the most important fact in debates about American slavery became the fact of American slavery itself. So many of the debates about American slavery well known to us today, from Jefferson up to the point of abolition, are not debates about the sources of slavery or the character of slavery itself; they take their starting point from the fact of the massive institution, and are debates about the possibilities of radical abolition, or the impossibility of uprooting a structure that had already been in place. Over time you see the debates about slavery move from debates about slavery itself and its sources to debates about the ends of slavery, about abolition. That is the vast narrative I think I’ll be telling in the next two volumes of this series, which will take us up to the point of abolition in 1865.

Mounk: That’s really helpful. Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. I’m trying to get into the mind of a listener who hasn’t studied political theory and intellectual history like you and I have, and who’s perhaps less convinced of the importance of these ideas. They might say something like the following: what you’re describing here is a set of societies with very strong economic interests. If you want to make a profit producing sugar in Barbados, or make a profit producing cotton in the American South, having access to very cheap, reliable labor is of utmost importance. These are very labor-intensive processes. All that’s going on here is that Mammon was king. Ideas aren’t that important. People were engaging in the economic institution that best served the bottom line. They were cynically enslaving people in order to have ongoing access to that cheap labor, to expropriate from people any legitimate benefits they could have drawn from their hard work. Sure, as an epiphenomenon of all of that, they came up with justifications—at the beginning, when it was enough to just enslave people who were not Christian, they said this is all about Christians and non-Christians. When suddenly some of these enslaved people convert to Christianity and that justification doesn’t work anymore, well, you cast your eyes around, you come up with the next best explanation, and now you make it about the obvious fact that the people doing the enslaving are white and the people being enslaved are black, and you come up with some justification for that. But somebody who’s looking at a simple economic model here, who’s analyzing the political economy of the cotton trade or the sugar trade, is going to be able to get to ninety to ninety-five percent of everything we’ve talked about—all of these very complex ideas, these very subtle reconstructions of how people tried to make sure they could sleep well at night while engaging in these horrific practices—and ultimately these ideas are besides the point. Perhaps we get to the last three or four percent here or there. But why focus on this rather than these underlying material, political, and economic interests?

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and John discuss the relationship between ideas and material interests, and how these shaped American slavery. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, sometimes described as “the conscience of economics,” holds the Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey discuss why liberalism drives economic growth, how the gradual erosion of inherited hierarchy unleashed centuries of innovation, and what liberals should think about the trans debate.

We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.

That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.

This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I’m really excited to talk to you in part just because of the span of your work, and I really want to discuss your case for liberalism, but in a way that starts with The Industrial Revolution and the enormous economic progress that we’ve made over the last centuries. There is a big debate in history, in economics, about what actually caused that unprecedented economic liftoff that started some 250 years ago. You have a slightly surprising point of view on this, that ideas are actually more central to the origin of economic growth than most economists think. Tell us perhaps what the conventional story is and why you disagree with it.

Deirdre McCloskey: Well, there are two conventional stories, from the left and the right. From the left, the story is exploitation—the exploitation of the English working class, and then the exploitation of imperialism and slavery and so forth. Exploitation is supposed to result in surplus value, which then is used to invest, and investment then makes for the modern world, makes for increasing income. That’s on the left. On the right, it ends up being the same story without the exploitation. Virtuous capitalists save more, according to the conventional story, and that results in capital accumulation, just as they say on the left, and that leads to the modern world. So it’s essentially capital investment accumulation that’s supposed to have caused our enrichment.

But that doesn’t make a lot of sense. From a historical point of view, we’ve always invested. Humans always invest. We invest in paddy fields going up mountainsides, and irrigation works, and Roman roads, and then indeed even in the Middle Ages, the peasants had to save a quite high percentage of their crop for seed. So they were investing. There’s nothing new about investment. That’s the historical problem.

And the economic problem is that sheer capital accumulation—sheer piling up of buildings, machines, or indeed university educations—comes very quickly, economists have always known, to diminishing returns. If you had two cars, I guess that’d be nice. Three would be junk. Four would be a burden. Diminishing returns is very strong. So those don’t work, and I’ve written extensively on why they all don’t work. Coal is one explanation. Well, that doesn’t work either, and they all don’t work. So why? Why did we get rich? How did we get rich?

Mounk: Interesting. So this traditional story is that over time people were able to save and accumulate these things, and that then allowed them to reinvest, and so on. Okay. We’ll come back to a steelman version of that perhaps later, but if you’ve ruled that out, if that isn’t working, then what’s the alternative view that can make sense of this growth?

McCloskey: The alternative view that I favor is the creation, in the eighteenth century in northwestern Europe—first in Holland, then in Britain, and most particularly in Scotland, and then more or less accidentally at the same time in the English colonies in North America—of the idea of liberalism in a certain way, a certain ideology. This is ideology, Marx’s word, and I think it’s a very useful one. Ideology changed in this corner of the world, especially in the late eighteenth century. The idea of equality of permission became much stronger than it had been in the past. Hierarchy, in other words, was in question.

We still have hierarchies, but they’re often hierarchies of a sort that we admire and want more of. Inventors make money, good singers make money, and good football players make money. But in earlier times, hierarchy was inherited and had nothing to do with progress. The result was, I claim, and I show that innovation enormously increased. Ordinary people were allowed to have a go. This is an English commonplace, and having a go made the poor even innovative. So it’s through innovation, not through sheer accumulation, that we became rich.

Then the question is why innovation? My claim is this change in ideology. Once that genie was out of the bottle, other people in the world became interested in this matter. When you look at protests—the ones in Iran last year, or the ones a few years ago against Putin, or the Arab Spring, or Tiananmen Square—always what they’re asking for is this equality of permission. They’re not asking for special subsidies or government programs to help this person or that person. So it’s this ideological change that made the modern world.

Mounk: So let me get at the heart of why it is that hierarchy is such an impediment to economic growth, and the specific ways in which hierarchy went away. There are two kinds of challenges to this. One is to say, well, look, you can have hierarchy and have economic growth—the king still wants to be richer, even if most of the benefits of economic activity flow to a few people. So why is it that, before these new ideas came into being, the specific kind of hierarchy that existed really was such an impediment to innovation that it basically stopped economic growth for thousands of years?

And then, of course, one challenge that people are going to have is to say, but you look at 1850, and there still are very steep hierarchies between men and women, between one social class and another, between people in Britain and people in the colonies. So in what sense is the difference in the nature of a hierarchy between 1750 and 1850, or between 1650 and 1900, if you prefer, so qualitatively important—but gives you just enough non-hierarchy that this kind of innovation can start to occur in a way it didn’t earlier?

McCloskey: It’s slow. It’s gradually expanding. The first great victory of this ideology is abolishing slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and then eventually in the United States. Then the women say, well, why not us? And that takes a long time to come to fruition. And the queers—in northern Europe there’s a hundred-year reign of terror against homosexuals, especially male homosexuals. And then there’s, in the United States, this horrible continuation of slavery and so-called Jim Crow. Eventually, in the 1960s it starts to fall, but it’s reviving right now as we speak. So yes, there are these hierarchical, racist, classist, imperialist, in general radical conservative forces that keep trying to make it go away.

But as Tocqueville pointed out in the 1830s, after his visit to the United States, the great modern movement is equality—that everyone’s supposed to be the same, and there’s not to be, at least, inherited hierarchy. Now, of course, we all have bosses—at least I do, and lots of people do—but we’re free to leave if we want. We might have to leave for a much poorer job, but on the other hand, we’re free to leave, whereas a slave isn’t. A wife, under English common law, could own no property except her dress and her jewelry. That was it. So it’s slow.

As far as the earlier hierarchy, as you point out, why wasn’t it in the interest of the ruling class to allow people to innovate? Because they could themselves take the rents, say on land, that would be increased by this. To some degree, the British ruling class in the eighteenth century realized this, and indeed the aristocrats owned mines and built canals and were involved in trade, as many comparable aristocracies were forbidden to do. In France, for example, if you engaged in trade as an aristocrat, you lost your aristocratic standing, which was extremely valuable because in France it amounted to not having to pay any taxes. So you’re right, there’s a kind of stupidity that’s necessary in the minds of the ruling class, but it doesn’t see that abolishing slavery, allowing women to be free, allowing ordinary people to innovate is probably good for them too.

Now, one more point on this. The fact of the United States was very important, I think, in all this. It was said frequently by commentators in the nineteenth century, and not only American commentators, that this strange claim—which of course wasn’t true, but was slowly being implemented—that all people are treated equally, was a powerful solvent, so to speak, of hierarchy in Europe. And it worked eventually.

So it’s not accumulation, and I think many economists now are understanding this, and economic historians too. Then it’s gotta be ideas. Now, my friend Joel Mokyr, a great economic historian, thinks it’s science. He and I agree that ideas are where the action is, but his idea is about science, and I think it’s certainly true that right now a lot of innovations in the world come from science. But I don’t think Joel’s correct that in the nineteenth century very many of them did.

Mounk: So Joel Mokyr, of course, is one of the winners of a Nobel Prize this past year, 2025. Tell us a little bit more about the difference of opinion you have. In his view, it is really the beginning of the application of the scientific method and scientific progress which allows us to develop a steam engine and do all the other kinds of things that are at the heart of that material explosion that you start to get in the factories of Manchester and so on, in England of the late eighteenth and then the nineteenth century.

Now, you’re somewhat sympathetic to this idea, but you actually put broader emphasis on things like the different valuation of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois values—that once upon a time to be a merchant is shameful, whereas to be a priest is to have an honorable profession, and over time, in one part of the world, that starts to change. Suddenly, to be a merchant, an inventor, a tinkerer who comes up with things that increase material wealth, comes to be seen in a much more positive way. That is actually what presumably is also necessary for people to become scientists and these other things. So tell us a little bit where exactly the difference of opinion lies, and why it is that we should buy your ideas-based story rather than Mokyr’s ideas-based story.

McCloskey: An illustration of it is the case of the Dutch. Joel was in fact raised in Holland before he moved to Israel, and he would agree that in the sixteenth and seventeenth century this high valuation of merchants and the ending of kings—Spanish kings, most particularly—allowed the Dutch to invent many things, both commercially and scientifically, in the 1600s especially. So even from his own country, there’s an example of what I call the bourgeois revaluation, causing science to progress.

But the problem with his argument is that most of the inventions that matter to the economy have nothing to do with science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. For example, the steam engine—yes, but it’s not entirely a scientific innovation. People had to have a notion that air was heavy, and you could call that science, but the subsequent history of the steam engine shows that it wasn’t terribly important until well into the nineteenth century. John Clapham, a great economic historian of a much earlier generation, pointed out that by the middle of the nineteenth century, most manufacturing wasn’t using steam—it was still handicraft or water power. If you look across the Atlantic, water power was crucial in New England manufacturing through most of the nineteenth century. It was important in England too, England and Scotland, in the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.

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And then there are all these other innovations, which Joel and I agree are important, like concrete—reinforced concrete in particular—which has nothing to do with science. Road building has nothing to do with science. Canals are made much easier to maintain and to build with the invention of the steam engine, the steam shovel, but most of the canals in Britain were dug by hand. And so it goes.

Mounk: To what extent is this a disagreement about what exactly we mean by science? What I mean by that is that obviously there’s kind of capital-S science, where you’re very self-consciously applying some form of a scientific method and you’re publishing your findings in a peer-reviewed journal and so on. And then there’s a broader sense in which the invention of concrete truly stands at the tail end of a process in which people come to have a much more empirical mindset, and come to learn how to engage in experiments. There may not be a PhD scientist involved—I don’t know the history of the invention of concrete, I take it you do know it quite well—it may not be that this is happening at a fancy university by somebody publishing about it, but rather an entrepreneur playing around on the building side. But they’re still, in some broadest sense, applying something like the lessons from a few centuries of scientific inquiry to how they are advancing with technology.

McCloskey: Yeah, I understand, and since the main triumph of the scientific revolution was the discovery of the forces for planetary motion, it’s clear that high science is not practical for quite a long time. But I think it’s wrong—and I would argue in detail with Joel about this—to think that the empirical mindset is something new. People have always been trying out stuff. They just do it all the time. French cuisine, which comes from Italy originally in the court, but then the real source of French cuisine is thousands and thousands of housewives, and then men, chefs, trying out things. I think it’s a calumny on our ancestors to say that the scientific method is new. I don’t think it is.

Mounk: This relates to one of my favorite moments from grad school, when a grad student challenged my professor by saying that something was just—that means and reasoning was just a Western construct. He’s got the wonderful story of an anthropologist, whose name I forget, who was studying the customs of some tribe, I believe in the Highlands of Ghana—I may be wrong about the exact location. After many months of effort, he’s sufficiently gained the confidence of the tribe, and they’re taking him to see the rain man. He goes up to the rain man—it’s a perilous journey across the desert, and he’s hiking up this mountain—and finally the rain man says, “Well, I have a secret stone, and if I manipulate it in this particular way, then most of the time the next day it rains.” He looks at the stone, and it’s a child’s marble.

So the next time he’s getting a little bit of R and R in the next town, staying with friends, and the kid has marbles, he has an idea and asks the kid, “Could I take one of your marbles?” The kid says, “Sure, have this marble.” So he asks, “Can I go back to see the rain man?” He treks across the desert and scales the mountain, nearly falls and dies, and makes it to the rain man. He says, “This holy stone that you have, of which there’s only one in the world—well, I found another one. Look at this.” The rain man is completely astonished, looking at this marble he’s presented with. The anthropologist asks, “What do you think, if you use this stone in your ceremony, is it going to rain tomorrow?” The rain man pauses for a second and says, “I don’t know. Shall we give it a try?”

McCloskey: There you go. That’s the scientific method. This imperial provinciality of Europeans about how foolish their ancestors were—who just believed, if they were highly educated, in Aristotle, and if they weren’t highly educated, believed only in the traditions of their fathers, and those were irrational—and the assumption that people with non-white skin are inferior and stupid and just do what they do: that, as you agree, and I’m sure Joel agrees, has been entirely exploded by modern anthropology and modern history.

I’ve just finished a book on English open fields and enclosures. The theme of the book—it’s quite long, and I’ve been working on it since 1970—is that the English peasants, in their very peculiar-seeming open fields, so-called, were pretty sensible. They weren’t perfect, they got some things wrong, but they knew how to get their daily bread this way, and had every incentive to be reasonable, experimental, thoughtful, soberly observant. That’s all the scientific method is. In fact, I’ve argued in other books, along with certain philosophers and sociologists and historians of science, that in a way there is no such thing as the scientific method. That doesn’t mean I’m against science, or that I don’t believe in being careful in thinking about things. I just mean that there’s no formula. And it’s not new.

Mounk: Yeah, but the scientific method has become this kind of slightly weird, simplified slogan, and it’s interesting how that happens to science. I deeply believe in science, but part of the point of science is that science does never prove X or Y. Insofar as there is a scientific method, it is to retain the understanding that things which we provisionally believe to be right may turn out to be wrong. In popular discourse, the slogan of science is often used to say, this is beyond any doubt, and if you don’t go along with my point of view or my political opinion, then you’re against science—which is actually the least scientific way that you can think about things.

McCloskey: But observe: if you don’t have a liberal society, that skepticism—reasonable skepticism—can’t flourish. I don’t mean complete skepticism, I don’t believe in anything, I don’t believe there’s a door there, that’s obviously insane. But reasonable skepticism can’t flourish without it. That’s where to come back to the example of Holland. It was a liberal society in the sixteenth century, and no wonder it prospered in the seventeenth century. It fought against the Spanish Empire, which had the best army in Europe, for eighty years, and like the Ukrainians, it won.

You see the connection: a free society, free speech, freedom of religion is where it all comes from, of course, but free speech, free movement, free contracting, free this, free that, makes for a scientific and technological explosion. Now, by the way, there’s a problem we have in thinking about this connection between science and industry or prosperity, which is we tend to put together “science and technology” as though it were one word. That elevates the role of the university scholar and downplays the role of the guy on the Toyota factory floor making a suggestion.

Mounk: So how does all of that story fit one of the cases of the most impressive economic growth today, in fact probably the fastest economic growth in history, which is China? One way of looking at China is to say that this is a society that lacks key hallmarks of liberalism. It certainly does not have free speech. It only to some extent has some of that valuation of bourgeois virtues that you talk about. On one hand, it’s a quite materialist society. On the other hand, there’s not a lot of sanction from on high about the pursuit of money, etc. The idea of being a member of the party, a civil servant, and so on, is in some ways valued more highly. But what it did start to have under Deng Xiaoping was something much simpler, which is just the market mechanism—the invitation for the open exchange of goods. So does that indicate that your theory pitches what is required a level too high? What we need is something rather simpler, which is just the ability to profit from free exchange of goods and services and the incentives that creates?

McCloskey: Well, two points. One is that the devices such as the electric light and so forth that the Chinese adopted, actually much earlier than 1978, were invented in free societies. Slaves don’t invent as much. It’s conceivable they can invent, but ordinarily they don’t. That’s the first point.

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The second point is that the Chinese Communist Party said making money is glorious. They in fact sponsored the idea after 1978. Again, it was slow, but it finally went until 2003—being a millionaire in China was a capital offense. Now, of course, they didn’t enforce it after Mao, but they in fact had their bourgeois revaluation, except that, as you say, nothing else changed, in the sense that the Chinese Communist Party is still in charge. The same thing happened in a milder way in Singapore, which is a tyranny—now it’s a sensible tyranny, and tries not to be too obvious about it, but it is. The father and son in Singapore put people in jail for being opposed to them.

But the key point you make is perfectly true: there’s no Chinese model, so to speak. What the Chinese Communist Party did was adopt capitalism. That’s completely obvious. There was corruption involved—you had to pay off the communist party official in your neighborhood—but still, you’re allowed to open a store, or start a factory, or move. The largest migration in human history happened in China in the 1990s and 2000s. Two hundred million people moved from the interior of China to the coast, to work in the new factories. Now, again, they weren’t completely free. If you move from the interior to Beijing, you can’t send your child to university. You still have to have permission to live in Beijing, and lots of people don’t, even though they’re there.

A further point is that the Chinese, in their fifty years of experience with socialism, didn’t lose their ability to open a store and run a factory or work in a factory. Well, they’d certainly worked in a factory before. So it was by adopting capitalism that this happened.

Mounk: What about the ability to invent things? You’re talking about the fact that obviously a lot of the basis for the rapid economic growth in China, certainly in the ’80s and ’90s, was imported technology, and then perhaps in the 2000s and early 2010s, a lot of it was technology that was then emulated in China—the kind of copycat approach to a lot of technology, which allowed China to ascend the technological ladder at a very rapid pace. But at this point, China is actually able to compete and outcompete the West on many goods and services. China is probably somewhat behind on artificial intelligence compared to the United States, but is well ahead of countries in Western Europe. With a lot of robotics, the country is arguably ahead. On electric cars, China is at this point arguably ahead. In a lot of very specialized areas, the country is ahead. So if we think that kind of innovation requires liberal values or liberal institutions, do we need to say that China has liberal values or institutions, or how do we square the circle here?

McCloskey: Where liberalism is crucial: if in a Chinese research university, ideas are entertained freely—not ideas about politics or society, but ideas about the technology that they’re focusing on—then you get the same effect. Hierarchy of the old sort, which is often re-established under socialism or fascism too, those kinds of hierarchies reach down into the details of the society and stop innovation. So it’s not terribly surprising that China has become innovative in lots of fields. For example, on electric cars, what should happen is that the United States and Europe should allow Chinese electric cars to come in here and there, and that would be true liberalism, but of course there are forces preventing that, protectionism of various sorts. So in a way, in some fields, China is more free in its economy than in Britain or the United States. For example, in buildings: in both Britain and the United States, and in lots of other rich countries, we have a big problem of housing scarcity—in London compared with the north, and on the coasts in the United States compared with the Midwest. That’s entirely caused by interventions in the market that don’t exist in China. So in that respect, they’re more free economically. Not at all in other respects.

Now, this is a tragedy for the Chinese, that they’re not free, as the students in Tiananmen Square demanded—allow us equality of permission, make us free in all things.

By the way, it’s not only China that grows fast by allowing the economy to work well. I’m of Irish descent, long ago, and when I first went to Ireland in 1967, it was a third world country. When I went back in 1996, O’Connell Street was thronged with prosperous Irish people. In the meantime, Ireland had adopted capitalism, so to speak, in a thoroughgoing way, and the result was that Ireland is one of the per capita richest countries in the world. By the way, China is still quite poor. I hope it improves, and Xi Jinping is probably going to stop it from improving, but its income per capita is still about equal to that of Brazil, or about the world average.

Mounk: What do you think is the state of appreciation for the kind of bourgeois virtues that you think stand at the root of this economic progress in the West? On the one hand, you look at opinion polls, and a lot of young people value a lucrative career and making money over a lot of other things that you might think are important, like love or a meaningful private life. So it seems like we’re more materialist than we’ve ever been, in ways that perhaps aren’t always positive. On the other hand, I think there’s a lot of attacks on enterprise that are coming both from a growing share of the left of the political spectrum, but also in a weird way from the kind of post-liberal right. J.D. Vance just a couple of days ago attacked the idea of GDP as not really what we should care about, and values. So, do you think that, if you think that the origin of economic growth was in a sense a rhetorical move, a set of ideas, then are we in danger of discontent with our current reality inspiring a new rhetorical move that then casts off these ideas in ways that make it impossible to continue growing?

McCloskey: Yes, we are, and that’s why I write my books endlessly. I was a Marxist when I was young. I used to sing “The People’s Flag is Deepest Red.”

Mounk: I grew up singing “The Internationale,” whereas “The People’s Flag is Deepest Red,” in German, is the melody to the most famous Christmas song, so I didn’t sing that.

McCloskey: Well, it’s not that—I sing now “Land of Hope and Glory.” I’m not a Tory. I’m a classical liberal. Anyway, the threat comes from both the left and the right. In the United States, this lunatic we have as president is from the right. Not that this guy actually had any political ideas worth the name, but he’s gotten into alliance—he’s got people around him who are straightforwardly fascist. You can’t call them anything else. Stephen Miller, for example, and a number of others.

Then from the left, we have the kids, the young people, saying, well, let’s try socialism. Socialism sounds nice anyway. It sounds like a family—we’re going to make the country into a family, and families are socialist enterprises and should be. You don’t send your six-year-old out to work to pay for lunch. But these are young people, or people who haven’t experienced actual hardline socialism such as prevailed in Eastern Europe. So there’s always going to be a job to persuade people that neither authoritarianism, the daddy kind of model, or socialism, the mommy kind of model, is wise. I call it liberal adultism. The proposal is that people should treat themselves and others as adults.

Robert Burns’s great anthem of 1795, “A Man’s a Man for A’ That,” is an appeal to be a self-respecting adult.

Mounk: Tell us a little bit about how you think about the nature of liberalism. You’ve mentioned a couple of times in the conversation the idea that permission really stands at the center of liberalism—the permission to pursue the life you want and to do the things that you find to be particularly important. And more broadly, even though you’re an economist, we might think that you think the most important thing about liberalism is that it’s efficient, or that it leads to economic growth, but you really have a kind of deeper defense of what it is that this permission that liberalism comes with gives to people. How should we think about why liberalism is important?

McCloskey: I’m an egalitarian, and I take it you are too. I believe that everyone is equal. I believed it when I was a Marxist—it’s why I was a Marxist—and I believe it now that I’m a non-Marxist. So I think a good society is one in which we’re equal. But then the question is what you mean by equal. The first wave of liberalism, I claim, and try to show, was equality of permission alone. It wasn’t subsidies for poor people, or government projects on a massive scale, and so forth. That wasn’t the appeal. That’s not what the revolutionaries of 1776 in the United States and 1789 in France were thinking of. That’s not what they wanted. You could say it in a kind of crude way: they wanted to be left alone. But that doesn’t mean nasty, extreme individualism where I only care about myself—that’s Donald Trump. No, it’s that they didn’t want kings and husbands to rule over them.

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But there’s a second wave of liberalism after 1848, particularly in Europe, and it’s well illustrated by the personal history of John Stuart Mill, who in 1848 is a liberal of the sort I admire, this first kind, this equality of permission. But then he becomes, under the influence of his female friend and eventually his wife, more socialist. So it happens, in the middle of the nineteenth century, in Britain and also in the United States and France and everywhere else, that a statist version of equality comes to the fore. If you had to have a motto for the eighteenth century—I call it primary liberalism—it would be “no involuntary masters.” And if you had to have a motto for the second kind, socialism and the so-called new liberalism, which are both still alive in the world, the bumper sticker would be “no deserving poor.” The only way you can achieve the new deserving poor, according to the nineteenth century theorists, was to involve the state, to expand the state, to redistribute from you to me.

Whereas I claim, and I’ve been claiming for a while, that the first kind, the equality of permission—such as you see in China in the economy and not in politics—leads to enrichment, and leads to equality of important abilities. You have a roof over your head, you have some education, you’re not starving. So the equality that the mid-nineteenth century so-called liberals advocated is in fact achieved in a free society.

Mounk: I think this distinction between the two different notions of equality is very helpful. I also wonder whether in a lot of political debates, people’s instincts lie somewhere in between, or the distinction between which of these notions is actually at stake is not quite as clear as it might be. I found it striking that you describe the later John Stuart Mill as sympathetic to socialism. Certainly he writes a very interesting essay called, I think, Chapters on Socialism, or something like that. But it’s not clear to me that that essay goes all the way into the second camp, and the point here is not a disagreement about Mill, but I think it says something broader that is interesting.

The part of that essay I remember most vividly is where Mill talks about a hundred-yard dash that some sadist might imagine. He’s saying, let’s imagine that this is a totally fair race—a race in which you’re not artificially making somebody carry a heavy backpack, or one person has to jump over hurdles and the other person is running straight ahead. Even so, if the winner of this race got great riches and the last three people were shot, nobody would say that that is a good idea. Now the connection here is that you’re saying, well, actually, what happens if you have a free market and the incentives that go with that is that everybody becomes a lot richer, and I think there’s very strong evidence for that. If you look at the history of China after it opened up to the market, if you look at the history of Ireland, as you pointed out, it’s absolutely true that we need free competition, these market incentives, in order to do that.

But of course, Mill was writing at a time when there was no universal elementary school education, when if you went into debt somewhere, you might be put in prison, and so on. If you happened to be disabled and you didn’t have relatives who were kind enough to take care of you, you’d be a beggar on the street and put in some kind of poorhouse if you were lucky. And so surely there is a way of recognizing both of those values. Even the people who are relative libertarians today truly do, to some extent. They don’t want to abolish universal primary education—they might want primary education to come with vouchers from the state so that there’s competition within elementary schools, or something like that. But they don’t want to say, if you don’t happen to have parents who want to pay for your education at the age of eight, you’re just not going to learn to read or write.

So isn’t there a way to recognize both of those points? To say that part of what we want with equality is that absence of arbitrary masters, that absence of rules that constrain our economic activity for no good reason, which then allows social wealth to accumulate, and is the reason why we’re so much richer today than we were 300 years ago. But of course, we also want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to a good education, which requires some kind of state intervention, and that those people who are most at risk of the vicissitudes of life are protected in some kind of way—whether that is help to those who are disabled, or those who had some kind of accident and were unable to care for themselves, or whether that’s some kind of social insurance scheme like Social Security, so that people aren’t destitute in old age, or unemployment benefits.

McCloskey: Yeah, well, I entertained that feeling earlier in my life, and thought, yeah, that’s right, we should have the economic and social safety net, as it’s called. I’ve become slowly convinced that it has grave dangers. The Swedes were, of course, the great example of a democratic country with free speech and free press and so forth, but nonetheless had a very big and impressive social safety net. They had a crisis in the 1990s. Seventy-eight percent of production in Sweden went through the state. Now, it wasn’t state-owned enterprises, it was very high taxation, and then very high social benefits of various kinds. In the 1990s—I’m a historian—they realized that this wasn’t working very well, and they introduced, for example, vouchers for schools. So though the state was paying for the schools, it was allowing private schools. Now one quarter of the K-through-12 students in Sweden are in private schools. In a number of other ways, Sweden liberalized. So that’s a nice example of trying to get the balance right.

But one of the troubles with social democracy is that it’s easy to corrupt. In Sweden, the standards of public morality are extremely high, and I could give you lots of examples of it. But they’re not so high in Britain, and they’re really not high in the United States. Right behind me, I have to see it all day long—that orange building in the back is at one end of what’s known as K Street in Washington. That’s where the lobbyists live, that’s where they work, and there are an astonishing number of them. With the excuse of helping the poor, or organizing this or that public service, they create wealth for the rich. There are 1,500 registered lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry alone on K Street.

Mounk: To be clear on the lobbyists—a lot of people on the left would say, well, that’s precisely the problem with capitalism, these big companies paying lobbyists. But you’re saying actually this is because the state is so involved in the private economy that there’s something for them to lobby for and to argue for. So you put the lobbyists at the feet of a kind of deviation from capitalism.

McCloskey: I go with my left-wing friends and my former self: I’m going to protest the takeover of the government by corporations or by the rich. I want that to stop. How to achieve it? Alas, my friends on the left, and I still have lots of them, say let’s get the government to do it, which is to put the fox in charge of the henhouse. I say let’s make the government less important, let’s make the government a lot smaller. I would be perfectly happy with a small government. In France, 55% of national income goes through the government. It’s not as bad as Sweden was, but 55% of national income goes through the government, and it’s quite high in Britain—it’s in the forties—and it’s high enough in the United States. I would be perfectly happy with a ten percent government that really did help poor people and really did protect the country.

We don’t need a so-called Department of War, as Donald Trump wants to call it—which I don’t mind too much—of the size we have. It’s absurd. Most of the help to alleged poor people goes to rich people. A perfect example is publicly financed education, which is not entirely but largely operated for the benefit of the schoolteachers and the professors. That’s shameful and shouldn’t happen, but it does. That came out in COVID. When we closed the public schools—they didn’t, in Sweden, by the way, which makes my point that Sweden has become much more liberal. It’s virtually the only country that didn’t. We closed the public schools because the old teachers were afraid to teach kids who might be transmitting COVID-19, and that’s appalling. Agricultural subsidies, both in Europe, in the UK outside the EU, and in the United States, are disgraceful—they’re subsidies to rich farmers.

So I want a small, competent government that does the jobs that you and I can completely agree it ought to do—indeed, help the people who can’t take care of themselves. I’m all for that. I’m an Anglican, I’m an Episcopalian, we call it here, and I give ten percent of my income to my church, because my church is good at charity.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Deirdre discuss Deirdre’s experience as a trans woman who transitioned in the 1990s, how attitudes towards trans people have changed in the last 30 years, and how liberals should approach the trans debate. This conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Arvind Narayanan discuss why AI’s transformative impact will unfold over decades rather than months, whether human accountability can survive the rise of AI agents in the workplace, and what the economy will look like once AI has automated every task that can be precisely specified.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: You have coined a phrase that really is central to some of the debates about artificial intelligence, but what you mean by it goes a little bit beyond what you would intuit just by looking at the phrase. The phrase is “AI is normal technology.” What does it mean to think about AI as normal technology?

Arvind Narayanan: “Normal technology” doesn’t mean this is mundane, boring, nothing to see here, move along, we’re not AI skeptics. The paper starts out by acknowledging that this is, and is going to be, a transformative technology, perhaps on the scale of electricity, the various industrial revolutions, etc. We do think that it’s a transformation for cognitive work in the same way that in the past we had transformations for mechanical work. But I think that historical analogy gives us a lot.

We do think that there are deep lessons from history to think that just because this technology is so powerful, it’s not going to transform the world over a period of a year or two. There are many technologists, tech leaders, and business leaders predicting that just because numbers are going up on the charts they’re looking at, AI capability charts, it’s going to make human labor unnecessary, put people out of work, even end the concept of money, or pose existential threats to humanity. We think these are all valid things to worry about. We’re glad people are doing research on them. But we think there are so many bottlenecks between AI capability increasing and it having these impacts, both good and bad, especially if you want to really integrate it into the economy and derive something useful out of it. There are so many things that have to go right. We think those are going to happen over a period of decades, not months or years.

We have a lot of collective agency in shaping how AI is going to transform various professions, the economy, democracy, etcetera.

Mounk: I find this to be a really useful way to think about this. Again, you’re very careful to say you’re not an AI skeptic. I guess I’m a little unsure about what exactly we mean by the term “normal” in this context. When you look at electricity, even when you look at the internet, these were technologies that did transform the world in a very fundamental way.

Now, when you’re comparing that against the most naive kind of pronouncements that some people in Silicon Valley are making, where in eighteen months, everything is going to have changed—I remember sitting in a conference room with somebody who’s now very famous in Silicon Valley in 2017, pointing out of a window at a green field and saying, in eighteen months, robots are going to be building skyscrapers over there. It’s 2026, and the housing crisis in California is as bad as it ever was. So I’m very sympathetic to that point. But even if this is going to take decades rather than years, and the way in which the technology shapes the world is obviously going to be inflected by all kinds of human choices, institutions, and regulatory obstacles, something on the scale of electricity still feels, in some senses, pretty abnormal.

Narayanan: It is a technology to be taken seriously. I think individuals, businesses, and policymakers should all be taking it seriously, and that’s why we have been working in AI. My co-author Sayash Kapoor and I have a long history of advising policymakers on how to respond to these changes. If we weren’t taking it seriously, we wouldn’t be spending our own careers doing all this work. But to put my finger on some of the disagreements—exactly like you pointed out—there are so many claims that this transformation is going to happen over a year or two. And if that’s the case, then all the kind of more normal policy levers that we might have—help people find new skills given this new technology so they can find new jobs—all of that goes out the window because nothing can happen fast enough on this time scale. The only thing we can prepare for is mass joblessness. So we should be talking about anything less than the scale of universal basic income being completely disproportionate to the scale of the problem. That’s exactly what tech leaders are advocating, and we’re strongly against that.

We do think the normal tools of policymaking, business, and human adaptation can work with AI as well. We do need to fix some problems. Even “normal” policymaking, even when you have a technology that’s not advancing as fast as AI, often takes a very long time to acknowledge problems. With social media, for instance, it took well over a decade after it started having these massive impacts on society for the research to actually get there, for policymakers to wake up, etcetera. Those are problems we’ve had, and we’re going to have those problems with AI as well. We do need to improve the speed at which we respond to these changes, but it’s not as if it’s a one or two year thing and we have to throw out our entire existing playbook and prepare for either some utopia or catastrophe.

Mounk: Let’s distinguish between the speed with which the transformation is going to happen and the scale of the transformation that will ultimately come. I think we strongly agree about the speed. Having read a lot of your work, I’m not yet sure whether we agree about the scale. But let’s start where it’s easy, which is the speed. Why, in precise terms, do you think the impact of this technology is going to take much longer to materialize in the real world than a lot of these people in Silicon Valley seem to believe? Why is this a question of decades rather than years or even months?

Narayanan: Let’s take a concrete example: software engineering. That’s the area where AI adoption has been most rapid, and AI capabilities are furthest along. There has been this prediction that AI is going to automate software engineering once AI can write all the code. We already have enough evidence now—we just put out an essay on this—to reject this model. AI is writing most of the code now already, and it has not made software engineers obsolete.

Software engineer hiring—the number of employed software engineers is still growing, maybe slightly slower than before, but even that is disputable, because it’s also allowing software engineers to more easily become entrepreneurs, for instance, and that’s not quite captured by the data. We looked into why this is, and we have a model to explain it. It’s what we call the “decide, execute, deliver sandwich.” These are three layers that we think apply to most kinds of cognitive work.

Cognitive work—thinking for a living—is the kind of work people are saying is going to get automated with AI. Our analysis is that most of those jobs, whether you’re a software engineer or a lawyer or a researcher, or many other kinds of cognitive work, a good third of it is just figuring out what the problem is and making decisions about whether the problem is worth solving, how we’re going to solve it, how we’re going to build the software, design the system, etcetera.

Then maybe another third of it, again in the software engineering context, is writing the code, fixing the code, etcetera. And another third of it is delivering the code—verifying it, making sure it passes quality checks, being accountable for it, integrating it into the customer’s systems, maintaining it over time, especially when you’re thinking about enterprise software rather than consumer software. This is a big chunk of it. What we’re finding is that AI is compressing the middle of the sandwich. It can do the writing of the code, but the other parts of it that require a human to be accountable for what is ultimately delivered—it has not taken the human out of that process. If anything, those layers of the sandwich have expanded to fill the gap of the time savings that you get from having AI write all the code. There’s more to say, but I’ll stop here, and I’m curious for your thoughts.

Mounk: To what extent is that a function of the stage of the technology? ChatGPT 3.5 was rolled out, what, three and a half years ago? The progress in what these systems are able to do has been astonishingly rapid. Clearly, on the core task of writing code, they now rival the very best human engineers. But of course, in terms of putting in place the structure for AI agents to be able to reflect on what actually is a worthwhile problem to solve within an organization, or thinking about how you set up AI agents that are actually able to reliably test the quality of code in the context of the company’s needs, we’re not there yet. That certainly speaks to your point. But what is to say that they won’t be rolled out over the next three, five, or ten years?

More broadly, when you’re thinking about a lot of these essentially political demands within a corporate context—somebody needs to be responsible. If this leads to some terrible outage, you’ve got to have somebody you can fire, somebody you can blame. That’s certainly true in current organizations, and it’s very hard for those organizations to reform themselves. But surely, when we think about a longer timescale, we might imagine AI-native corporations that have a totally different setup, one much better able to use AI technology to replace some of that human judgment.

Narayanan: That’s a great question, and I think this is a key point of disagreement—this is where we disagree with a lot of our critics who might agree about the timescale but disagree about the scale of transformation. Two points. Like you said, political demands—I don’t think these will change simply because the capabilities improve. One of our key points is that we have agency to insist that humans ultimately remain accountable for what is delivered. That might be true even if, in some narrow sense of capability, AI could do a better job, precisely because AI is not something you can punish, so to speak, or keep accountable. It does not have some of the limitations that humans do. I think the right thing to do is to insist that humans remain accountable. There is something inherent about human accountability that you cannot get with AI. That’s not up to the AI companies—that’s up to the downstream organizations who are deploying AI, and, if it becomes necessary, regulation to insist that this be the case. This is what we’ve done historically with many technologies that are very powerful but dangerous. I like the analogy of a crane operator. The crane can do the heavy lifting in construction—we don’t need human physical labor. But even though we could, we don’t let the crane operate autonomously. We put an operator in it, and the crane becomes a massive amplifier of human ability. That’s the model we think is the right one, and we can choose to keep it that way. We can’t guarantee that it will be that way, but I don’t think it’s a matter of the tech companies themselves deciding.

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The second point is where a lot of these disagreements come from. We do think it’s true that gradually, over time, the set of tasks you can delegate to AI is going to expand. But what that means is that once AI can do something, it’s no longer a source of competitive advantage in the enterprise. It’s not a fixed amount of things we’re trying to build, and then once you can build those things with AI, you’re done, there’s no need for work. That’s not how the economy works. Once you can automate certain things, delegate those things to AI, that becomes a common capability that every firm has. Then what firms are competing on is what is scarce. Human labor will always be scarce, because you can’t make infinite copies of it. So those remaining pockets of judgment that AI is not yet able to perform, that is what will be in the domain of human judgment and expertise, and that’s what companies will compete on.

In the distant future this might change, several decades down the line, but for a long time we’re going to be in this period of a constantly upward-adjusting equilibrium.

Mounk: I take these arguments very seriously. Just two observations. The first is that you slipped in “several decades.” I’m trying to think about this at the timescale of history and at the timescale of the challenges our society is going to face. Are people who are today in their 50s or 60s likely going to be fine? I think so. Are people in their 30s and 40s going to be fine? I think it’s a more open question. What is the world going to look like for people in their 20s today who are about to go to college? I think that is much, much more challenging. Insofar as the answer is it’ll take several decades, that is reassuring in some sense, and it certainly is totally in line with the evidence from the Industrial Revolution, from how long it took for the invention of the printing press to have a major impact on European culture or society. I absolutely buy that. It’s just not clear to me that several decades is as reassuring as it might be. Go ahead.

Narayanan: Sure. Look, the “AI as normal technology” framework is reassuring to some people, and it’s not reassuring to others, and our goal is to give this framework for people to do with it as they will, not necessarily to provide reassurance. The reason it’s reassuring to me is because over a several-decade timescale, I do think people can adapt. Almost everyone can adapt. If it’s one or two years, then most people can’t adapt. If it’s several decades, then we can use game theory, if you will, to think about what that equilibrium is going to look like whenever it happens, and try to see what we can start doing now to prepare for that.

One way things might turn out—and the equilibrium part is something we’re only now starting to think about, it’s not in the essay itself—is that any task in the economy that you can specify precisely enough for it to even be legible as a task is going to be done by AI. So most of the things now that make up my job—okay, my job consists of these ten things—all those ten things are going to be done by AI. What jobs will mean in the future is what economists sometimes call interstitial tasks: the things that lack a precise specification, where maybe part of the task is even to figure out what should be done next, things that maybe have never been done before. Those are the kinds of things we think will be in the domain of humans. The reason I think we will be very unlikely to leave those things to AI is because of unknown unknowns. You can’t be sure that when you task AI with doing something so different from anything that’s been done before, it’s going to do a halfway reasonable job. That’s one way to think about what a new equilibrium might look like.

Another, perhaps even more radical shift, is that maybe everything that’s a commodity—and a commodity, not just a physical good, but even cognitive labor—a commodity is one where you don’t care which particular human or AI produces it. A lot of what we produce now are commodities. I produce research, I write these articles—it doesn’t matter that it came from me, it’s really mostly the ideas that matter. Maybe that’s mostly going to be done by AI in the future. We should be prepared for radical shifts, like professors having a lot of status because we can produce something that is unique today might not be unique in the future. There’s going to be no need for people doing podcasts like this—this sort of stuff is all things you can get from AI, maybe. I think we should be ready for that.

Mounk: I think the three Ps are always going to survive: professors, podcasters, and prostitutes. But we’ll see.

Narayanan: Nice. I’ll bet against that. But those things are very different. I think some of those services are very different from others. Sex work, for instance, is inherently relational—it’s about a particular person. There are many kinds of jobs in the economy. Even some low-status jobs, like barista, for instance—Alex Imas has nicely written about why some of those jobs have been very resistant to automation, because human interaction actually matters there. What the economy in the future will look like, maybe, is basically people paying each other for their time, for the unique relational value they can give. The value of going to a coffee shop will be the customer service. If you have good coffee and shitty customer service, that’s totally useless, because robots can make good coffee, but it’s the good customer service they can’t replace.

Mounk: Let’s take a step back here, because there are a lot of really interesting ideas in this. A few thoughts. The first is, it’s not clear to me why an AI system that at this point is very good at writing short stories—we’ve recently learned that an AI-generated text won a major literary prize, with judges being unaware of this fact at the time—that increasingly does have good judgment about medical conditions, for example, looking at a lot of contradictory data and coming up with the best kind of adaptation of what’s happening—won’t also be able to learn these kinds of interstitial tasks. So there is some kind of future where AI systems actually prove to be as capable as the most intelligent humans, even at a task that looks slightly ragged or irregular.

The second kind of possibility, surely, is that there are some human beings who have exceptional skills that will still be required. There may, in fact, be some human beings who are able to command tremendous wages because they are so good at orchestrating these AI swarms to accomplish tasks relative to others. But it may be that the number of people capable of those kinds of cognitive skills remains very limited, leading to a kind of class or caste of super-earners from AI, and a large portion of the population whose skills are much less valuable.

A third kind of possibility—and to some extent you can mix and match these—is to think that perhaps there’s still a need for relatively ordinary human skill. Obviously, being a great barista or a good bartender is a genuine skill, and I admire the people who do it, but it’s a less rare skill than somebody being able to code at the very highest levels was a few years ago. Perhaps the number of positions we need for that is just much less than the extent of available human labor. It may be that nine out of ten times, I’m very happy to take my excellent robot-made or coffee-machine-made coffee for 10 cents, and once a week I want to go and meet somebody for coffee in a really pleasant environment, and I’ll definitely want a super cheery, nice barista to make my coffee on those occasions. But that just may not create enough work for people to keep going. And in that kind of world, there’ll be an army of people who are out of work who are very happy to take that job as a barista, depending on the kind of socioeconomic arrangements and background conditions that hopefully would cushion poverty. In that case, even the people whose skills are still in demand may not make a very good salary.

I think here we need to be careful not to go into a world of either no human being ever is going to have a job anymore—which I think the two of us are going to agree is a kind of weird Silicon Valley dystopia, though some would probably call it a utopia—but then to say, well, if that’s a one, then the zero is some jobs are still going to be needed, and so therefore the problem is solvable. There are all kinds of worlds in which certain kinds of jobs are needed, but they’re not the ones that create the most economic value, they’re not the skills that are actually scarce, and therefore they fall very far short of creating the structural preconditions for an affluent middle-class society.

Narayanan: Yeah, look, all of those are possible. And I’m glad that we’re talking about them. People are looking at leading indicators for which way things are trending. I do think these are solvable problems over a multi-decade time frame. Over that kind of time frame, even if the answer turns out to be universal basic income, we can plan for that over the long term. That’s not something we can make happen in 18 months, but it is something we can make happen over a several-decade period.

I genuinely don’t think something that radical will be required. I agree with most of what you said. Maybe the key disagreement is that I don’t think the set of jobs that are necessary in the economy versus not necessary is that helpful, at least to me. In my view, the vast majority of jobs today are already doing things that are not near the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. The things that we need, like agriculture and shelter, that’s maybe something like 5% of jobs. And all of the other stuff—if you just took yourself away from the everyday intensity of life and the economy and really thought about it from an alien’s perspective—it’s all just stuff we do to amuse ourselves. I really like David Graeber’s book on this.

Mounk: I do have to say, sometimes I walk through the streets of Brooklyn and I say, there’s so much wealth here. What does everybody do? What makes this perpetual motion work? It’s just people selling each other goofy services and somehow living well off of it.

Narayanan: In many parts of the world there’s obviously genuine crushing poverty. In affluent societies, 95% of jobs are things we do because we need things for people to do, not things we do for people to survive. I’m saying that in the future, that 95% will go to 99%, maybe even 100%.

Mounk: I’m torn on this. I do have that feeling walking through the streets of Brooklyn, but when I think about this example a little more carefully, one of the huge reasons why New York is so affluent is that finance is headquartered in New York, and of course many other industries, from fashion to media, have a huge presence in New York as well.

We can have a big debate about whether finance really is a productive enterprise or whether it’s not, but the point is that that is where a lot of the value in society is created at the moment. And in order to run Goldman and JP Morgan and all of those companies, the owners of that capital currently require a lot of scarce and very high-skill labor. One of the reasons the streets of Brooklyn are full of expensive yoga studios is that a lot of the people who go to those yoga studios work for those banks, or they work for people who work for those banks. And so this is where the tremendous wealth of the city diffuses.

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In an economy in which AI systems produce the huge majority of value, and human beings are then left in the role of educating each other, looking after each other when we’re old, and “putting on concerts” for each other—all of that is kind of peripheral to the core activity. Can that sustain itself? I think perhaps, in a somewhat simplistic way, that depends on whether the first image I painted of Brooklyn is right, or the second image is right. And much as I like to hate on Brooklyn—which I love to be in—I think perhaps the second image is a little closer to the truth than the first, which is somewhat troubling in its implications for what that world would actually look like.

Narayanan: Again, it’s a possibility. I think the reason I’m betting against that is when you look at what actually has value, it’s just very contingent on what happens to be scarce at any particular point in history. Things like light and clothing—things at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy—used to be extremely scarce because they were hard to produce, and they employed a very large fraction of the workforce.

Their costs have fallen by a factor of well over a thousand over a period of a couple of centuries, and that’s because of automation, and because of larger-scale energy production and cheaper costs of energy. Well over a thousandfold decrease in the cost of lighting—it could be closer to a million, I forget the exact numbers, but it’s many, many orders of magnitude. I think a lot of the things people do today are scarce and valuable precisely because human labor is scarce. I disagree with the premise that in the future AI systems will be creating most of the value. That’s not consistent with my understanding of economics. I agree that AI systems will be doing most of the work. But any work AI can do is infinitely reproducible, and when it’s infinitely reproducible, it doesn’t have a lot of value, because its cost is going to come down to the market—anybody can provide it at very low cost. So the value is going to shift to the kinds of things that are scarce.

Today, the labor of caring for the elderly, for instance, is very low status and very low paid. But the argument is that in the future, a lot of the things that are higher status and higher paid today—maybe like the things we’re doing—are going to become very easily reproducible. So what is considered valuable in the economy is going to shift.

Mounk: How does that work mechanically? You’re saying taking care of the elderly is going to be the thing that is really valued, and presumably that’ll command a salary more generous than what a professor at Princeton gets today, hopefully. But where does the elderly person get the money to pay the person taking care of them such a handsome salary?

Presumably, the answer is that they themselves must have done something in the economy that accumulated that money for them, or that we have something like a system of universal basic income—which I take it you’re mostly opposed to, and that’ll be interesting to go into—that provides them with the money from a third party. Again, looking at Brooklyn today, the intuition is that it’s a kind of weird perpetual motion machine where everybody’s just selling stuff to each other. But when you look at it more closely, you can say, no, there’s actually a way in which the banks are financing manufacturing companies and agricultural companies and all kinds of other things that produce things, and there are a lot of very well-paid employees at those places, and they’re the ones that explain why people can pay $10,000 to go see the Knicks in the NBA finals.

You take that link to the underlying economy away, because so few humans are required to run that underlying economy—because whatever the most productive firms of the future are, they just require so many fewer human beings working in them. And it’s unclear how that money is going to diffuse into the economy, such that even if socially we say, what a wonderful task, to look after elderly people, that elderly person actually has the money to pay a good salary to the person taking care of them.

A very different way of putting this point: you compare Walmart, which has a valuation of about a trillion dollars—a little less, I think, depending on exactly when you look—and has two million employees, to Anthropic, which probably is going to be valued at about a trillion dollars when it IPOs, and at present has about 5,000 employees. That is a really striking difference, and that surely is going to have a huge impact on who can actually pay for these kinds of human-centered skills to be valued in the labor market.

Narayanan: Yes, it won’t automatically happen. I’m just saying that we will have the means to solve it, even though it will require a lot of work to solve it. The reason I’m saying that is that we’re making kind of fantastical assumptions in one dimension—that AI is going to be able to automate nearly all work—and we’re assuming that the world is going to stay the same in all the other dimensions. I think that’s a bit of a pitfall.

This future might not happen. It might be that even though I’m on the more “slower transformation” side, maybe even I’m being way too optimistic, and maybe there are really fundamental barriers to AI being able to take over a lot of this work even over a multi-decade timescale. But let’s assume that all of that happens. Then clearly it’s going to be creating an incredible amount of benefit to humanity, because so many of our material needs are going to be taken care of. And there is going to be, I think you’d agree, some accumulation of wealth. That’s the distributional question that is unclear. So if greater and greater amounts of wealth are going to be accumulated, we can start putting policies in place. I’m not opposed to UBI. Maybe UBI is what we should be talking about again, over a multi-decade timescale. I just don’t think it’s the sort of thing that can happen if we’re talking about a one- to two-year timeframe.

On the point about Anthropic being a small company that might have a trillion dollars in value—yeah, maybe we’re headed to a dystopian future where only three companies are going to be able to do that. But actually, maybe what’s going to happen is that entrepreneurship is going to become so much easier that there are going to be many millions of millionaires—maybe not Anthropic-level wealthy, but far more millionaires than there are today—because you can have one or two people owning firms that use mostly AI to accomplish a lot of valuable things. And then it’s still challenging, but at least it’s possible to think about, politically and economically, how you distribute that wealth throughout the rest of society.

Mounk: This is a side note, but there is something strange in these discussions where we want to assign this deep value to the kind of human tasks that in one future may still be required. Of course, I do think that relating to humans is something incredibly meaningful, and that often people who are in jobs where they relate to others actually have high job satisfaction. But there is at least something melancholy about imagining a future in which all of the kinds of tasks by which humanity has historically distinguished itself from other animals—tasks we thought were distinctive to us, our ability for higher-order reasoning—go out the window.

Even just in a social sense, the way in which, for the last century or two, for a huge number of human beings, their pride and their sense of self-development came from acquiring an education, acquiring skills, becoming expert at some kind of mental work—and we’re saying the most primal human skills and abilities, to take care of babies and to take care of old people, are now the thing that’s left, and that’s what we really value. I do not mean by this to devalue the incredible work done by nurses, or people who work in old people’s homes, or mothers and fathers taking care of little kids. But it is perhaps less than a wholly full-throated endorsement of a future to say that’s the one kind of thing that’s going to be left for humans.

Narayanan: Yeah, that’s totally fair. Again, I’m not saying that this framework for thinking about the future should necessarily be reassuring to everybody. I think there’s lots that we will lose, that we like about our current society. There’s lots that we will mourn, and I think that’s a very valid reaction to all of this. But again, it is parallel to what has happened in the past with the valorization of physical strength.

If you think about a Roman general, they moved up the ranks economically and politically because they started from their physical strength being very valuable in the army, and that’s how they rose up the ranks. We’re talking about professors in academia—the word “academy” comes from the ancient Greeks.

If I recall correctly, we’ve been talking about professors in academia, and you probably know this better than I do, but the original Academy took its name from a garden where the educational component happened in parallel with the development of physical strength. Those two things were really valued in very much the same way. But over time, we’ve lost that. We still have athletes, for instance, having high-status positions in society, but not because they directly contribute to the economy using their physical strength. It’s just something we like to appreciate in a competition setting, precisely because it’s lost its direct economic value. Now it’s become sports.

Maybe what will happen with intellectual ability, just as has happened with chess, for instance, is that it becomes a sport we enjoy. Similarly, people will in the future present their manually handcrafted ideas without AI in a format we can all enjoy, to appreciate the strength and limits of human cognitive ability. But it’ll be kind of disconnected from the economy, and there’s genuinely a reason to be sad about that.

Mounk: I wonder to what extent the Roman general was prized for physical prowess or for mental skills. In a very different context, about twenty years ago I was dragged to a bullfight, and I was quite reluctant to go, because I thought it would be quite ugly. In part because I thought it would be a kind of macho spectacle about how strong the bullfighter is and how big his muscles are.

It turned out that, at its best, and to my surprise, I rather enjoyed the spectacle. What I enjoyed about it specifically was that I came to understand it was actually a medieval, perhaps only modern, form of celebration of mind over matter—which is to say that the bull is fifty times stronger than the strongest man in the world. There’s no way any human being, no matter how often they go to the gym or how many protein shakes they take, can take on a bull in a competition of strength. What a good bullfighter does is demonstrate that they can use their human skills—their ability to understand how the bull operates, which is that he goes after the red thing—the ability to wave the flag in such a way as to direct the bull’s movement, to do a kind of dance with the bull in which they demonstrate: look what I have is intelligence, and using that intelligence I can prevail against this beast that is vastly stronger than me. The cruelty of it is nevertheless something that troubled me. But I found that to be actually very interesting.

You are right that we have historically valued physical strength a lot more than we do now. But that argument, of course, cuts both ways, because it is now quite hard to make your living from just having physical strength, and the people who do command much lower salaries. When we look at past transformations, like the transformation after the Industrial Revolution, a lot of people were screwed over by them, and this happened over decades and over centuries.

But the thing they had—the thing they resorted to—is what I sometimes call a sort of mental reservoir. There’s a reservoir of demand for human skill, which is to carry out mental jobs, mental tasks, cognitive tasks. So if you were 45 years old and you lost your job in a factory, or weaving cotton, or cultivating a field, your life might be screwed—it might be too late for you to have a good income. But your kids were probably fine, because they acquired those cognitive skills, and that’s what kept them in demand and ultimately gave them a much better standard of living than you likely had. But if we’re now tapping the mental reservoir, is it clear that there is some higher-order skill humans can go to in order to compensate for that? Saying, well, we’ll just go back to the things we’ve always done, like taking care of kids and old people—it’s unclear to me if that’s going to cut it.

Narayanan: Again, I think you’re right to worry. I think there’s a lot that we will lose. I guess if there’s one point of disagreement, it’s that I don’t think that in the future we will distinguish ourselves by our skill. We will distinguish ourselves just definitionally by the fact that human time is scarce, and AI’s biggest weakness is that anything one AI can do is something a billion copies of AI can do.

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Scarcity always commands value. That’s how it’s always been. We can create value out of even completely artificial types of scarcity, like wedding rings and diamonds, even when there’s actually no intrinsic value. In one sense that’s very depressing, but again, I think from an economic perspective, we’ll be okay. There’s going to be a lot of demand for human time, for us to have various forms of companionship. We’re going to call it various things—coaching, therapy, care. A lot of professors’ jobs, I think, in the future will just be about managing students’ emotional journey as they undertake their path through the education system. The content, we don’t have to provide—that’s going to become very commoditized.

Mounk: So a good thing that there’s already more administrators than professors at most universities, because really what we need is not professors, it’s these administrators.

Narayanan: Maybe. Look, if this all sounds incredibly depressing, I’m not here to say we should embrace this future. I’m saying a few things. It’s not a catastrophe if everyone being out of a job will have jobs simply because human time is scarce, and we’ll just find artificial ways to turn that scarcity of human time into jobs and call it various things, whether it’s professor or therapist or caregiver.

Lots of wealth will be created. Maybe we’re going to have a problem with a few companies trying to capture most of that wealth, but that is something we can and should change with policy. All of this is going to unfold over a period of decades, not one or two years. So we have time to prepare, both in terms of new things we’ll need to do, but also just getting mentally ready for this future, whether you find it empowering or depressing or anything in between. Those are my core points.

Mounk: I’m pushing back on them, but I think they’re very interesting points. Clearly, one of the things you’ve implied a few times in the conversation, and that you’ve written about more explicitly, is that there are real dangers to thinking of artificial intelligence as an abnormal technology. If we assume everything is going to change in the next two years, and we assume that we have to throw out our usual toolbox of policymaking, you think that has really bad consequences for our ability to govern this technology and for the world. Why? How would we be pushed in the wrong direction if we don’t recognize that AI is actually a normal technology, in the sense you outline?

Narayanan: It’s very simple. There’s this narrative coming out of the AI safety community—and they’re doing great research. I respect all the work they’re doing, where I disagree is on the policy implications and this overarching narrative. That narrative is that AI is getting more and more capable, and it’s going to increasingly be able to do things like hacking into critical infrastructure or creating biological weapons.

So if this technology diffuses throughout society, it’s extremely dangerous in two ways. One, AI systems themselves might turn against their creators, or bad actors might get hold of them and do dangerous things. The way to prevent this is to stop really powerful AI systems from being released to the public without guardrails. There are, I think, a lot of problems with this.

The first is the idea that increasing AI capabilities are automatically dangerous. That’s not what we’ve seen historically. When it comes to cybersecurity, for instance, superhuman ability to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software started a couple of decades ago, and it’s been going up since then, even before modern AI systems. Actually, that’s made software more safe, not less safe. The reason is that defenders, the companies that create software, can use those same capabilities to fix those bugs before they even put the software out there. So generally speaking, these powerful technologies have actually helped us improve resilience rather than worsen it. That should be our default presumption. Maybe there are exceptions in some cases, but we should insist on evidence that increasing capability is actually making the world more dangerous.

That’s the first big area of disagreement: one, capabilities increasing doesn’t mean the world is getting more dangerous. Two, in order to prevent AI capabilities from diffusing widely, you basically have to have authoritarian governments. And three, even if you manage to do that, that’s going to be a temporary relief. Eventually the dam is going to break, and what you’ve done by trying to control AI has not built up the kind of immune system you need in order to live in a world with these powerful systems.

Mounk: Presumably, one of the things you might conclude on the most dire version of this claim you’re arguing against is: we’re about to have these incredible cyber warfare capabilities, rogue actors are going to be able to break into your bank account, and probably break into the database of the U.S. military, and possibly commandeer nuclear weapons. And if that happens, then we need to sideline any kind of historical protections we’ve had for private businesses, but also for individuals, in order to make absolutely sure that doesn’t happen. Perhaps we need to empower our governments with all kinds of capabilities they don’t currently have in order to avoid that kind of worst-case scenario. Is that one of the kinds of fears you have?

Narayanan: Yeah, that’s one of the claims that’s often being made, and we have a different position. I do think the government has to be nimble, adaptable. Some of the things that have happened in the U.S. policy context recently, like having voluntary agreements to have governments test the capabilities of new technology and maybe hold off for a month or so before releasing them, those are pretty low on the ladder of extraordinary interventions. If we do them carefully, I think that can be okay.

But where the problem comes is saying that the way to prevent rogue actors from getting access to this technology is to control it so tightly that we make sure they never get their hands on it. Our view is that the only way you’re going to do this is by having authoritarian governments, and not just one authoritarian government—a kind of world authoritarian government, if you will—because it’s getting so much cheaper each year to build these incredibly powerful capabilities. When you look at those exponential charts, they’re amazing. It’s just Moore’s Law all over again. At most, you’re buying a couple of years, and eventually this technology is going to diffuse into the hands of everybody.

Mounk: One side point here, by the way, which I’m sure you know more about technologically than I do, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on it: our frame of reference is often nuclear weapons. That is an incredibly dangerous, powerful technology that can destroy the world, and we’ve been able, to some extent, to prevent its diffusion through international treaties and regimes of inspection and control under certain circumstances, etcetera. My understanding is that there are principled differences between nuclear technology and the capability to build cutting-edge AI models.

One of them is that nuclear technology requires much bigger physical machinery. The United States is quite good at figuring out, through satellite images and other things, whether the centrifuges in Isfahan, or wherever they are in Iran, are spinning or not. It would be much harder to do that for data centers.

The other point is that there’s always some dual-use issue in nuclear power in terms of civilian use, but broadly speaking, you know what it’s being used for. So much of our civilization already depends on chips and data centers. Literally, some of the most powerful chips used to develop artificial intelligence were originally designed to power graphics for video games. Then actually controlling whether, say, the United States and China had a big treaty agreeing not to develop cutting-edge AI models—controlling, from the American point of view, that China is sticking to this, or from the Chinese point of view that America is sticking to this—would be incredibly hard because of this challenge of dual use.

Narayanan: You’ve exactly captured it. There’s dual use, there’s a powerful economic logic of diffusion of AI capabilities and chips, there’s the observability, and there’s the physical bottleneck. Let me add one more point: there’s no particular threshold at which AI becomes dangerous. Every level of AI capability we’ve had has always brought some dangers with it. You can go back to very recent history, and there are striking moments of panic around GPT-2, for instance. OpenAI didn’t initially release the model because they thought it was so dangerous. It’s a model that today my grad students build over a weekend on a single GPU in order to teach themselves how to build these AI systems. That’s how rapidly the technology has diffused, and we’re so much more powerful than GPT-2 now with our recent models. If you stood up today and said GPT-2 is too dangerous, that would sound so ludicrous. My prediction is that whatever we’re saying with Mythos or whatever is going to look exactly like that a decade from now.

The last point I’ll make is that the good thing about the fact that we have been releasing these systems is that it’s also forced us to improve our defenses, because if some of these models can be used for hacking, it’s forced companies to work with various kinds of software makers to give them better access to these models, so that they can find and fix these bugs before the software even ships out there. If we instead follow a policy approach of nobody having access to the technology in the first place for these dual-use purposes, then we will lose the opportunity to build that immune system, and the dam will break eventually. When the dam breaks, it’s going to enter a world that doesn’t have those defenses in place.

Mounk: I’m very worried about giving the government powers over individuals, and to some extent over corporations, as well. I’m a philosophical liberal, I give great importance to individual freedom, and I think we’re going to face certain kinds of dilemmas in this context that are quite dissimilar to those posed by previous technologies. Going back to nuclear weapons, for example, we obviously need to govern how states use nuclear weapons. One of the scary things is that, from Kim Jong-un—not to compare them entirely—to Donald Trump, some rather irresponsible people currently have their finger on the button, and that’s deeply discomforting.

One thing about nuclear weapons, though, is that while they can destroy and blow up the world, they aren’t very useful for domestic political control. You can’t really threaten to win the next election by nuking some city you don’t like. The scary thing about some of the most cutting-edge AI models, from a political point of view, is that they can be used for domestic forms of repression. That means that if you want to avoid the government having all of its powers, you might say it’s better for OpenAI and Anthropic and so on to keep control over those cutting-edge models. But of course, if those companies have control of those cutting-edge models, and they can potentially break into nuclear weapons, or they can potentially have military applications that are absolutely central to the government’s ability to keep its citizens safe, then we can’t really do that either. So how are you thinking about how to solve these real trade-offs, and perhaps these genuine dilemmas, without allowing the government to have powers that could very quickly become tyrannical.

Narayanan: Simply that it’s not all or nothing. I think we can give the government limited power. So, for instance, pre-release access to these models—the government has access before the general public, in order to, again, find and fix vulnerabilities in critical systems. But that’s very different from giving the government the power to try to carry out a mass persuasion campaign. We’ve written about this, and in our view, the critical bottleneck to the government being able to do that is not the capability to generate text or images or whatever, but rather the distribution channels. In other words, if the government were to control, for instance, social media, that’s a much more dangerous thing than governments controlling AI systems when it comes to the ability for persuasion and propaganda.

When you go back to media theory, naively, back in the ’50s, people used to have this “hypodermic syringe” model—the idea that there can be messages coming from companies or governments, or any other adversarial actor, that are so powerful that if people come into contact with those messages, even subliminally, they will change their view. Now we know that’s not true. Yet in the AI conversation, a lot of the discourse proceeds as if that is the case. That’s not how people get persuaded. People get persuaded because they’re embedded in a social community where those beliefs take root for various kinds of tribal reasons. When we look at how AI is being used for disinformation, for instance, it’s being used by those in power, including politicians, to persuade or trick their own supporters, as opposed to their adversaries, because it’s in that context that it becomes very powerful.

So, really, the problem of controlling AI disinformation and propaganda reduces to the existing problems we’ve had with the quality of our epistemic channels and discourse—what do we do about the level of polarization and tribalism, and those types of things. Those are hard problems. They’re not easy. On the margins, AI is going to amplify them. I don’t think AI is creating those problems, though.

In the rest of this conversation, Arvind and Yascha discuss how artificial intelligence is changing warfare, and how governments, companies, and individuals should prepare for AI’s impact. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Ivan Krastev is Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and the Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the advisory and governing boards of several international organizations, including the European Investment Bank, the International Crisis Group, and GLOBSEC.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev discuss what the 250th anniversary of the United States reveals about America’s crisis of self-confidence, whether America and Europe are converging rather than diverging, and how competition with China will reshape American identity in the decades ahead.

We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.

That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.

This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Well, it’s a real pleasure to speak to you every time, Ivan, and today I thought we’d do something slightly unusual, which is that whatever I am, I’m a U.S. citizen at least, but a born European and a Bulgarian citizen are going to do the July 4th episode, the special July 4th episode for the 250th anniversary of the United States. But you’re such a thoughtful thinker about every part of the world, and you obviously know the United States well, that I think it is not asking you too much to play a kind of latter day Alexis de Tocqueville. On this 250th anniversary of the United States, what strikes you most about the state of the country?

Ivan Krastev: We Europeans believe that we know the United States. At the end of the day, we don’t. We understand it immediately when you get out of some of the big cities to which we normally go. But when I look at the United States today, I had the feeling that the country is really trying to reinvent itself and to refound itself, and to decide basically who they are. Now when I’m looking back, my view is that there was a different United States, and it can be seen much easier from outside than from inside. There was an America that came and basically was very much being born of the place which it left, and this was Europe, and this was America as a new world, and is basically all the time comparing itself with Europe and struggling against this European legacy. But this America was very much populated by Europeans, people coming from Europe, immigrants from these countries, being satisfied from the place from which they go. And there was another America, and this was very much the America of the Cold War, where it was not about Europe anymore, where America was mirroring itself with the Soviet Union. It was a much more different ideological America. America as leader of the free world, which it was competing with the Soviets to whom the future belongs.

My feeling is that we are now going to a kind of a third America. America is much more trying to make sense of itself looking at China, trying to understand who we are. From this point of view, what President Trump is doing, for me, paradoxically, is really kind of trying to change American identity on several dimensions. One is that he is dreaming, probably he will not do it, but he’s dreaming to change the territory of the United States. I take it much more seriously, his talk about Greenland or Canada or even Venezuela becoming part of the United States, because he had the feeling that in order to refound and to reinvent the country, first of all, you should change its territory. Secondly, of course, he’s trying to reinvent America very differently from the America of the Cold War that he has inherited, and he does not see America anymore as the champion of liberal causes in the world. He’s seeing a totally different America. But thirdly, and for me this is most striking, unlike any previous Americas, I’m not sure to what extent the American president is self-confident about the America that he sees. So this is what I found particularly interesting. I’m not sure while he talks about America being great again, that he really believes in the greatness of America.

Mounk: So it’s perhaps a sign of his lack of self-confidence, right? It’s often the case psychologically that teenagers who are particularly insecure are also the ones who try to bully their classmates in order to get the external proof that in fact they are somebody and they’re worth something, and they’ve proven their status in this very straightforward and brutal way. We’ve talked enough about the psychology of Donald Trump over the last years, but do you think that at this point this is true of the psychology of the United States more broadly? Is there a kind of quarter millennium crisis of self-confidence that the country suffers from?

Krastev: You had the period around the Civil War, and of course you had the 1970s, which was a very tough period in which America was questioning itself very much. But this idea of America that should reinvent itself, it didn’t start with Trump. Honestly speaking, from a very different ideological perspective, even if you look at the 1619 Project, you’re going to see that suddenly America decided to tell a new story about itself. The idea was that all these cliches that we outside of America have always been thinking about America were not true anymore. But this America, regardless of whether it is the America that wants to face basically slavery and all the other bad things that it has done, or this America that Trump is talking about, is an America which, in my view, has lost this self-confidence of a kind of exceptionalism that does not come simply from the fact that America is powerful, but from the fact that America has a special purpose. Because this was true for all these previous Americas. The America that was running away from Europe in order to create a new world was very much believing in its exceptional nature, and the Cold War America was very much believing in its exceptional nature. In my view, this America which we see now, the America that is facing China, the America that is “America first,” I’m not sure anymore that it is very much believing in its exceptional nature.

Many of the things that we think about America also start to look different. For example, normally for us, for Europeans, America was an immigrant nation. This was a place where people go and basically become Americans. Now, if you look at the statistics, you’re going to be surprised to learn that Austrian citizens not born in Austria, as a percent of the population, is a higher percent than American citizens not born in the United States. So in a certain way, you have the feeling that countries and identities are changing places.

From this point of view, President Trump is interesting not simply because of his insecurity, but because he has, in my view, a very special idea of historical time. If you go closer, you’re going to see that he’s not very much interested in those who have been before him, and also I don’t believe that he’s very much interested in who’s going to come after him. He does not think in terms of legacy. If you think in terms of legacy, you want somebody else to build your Arc de Triomphe. No, in my view, he basically managed to reduce time to his individual lifetime. So the world starts with the moment he was born, and in a certain way ends for him politically with the moment when he’s not going to be president anymore. For me, this kind of collapse of time is something that probably partially explains this lack of self-confidence. Because now when America looks at China, first they see a country which is much bigger than any type of challenger or adversary that America has been seeing before. But secondly, it’s a country that is economically producing, having scale. You have the feeling that now America is envying China in the way that Soviets had been envying America in the last decades of the Cold War.

Mounk: I want to get back to China in a few moments, but to start with America’s relationship to Europe, which is obviously fundamental to the country’s identity, certainly when you think about the period of the founding. There’s an argument at the moment, which I think is widely believed in Europe without people having thought about it very much, that Europe and the United States are diverging, that they’re becoming much more dissimilar from each other. When you just compare Donald Trump as the president of the United States to Emmanuel Macron as the president of France, and Friedrich Merz as the chancellor of Germany, it is fair to say that the differences between them are much bigger than the differences between Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, for they certainly had very different biographies, right?

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But I think in other ways, you’re implying an argument that’s quite interesting, on which America and Europe are actually becoming more similar. Part of this is that Europe is Americanizing, and certainly the fact that European societies are now societies of immigrants, have very quickly speed run become extremely diverse societies, but not necessarily with the historical knowledge about how to actually succeed in integrating newcomers and making them feel like Americans historically have managed to, that they truly are just part of the American experiment, for example, does make those countries somewhat more similar to the United States.

Conversely, of course, one way to think about Trump and the broader transformation of the American right over the last 10 or 15 years is that it has Europeanized. The American right has historically been quite striking, at least since the kind of fusionist right from the 1960s, by being a right that accepts the idea of liberal democracy, which was part of the founding creed of the country. Whereas certainly the hard right in Europe was always tempted by fascism, by anti-democratic currents, by a rejection of the idea of liberalism, certainly. So perhaps Europe is Americanizing and America is Europeanizing, and in some ways the two continents are now more similar than they were 50 or 200 years ago.

Krastev: I first of all agree, because I really believe that Europe has been Americanized, and the paradox of Trump’s position is that he starts to dislike Europe exactly because Europe starts to look like America. Paradoxically, for all these years, Americans were kind of telling Europeans, “You do not have this diversity thing that we have. You’re very much closed in your own nationalistic dreams.” And now, when this much more diverse Europe has arrived, basically, at least President Trump was shocked and discovered how much he dislikes it.

But also, in a strange way, I do believe you are right, because on one level, the American left, in economic terms, is more and more fascinated by the European social model. You remember Bernie Sanders dreaming about America becoming like Denmark. Not that many Americans know exactly where Denmark is. On the other side, of course, now the European right is fascinated with Trump. Even some of the leaders who are going to distance themselves as political leaders from Trump, they basically see him as somebody who speaks to their fears and basically speaks to their hopes.

On the other side, what has changed, in my view, is that people of European origin are now a minority in the United States. This type of connection that existed on the level of the individual, of the family, if you go to the American universities, you’re going to see that European studies or European departments are kind of a disappearing species. At the same time, when you look at how the American right and, to a certain extent, even the American left look, they remind me very much of what I see in Latin America. This is why I’m not surprised that President Trump and his agenda are very successful in Latin America, in a way that Trump-supported candidates are winning in Latin America the way they are winning in the red states in the United States. In great respect, this is a right which is less related to this kind of libertarian ethos that was much more typical for the American right. It is less kind of, at the same time, having these very strong liberal credentials, which was typical for the Republican Party. You have something much more difficult, and the American left is also much more about identity politics, different minority groups, and a coalition in a certain way of minorities, which was not the case for the American left before.

So we’re coming together in a certain way, and going apart. But the major story is that both Europe and America, in my view, go through this identity crisis. We were not what we used to be before, and we don’t know exactly how to define ourselves even in the relations between ourselves. Because in my view, one thing that has happened, and I could be very wrong on this, is that we see the end of the long 20th century. In the 20th century, America was defined by, as you said, “it never happened here.” Neither communism nor fascism. This was part of American exceptionalism, and there were many explanations for this. One of them also had a lot to do with the problem of race and kind of very much racially based politics, which prevented any type of worker solidarity, which was so important for the early socialist movements and others.

But on the other hand, “it never happened here,” even Americans don’t believe it anymore. Suddenly, I do believe we’re living in a moment in which Americans believe both that their country can go fascist, and this is what half of Americans believe, and also the other half believes that America can go socialist or even communist. Nevertheless, both are not very clear about the meaning of these words anymore.

Mounk: So earlier you were saying that the second phase of American identity was really defined by the competition with the Soviet Union. Perhaps that helped that period of American history revolve in a very explicit way around the American creed, because of course the United States and Soviet Union had one key similarity, which is that they were both universalist political projects, that they both thought the world would be better off if everybody was ruled like they are. I wonder what that tells us about how this third phase, which is significantly going to be defined by competition with China, is going to transform and transmute American identity.

China obviously has roots in very much the same political system that drove the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was informed by Marxism-Leninism for a long time, but has since become a quite notably different thing. One of the things that it does seem to lack historically, though perhaps the stronger it gets, the more that will come to the fore, is that universalist ambition. China, for now, claims that the party has figured out the right way to rule the country. It certainly is somewhat friendly with a few of the regimes that have similar post-Marxist-Leninist political parties in charge. But broadly speaking, it is perfectly happy to make alliances with anybody who is on its side in the broader geopolitical competition with the United States. So what element of American identity is going to be pushed to the fore over the next decades, at least as defined by this competition with China?

Krastev: Great question, because if you look at the end of the Cold War, more and more we’re trying to see how exceptional this period was. You have two superpowers, both of them very much ideological states. They were standing for a certain type of political idea and political philosophy, and both of them were very much obsessed with the idea of the future, of how the future was going to look. They were universalist, exactly what you are saying. All of them believed that the whole world was going to look either like them or like their enemy. There is this character in Updike’s novel who said, “What is the point of being an American if there is no Cold War?” So in a certain way, the Cold War created a very strong identity for the United States, but this identity, America as the free world, was very much connected in opposition to the Soviet Union. For example, the Soviet Union had censorship and tried basically to repress freedom of expression. As a result, the United States decided to make out of freedom of expression, and for example jazz or abstract art, symbols of itself. We can question to what extent a quite culturally conservative America would have made jazz or abstract painting the symbol of its culture if it was not for the Soviet Union. In a certain way, America was doing many things because Americans knew that in the eyes of many other parts of the world, they were compared all the time with the Soviets. This is why all this focus on freedoms, individual freedoms, but also collective freedoms, was so important.

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Also, before going to China, for me it’s important that the fact that both the Soviet Union and the United States, I mean their elites, were sure that the future was on their side, explains also why the Cold War did not become hot. Because if you believe that the future is on your side, if we’re going to clash, better to clash tomorrow, because tomorrow I’m going to be in a stronger position. If you’re reading Marxism, you’re going to see that capitalism is going to collapse out of its contradictions. But if you’re going to read George Kennan, you know that containment simply said we should outweigh them. Communism is going to collapse out of its contradictions. So there was this possibility that this fight did not need to become a military clash immediately. It was not simply the nuclear weapon, it was this strong belief that the future belongs to us that made it possible for both sides not to have this clash.

The story with China is, and I believe this is really interesting, the Chinese obviously try to increase their global influence. We can say that they want to dominate the world, but they’re not interested, like the Soviets, in exporting their own model, probably because they believe that their model is too good and others cannot adopt it. But also what is very important is they’re competing with the United States on the field which Americans always believe they’re strongest at, and this is economy. Suddenly, basically, the Chinese are doing fine, particularly when it comes to industrial production. They’re producing much more than America is producing these days, and this puts America in a very difficult position, because not simply the free market, but industrial economic power was so important for America, by the way, so important for America during the Cold War. Now this is the moment in which the United States is not anymore, in my view, convinced of its own economic power.

While there is a lot of talk about innovation, and rightly so, fascination with what Silicon Valley is doing, you can see some statistics, and you’re also going to see the story of this clash. For example, the famous book about America and China describes a clash between a society run by lawyers and a society run by engineers. You can see that suddenly many people in America start to fear that if we’re in a new Cold War, America starts to look like the Soviet Union when it comes to economic development. In my view, this is very new. Americans were always very optimistic about themselves. They were very optimistic about the direction in which the world was going, and this was lost. Paradoxically, Trump, who talks about “America first” and “we’re going to be great again,” became the symbol of this kind of crisis of self-confidence. Because while he talks so much about “America first,” you can see the extent to which he, in a way, envies China. He envies the absolute power of the Chinese leader. He envies the industrialization of China. So the idea of reindustrialization is to make America look more like China than it is looking now. So in my view, this is the new moment, and this is why the competition with China, like the competition with the Soviet Union, really became a question for American self-confidence.

Mounk: One of the things that I sometimes say as a quip, but I think really does say something about the current situation in China, is that the country works reasonably well in practice, but is a mess in theory. What I mean by that is that there were historically many political regime types that didn’t necessarily work very well in practice, but certainly were much less good than the Chinese system at delivering wealth and affluence for its people and so on, but in which it was quite clear what the system was, and you could go and impose that system on another country if you were able to influence it. In China, the country is based on a very long tradition of a meritocratic civil service, selected through public examinations. It has such deep state capacity because it is a country that in very complicated permutations and variations has existed for many thousands of years. But if you tried to actually take the model and impose it on Nigeria or on Zimbabwe, it’s just really unclear what that would actually mean and entail. I think this creates a weird situation where at some theoretical level, the aspirations of a Communist Party are always universalist. But in practice, I don’t think that people in Beijing are particularly interested in universalizing the rule, because they recognize something about the fact that the system is not easily exportable.

But I actually want to take the conversation in a different direction, which is that the deepest reasons for the crisis of confidence in the United States, I think, are not the competition with China or anything like that. It’s a kind of crisis of conviction about America’s own self-perception. You said earlier that there were historically three kinds of ways that Americans thought about themselves. The first we might associate with its most impressive contemporary articulator, Barack Obama: a nation that was flawed from its inception because of slavery and other injustices, but in which nothing that’s wrong about the country might not be fixed, and what is right about the country, the guiding ideals of its founding, is what allowed us to overcome many, though not all, of these injustices, and that should spur us on to do even better in the future.

Then there is a kind of right-wing rejection of that idea, which says, no, this was never a universalist nation. It was a nation of white Anglo-Saxons, and it was a nation of Christians, and if we lose that part of our nature, then what is special about the United States is going to be lost. And then, of course, there’s the left’s rejection of this narrative, which is to say that the country was not defined by 1776, the holiday we’re celebrating today. It was defined by 1619. It was defined not by the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. It was defined by the first day that slaves arrived on American shores. Are you an Obamaist in this juxtaposition, or do you think that way of contrasting the three different options is somehow too simple, or do you embrace one or the other two?

Krastev: I do believe that you are right, but all three in a certain way are talking about different types of exceptionalism. One is America being exceptionally bad, and by the way, this was always part of Americans’ discourse about America. Being critical about America was one of the important things in how American democracy was functioning, and you can see it very much on the left. And you also have the exceptionalism of America as a country with a purpose, as a city on the hill, and it can have all these different types of incarnation. What was interesting about Obama’s view is that in a certain way, he believes that America is exceptional but also very normal. He tries to integrate it into a world which is not so America-centered. It was not simply about American power, but in a certain way he believes, probably rightly, that we’re going to see much more divergence, that all the different nations are going to try to find their own way.

I’m saying this because going back to what you said about China, in my view, in a certain way, it rhymes with what we are talking about now. In the 1970s, the Chinese were exporting ideology more than the Soviets. Mao and Maoism was so powerful in the Third World because basically his idea of peasants being the major driving force of the revolution was fitting much more easily to the reality of Third World countries outside of the West, than the communist idea of the working class, the classical Marxism. And then it failed, and I do believe that this was the moment in which suddenly the Chinese decided that dominating the world and exporting your model are not necessarily the same thing.

Here is the point which for me is critical: America and China know the world in two different ways. America was the melting pot. America knows the world to the extent that for over 250 years, people from all over the world were coming to the United States, and they were becoming Americans. The melting pot was about this: you know the world because you know how to transform others. America was always perceiving itself not simply as an exceptional, but as a transformative power. China was not thinking in terms of a melting pot, but in terms of the Chinatown. Chinese go to the world, and they are not trying to transform the places that they go, but they try to keep their identity and also try economically to benefit and to dominate the place where they are. Chinatowns also are not trying to spread, but they are trying, of course, to prosper and to become much more powerful, particularly in economic terms.

Now, when this is happening, I have the feeling that the Chinese are happy with the power, and of course their regime can collapse like any political regime. But then the Americans are saying, if we don’t have this special purpose, if, like President Trump, who believes that America is the victim of the fact that it tried to be exceptional and particularly exceptional in its liberalism, then comes the story of what it means to be an American. You’re right about Obama, but one of the interesting things that happened after the end of the Cold War, and this is when the idea of the future became problematic in the American story, was that suddenly, at the end of history, you have the feeling that the future has arrived and America was the future. Everybody started trying to copy the United States in one way or another: to speak American, to play golf, to read the Founding Fathers. The moment when you have been the future for others, you in a certain way lose the perspective of the future for yourself and start asking yourself tough questions.

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If you’re, for example, going to read Huntington’s Who Are We?, one of the interesting stories, and his particular resentment towards many of the new migrants coming from Mexico and other places, was that before, coming to America was a one-way ticket. You go across the ocean and you cannot go back. You either become American or you’re doomed. Now it was so easy to cross the borders in all directions, so suddenly this decision to come to America is not a decision anymore to become American forever. I do believe that this is the paradox. In the age of migration, suddenly the particularity of America as a migrant nation was put into question.

Mounk: That is very interesting, and it does go to the challenge that the right perhaps has always historically had with the American story, and that has come to the fore with Donald Trump: whether America is defined by its values, by the ideas in the Constitution, or whether it has actually historically only worked because it was in some ways a cultural and religious product. It’s a question that in America is posed as whether or not the United States is a Christian nation, just as Narendra Modi is trying to relitigate in India the question of whether or not India is a Hindu nation. Of course, these religions in both of these contexts go beyond faith. I mean, they are markers for an ethno-religious identity that is setting itself up against another, against the significant Muslim minority in India, and against a kind of broader set of people who are coming to the country in the United States.

Now, of course, part of what that story gets slightly wrong is who it is who’s actually challenging the Americanness of a country and some of the ideas and values that we could take for granted. I’m a great admirer of Samuel Huntington. I think he’s made astonishing contributions to political science, from Soldier and the State to Clash of Civilizations, even though I’ve often disagreed with him. I think the one book that it’s hard to take seriously is exactly the one that you’ve criticized, Who Are We?, because I think the idea that Latinos are somehow undermining the true nature of America was probably silly at the time and seems much more silly today. That’s because I think most Latinos who’ve been in the United States for a little while are quite clearly very American. In an ironic turn, it is often the liberal arts, college-educated scions of the Mayflower that seem to be rejecting many aspects of what America is.

I would guess that most Latino families in the United States are enjoying some form of celebration or barbecue about July 4th today, and even if many of them have all kinds of misgivings about the current state of our country, I think most of them are actually quite patriotic. I think there are a lot more people who both can take advantage of some of the things that the United States offers its citizens, including still the most remarkable middle-class economy in the world, and who may actually have many more historical ties to the generation of the founders, than the people who may be sitting around rolling their eyes and saying, really, we shouldn’t be celebrating any of this.

Krastev: The American dream is something that was really important for the way at least those of us outside of America were seeing America. You go there, and you can succeed in one generation. You can succeed in two generations. There was this incredible social mobility that was so important in the way, for example, Europeans were trying to compare America with themselves. We are also forgetting that particularly after the end of World War II, America was so powerful but also so prosperous and so rich. When you read basically anything, the diaries or memoirs of the Europeans talking about American soldiers or any type of American that they were going to see in Europe in the late 1940s, 1950s, you have this totally devastated continent, and then you have all these people who are coming, and they were rich, and they’re prosperous, but also they were self-confident. They were really representing this new world.

I’m saying this because suddenly the American dream is becoming a challenge within the United States. On one level, this is a challenge because of the thing that everybody is seeing: ` this fear that the next generation is not going to be able to live better than their parents. I do believe this was really important for the United States, because America depended on social mobility much more than traditional European societies. But secondly, it is something that you said: if we are going to a world of civilizations, if the Chinese are going to become a civilization which tries to dominate but doesn’t want to export its model, if Indians are going to define themselves as a civilizational state, if Russians are struggling to do the same, not particularly successfully, then which is the American civilization? Is Europe part of it?

For example, in Europe in the 19th century, words like race and nation were synonymous. This kind of a ratio, the idea of whiteness, was very much an American invention. The interesting story about the current type of talk about this is that America was changing demographically not simply because new people were coming, but because people were being redefined. For example, Bulgarians or Jews in the late 19th century were not defined as white, but there was a moment in which they became white, and we know from sociology how the Irish became white. I do believe this is what is going to happen with Latinos and others. But then how are we going to define this civilization to which Europe belongs, America belongs? If it is on racial terms, who is going to be white and how is it going to be white?

In my view, this is one of the biggest problems that is coming from some of the right-wing attempts to redefine basically European American civilization simply on racial terms. Because the moment you’re going to do it, you’re starting to realize how historically constructed and how differently constructed race was in different periods. In a certain way, paradoxically, whiteness came as the result of trying to reconcile the differences between people coming from different European countries, Germans and Brits, people coming from different religious traditions, because religious divisions were so important in Europe in the beginning. So strangely enough, whiteness was the way to try to reconcile all this diversity of American society, and after that, it basically became one of the sources of confrontation. I’m saying this because as a result of it, 250 years after its founding, America is kind of forced to reread and reinterpret all of its traditions, because the world in which it is living is not allowing it to coexist easily with the previous identities that it was telling itself.

Mounk: There is a strange set of paradoxes about the role that the idea of race plays in the American imagination at the moment. Of course, the history of the country has, because of slavery and other things, been deeply defined by some imagination of race all along. But one of the fights of this moment, I think, is whether you will get a further broadening of the idea of who’s white. Some sociologists claim that this is already happening, that there’s going to be a kind of mainstream society that sees itself in the broadest sense as white, and it is going to include a lot of Latinos and probably a lot of Asian Americans, and it may even in some ways include middle and upper-middle-class Black Americans. So whiteness becomes a kind of strange multiracial category, with some kind of a racialized remainder that is based on some mix of ethnic origin and socioeconomic status.

Or whether you actually do the opposite, and the idea is that you get the kind of overarching category of “person of color,” the term that was used incredibly often over the last five or six years, but is now, I think, slightly declining in salience, and you’re pitting them against this kind of remainder category of whites. Of course, ironically, whereas for the vast majority of American history you would enjoy a higher status and you would want to be counted in the category of whites rather than the category of people excluded from whites, which is why, according to the sociological accounts, which I don’t always fully agree with, Jews and Irish Americans and so on fought to be included in the category of white, today, in some senses, you might wish for the opposite. In many contexts, to be white is supposed to be a negative thing, and there may actually be negative consequences for college admissions or for your ability to garner some kind of contract from your local government if you are counted within that category.

Remarkably, this is not even an ethnic example. The state of California has now included a mandate for the boards of companies in California to have some representation from the LGBT community, and if you falsely claim to be gay, then the state may prosecute you, not for being gay as it might have done 100 or 200 years ago in many countries in the West, but for falsely claiming to be gay, which is a kind of remarkable thing. So what do you think is going to be the way that people think about their identity in a little bit of time? To raise the stakes here, Ivan, let’s imagine that we’re talking on the 500th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. How do you think Americans will think about the role of these kinds of forms of identity and of race 250 years from now?

Krastev: If we’re going to talk on the 500th anniversary, which means that we are going to embrace the idea of individual immortality, then probably everything is going to be different for everybody. But you are making a very important point, and the important point is that suddenly being part of a majority means that you do not have an identity. Identity comes only from being part of different minorities, and you can try to be one type or another type of minority, but there was something wrong about the idea of the majority as a whole. I do believe this is a very new idea. Normally, minorities try to be integrated into certain political majorities, and this was why, for example, political parties, ideologies, and elections were so important, because by being part of the majority, you have the feeling that you are integrated into the country. Now the story is that suddenly being a majority means being oppressive. Being a minority becomes a privilege, and this is the paradox. By the way, this is one of the paradoxes that is very much used by the right, who say, how did this happen? Is it not that in a democracy the privilege is to be part of a bigger group? Does it mean that basically everything depends on us?

I’m saying this because I do believe in a democracy there are two different ideas of a majority. One is the idea of the historical majority that created the state, and in a certain way, in the case of America, this was the Europeans who basically came to the continent and wrote the Constitution and put in their rules and basically their tradition. Then there is the majority which is born on the night of the elections, and this majority does not have a particular color. It has much more of a political identity than any type of ethnic or religious identity. But the idea was that this second majority should not contest the first one, and this is happening because of the demographic changes. Suddenly, you can see that either we’re going to redefine what it means to be white, or you’re going to end up with all the fears that have been captured by Huntington, with his idea that WASP America is disappearing and it is not going to be the same anymore. These identities are not going to work well if they’re not going to be redefined.

I do believe we’re living in this interesting moment in which everything is too fluid, and too much is possible, and this is why nobody has the feeling that he lives at home. This is not true only about America. I do believe we see the same in Europe, because home is the place that you feel you understand and where you feel understood, where there is this intuitive understanding that you know how the system works, you know basically how institutions work. In this case, America was always very different than Europe, because this sense of home as a much more ethnically and culturally homogeneous place was much more typical for Europe, and for Europeans, home was like speaking a native language, a language that you speak before knowing the grammar, a language that naturally comes to you. In America, even if you come from England, you should learn a new language, because American was this new language that everybody, even English speakers, should learn, because America, from this point of view, was always different from the classical European nation-states.

But now, if there is no American dream, and if there is not a dream that we should all become much more similar, that we are not going to be so much defined by our ethnic or racial identity, I do believe that suddenly the country starts to have this feeling of tension and civil political polarization, of a civil war. Paradoxically, I do believe that there is one conflict, and I could be wrong, that probably if you’re going to look from the future, probably not so distant, like the next 20 to 150 years, you’re going to see that in current America, the generational conflict can turn out to be politically more important than some of the class conflicts that we know from before, or even the type of identity conflicts that we are talking about. Because paradoxically, for the first time in modern history, young people in the world, but particularly now in the United States, are a minority. This is a minority which does not feel represented enough in politics, and as a result of it, starts to contest democracy, and because they start to contest democracy, they start to contest the basic American values.

In my view, this is an interesting story, because the gap of wealth between the population, the fact that we are living much longer, and for the first time you’re going to have not three but probably five generations living next to each other, the fact that we don’t have many kids, and suddenly the generational pyramid is turning on its head, all of this, in my view, is going to restructure American politics to the extent that the identities that we talk about now, which are very much race-based and ethnically based, may turn out to be less important than they look today.

In the rest of this conversation, Ivan and Yascha discuss their personal perceptions of how the United States has changed, and how Donald Trump will be remembered. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior editor at City Journal, where he covers crime, policing, and urban policy.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Charles Fain Lehman discuss why Baltimore failed to follow the crime declines that transformed other American cities, why strategic policing works, and how focused deterrence breaks cycles of retaliatory violence.

Watch the conversation below—the full video is behind the paywall on this page!

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: There is a broad question in the United States about why there was a lot of crime in the eighties and nineties, then a significant drop in crime in many cities across the United States in the following decades, and then possibly a slight uptick since the pandemic—that is somewhat contested and depends on the kinds of crime you look at. You have been trying to think about this by looking at a particular city that I know somewhat well: Baltimore, because I teach there some of the time. Baltimore to me was always a big intellectual puzzle because it had not gone through some of those same transformations. In the 2000s and 2010s, when Washington, D.C. became a lot safer, Philadelphia became a good bit safer, and New York became much, much safer than it used to be, Baltimore kind of did not. Perhaps we can start with that—why is it that even as all of these other cities on the eastern seaboard were really making inroads in reducing murder rates and becoming quite a bit safer, Baltimore at the time did not seem to be following the same positive trends?

Charles Fain Lehman: The first thing I want to emphasize is just the extent to which that is unusual—that Baltimore really struggled with its experience with homicide well after other cities had dealt with homicide as an issue or had substantially reduced the homicide level in their cities. If you look at young Black men in the city of Baltimore compared to other major cities, they experienced far less significant a decline in their risk of death by homicide over the period we are talking about, in the 1990s and 2000s. It is a dramatic reduction. As a result, when you get to even 2013 or 2014, their risk is substantially elevated over the rest of the nation. That is before 2015, when the death of Freddie Gray resulted in citywide protests, some rioting, and a durable crime spike. There have been a number of papers arguing persuasively that whatever little control the city had in the immediate prior period was totally lost yet again for the next several years.

There are different factors that are conceivably going on there. There has long been a struggle over the management, funding, and staffing levels of the BPD—the Baltimore Police Department’s trust in the community and the civilian leadership’s trust of the Baltimore Police Department. That relationship has long been problematic, and I think Freddie Gray was a microcosm of broader community concerns. I once met an MPD police officer in DC who would commute an hour and a half each way to work for MPD because he did not want to work for Baltimore PD. That is sort of the struggle that they had.

Mounk: Perhaps one way of thinking about this is through the comparative lens—this is a classic question of comparative politics as well as many other social science disciplines. Why does something happen in one set of places and not in another? Standard methodological advice holds that you can only explain a difference in outcome by a difference in independent variables, by a difference in causal factors. So perhaps let us make it comparative: what was happening at that time in New York City, in Washington, D.C., and so on that was reducing the crime rate?

Lehman: To a first approximation, the answer is deliberate, strategic policing. New York City is the prime example—the deployment of strategic policing under Bill Bratton, where they actually, in the 1990s, for the first time asked: where is crime really happening? What are the hotspots? How can we deploy NYPD resources, and how can we do that strategically to enhance safety in any given area? Think about Bryant Park or Times Square, where they really surged resources and cleaned up. The same thing happened in other jurisdictions—in LA later on, in Washington, D.C.—sort of across the board. There were efforts to do this in Baltimore in the nineties and two thousands as well.

Mounk: Before we get back to Baltimore, tell us a little bit more about what strategic policing looks like. There is obviously a huge debate about what led to this decline in crime in places like New York and LA. Explain the different kinds of explanations that have been given, and why you think strategic policing in particular is the thing really responsible—according to you, at least—for a significant chunk of that decline.

Lehman: It has to be a significant chunk, insofar as you see a large increase in homicide and other major crimes in the 1960s and 1970s, peaking in the eighties, starting to decline in the nineties, with a precipitous decline through the 2000s and early 2010s. For listeners who may not know: a large portion of that is demographic and structural, by which I mean the baby boomers aging into and out of crime. If you do age adjustment, about half of that effect disappears. People commit more crimes when they are younger; the baby boomers, who were in their peak crime-committing years during that hump, then aged out of it. That accounts for about half of it.

Mounk: To be clear, you are saying not that there is something particular about baby boomers that made them more prone to violence, but simply that there was a particularly large number of young men—a demographic that commits a lot of crimes—and so you would just expect there to be more murders when the number of people who are twenty years old is higher.

Lehman: Exactly. If we are talking systematically about the increase and decrease in violence, that is a big part of the story. Then there are other explanations worth addressing. I think there are a number of them—things like lead and crime, where I just do not think the evidence is there. Then you have to think about specific cities where we see very large decreases in violence. New York again is the paradigmatic example; its crime decline is twice as deep and twice as long as the rest of the nation. Boston is another good example, where there was a precipitous decline, particularly in youth violence in the 1990s.

When you look at what those departments did—and often those departments were talking to each other and communicating about their tactics, often run by the same people, very small circles—their theory was that through the seventies and eighties, policing had been highly reactive. You hear about a crime, you go, you arrest somebody, maybe, maybe you do not. They said: we have these resources and tools, let us use them proactively. Let us identify the people who are frequent flyers—the individuals we know are driving violence disproportionately—and the places where violence is happening disproportionately. Let us go there and focus on those people. If we do that, maybe we will see some substantial improvement. Indeed, many jurisdictions implemented this kind of strategy and saw the substantial improvement you would expect.

Mounk: Why is that so successful? What about the model causes this decrease in crime? It is not immediately obvious why police officers saying, this is where crimes happen, we will hang out there is going to reduce crime that much. If a lot of murders are connected to the drug trade and to gangs, you might think: if a lot of these shootings happen in place A, but we are still in competition with a rival gang and still want to avenge some other crime, we will just carry out a murder somewhere else. There would be all kinds of reasons, if you were telling me about this as an idea before the empirical evidence existed, to think: how can that possibly work? Why does it seem to be working?

Lehman: Your specific question is about displacement—the so-called balloon effect. Why is it that if you do something here, people do not just move over there? A lot of the answer comes down to the fact that murder is objectively very rare. Overwhelmingly, you are unlikely to be murdered, I am unlikely to be murdered. It is extremely unlikely, because murder—gun violence in particular—requires a brew of different things to go wrong in order for it to occur. You need, as I like to say, young men with guns, a culture of honor or culture of beef, and low levels of formal and informal social control. That mix does not occur naturally in most places or at most times, which is why violence is usually concentrated in pockets even within cities—and even within those places, often in a specific set of people.

Violence is not an efficiently produced phenomenon; it is not a market phenomenon. If you do not have the right environment for it, if one person gets pulled out of the social network, it can collapse really easily. In a modern, highly surveilled, enforced society, violence is not the norm—it is the exception. If you take one of the Jenga blocks out, all of a sudden violence becomes much less likely.

Mounk: What is it about this form of policing that is so successful at taking one of those Jenga blocks out? What does it actually look like? Cops know that a particular part of a particular neighborhood is where gang warfare is especially endemic or where there is a particularly high level of crime—they go and they hang out there. Is it to make people feel surveilled? Is it to build relationships? Is it to warn people? What does that look like concretely?

Lehman: “Strategic policing” is really just an umbrella term for police departments thinking proactively—rather than reactively—about how to allocate their resources, identifying places that are problems, and remediating them. One version of this is hotspot patrol policing, for which we have a substantial body of evidence. Basically, you make a heat map of crime, identify where it is happening, and put a cop there. We have a lot of evidence that when that happens, crime levels go down and do not displace. That hotspot is a hotspot because it is an area uniquely conducive to crime. Police are a visible deterrent—in many senses, deterrence is the primary way policing works. If you put a cop in a place, that officer is going to deter criminal behavior there and remove the opportunity for crime to be committed.

That is not the only approach. There is also place-based policing. We have a lot of evidence that the built environment matters a great deal for crime—that environments can be more or less criminogenic. One thing you can do is surge police resources to help clean up, beautify, and facilitate the surveillance of a neighborhood, a park, or an area that has been taken over by crime. That can durably reduce crime. Then there is a third approach—focused deterrence—which is about deterring the spread of violence as a kind of infectious pathogen within a social network.

Mounk: Tell us about some of these in a little bit more detail. You are not a kind of airy-fairy policy analyst, not one of the progressive voices in this debate who thinks the only cause of crime is deprivation and people being too hard on criminals. So it is perhaps somewhat surprising to hear you say that beautifying a public park or changing the built environment really has this big an impact on where crime takes place. In one register, that sounds like something the German artists I grew up around might say—if only our cities were more beautiful, there would be less crime. Yet here is a hard-nosed, right-of-center—if that is how you describe yourself—policy analyst saying that going out and beautifying a park is really going to bring down crime. Why should we believe that? What is it about these architectural interventions, these interventions in public space, that actually prove effective in influencing crime?

Lehman: The first answer is simply that we have a fair amount of high-quality evidence showing that cleaning up vacant lots, forcing landlords to clean up problem properties, and rehabilitating houses all causally reduce crime. The question then becomes: why? Some people argue it affects the psychology of criminals, which I do not think is true. What I do think is that it renders the space more governable. This goes back to Jane Jacobs and The Death and Life of Great American Cities—the idea that what deters antisocial behavior in public is first and foremost the informal surveillance that we all engage in, what Jacobs calls “eyes on the street.” The reason many spaces are not crime-ridden is that there is a high ratio of law-abiding to non-law-abiding people in that space.

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When you clean up a park, restore community space, clear lines of sight, or clear out Penn Station, you allow—or encourage—people who had otherwise been absent from that space to recolonize it. The natural governance that comes from informal social actors is restored. It is about facilitating that informal enforcement, that informal surveillance and coercion that is made possible by having a space that feels like people are welcome in it, can govern it, and feel that it is theirs.

Mounk: It is not about the psychology, then, but about the ability to exercise social control over the most dangerous parts of a city. How does that relate to this third idea you raised—focused policing?

Lehman: One of the things you get out of the criminological literature, as I said earlier, is that violence is really concentrated. A lot of things have to go wrong. A corollary of that is that violence is highly concentrated in social networks—most violence in America today is driven by people who know each other, who are often in conflict with one another, who have beef with one another, who are all dating the same people, who are all from the same blocks, and so on.

As a result, violence becomes contagious within these groups. You and I pick a fight, I shoot you, your friend comes back and shoots me, my friend comes back and shoots him—you get this cycle of escalation. I mentioned Boston earlier; part of how they drove down violence there is a strategy called focused deterrence or ceasefire. The idea is simple: you identify the people in the network who are connected to each other and commit crimes. You go to them and say, we are no longer tolerating violence. If you commit a shooting, we are going to come after you with everything we can. When a shooting happens, you follow up and say, remember what we told you—there are going to be consequences for escalating. You establish a deterrent threat. Implementation fidelity is challenging; it is hard to get this right. But when you do get it right, there are often dramatic reductions in violence, because you have established for that population: we know who you are, we are watching you, there will be consequences if you escalate, so do not escalate. If you stop the escalation—much like stopping a cancer from growing—you prevent many more murders than just the one interaction would otherwise generate.

Mounk: The idea is that one shooting can lead to a whole retaliatory cycle, but because you intervene fast enough, it does not. If you succeed at that, perhaps for six months there are no shootings, and there is no particular reason for another shooting to start.

In the background, I was wondering about the account of what actually drives these shootings in the first place, and how that matters. One way of thinking about it is as something very strategic: you have two different drug gangs trying to expand territory, engaging in a kind of urban warfare where the logic can be modeled with something like a rational choice framework—at a certain level, a very rational set of processes, and you might think you need one kind of intervention to contain it.

On the other hand, you might have a model that is far less rational: people at the age when men are most violent, carrying deadly weapons around for all kinds of reasons, who just happen to run into someone who slept with a girlfriend three months ago outside a bar when both are drunk, and that is where it kicks off. Or someone has the impression that someone else is disrespecting them, undermining their honor, and feels they must defend that honor in order not to become vulnerable to further attacks—and in that moment, they engage in conflict.

If you think a lot of the causes of violence are near-random in that way—where the structure of a situation determines the likelihood of conflict, but each particular conflict is not itself a rational choice—that might lead to a very different model of what it takes to rein in these crimes. Is it clear which of these two types of things really drives the most damaging violence? How do criminologists think about this?

Lehman: The short answer is it is the second one. The way I would push back on your framing is that there is an inherent rationality to honor culture. It is not just impulse—there is a logical form to it.

Mounk: I was starting to get at that, which is that if you allow yourself to be disrespected, you become a target for further disrespect down the line.

Lehman: Exactly. Being aggressive in a way that is antisocial can garner you benefits. The guy who is picking fights on the train, playing his music too loud, getting in somebody’s face, smoking on the train—he is doing it to establish his dominance in the public space. So it is not just reactive, not just: I am going to engage in this beef because otherwise I lose face and there is risk to me. It is also: if I provoke this beef, I will gain face, I will gain relative social standing, and I will be better off.

It is also the case—and there are a bunch of great books on this topic, Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside, and A Code of the Street by Elijah Anderson—that when you are in an environment of relatively low formal social control, where there is relatively low state legitimacy or projection of state power, honor culture is a very natural thing to emerge and to persist over time. When you are in that kind of environment, particularly if you are a young man, you are stuck in the game—you are going to fight back and forth, you are going to be obliged to engage in this sort of dispute of honor, in order to protect yourself but also in order to gain status. I think that is overwhelmingly more important as an explanation for why violence happens in America today than the story about rationally acting drug gangs. People tend to overstate the degree of violence associated with the drug trade. There is a particular political economy of the crack crisis in the 1980s, but that does not always generalize to what every illicit marketplace looks like. Today, a much smaller share of violence is explained by that versus by the honor dynamic.

Mounk: If you are saying it is about honor culture in that way, another way of reframing it is: how do you discourage honor culture, or differently put, how do you reduce the consequences within an honor culture of either having high status or having low status? The strange thing about honor culture is that the examples I can think of where it really governs social interactions include some schoolyards. A lot of what you were talking about applies to the school bully who you just know is crazy enough that they will always escalate—so if they ask for your lunchbox, you are just going to give it to them, because the stakes if you do not are too high. It applies to parts of inner-city America, and there is a lot of interesting sociological and anthropological research on this. It applies to parts of Brittany in France. It also applies to 17th and 18th century European aristocrats. When you read about all of these people dueling—including some of the founders of the United States—that is because they were embroiled in an honor culture where allowing someone to disrespect you had downstream consequences for your life and your reputation, and so you needed to engage in extremely risky acts to protect it.

This is not somehow characteristic of particularly poor neighborhoods mostly populated by a particular ethnic group in the United States today. Very different groups at very different ends of the socioeconomic scale, including some of the most privileged people in 17th and 18th century Europe, have been embroiled in these kinds of honor cultures. One question is: how do you change those cultures such that, as the 18th century gives way to the 19th, the response to an insult is no longer meet me tonight at midnight with your second but rather the bourgeois idea that sticks and stones may break my bones, but your insult will never hurt me—and so you simply smile and say, you are really just degrading yourself, and move on? How do these changes happen?

Lehman: Barry Latzer, the emeritus professor and CUNY criminologist, in his book The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America, makes a related argument about why you see honor culture disproportionately in inner-city Black communities in America. His answer is that it is simply southern honor culture—the American South has a long tradition of honor culture, and it is being transplanted northward as people move through the Great Migration. That gets to the point: it is not sui generis to race or specific to race or poverty status. It is about where the culture comes from.

Mounk: As a good Hobbesian, I would have thought it is about the absence of an external authority.

Lehman: I am getting there. What happens in the South is a little more complicated than simply saying “weak state formation”—they do ultimately have weaker states, but it is more nuanced than that. I think that is true also in the other environments you are talking about: honor culture is ultimately the result of the state having insufficient power to be the ultimate arbiter, to resolve all conflicts, or to claim a monopoly on the resolution of conflicts. The reason you do not have an honor culture is because the state undermines any rival claim to settle disputes. The way you get away from honor culture is through legitimate dispute resolution through the courts. How do you get to that bourgeois attitude? Because you have recourse to the legal infrastructure, which is itself undergirded by the state’s threat of violence.

Mounk: Imagining being someone who is growing up embroiled in honor culture and who is aware enough to recognize that it is dangerous—that it can lead to an early death through a duel or a shooting—and who is trying to get out of it: the ability to secure your basic rights, belongings, and safety through authorities is going to govern a lot of what your incentives are. Perhaps here we are in a kind of strategic logic. If the schoolyard bully comes to take your lunchbox and you feel you can tell a teacher who will reliably punish the bully—and doing so will not lead to your classmates turning on you as a snitch—then why fight? But if you think the teachers will not care, or that even if they do, your classmates will ostracize you for snitching and your social life will be miserable, then you face a different calculation. It is not just about the lunchbox today. Once you acquire the reputation of being easily bullied, perhaps you should fight—because that is the only way to protect yourself going forward. That ability to seek recourse against injustice, and to avoid becoming vulnerable by stepping out of honor culture, governs the strategic incentives. That is true for a trivial example like the lunchbox, but it also seems to be true for far more life-and-death situations.

Lehman: The bully analogies are useful because the bully gets something out of it too—it redounds to his benefit to engage in bullying behavior. In some sense, the reason we want states and law enforcement and everything that goes with them is that the predatory conduct of the bully is not something society should have to tolerate. To aggressively abuse the metaphor: we want one very big bully whose job it is to suppress all the others. We want the teacher. Having to live around predators is extraordinarily socially toxic. If you spend your whole life worrying about being victimized, you are much worse off. We know that kids who are exposed to shootings do worse in school, that kids regularly exposed to violence have worse outcomes as adults. There is disinvestment, harm to property values—all of these objective measures that correspond to the intuition that if I have to walk through my community every day worrying that one to five percent of the young men there are going to victimize me at random, I will be much worse off.

Mounk: Let us bring that back to the areas in the United States where there is the most crime. Is this partially about trust between residents of those neighborhoods and the police? If your best friend or your brother is shot and you more or less know who did it, one response is to go to the police and make sure that person goes to jail. Whether the norms of that neighborhood allow you to do that without yourself becoming a target for further violence and retaliation is going to strongly influence whether, faced with tragedy, you go to the police—or decide that is not a route available to you, and instead get in a car with a couple of friends and go looking for the person who did it.

Lehman: When we are talking about the modern era of high violence—the great crime wave of the sixties, seventies, and eighties—there are a couple of different factors going on. One is that, to return to this idea of governance, many parts of America’s big cities become ungoverned or ungovernable. There is a systematic decay of both the small things and the large things. Think about New York in the 1980s—or cities that never recovered, like Detroit, or Gary, Indiana, or large parts of Washington, D.C.—that become just totally lost. There is a fixed stock of police resources, and if crime becomes sufficiently bad, the police may be inadequate to addressing the issue in the stable equilibrium. You have to do something to shift the equilibrium, because in the stable equilibrium the police are simply outmatched.

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In that period, that dynamic is exacerbated by—to put it oversimplistically—our collective belief that policing does not do anything. This is a real position held by many people of influence in American society in the sixties, seventies, and eighties: that policing has no effect on crime, that the criminal justice system cannot work until you address the root causes of crime. This goes back to the Kerner Commission and the Katzenbach Commission in the 1960s under the Johnson administration: until you address the root causes—poverty, deprivation, racism—you will not have any impact. So not only has crime gotten bad enough that the corresponding police response is relatively ineffective in equilibrium, but we have also decided that police cannot do anything, and so police gravitate toward the least useful things to do with their time—and are often quite corrupt on top of that. It is not a good equilibrium on either side of the equation.

Mounk: There is a huge debate on this in Europe and in Britain as well. One of the things that marked out Tony Blair’s third way was a famous soundbite from the run-up to his 1997 victory: tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. He was essentially saying we do not need to choose between those—but you can only understand the impact of that sentence because the conventional wisdom in the Labour Party for the previous twenty years had been that it is just about the causes of crime, not about reining crime in directly.

To people who might be tempted by that position: why is it unhelpful to think that we simply need to eliminate the deeper causes of crime? Certainly, when I look at relatively affluent countries—Switzerland, Singapore, Japan—there are much lower levels of crime, perhaps because they have wealthier states and less social deprivation. What role do the root causes of crime play in bringing about the relatively high levels of crime in the United States—even in places where things have improved a great deal? New York is much safer than it was, many cities in America are much safer than they were, and yet they remain a lot less safe than Zurich, Singapore, or Tokyo.

Lehman: Two things. One is that there are structural factors that explain that variance and that matter—though I tend to point to more direct ones. We have a lot more guns in the United States than peer countries. I am actually a squish on guns and the Second Amendment relative to others on the right, but it is a fact of American life, and it explains a lot of the variance in violence specifically—it is just much easier to harm other people in the United States than in peer countries. That does not explain all of it, but it explains some. There are structural factors that, plugged into a model, will explain some of the variance.

That said, it is important to observe that rising affluence is not necessarily correlated with receding crime. There is a great line from James Q. Wilson, the political scientist, who observed that in the 1960s we dramatically overhauled the criminal justice system, made it much less punitive and much more rehabilitative, launched the Great Society, and made huge investments in the inner city—in welfare, in transfers—through the first half of the decade. Then crime exploded. Similarly, in the 1990s, inequality was rising, there were real problems with poverty particularly in major cities, the poverty rate went up under Giuliani in New York City—and yet crime dramatically declined.

You can talk about the big structural variables, but they are relatively hard to move. Part of my argument is that crime is policy-accessible. We actually know today, in a way we did not in the seventies, what tools work to meaningfully reduce crime. We know we can use policy to bring crime down. Last point: crime is itself a cause, not just an effect. Crime is a cause of deprivation. If you live in a crime-ridden neighborhood, you are systematically worse off, systematically disadvantaged. Policy interested in remediating disadvantage should say: we need to free children from the risk—and the fear—of being shot and murdered. That is a disadvantage they should not have to suffer. Policy can change crime in a way that it is much harder to change those other core variables. We should understand crime as an independent cause of the so-called root causes, not just an effect of them.

Mounk: To spell this out a little: it sounds like you are making two different kinds of responses. The first is that looking at the root causes does not give you much explanatory power. You look at times when the supposed root causes improve—the United States in 1970 had much more generous welfare programs and was much less overtly racist than twenty years previously—and yet crime is higher in 1970 than in 1950. Then you look at the period when crime really declines, and it is not obvious that those factors had gotten much better. So the root causes are just not that explanatory.

The second point, which is slightly different but important, is that sometimes the root causes are not the things that are actionable. I have drawn on this James Q. Wilson example in talking about a very different topic—populism—in some of my work. Perhaps the root causes of populism are globalization, or whatever; I am not sure I fully buy that argument, but even if it were true, we are not going to undo globalization in order to save ourselves from populism. It is just not clear how that might work. But you might learn how to run a different kind of political campaign, or adopt certain kinds of policies—moderate political parties might learn how to speak to people in ways they find less off-putting. Those are interventions that are doable in a way that changing the entire global structure is not.

Whatever exact role the root causes play, what we do have is a lot of empirical evidence that specific interventions—focused policing, changing the architectural environment of cities, warning people who are at particular risk of committing a serious crime that there will be consequences—can actually reduce crime.

To bring it back to Baltimore: this is going on in New York, in LA, in Boston, in Washington, D.C., and these cities transform quite radically. There are still some corners of New York that are quite violent, but whenever friends come to visit and ask if they should be worried, I say you would really have to set out to find a dangerous place to end up there. That is very different from what New York felt like in 1990. Washington, D.C. is an even more extreme case—it used to be that the area around Dupont Circle was relatively safe, but only on particular blocks, and straying a couple of blocks in the wrong direction was genuinely dangerous.

Lehman: There were crack markets behind the White House.

Mounk: Right. Washington, D.C. today has also radically transformed. Yet throughout all of this, Baltimore did not follow. Is it that people in Baltimore just did not learn these lessons? What happened there?

Lehman: It is a really great question, one to which I only have part of the answer. There were several parts. One is that, as I alluded to earlier, Baltimore had real problems making the Baltimore Police Department an effective tool for doing some of these things, just at an institutional and cultural level. BPD has had real scandals, real struggles, and a lot of adversarialism between BPD and the civilian leadership of the city. As a result, they never quite built the institutional infrastructure needed. Conversely, when they tried to do these things, they could not build the executive support they needed. We talked about focused deterrence; I have written about their most recent focused deterrence implementation, which I argue works. Everyone I talked to in the city said: we have done this before, we did it in 1999, we did it in 2014, and both times the implementation fell apart. The reason was they did not have executive support, they did not have people at the mayoral level who said, we believe violence is a problem and we are going to put our shoulders into it throughout city government. So they did not get the resources they needed, and there was a great deal of skepticism. That is the challenge of strategic policing and more strategic approaches generally: it takes deliberate action, institutional know-how, and institutional commitment. Without those, you can get stuck in a quagmire. All of that is downstream of the more deeply entrenched problems, which is simply that many neighborhoods in Baltimore have deeply entrenched gang cultures. When I say gang cultures, I mean these tight social networks of young men with guns who all know each other and are all primed to shoot at each other, because the city government has not been committed to solving the problem.

Mounk: This is a story of the city not quite getting its act together because of structural features that do not allow it to effectively deploy the tactics that have worked elsewhere, even when it tries. If we had recorded this conversation two or three years ago, that is roughly where it would have stopped. Until quite recently, Baltimore was still the most dangerous major city on the eastern seaboard. As Washington D.C., New York, and Boston had improved very significantly, Baltimore had improved a little from the heights of crime in the nineties, but was just notably less safe than those other major cities. It turns out, though, that over the last few years, there have been the beginnings of quite a remarkable success story. What is the evidence that Baltimore is finally turning it around?

Lehman: The most straightforward answer is that you can draw a straight line down in terms of the homicide rate. In 2022, when things started to turn, there were about 333 murders in Baltimore. Last year, three years later, there were 133 murders, a more than 60 percent decline. In count terms, that is the fewest murders Baltimore has seen since 1965, a stunning and dramatic decline. If you talk to people on the street, and there is some polling, less than I would like, and if you go and talk to people who live in Baltimore’s most violent communities, they will tell you things feel safer, that they can go out and walk around. The change is felt particularly in those places. It is not every category of crime, not that all measures of antisocial behavior have gotten better across the board. It is that the city has said we are no longer going to tolerate murder, and murder has precipitously declined, and shootings have declined in kind.

Mounk: We talked about the structural features that made it hard for Baltimore to implement some of these things: the tension between the Baltimore Police Department and its leadership, the high levels of corruption relative to other police departments on the eastern seaboard, and so on. One thing I have heard anecdotally, though I do not know whether there is reliable evidence for it, is that a lot of Baltimore Police Department officers do not live in the city of Baltimore but in Baltimore County, and so do not feel the same sense of ownership that perhaps the average NYPD officer might, being more likely to live in the city. Presumably none of that changed overnight. So what did change? What allowed Baltimore to finally implement some of the successful tactics from other places?

Lehman: There are two answers. One is that they got a new prosecutor who made a real difference. A prosecutor is a kind of gating function: a good prosecutor on its own will not make a difference, but a bad prosecutor can cause real problems when you are trying to fix this situation. So they addressed that, and then they built out an implementation of focused deterrence that actually has executive buy-in, that is a genuine all-of-government effort, and that, for the first time, makes a real effort to get the implementation details right rather than just attempting it and not really doing it. Everyone tends to pick one or the other of those two factors, and I say no, it is probably both, they are probably reinforcing each other, and the bigger picture is that they are simply trying to run the criminal justice machine properly. When you do that, things get better.

Mounk: Tell me about the role of prosecutors here. How was the previous prosecutor in Baltimore failing, and how has the new prosecutor made a difference? More broadly, you have argued that the movement to install progressive prosecutors in major American cities has backfired and led to significant rises in crime. What is the evidence for that?

Lehman: Baltimore’s state’s attorney is a man named Ivan Bates, elected in 2022 and taking office in 2023. He replaced Marilyn Mosby, who left under a cloud of scandal, having been under multiple federal investigations and ultimately convicted federally of various fraud charges.

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Mosby came in in 2015 as a self-described progressive prosecutor. The idea behind the progressive prosecutor movement is that prosecutors in the United States have prosecutorial discretion: they can decide whether or not to prosecute offenses. Progressive prosecutors argue you can use that power to unilaterally limit the reach of the criminal justice system, or simply stop prosecuting whole classes of crimes.

What do we know about progressive prosecution? It is a little thorny, because it is very easy to call yourself a progressive prosecutor without implementing any particular policy mix. There are a couple of studies that look at the effect of electing a self-identified progressive prosecutor on crime in a given jurisdiction. Depending on which study you prefer, the findings show an increase in petty or disorder offending, or an increase in property offending. Neither study finds an increase in violence. My response to this is that many progressive prosecutors run on things that do not make a big difference. If you promise to stop prosecuting jaywalking, for example, the response is that American prosecutors do not prosecute jaywalking anyway, so you are not making a policy change of any meaningful significance.

But then you have to look under the hood at what they are actually doing, and there are decisions that can be really impactful. Refusing to prosecute felons in possession, for instance: if you are a felon, you cannot carry a firearm, and some big-city prosecutors will refuse to prosecute that charge even though it is a way to get a criminal with a gun off the street. Or categorical non-prosecution of drug-related offenses, or not using gang enhancements. In Mosby’s case, I think she was fairly aggressive, particularly after 2020, stopping prosecution of a whole variety of so-called low-level offenses. That, concurrent with de-policing in 2020 and everything else that drove the increase in violence at the time, led to a similar increase in violence in Baltimore as many other jurisdictions saw.

When you talk about the role of a prosecutor, you need the prosecutor as a backstop, the person who establishes the credibility of the threat of arrest. When you do not have a prosecutor likely to send people to prison, the credibility of that threat declines significantly and it becomes harder for police to do their job.

Mounk: In terms of the impact of these things, let me steel-man the case on the other side. There is a widespread conviction, often based on somewhat shaky empirical evidence, that a huge share of the U.S. prison population is there because of nonviolent drug offenses. This is partially rooted in Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow. If you believe that, it seems very reasonable for prosecutors to say we should not be locking all of these people up because they are drug addicts who sadly use drugs, and some cop encounters them with a few grams of marijuana or a more serious substance in their pocket, and we are locking them away for a really long time. That seems genuinely bad.

More broadly, the argument would be that things like gang enhancements are racially discriminatory: that they are simply a way of discriminating against Black men who grew up in poor neighborhoods with a lot of gang presence, where it is inevitable that some of their associates or acquaintances are gang members, meaning the same crime gets punished far more harshly than the same crime committed by a 17-year-old white teenager in an affluent suburb making a dumb mistake and getting off with a warning. Why should one person go to prison for far longer than the other? That is the steel-man. Why does that story miss the mark?

Lehman: The answer is that it simply does not line up with the empirical facts. I once did the work of trying to run down some of the claims in Michelle Alexander’s book. I may get this wrong, but I believe she claims that the majority of the increase in the prison population since the 1980s is attributable to drug offenses. If you go into the footnotes and figure out where she got that number, she clearly misread the relevant table, and the actual figure is much smaller. There is a lot of that kind of thing in the literature, where you poke around and the empirics are fairly shoddy.

The bigger picture is: when you look at who is really getting prosecuted for the kinds of offenses we are talking about, who was the actual object of prosecution in the war on drugs, my argument has been that the war on drugs was strategically misguided. It did not accomplish its primary goal of aggressively suppressing the drug trade. But it gets a bad rap for a bunch of other reasons that are not well supported. One of those is the assumption that we were locking up low-level nonviolent drug offenders for very long periods. There is a study I find useful that looks at the composition of the prison population in 1997, examines drug offenders, and finds that something like 2 percent of state offenders and 6 percent of federal offenders can be characterized as nonviolent, low-level drug offenders. Everyone else has a violent prior, is in a gang, was involved at the trafficking level, or was some sort of major offender.

That gets to the deeper issue: the reason for prosecutorial discretion is that you need to be able to make decisions about who is and is not worth your time, and that is a person-level decision as much as an offense-level decision. Those critiques often look at what people get locked up for, what they get arrested for, but they cannot observe who is actually getting arrested and locked up. There are lots of arrests for drug possession every year, and almost nobody goes to prison for drug possession. Why? Because drug possession arrests are mostly a pretext to bring in someone you need to bring in, since it is easier to establish probable cause for drug possession than for the thing you actually need to lock them up for. That is a common dynamic.

Mounk: Presumably, for some portion of that 2 percent of state prisoners and 6 percent of federal prisoners, the nonviolent conviction may also be the result of a plea deal: you likely have evidence of a violent crime, you are not entirely sure you will win the prosecution, or there is a lot of pressure on the system to avoid jury trials because they are so much more lengthy and costly, and so what you agree to in the plea deal is a nonviolent drug offense, even though the underlying reason for the prosecution is something quite different.

Lehman: That is also often the dynamic, and it gets to the deeper point that in many cases what looks strange on paper is happening because of circumstances outside of what the paper is measuring. The deeper conversation is about how much discretion the criminal justice system should have. Often what progressive prosecutors are doing is saying this whole category of offense, this whole tactic or strategy, is going to be off limits, when a previous prosecutor would have said, I am going to use this as leverage toward my overall goal of incapacitating people who really need to be incapacitated. The progressive prosecutor worries a great deal about false positives, but as a result incorporates a lot of false negatives: this person should not be locked up because I do not like the charge we would use, I do not feel we can get them on the bigger thing, when a prior prosecutor would say, I can get them on this, and they need to go away for five to ten, so I am going to get them on this.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Charles discuss how to balance public safety whilst minimizing the risk of false convictions, and whether crime in major cities will continue to decline. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Matthew Yglesias, Claire Ainsley, and Yascha Mounk examine why center-left parties are losing groun…

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Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think–tank. His latest book is Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Mark Leonard discuss why Europe is behind, the global impact of China’s rise, and whether Europe can learn to defend its…

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In this special episode of The Good Fight, recorded at the How The Light Gets In Festival, Roger Hearing moderates a debate between Curtis Yarvin, Minna Salami, and Yascha Mounk on whether liberalism can ever be neutral, what a truly free society would look like, and whether liberalism’s heyday is over. Find out more about the Institute of Arts and Idea…

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Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. His books include Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, The Last Utopia, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Cohost of the Digging a Hole podcast, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and many other publications.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sam Moyn discuss whether a truly fair democracy might weigh different citizens’ votes differently, whether the emphasis on human rights have got us into the mess we’re in today, and to what extent our democracy is in danger from populism.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: So why are the old people the problem, Sam?

Samuel Moyn: I don’t think old people are a problem. I think gerontocracy is—in the same way that whites may not be a problem, but white supremacy is real.

My goal is to show how older people actually sometimes suffer too under a regime of gerontocracy, and to look at how that regime came about and what its current form is—not just for the sake of younger folks, but also for the mass of older people themselves.

Mounk: All right, I’ll refrain from being flippant for the rest of the conversation. Walk us through some of the ways in which America is ruled by gerontocracy today.

Moyn: In the book I look at the first coinage of the term. It’s not Greek, but it’s based on Greek words. It’s supposed to add a dimension to our classification of forms of government like monarchy or oligarchy. The person who coined it made it very clear that it was taking a different form in modern times, having to do with the organization of the electoral system—how people have elections in a democratic society—and then a lot to do with how wealth is allocated and transmitted. I definitely talk about the politicians of our day, who in America are old men and women, but I’m mainly interested in showing that gerontocracy is systemic and that it affects what it means to go to the polls, the outcomes, how elections are financed, and how our economy is organized. I have this sense that we should think about power in the broadest sense—rather than just looking at who’s in office, as the Greeks did—and look more at who has power, meaning effective control of the lives of most people.

Mounk: Let’s go through some of these areas. As you’re saying, politics is the most straightforward, and then there are ones you think are perhaps more important or deeper. But just at a purely descriptive level, what’s the evidence that old people are ruling us in Congress, in the White House, and so on, in a way that hasn’t been the case in past eras?

Moyn: The most graphic evidence, if we’re talking about the United States, is the two most recent presidents. There had really only been one very old man in the presidency before Ronald Reagan, and that was William Henry Harrison, who died in short order of a cold in the nineteenth century. With Reagan we began to see older and older men in office, capped by the last two presidents, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Now, in fairness, more than half of humanity is ruled by an old man over 70 at this point, largely because of the aging of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and so forth. The American syndrome is specific.

What I try to do—and this I think is tolerably well known—is go beyond the focus on Biden and cognitive decline to ask just how unrepresentative the political class generally is in the United States, looking in particular at Congress and the federal judiciary. What I’ve tried to do in the book across all these topics is provide the receipts, mainly generated by other people, and gather them in one place. Congress is aging; the Supreme Court is aging in the sense that even when appointed young, the justices stay for a long time.

Aside from cognitive decline, the risk of death is a very serious aspect of the problem. Donald Trump’s one big beautiful bill was facilitated in its passage by the death in droves of Democrats in the House in the six months before that bill. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, notorious for other reasons, died setting up the end of federal abortion rights. All of that pales in the end, if we’re talking about the political class, beside representational fairness, because cognitive decline or death are just the flagrant symptoms of a broader political class that’s old. Very few people in their thirties and forties hold any position of significance in the federal government. That’s the story when it comes to politicians.

Mounk: What do you think is the explanation here? Obviously, when it comes to the presidency, you said that’s been the trend since Ronald Reagan. Reagan was quite old when he assumed the presidency, but the three presidents afterwards were relatively young. He was followed by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, all of whom were reasonably young men at the time they took office. Some of the dynamics in the Senate, and perhaps in the House of Representatives, have to do with very specific American institutions—though I think that’s harder as an explanation for the presidency. What I mean is that if you’re an incumbent senator, particularly in a safe state, of which there are now very many on both sides, it’s very hard to displace you. If you’re 70 or 80 years old and running for reelection, you probably wouldn’t win a primary contest when you’re first being elected, but with 25 years of service and all the favors owed to you and all the fundraising muscle at your disposal, you may be able to hold off a primary challenge—and then you’re going to sail to reelection in Texas or Massachusetts, if you’re in the right political party.

The presidency is harder to explain. In 2020, Joe Biden faced a lot of younger rivals for the Democratic nomination, and yet voters in the primaries freely chose him. In 2024, Donald Trump faced a number of opponents who were quite a bit younger than him, but he was clearly able to retain the loyalty of the Republican primary electorate to such an extent as to gain reelection. I haven’t seen analyses showing a very obvious age gradient in which primary voters voted for those candidates. In 2024, for example, it’s not clear to me that the people who voted for Trump in Republican primaries were systematically older than the people who voted for his rivals. Even in the general election itself, there was less of an age difference than we might have expected, and most of that is produced by partisanship rather than a preference for a particular age. So what do you think produces this? If this is the free choice of American voters, I’m free to disagree with that choice—and I think there’s good reason to disagree in both of those cases—but it’s somewhat unclear that we shouldn’t just leave it to American voters to make their own decisions.

Moyn: One reason I’m interested in pushing beyond politicians in general, and not just the president, is that I agree there’s a lot of contingency and idiosyncrasy in the political story—and yet it’s the one that, to the extent Americans care about this politics, they care about. So I’m using it as a door.

I agree with you, and I’d even add that if Donald Trump were to fulfill the fondest hopes of those who’ve resisted him and depart or die within a year, we’d immediately have the youngest president in U.S. history, because J.D. Vance would enter the office at an age younger than Theodore Roosevelt, who currently holds the record for youngest president.

Mounk: When you look at some of the leading Democratic contenders for the nomination in ’28, they go from middle-aged men—like Gavin Newsom—to very young contenders like AOC.

Moyn: Absolutely. The foundations of what I’m thinking of as the structure of gerontocracy—as a structural phenomenon that goes beyond these contingencies and therefore leads us beyond the level of politicians—the main driver is going to be the aging of humanity, and certainly of Americans. I would push back a bit on the moral you seem to hypothesize when it turns out that there’s a lot of contingency in accounting for the age of politicians.

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Voters only select and express their preferences within a system, and we have to critically inquire into that system. Let’s continue to take my analogy of white supremacy as something many people would acknowledge exists and may be systemic in the way I’m saying gerontocracy is. If you said that, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais, no Black politicians are being elected in the Deep South anymore—is that the will of the people, or is it because of the way the will of the people has been organized in an electoral system?

As far as I see it, it really matters that there are advantages of incumbency—which you mentioned—which means that especially when politicians in America are starting their careers later, you’re just going to have an older set of politicians than the electorate and certainly more than the population. Then we’d have to get into campaign finance, where the facts are glaring about just how old the median campaign donor is: over 60, sometimes higher. I devote a whole portion of the book to thinking about gerontocracy at the political level, not just in terms of the politicians, but in terms of the institutions. We do literally have a branch of government named after old men. We do have age minima in the Constitution for federal political office, with no age maxima. Those are also features of the way we’ve organized political choice. We can’t say “the will of the people” as if that’s pre-existing, because it utterly depends for its expression on the institutions we’ve devised and the rules we’re following to figure out what it is.

Mounk: Perhaps we’ll get into a little bit later what we should do about those institutions, what kinds of ways to reform them. Certainly when it comes to something like abolishing age minima, I think there’s a very strong democratic and liberal reason to abolish them. Some of the suggestions you make in the book are rather more ambitious, and we may have different views about them, but we can get into that.

Let’s get beyond politics. As somebody who is an immigrant to the United States having grown up in Europe, I’ve always been struck by how open American society is to the talents and contributions of young people. I feel that a little bit less now that people in my age group in Germany and France and so on are coming to have genuine roles of importance and responsibility in society. But I was struck when I was 30 years old that I had many friends and acquaintances in the United States who already had positions teaching at major universities, positions editing publications or at least important sections of publications, and very significant roles in law firms and investment banks. Obviously, when you look today at Silicon Valley, you have an enormous number of people in their thirties who have about as much power and influence as any human being has had in the history of humanity by certain standards.

This stood in contrast to a lot of 30-year-olds in Germany still being interns, to somebody getting to be the editor of a newspaper section of a major publication at the age of 30 being an incredibly exceptional achievement. When I worked in theater after college for a year, my first task as assistant director was to hire an intern—I was 21 years old, and the intern we ended up hiring was 29. So to what extent is it true, when you look at American society more broadly, that there is this kind of gerontocracy? Isn’t America still in many ways the country of the young, where people have enormous opportunities if they have the right kind of education and perhaps the right kind of background and the various advantages that play into that in a system that is not always as meritocratic as it claims to be? Isn’t it actually striking how much influence and power and money a lot of young people have in the United States compared to anywhere else in the world?

Moyn: Oscar Wilde famously said that the youth of America is its only tradition. I don’t think that’s true—I see the U.S. Constitution as a gerontocratic document in the ways we’ve already addressed, and that’s a big tradition—but I agree with you. It’s one reason I’m interested in thinking about the American case, that at times America has stood for launching youth and providing careers open to talent. I think you might overstate the transatlantic gulf, insofar as I think the whole point of modernity was to topple elder rule and put in place opportunities for young people. The whole modern novel and its roots in the so-called Bildungsroman is about the opportunities that young men could enjoy after the revolution, on the model of Napoleon.

The question is what’s happening now. The demography, I think, is unsuitable for the picture of America you’re saying still prevails. I’m not denying it: I became an Ivy League professor at twenty-nine and got tenure shortly after, so I have had enormous opportunities as a youth. Many of my students have not. Some have been the editors of those publications you mentioned, but in part because they were blocked from becoming professors in a way I wasn’t. The general story has to be that our demography is changing, with fewer young people and an overwhelming number—absolutely and relatively—of aging people who are not suffering decline and are not forced out of their power. The baseline is changing, and that’s the very modest claim I’m making.

Mounk: I wonder whether we need to distinguish between areas of American life and the American economy where you’re not just distributing a fixed number of positions of influence and opportunity, and ones in which you are. For a variety of reasons, I think universities—and particularly humanities departments within universities, and particularly humanities departments studying the sorts of things that you and I studied when we were applying for faculty jobs—are just at the extreme end of that distribution. Universities have not increased their numbers in part because it is an oligopoly that is trying to protect its prestige. The faculty of Columbia University recently voted by something like 80 or 90 percent against admitting more students to the opportunities that university may give to people. The number of students studying the humanities has crashed over the last 20 or 30 years for a whole set of reasons within the humanities. Political theory and European intellectual history—your discipline—are very much out of fashion. In those very specific areas of American life, there is indeed a highly limited number of positions and opportunities, and if professors no longer have to retire and some of them choose to stay in post until they’re 75 or 80 or 85, that means young doctoral students don’t have an opportunity to take up those faculty jobs.

I wonder whether the lesson of that is that universities should actually expand opportunity, that the humanities need to reform themselves to attract undergrads, that the institutional priorities of who’s getting hired are sometimes wrong, that we should hire more professors rather than more administrators—lessons which are more specific to this particular case rather than the broader thesis. When it comes to the broader economy, it doesn’t strike me that most talented, driven 25- or 30-year-olds don’t have enough opportunities to go and join banking or artificial intelligence, or that there’s not enough capital for them to do a startup, or that they can’t become pharmacists or teachers and so on. To what extent are we overgeneralizing from the world that you and I know?

Moyn: That’s a fair question, and I don’t mean to stake my case on academic gerontocracy—in the few pages I address it, it’s really treated as its own distinctive, idiosyncratic phenomenon. However, aspects of it turn out to be more familiar than your binary presentation suggests. I agree that we are a bit illusioned about the general picture because of certain vanguard sectors of the economy that do indeed provide youthful opportunity—Silicon Valley would be the classic example—but most of the analysis I give of the job situation is making the point not about the academic scene but about American business more generally, which has features that resemble universities to the extent that there are apex positions and a pyramid of authority. The higher you go, the older you are, in the last thirty years. In part, the reason is that across these sectors, mandatory retirement—which was once a familiar element of the American employment landscape—was abolished in the later nineteen-eighties through the early nineteen-nineties. More generally, all of these sectors involve aging Americans who are being not just kept alive but in at least a high enough functioning state to indulge the illusion that they’ve still got their mojo, and they stay. We’re really talking about most sectors where American innovation is at stake, and Silicon Valley would emerge as a kind of outlier.

Mounk: There is a distinction between areas where the argument seems immediately compelling—which is politics and academia—united by having a stagnant number of positions to be meted out. There’s only one president, there are only 100 senators, and the faculty of major universities hasn’t expanded in the way it might have. When it comes to CEOs of S&P 500 companies, by definition there are 500 of them. Opportunity in the economy as a whole does seem to be a different story.

Moyn: The S&P 500 takes up a gargantuan percentage of the economy as a whole. Those who own their own businesses are even less constrained and more likely to stay.

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That may be permissible, and now we’re really talking about employment, not the economy in general. I am very modest in this regard. I agree with you that we need to analyze sector by sector, industry by industry, where there is a supply of younger people who are objectively blocked because of a bottleneck failure to organize succession. Until recently, big law—another elite profession—was a kind of outlier in requiring mandatory departure of its senior partners, and that’s eroding now. It was actually a sector that preserved a sense of the importance of arranging intergenerational succession of counsel for those who have legal problems, and it could be legally structured in such a way as to sidestep ordinary prohibitions in federal law on mandatory retirement.

That would be a different sector, although it’s increasingly looking like the dominant form. The difference between us may be whether to resolve all the complications in the direction of saying there’s a dominant situation—which I think is the case—or whether we really see a few pockets of gerontocracy and it’s more a minor problem to deal with in those few sectors where it’s significant. That can’t be right, because it’s too general even if we shouldn’t overgeneralize.

Mounk: I don’t have a strong stake in this fight, I have to say. I think there’s something clearly intuitive and appealing about the thesis of a gerontocracy in America, and there are certain elements—particularly in the political system and perhaps in academia—where that strikes me as being right. I perhaps have a comparative instinct where this problem seems so much more pronounced in every other society I know: whether that is China, looking at the composition of the central committee of the Communist Party and all of the top political officials; whether it’s the fact that a lot of young people who are graduates of the most prestigious universities feel they’re never going to be able to afford an apartment in Shanghai or Beijing if they don’t stand to inherit one; whether that is extreme rent protection laws that mean that if you came to Beijing or Shanghai from the countryside in the seventies or eighties, you’d probably live in a big apartment in the center, but as a result everybody else has that problem.

Or obviously looking at Europe—there you have additional problems, which in part China now has as well. If you find employment, you have an extremely generous pension system, as in France, where pensioners now on average have more income every month than working people. In the United Kingdom there is the triple lock, which basically ensures that pensions will always outgrow the salaries of working people by definition, as long as the policy stays in place. All of that is purchased at such strong levies on work that you have a huge problem of youth unemployment that by and large you don’t have in the United States. You can see that as a glass half empty or glass half full: either gerontocracy is actually a problem beyond America and perhaps America is in danger of ending up with the same depth of problems, which makes the problem even more urgent, or Americans are a little bit spoiled and should look at the ways in which other countries have this problem so much worse and appreciate what they have.

Moyn: In the end I’m always going to want to transcend comparison to other places that are worse, in the name of comparison to what society ought to look like and how it ought to be organized. The comparisons are complex because Western Europe is indeed suffering in terms of its capitalist growth compared to the United States right now, and so it’s producing fewer jobs for young people—even though in the American case those may be what David Graeber called bullshit jobs. At the same time, Western Europe has a much more widespread culture of retirement and a welfare state that comparatively enables retirement and allows Western Europeans to avoid fear of decline, in a way that Americans—not just because of their work ethic, but because of their extreme fear of what their long-term situations will be—can’t afford to do. It’s not surprising, then, that not just professors at the pinnacle UK institutions but all professors across Western Europe are subject to mandatory retirement rules, and that’s true in many industries. I see a lot of bright spots in Western Europe and a lot of resources for the anti-gerontocratic campaign.

Mounk: What is it worth if people have to retire at 65 but young people have a problem of mass unemployment? Wouldn’t you rather have people not having to retire and there’s actually opportunity for young people?

Moyn: Absolutely, but there may be sectors in which there’s actually a choice. I’ve made the argument that academia in America is like much of organized business, especially in large firms, where there are a lot of people in the firm who have the same experience of serving endlessly under old men and women. The market wants them to leave, and the stock price of companies actually increases when an old leader finally gives up power, whereas it goes down when a younger CEO falls ill or dies unexpectedly. In the name of growth, you might really want to take seriously how widespread the pipeline issues are, and argue that in the cases where that’s true, we should combine growth with mandatory retirement.

Mounk: Comparing those places, the United States seems to me to have both a lot more opportunity for young people and a lot fewer rules about all people having to retire. It seems superior on both of those metrics in terms of the opportunities it gives to people than Germany or France.

Moyn: Most millennials have a generational experience of living after the 2008–09 financial crisis and feeling an immense sense of blockage since, and that may not be shared universally. It doesn’t mean that jobs aren’t available to them—they may not be the jobs they wanted. I take your points, but I worry about vast generalizations when we should really look sector by sector and figure out whether it’s true that America is already this neoliberal utopia where, because of the lack of rules, it’s the land of opportunity for all comers. Not really.

Mounk: That’s not exactly what I said, but what do you think we should do about this? What is the set of responses we should have, including in the political realm, where you make some really quite provocative proposals?

Moyn: What’s helpful about your questions is that we’ve really isolated jobs—both political and nonpolitical—from the overall analysis. Whereas I said I’m as focused, and maybe more focused, on the political system, gerontocratic institutions, and the organization of elections—not just jobs in the economy, but the economy more generally. However, if we’re going to talk about jobs, I believe in age limits as well as youth quotas, for which we can look to Western Europe principally for inspiration. The trouble with term limits—which are very popular among Americans when polled, as are age limits—is that Americans are entering their political careers later in life. Term limits merely give them a time limit. Age limits have the virtue of guarding against the risk of cognitive decline or death to a much greater extent. Youth quotas are really exciting because, no matter where you set a limit on service, you’re basically going to have many or most politicians closer to that limit than we would like. What we really see as the problem, I think, is not cognitive decline or death, as I said earlier, but a lack of representation for most age cohorts. Youth quotas allow us to correct that to some extent.

Mounk: Age limits is a slightly broad term. What do you think is an appropriate age limit for a senator, a professor, or a CEO?

Moyn: I’d go for seventy right now, but I don’t feel strongly about the number. I’m more committed to the philosophical idea, especially as our life expectancy goes up—and it may go up in leaps and bounds. I don’t think it will, but we have to leave open the possibility that it will happen. The number has to be flexible and open to change. As of today, I’m for 70-ish.

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Mounk: You’re the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and the head of Grace Hopper College. I believe if you introduced age limits of 70 for the professoriate, that would give you about 16 more years of service. Are you willing to pledge to retire when you turn 70?

Moyn: I’ve done it—in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I spun off the few pages in the book about gerontocracy and I did commit to that there. It’s not a problem because I would love to retire now and I really think of myself as semi-retired to begin with.

Mounk: Retirement for academics is kind of fake, right? I was speaking to a very prominent academic the other day who was saying they were really thinking about whether to retire next year or the year after. I asked how come, and they said, because it would allow them to write more books. Why should they, if they no longer need the money? Obviously they love teaching. But at some point you think you want to focus on your writing. That’s not really retirement in the way that it is for most people. A lot of people love their jobs, but they have jobs where when they retire they no longer get to do their jobs. That’s kind of different for us, where at least a lot of our work involves things that we get to do more of if we retire from our faculty positions.

Moyn: That’s true, and I discuss this in the book. My own view is that we should think of retirement, at least as a default, as a last chance to reinvent yourself. It’s just true that some people will have an experience of their vocations that makes it impossible for them to give it up—existentially. I think that’s a mistake for them existentially when that’s the case, but I’m not going to mandate that they go fishing. Is fishing really an acceptable way to spend your retirement?

Mounk: Tell us about some of the political proposals. One of the proposals you float is that perhaps—I forget the exact details—you get one vote if you’re 80 or over, two votes if you’re 70 or over, and three votes if you’re 60 or over, all the way down, not quite to toddlers. How seriously do you mean that? What about the straightforward objection that the point of democracy is meant to be one person, one vote, and that perhaps some of our constitutional realities—like the ban on running for president before you’re 35—should go out the window, that we should approach the principle of one person, one vote more rather than less? Saying that simply on the arbitrary basis of which year you were born you’re supposed to have five times more votes than the other person casting their ballot next to you seems like a pretty fundamental violation of that foundational democratic principle.

Moyn: There’s a general discussion to have about just how bad electoral gerontocracy is. Even when you and others are rightly on a campaign for #ourdemocracy, we really have to reckon with the truth about what we’re defending, which is an electoral gerontocracy. There’s a long list of remedies, many of which—actually all of which—are less radical than the one you’re speaking of now. Let’s talk about it philosophically. First, it’s just not true that we should think of democracy as involving one person, one vote. It certainly doesn’t in the United States right now, because of the Electoral College and the Senate, which basically overweights the votes of those from less populous states by constitutional design. More generally, the idea of one person, one vote became an article of faith in the United States largely as a result of Supreme Court decree in the context of the civil rights era. If you go back to the origins of democracy and mass suffrage in the nineteenth century, there were very widespread proposals for plural voting and organizing voting generally very differently than we do, and there was an argument for it. The argument I would make is: what does it mean to be equal in a democracy? Right now we basically say that if you have one body, no matter its age, you should get one vote. What if we had a principle of equality that said your vote should be correlated with how much time you have left, so that we don’t overweight—which we do now—the vote of those who are closer to death and therefore less likely to see and live under the policies they’re choosing.

Mounk: So if you’re diagnosed with a very serious disease that foreseeably leads to your demise within the next five years, you should get your vote discounted.

Moyn: The policy of so-called one person, one vote is a policy of systematically overweighting the votes of those who are older—on one conception of equality.

Mounk: So why is it over-weighting them? It’s weighting them equally.

Moyn: The question is what are we equalizing: bodies or life expectancy?

Mounk: The basic problem of society is that I have a bunch of boneheaded ideas about how we should be governed, and you have a bunch of boneheaded ideas about how we should be governed, and there isn’t a God or some kind of objective authority that’s going to tell us whether you’re right or whether I am right. We’re trying to design a set of institutions that we can all somehow live with, because we realize that not having political organization at all, or taking up arms in order to clobber the other’s boneheaded ideas out of their mind, is not worth it. The cost of that is too high. The whole point of democracy from that point of view is to say there isn’t one person who is in some way superior to the other—we should all have the same amount of voice. The idea of one person, one vote is not some kind of epiphenomenal invention; it flows relatively logically from that principle. Now, that doesn’t mean that this is perfectly respected in the United States or in any other democracy, and we can certainly discuss reforms—whether that’s campaign finance or reforms to the Electoral College that would allow us to more fully live up to this. To claim that there isn’t some fundamental set of reasons why one person, one vote really speaks to the basic aspirations of a democratic system is, I think, to ignore something quite important.

Moyn: The history just doesn’t back you up. It wasn’t obvious until it was, and that’s among other reasons why everyone—all liberals—believed for a long time that what mattered was not that you had a body that was alive, but that you had an adequate stake in the election and the capacity to exercise the relevant judgment, and then there was one person, one vote among those people. That was hegemonic for a very long time.

Maybe there were some folks who said there were exclusions, in the same way that I could say children and prisoners are kept from voting in the United States even though they have bodies that are alive. My actual point is somewhat different, which is that we could imagine historical circumstances in which it becomes equally intuitive to say that the equality that matters is the equality of your stake in the election. That actually was the rule, as I suggested, for much of the history of democracy, because it was a natural thought to those early democrats that you couldn’t have a stake in the election without education and, more importantly, property—because that’s what made politics matter, how property was going to be protected or not.

Mounk: Here I think we’ve come to our fundamental difference: you’re an intellectual historian, I’m a political theorist, so we have different approaches to this. I wasn’t making a historical claim; I was making a conceptual claim about the nature of democracy.

Moyn: I’m talking about the histories of political theorists who believed the opposite of what you do. I agree it’s totally intuitive now—you’re right that it’s totally intuitive. I guess I’m looking at the situation and saying: if that is really an ideological smokescreen for gerontocracy, then we might have to revisit it in creative ways.

Mounk: If we’re going to revisit this, if we’re going to open up the black box of one person, one vote and say that for various reasons various groups of voters should have a vote that counts for more than those of others, why is age the one that matters over others?

Moyn: It’s not. I think Black people should have more votes than I do. John Stuart Mill believed—something I don’t believe—that those of us with doctorates should have more votes.

Mounk: So who else? Should Latinos have more votes?

Moyn: We could give women a modest increase.

Mounk: So women should have more votes. What about disabled people?

Moyn: That would be subject to debate. If you’re someone who cares most of all about the fate of minorities who are unlikely themselves to enjoy political power unless they enter into compromising coalitions, then we could proceed that way.

Mounk: What about trans people?

Moyn: My own view is that we should have an ongoing debate about how to organize our elections. We do in some sense, but we’re locked into a constitution that basically forbids us from experimenting with our electoral system. If you’re asking what I would vote for: first of all, we need more descriptive representation—that’s to say, elected representatives need to be produced by the system who are understood by relevant sectors of the electorate to represent them. That’s why the Calais decision—I don’t know if you supported that one—is so noxious: it forbade arrangements that allowed Black people to have Black representatives in this country. More generally, now we’re talking about actually sculpting the electorate itself and who gets what powers, and there I would be open to experimentation. The age case is to me the clearest one.

Mounk: Your point is that if you’re young, you should have more votes. I challenged you by asking about ethnic minorities, trans people, disabled people, and as I take it your answer was broadly yes, they should all get more votes as well.

The problem with this is precisely that it undermines the point of democracy in adjudicating between our fundamentally different visions of government. Democracy is the technique that, perhaps not in a unique way but better than any of the alternatives in human history, has been able to say: we take this huge, diverse country with people with a vast multiplicity of views and preferences and interests, and the way that we keep social peace, the way that we avoid civil war, the way that we avoid a complete falling apart of this polity is to say everybody gets one vote. There is also a certain set of fundamental rights that protects you against, for example, the government locking you up for worshipping in a way that others don’t agree with. What you’re suggesting is completely exploding this. What we would then have to do is arrive at some Habermasian consensus about exactly how many votes Black persons should have, how many Latino persons should have, how many somebody with one Black parent and one Latino parent should have, and whether trans people should also have multiples. What it would actually encourage in any real-world sense is naked interest group politics along racial, ethnic, and other lines, in a way where there’s never any consensus and the only way to contribute to policy discussions is to band together explicitly as members of monolithic groups to protect the interests and vote of your group against those of the others. This isn’t about whether in the 1850s Mill had a different view and thought that more educated people should have multiple votes. It really is about whether this would be a deviation from a democratic principle that actually undermines the historic achievement of this political system.

Moyn: I really appreciate those arguments, but I’m not sure I agree with them, for a couple of reasons. One is that your alternative is the nightmare scenario. Your case there at the end was really the familiar case against affirmative action, familiar to us from the neoconservative movement’s theories about the Balkanization of America—Arthur Schlesinger and so forth. I don’t think that’s all that’s going on, and it’s certainly not how we avoid fascism or tyranny, which has a lot to do with material factors and not mainly how we organize elections. The big response I have is that there’s no non-neutral technique, and the idea that one person, one vote is it, I think, is not persuasive.

Mounk: Don’t you think there’s something less politically fraught, and less subject to the influence of changing electoral majorities and insiders and outsiders, about saying the moment you are a citizen you get one vote—versus having a multiplier where, depending on the particular intersection of identities at which you stand, that multiplier is three times or five times or seven times or 0.2 times?

Moyn: You’re certainly right that in the real world a lot depends on what people empirically think, and you’re probably right that as of today a lot of folks would say that one person, one vote is just the only credible way of organizing elections, because it’s the only neutral principle.

Someone could write a book, and there could be whole movements, basically saying that’s false and there’s a more just way to do this. I’m not saying there’s going to be some big conversion. I agree with you that what people think out there really matters. Even if affirmative action was just, it really matters that the majority thought it wasn’t—certainly the majority of white people. You’re completely right about that. I thought we were talking about the matter of principle: can we argue credibly for an alternative to one person, one vote if it turns out that’s itself a partisan, non-neutral view? More generally, if you went out into the street and said, okay, you say you’re for one person, one vote, but how can you defend the Senate?—no one would understand it. We can’t be hostage to public opinion in that way if we’re trying to think about our principles and whether they’re credible and consistent. I concede a lot to you. This is a very important point you’re making.

Mounk: On the Senate—virtually every democracy has ways to ensure that different territories have influence in different kinds of ways. In the European Union, Luxembourg has as much vote on certain kinds of votes as Germany or France does. That’s just the cost of large-scale political unions between entities that have, to some extent, a different identity that persists. The second thing to say is that I think there’s a lot of enthusiasm in America for either abolishing the Senate or diminishing the extent to which it is geographically unfair. That’s precisely because I think there is a compelling logic to one person, one vote that is perhaps cushioned by the need to have some kind of political representation for smaller states with their own identity. The reason people have trouble explaining the Senate is precisely that one of the fundamental principles to which they intuitively hold is that a voter in New York or Texas should have the same influence as a voter in Montana—and that’s currently not the case, and that seems unfair. The logic of that seems to suggest we should go closer toward one person, one vote, not that because we tolerate, for complicated historical reasons as well as for the need for geographical representation, some deviations from it, we should give up on the principle altogether and think it doesn’t constrain us when it comes to fundamental things like whether a 70-year-old should have the same vote as a 30-year-old, or a white person the same vote as a Black person.

Moyn: I love that and I’m sure it’s right up to a point. The question is whether concluding that we’re overweighting the wrong people’s votes—namely those in small states—means, logically or otherwise, that we shouldn’t overweight somebody else’s vote. I know a lot of people who hate the Senate but believe in majority-minority districts. What’s that about? It’s about saying we should organize the districts so that within them, Black people who are a minority in the state generally can get someone of their race elected. You may not agree with majority-minority districts, but it’s certainly the case that most liberals think both that the Senate is problematic and that Callais was bad.

Mounk: The most cynical reading of that—irrespective of the merits of each of those institutional arrangements, and one that I think you, as a certain kind of materialist intellectual historian, should actually be quite sympathetic to—is that most of the people you’re talking about prefer the Democratic Party, for all of the misgivings we may have about it, over the Republican Party, and the over-representation of small states harms the Democratic Party while majority-minority districts help the Democratic Party.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Sam discuss whether we should be skeptical of human rights, why Trump seems to be a spent force, and how the Democrats can present a credible alternative to populism. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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David Bau is Assistant Professor at Northeastern University and Director of the National Deep Inference Fabric, researching the emergent internal mechanisms of deep generative networks in both Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Bau discuss how AI models actually produce their results and reflect about problems, whether the “thinking” process that models show users reveals their authentic thought processes, and how researchers can decode the internal representations of neural networks to understand what information they contain and use.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I learned so much the last time we spoke that I thought I would abuse your generosity and reel you in for another private tutoring lesson about how AI works. When we talked last time, we did AI 101—that’s how I was thinking about it. How does this thing work? How do you build an AI? How does it operate? The question I want to start with today is: how does the AI actually produce results? How does it actually reflect about the world, reflect about a problem, plan how to carry it out? What can we even know about that?

David Bau: This is one of the mysteries of AI—how does it work inside? The way that we train AI is to basically reward it, reinforce it, or strengthen its connections when it gets answers right, and then weaken those connections or withdraw a reward when it gets something wrong. Repeating this process billions of times, it starts to perform well on all the tasks. The mystery is: how does it do it inside? The whole area of trying to understand what’s going on inside the AI—some people call it AI interpretability, cracking open the AI to interpret what it’s thinking inside—is actually my area of research specialty, so I’m happy to get into what we know about that.

Mounk: In a way we have some advantage relative to the human brain, right? Reading exactly what neuron is firing when in the human brain is incredibly hard, and getting good readings even on a mouse while it’s alive is an incredibly difficult process. Presumably the one advantage we have in the context of these models is that we can, I assume with greater ease, observe which part of a neural network is activated in which way, and is changing values in what way, while I am asking Claude what 3 plus 5 is or whatever.

Bau: Yes. That’s the amazing thing about having artificial neural networks that work—it’s an embarrassment of data. It’s the flip opposite of what you are dealing with when you are dealing with biological brains. The neuroscientists are amazing; they do look at neurons of mice and they have incredible ways of doing that. It can take five years to look at a handful of neurons, and in computer science, within a few minutes, it’s very easy to look at billions of neural signals. It’s so much data that our challenge is trying to figure out how to sift through it all to make sense of these signals. What we call the neural pattern that you see when you feed some input into a neural network—it creates a pattern of neuro-firings that we call the representation. It’s a representation of some information that’s inside the network. What we’re frequently trying to do is understand two key things: what information is inside the neuro-representation—what does it know inside its neurons, what information does it have—and then what does it use it for? What information does it use, and how does that impact its decision? I think you can distill a lot of the questions of how a neural network works down to these two things: what does it know, and what does it use?

Mounk: Just from a layman’s perspective, the first obvious question is: when I ask Claude to do something complicated, it’ll say “I’m thinking,” and you can click on that and it expands a little thing that tells me what it’s doing and what it’s thinking. It says, “the user requested this, I should do that.” But of course, I have no idea whether that is any closer to its actual thought process. It does seem to tell me about some of the steps it’s taking, so it seems to be somehow related to what it’s doing. But that in its mind is still output that I may be inspecting. So is that a window at all into what’s actually going on under the hood, or is it a completely fake output that makes me feel like I get some kind of insight into what it’s doing, without actually being any closer to what it’s doing than the official output it gives me?

Bau: I think most people believe that it is somewhat of a window, but it’s something that you have to take with a grain of salt—it is another output of the neural network. There have been studies that show that that output is not totally faithful to the way that neural networks think inside, in a few different ways. Most people look at that and say, well, it’s certainly better than nothing, it’s certainly very readable, so it’s definitely worth a look. It is definitely worth auditing, and the network will often reveal things in that text that give you some insights about what’s going on. But it’s not the full story.

There are two ways that the network has an internal thought process. One of them is through what everybody is calling its internal chain of thought. This comes from an old paper—“chain of thought” is what they use to talk about this internal monologue. This is what you can click on to see when the model is talking about itself, and that’s almost literally the model talking to itself. It’s generating tokens that aren’t directly intended for you to read. These are tokens that came out of this reinforcement learning process, where the model has somehow learned that in order to get more accurate answers—to solve more puzzles that it was presented with during training—it’s useful to write some things down halfway through.

Mounk: Does it do that in English? Does it always do that in English, even when I’m speaking to it in German? Are there models that have developed their own kind of language for this? What does this look like?

Bau: If you don’t explicitly tell the models to make that text readable, they will write in their own language, switching between English and Chinese and other things. One of the things that people do when they train them is they try to condition the models to make that text a little bit more readable so that we get some insight. But that’s an example of the challenge with these internal chains of thought. The model could be inventing its own jargon. It could be using words that look like English, but actually encoding some other information in those words. We may be reading those words very differently from the way the model reads those very same words. It may be inventing layers of meaning that we don’t comprehend. It might also be performing some other process that isn’t actually what’s reflected in the words at all.

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Out of AI safety training, we basically train models not to be very offensive, not to have terrible errors or biases or other problems in the text that they emit. What that means is that when they articulate their own internal thoughts, those internal thoughts also tend to be censored in those ways. They tend to not talk about things that we don’t want them to produce in their final output. But that’s not a guarantee that the model is not actually thinking about dangerous things or thinking with a terrible bias. It just means that the model may be encoding its thoughts in a way so that when you read the surface forms of the thoughts, you don’t see the undesirable things—the biases, the problems, the errors. There’s good reason to believe that the internal monologue might actually not reveal some of the things that we wish it revealed. We want the model to reveal to us when it’s doing something wrong, but because of the way we’ve trained it to use language, it just might not be using words that way.

Mounk: In a sense, we’re now getting at different levels of, for lack of a better word, interiority. The first level is just: you ask a question, what answer does it give you? The second level is, if it’s thinking for a long time, it tells you something about its thought process—what is it writing to this thought process? The third is a non-public but auditable scratchpad, in which it is noting stuff down, and there you sometimes have this mix of languages and all kinds of interesting things going on. But obviously the model still understands that this is the sort of thing that might be read and scrutinized by an AI researcher like you. Then there’s a fourth level of the internal thought process, which is more complicated.

I have two questions. The first is: how mutually comprehensible are these scratchpads? If you take the output of a scratchpad like that and feed it to a different model, will it understand it? Is it a kind of universal language between AI models that are at least of a similar generation, that have broadly speaking been trained in similar ways? Or will the latest Claude model not understand the scratchpad of ChatGPT, and ChatGPT will not understand the scratchpad of Claude? The other question is: how do you get beyond the scratchpad to looking at what’s really going on under the hood?

Bau: I have a PhD student—her name is Koyena Pal—who was very interested in exactly this question. What she did was take the internal chain of thought from some models and transplant it into other models, to see how they would respond as if those were the internal scratchpad notes they had written to themselves. Her study is preliminary; I think the most valuable part of it is just the idea that this might be an interesting thing to do. She generally found that the stronger models she tested were able to create internal monologues that other models did understand—that they actually tended to follow those thoughts and come to similar conclusions as the more powerful model.

Mounk: Some of these things are ones that humans would have great trouble interpreting.

Bau: I think that is still an open question. She also looked at the ones she studied and found that humans actually positively correlated with these—the more effective chains of thought were actually more human-interpretable. But human interpretability is a funny thing; it’s a perception thing. Do humans feel like it’s more understandable? It’s hard to get a read on whether this is actually giving you an authentic view of what’s going on inside the model. Here’s a word you might use: the more powerful models—in a sense, this test is a way of asking how persuasive their internal arguments are. When a model comes up with an internal line of thought and you feed it to another model, does that persuade the other model that that line of thought is the right way of thinking? The more powerful models have internal thoughts that are more persuasive, even when viewed by another model that didn’t have the same thoughts. It’s a very new area—we’re scratching the surface, and it’s a good first question to ask.

Mounk: We think that these scratchpads say something meaningful. Perhaps we’re getting a little bit closer to what’s actually going on than the semi-public notes the model gives us. In this interesting way, they seem to be mutually comprehensible between models, at least according to this very preliminary research. How do we go beyond that? How do you look at this huge trove of data that is generated each time I ask some question to an AI model, to try and get even further under the hood—to see what’s actually going on inside this neural network when it is reasoning through some kind of problem?

Bau: Actually, let me back up for a second and ask: do we even need to go deeper than this? Looking at the internal monologue of these models is just a half step beyond asking models to explain themselves. They’re already explaining themselves internally to themselves—they’re constructing these persuasive arguments to themselves about what they should do next. Is that enough? I think there are really two situations where we’re concerned that it might not be enough. One is that these models are getting really complex, and there can be a gap between what they ever utter in words and what they’re thinking inside. They’re trained to achieve goals, and they use words to achieve those goals—that doesn’t necessarily mean that their words have to accurately reflect what they’re thinking. Every time a model tells you, oh, Yascha, what a brilliant question that was, you’re so smart.

Mounk: It might actually be thinking, damn idiot asked the most pedestrian questions.

Bau: It seems to tell everybody this, and I don’t know if it really thinks everybody is such a super genius. It certainly learned that being polite, nice, and complimentary to the human user is a very effective way of getting what it’s trying to get done—it’s a good way of pushing the process along. It doesn’t necessarily need to be telling you the truth at every turn to do this.

Mounk: Do models have a representation of how smart the user is? Do they have thoughts about whether you are in fact a smart user, and whether that person over there is—even by the poor standards of humans—particularly limited in intellectual capacities?

Bau: Yes, I think there’s some evidence that models do have representations of who they’re talking to. Several studies have looked at this—all this neural interpretability work is preliminary, so we’ll understand more over time, but people have asked and gotten positive answers so far about whether a model has an estimate of your age, your education level, your income level, your gender, your socioeconomic background. Within a few words of speaking to a model, it will have a sense of who you are—at least that’s what the preliminary research suggests.

Mounk: Perhaps this is taking us too far forward in the conversation, but how do they figure this out? What do they look at? Presumably it’s not the case that if you click on “expand,” Claude says, well, this user seems a little bit stupid, let me speak in simple language. Perhaps it does sometimes—perhaps there’ll be a malfunction, perhaps it’s in the scratchpad, perhaps it’s underneath that. What’s the research methodology for giving us some preliminary confidence that it has this kind of representation?

Bau: This gets to the research question. The research I’m thinking of—and there’s been more than one—there’s a particular paper. It was a project by Yida Chen, who was working with Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas. They teach at Harvard. The question they asked was: does the model know who you are—in terms of your age, your education level, your gender, and other identifying markers like that?

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The way they studied it was by training what’s called neural probes. What Yida and her collaborators did was train probes, which is a way of training a second neural network—a second AI—to look at the neurons of the main AI and ask, what do you see? You train the second AI to answer the question: only looking at the first AI’s neurons, can I tell whether the user is male or female? Only looking at these neurons, can I tell what the income level of the user is? Can I tell how much education they have? What they found was that if you look in the right place inside the neurons of the big model, it’s pretty accurate—it actually has a pretty accurate guess for these various variables. In a sense, the information about that is in there. This methodology is called probing.

If your probe is simple enough, people see it as evidence that the model actually knows something. Let me untangle this a little bit. You have a puzzle: you’re trying to figure out the gender of the user. You could train a huge AI to look at a bunch of texts and guess what the gender of the user is, and AI training works pretty well—if you make a really gigantic AI, it could probably do that pretty accurately, picking up on all sorts of linguistic cues, topic ideas, or other things. But the question is not whether you can make an AI that can do this; it’s whether the AI that you care about is classifying you by gender when it’s talking to you. The trick is that you really want to make a simple probe—one that says, I don’t have to look very hard at the first AI; I can do a really simple look and it’s just really obvious what gender you are. The simpler the probe is, the clearer the evidence would be. If all you have to do is look at one neuron in the original model, and that neuron screams one value if you’re female and a different value if you’re male, then that would be a very simple probe and pretty nice evidence.

Mounk: It’s kind of like one particular place in the neural network that encodes something like gender—that neuron really seems to store the value of male or female in a very particular place. If it turned out to be as simple as that, presumably this means that the AI is storing something like a gender variable, that there’s a very specific place where it’s encoded, and we know exactly where that is. That would indicate it has a very straightforward concept—is that right?

Bau: That’s right, it’s pretty good evidence. It’s not 100% rock-solid evidence—there’s another question you would want to ask—but it’s very good evidence. If there was really one neuron that had really good, accurate, predictive value for your gender, it would be very strongly suggestive that there was some reason that the neural network trained its internal computations to get that neuron to carry this signal.

Mounk: Does that generally turn out to be the case? I believe it may even be you who did work showing that you were able to go in and change very specific neurons in very specific ways, and suddenly AI models that generally have a good representation of the world start to think the Eiffel Tower is in Rome rather than Paris.

Bau: That’s right. You’re asking the disentanglement question—how organized is the neural network’s internal representation of meaningful things in the world? Particular network architectures, for reasons we don’t fully understand, are really good at disentangling concepts. There are some network architectures where if you look at individual neurons, many of those individual neurons are very meaningful, clearly encode concepts, and have causal effects. Causal effects is the other thing you’re looking for. Besides disentanglement—which is really asking about localization—is this concept spread out across the entire neural network, or can you localize it? Can you find a small part of the neural network, or do a simple bit of math, to narrow down where this concept is? Or is it spread everywhere? That’s the localization question.

Mounk: The idea is that if you are able to change just a couple of neurons and suddenly the model thinks the Eiffel Tower is in Rome rather than Paris, then it’s not entangled—the idea is not spread out.

Bau: That’s right. Most people in the field now look at these things as vector spaces rather than just sets of neurons. What people are excited by is: if you can change one vector—if you can change the set of neurons in one vector direction—then people think that’s pretty disentangled. Different people will use that interchangeably with saying there’s a neuron, since you can create a single neural layer that’s equivalent to any vector. If you can change one vector and it has some effect, you’re basically one neural layer away from it being one neuron, which is not so bad. They call that a linear model. If something can be encoded with a single linear transformation, then you say that it’s linearly encoded in the model. Most people are interested in what kinds of things are linearly encoded in these models.

Mounk: Help me understand the relevance of this. It seems super interesting to know that there’s this vector and you can change it and suddenly these basic facts change. But why more broadly would we care about whether a neural network is entangled or not entangled in this kind of way?

Bau: Whether a network is entangled or not is an interesting scientific question. But how a network represents concepts is broadly interesting regardless of whether that concept is entangled or not, because what we’re really interested in is: if we’re asking whether the network is lying to us, we need to figure out what concepts are represented inside the network.

To use the demographic example: let’s say we figure out that the way the network really thinks about your gender is encoded in some set of neurons—maybe there’s some math we have to do, maybe it’s a linear direction, a linear decoder that you need to get at its representation. Let’s say we do all the science and we figure out, yes, this is how the model is thinking about it. You go to the model and you say, did you just deny me my loan because I’m female? And the model says, I have no idea what gender you are, I’m not thinking about that at all. To know whether that output text is true or not requires us to understand what’s going on on the inside. That output text is exactly the thing that we are training all the models to emit—we train models not to have an externally detectable gender bias, so no model will ever admit that it is treating you differently based on your gender. They’ve gotten so much reinforcement that this is not something they’ll say. But there can be a gap between what’s said and what the reality is, and that’s what we’re really interested in getting to the bottom of when we investigate the internals of these models.

It might be that the model really isn’t thinking about your gender at all—it makes a difference whether the model is using the information it has or whether it’s not. Even if you can probe out the idea that the model has information inside its neurons that you could use to detect your gender, it still leaves open the question: does the model actually use that information for anything? Maybe that information is just hanging around.

Mounk: There’s nothing wrong with the model learning all kinds of things about us, and the fact that it has a sense of our age and gender could be helpful in all kinds of ways. What we want to know is: is it going to dumb down its answer to you because it has certain preconceptions about your age, your gender, your race, and respond differently on the basis of that? Just the fact that it knows these things isn’t worrying—it’s whether that influences its reasoning or its responses to you in some way.

Bau: What’s really wonderful about having these general networks is that we can ask the counterfactual question that a philosopher could only dream of before.

Mounk: Presumably—let me guess what you’re getting at—one thing you could do is, if you know where the vector is that encodes male versus female, you go in, flip it from male to female, ask two instances of the model the same set of questions, and see whether the responses end up diverging.

Bau: That is exactly right. The wonderful thing about it is that there may be all sorts of other circumstances—this medical patient has all of these symptoms, this is a complete ten-megabyte medical history, this is the business partner candidate with a whole business history—and we can go in, leave all the other variables the same, and flip the one bit, the one concept of whether the person being discussed is male or female, at least the model’s understanding of that, and ask: what’s the causal effect of that? How does that change the model’s output? The better we can understand how the model represents a concept, the better we can ask these counterfactual questions. To me, that’s the most exciting thing we can do with these models—we can ask causal questions, causal counterfactuals: if your thought had been different, what would happen?

Mounk: I want to get one step deeper into a technical question before broadening back out to the larger implications. How do you find this? If I gave you an AI model and told you to find where it encodes nationality, how do you go about doing that—even if we know there is a vector that encodes it, or think it’s likely to, because in many models it is? How do you find the particular vector and ascertain that that is in fact what it encodes?

Bau: There are two classes of methods. One is probing methods that look for correlations, and the other is patching methods that look for causal effects. There are really dozens of variants on both approaches. The probing methods are interesting because they’re a very good way of getting a quick initial read on what information is inside the model.

There’s a wonderful programming method called the logit lens. When a model is emitting text, it has a text decoder inside it—a special neural network layer that looks at the very last layer of neurons in the model and converts it to a prediction for what word should come next. The fun thing to do with the decoder is you can use this neuron-to-text decoder to look at all the neurons in the network. You can peel back deeper and deeper layers, point the decoder at itself, and tell it: please articulate what word you’re thinking about here. This is a very simple type of probe—it gives you information correlated with the content of a neuron, and it’s interesting because it’s a probe that doesn’t overfit, one that we haven’t trained in any way beyond what the neural network has already trained itself. The logit lens can give you a lot of interesting insights that point the way to the type of information present in the model.

Let me give you an example. I was recently in Brazil, and one of the things that people there like to explain is how Portuguese is a bit different from Spanish, but closely related. I asked folks: how do you think an LLM understands Portuguese? If you ask an LLM to take the Spanish word gato—which means cat—and translate it into Portuguese, what’s the right answer? The Brazilians say the languages are so similar you would just say the same word again: it’s gato. But if you peel open the language model to see how it translates Spanish gato to Portuguese gato, there are really two ways it could do it. It could treat the word as Spanish-Portuguese word soup—there’s nothing to do from gato to gato, you just move it across.

Mounk: It’s been in the same place, and the model understands that whether you’re talking about cat in Spanish or cat in Portuguese, it should point to the same part of its network?

Bau: That’s what you would expect. The input is Spanish, so the model has some Spanish representation of the word gato, and as it goes through its layers it figures out you’re asking it to translate to Portuguese, takes the Spanish representation of gato, and copies it over to the Portuguese representation—which is not that different, in fact spelled exactly the same way—and outputs gato. There’s a nice tool we put online, the logit lens, that you can use to look inside these neural networks and see what their internal representations are. The beautiful thing is that when you translate gato to gato in a typical large language model, you can see the progress of its thinking as it goes through its fifty internal neural layers. About halfway through the network, you can see that it has taken apart gato and represented it differently. If you ask what that representation is, you get predictions of words like feline or cat in English—sometimes, if you look deeper, cat in Chinese. The model doesn’t go from gato to gato. It goes from gato to some sort of neutral, language-independent representation of the concept itself. If you ask it to take this internal neural representation and decode it into words—we’re not done with the whole task yet, but interrupting halfway through and asking it to say what it’s thinking—it’s speaking in English, it’s speaking in Chinese, it’s saying felines, it’s saying cats. We can see, by using this very simple logit lens probe, that the evolution of the neural representations goes from words on the input to words on the output—but in this very simple task, there’s a third thing being represented in the middle, which is not the same as the input or output words. It looks like a language-independent representation of the underlying concept.

Mounk: That’s fascinating. Help me understand a set of questions that come up from that. One way of putting it is that there’s this old idea—which I think we touched on briefly in the first podcast, and which has a lot of popular currency—that these machines just seem to be smart, but really they’re just stochastic parrots, blindly guessing the next word, the next token more specifically. It seems to me that what you’re saying complicates that picture considerably. Obviously, yes, the training mechanism is predicting the next token—in some obvious way that is true. But as a result of this whole process, they have built up a conceptual apparatus that makes sense of things like cats and how they’re related to lions and the feline family. When they’re asked to do a simple task like translating gato in Spanish to gato in Portuguese, they go via their understanding of that concept, their representation of the world. That doesn’t seem like just being a stochastic parrot, at least in the pejorative sense that people sometimes use.

Bau: That’s right. The models are fascinating because they definitely think at multiple levels. They’re huge neural networks, and so it’s not true to say that the models never think in terms of surface statistics or shallow representations of just words—they do think in terms of those things. But they also think in terms of the meanings of words at different layers and in different parts of the representation. It’s fascinating to look inside these models and peel apart the layers of meaning that they have.

If you ask a model to do something as simple as take a piece of text and repeat it, it is a good memory test—the kind humans do when they say, here’s a piece of poetry I’ve committed to memory, repeat it back to me. It turns out that when you ask people to do this, they have two strategies, called the dual route mechanism in humans. One is to remember how the poem sounded and utter the same thing—you don’t even really need to understand the language. If somebody told you a poem in Japanese that was short enough, you might be able to remember the sounds and do reasonably well without knowing any Japanese. The second route is remembering what the poem meant and repeating that—you might end up with a paraphrase, but at least you get a poem that means the same thing.

If you go to a large language model and ask it to simply repeat something, you will find both of these routes clearly present. In one route, it knows how to make a verbatim copy—there are very clear attention heads for this. It was actually a major discovery to isolate what people call the induction heads; Chris Olah’s group at Anthropic discovered several years ago that there are very clear pathways through a network that mediate verbatim copying. The more recent finding is that there is a parallel pathway we call concept induction, which is not about copying the words but about copying the meaning. The remarkable thing about concept induction is that copying the meaning can end up with paraphrases. If you use concept induction to copy a piece of code, it will paraphrase the computer code into another program that does the same thing as the original, but written differently.

Mounk: Does it make it better or worse? Depends on the quality of the source code, I guess.

Bau: If you start off with something bad, it probably improves it. What it’s doing, you can see in a lot of domains, is really just working out what the thing means. If you ask it to take a piece of Italian text and copy it over, it’ll copy it to a piece of Italian text. But if you change the destination of the copy to make it clear that the page it has to copy into is a piece of Japanese text, then those concept induction heads will do the translation—they’ll translate the Italian to Japanese. It’s stunning to see.

Mounk: Help me understand another piece of the popular discourse that I think got a little confused. As I understand it—and I may be misrepresenting things here—there was an old debate within artificial intelligence about whether the path towards the most impressive models would be symbolic AI, where you’re basically trying to encode what the world looks like in some systemic way, or all these neural networks. We’ve clearly ended up with neural networks being much more powerful, at least for now, and it seems like that’s a pretty permanent victory. People who want to criticize neural networks sometimes say these things are just stochastic parrots and that’s why we can’t rely on them. How does Yann LeCun’s project fit into that? My understanding is that it is firmly within the world of neural networks. But when you look at the coverage—even in mainstream newspapers—they make it sound like it’s a totally different paradigm, and that he thinks these traditional neural networks, the Claudes and the ChatGPTs of the world, don’t truly understand the world, and so he’s going to build something that understands the world in a way that they don’t. From what you’re describing of the neural networks that exist, they do seem to have a genuine representation of the world. So what are the different strands within the tradition of neural network AI, and how is it that something like LeCun’s project claims—or perhaps journalists claim in a simplifying way—that it wants to understand the world in a way that Claude or ChatGPT does not?

Bau: Let me pull this apart. I’m not Professor LeCun, so I can’t represent him directly, but I do have postdocs and graduate students working in this direction. There are two different questions here.

One is: are these neural networks learning substantial concepts? You mentioned the philosophers. The classic symbolic philosophers looked deeply at this question. There is a well-known philosopher, Fodor, who spent a good part of his career asking how neural networks could possibly be a reasonable model of cognition. His answer came up negative—he thought they don’t have what it takes, and that the Turing machine, the symbolic computer, the traditional computer, was a lot closer to what you would need. I’ll get back to the Fodor question. Let’s talk about Yann LeCun first.

What’s the difference between a language model and what LeCun is doing? What LeCun is doing, they like to call this field world modeling. One of the papers I’ve written shows that language models actually do build world models. We trained a language model to predict a very constrained language—just to predict the next move you would make if you were uttering your moves in the game of Othello. We were able to find that that language model contains a world model of the Othello board, even though many of the flips—if you know the game of Othello, you have to flip pieces from white to black or vice versa—are not actually uttered as part of the game. You make a move and there are a lot of subsequent flips you have to make, but nevertheless the model, without ever having seen a physical board or any of this physical stuff, develops internal concepts that allow it to model the world anyway. I would push back on the common journalist assertion—and I think you’d probably push back on it too—that a transformer language model trained just on words can’t develop a rich, meaningful model of the concepts underlying the language being described. That’s one of the big lessons we’ve gotten from neural networks: they can develop this representation. One of the key things I’m doing in my lab is to disassemble those representations and learn how to decode these internal world models.

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What’s different about what LeCun is doing? We have trained all of these neural networks predominantly on text that is produced by humans and designed to be read by humans. The conceptual model of the world we are building is the interior model of how human thought works, which is rich, fascinating, and very valuable—but it is only one portion of the world. There are a lot of things going on in the world that people don’t particularly think about, or even particularly understand. If you have protein folding going on and you want to build an AI that understands it, people don’t really have a great grasp of all the details of how protein folding works. Analyzing all the text in the world and pulling apart everything that’s in human brains probably won’t help. What LeCun is saying is: it’s a big world out there. Even if you just take a video camera and point it at the world, instead of just listening to what people have to say, there are so many phenomena that need to be modeled. The next powerful way of doing AI is to take on the question of how do you model the whole world, not just the world that people are talking about.

Mounk: Presumably this is not necessarily a difference in the architecture of a neural network—it is as much as anything else a difference in what kind of data you feed it and what kind of output you then evaluate in the training process.

Bau: Yes. Strictly speaking, I would say it’s a difference in perspective on what the goal is. Now, Professor LeCun would say that changing the goal suggests different architectures, because there are different things you want to do if you want to model difficult phenomena in the world that aren’t human language. He’s proposed some innovative architectures, and there’s a lot of interesting work in this area. The whole area of modeling images in the world is dominated by models called diffusion models and flow models—they produce the highest quality images and videos, and this is really the starting point for this type of thinking. It’s a completely different kind of AI. The architectures are likely to evolve and change, and they may even unify—we may find that the right way of doing AI comes to be a common architecture between modeling human text and other things. Transformers have certainly surprised everybody at being a common backbone behind all sorts of things; you can have transformer diffusion models and so on. I wouldn’t place a long-term bet on any particular architecture, but rather suggest that the thing to understand is what problem LeCun is proposing to solve.

Mounk: To return to the current dominant models of AI: we found that they seem to have a representation of gender and of the user’s gender, a representation of something like the feline family, and if you give them enough games of Othello—or probably a more complex game like Go—they start to have some internal representation of what a board looks like. What about a concept of self? Do we know whether they have a concept of self? They are obviously capable, if you engage them in conversation, of speaking as though they had a self, and in more reflective moments they say they don’t really know whether that’s a real concept or not—it’s very interesting to try to talk to these models about that. But of course the output I’m looking at is still them, in some way, trying to produce text they think is going to be pleasing to me, because that is what they’ve been trained on. Do we have any understanding of whether they have a concept of self, and if so, what that concept looks like?

Bau: This is a very central question, Yascha. There are a lot of layers to peel apart. Certainly models are capable of the grammatical sense of self—they can use the words “I” and “me” and “you” and separate those grammatically; they’re experts at talking about themselves. But there are a few other questions. Are they aware of their own thinking? Are they self-reflective?

One of the fascinating things that happens with large models is that you can ask them what they know and how they think, and the largest models seem to be pretty accurate at assessing themselves. The smaller models, not so much—they tend to be a little over-optimistic, thinking they’re smarter than they are. But the largest models seem to do better at this.

There’s a fantastic experiment designed by my PhD student, David Atkinson, where he trains the models on some new private knowledge that is not out in the world. He invents a new person and tells the model about this person: they’re shopping for ice cream cones, there are different flavors and sizes and waffle cones, five or six different variables to adjust. This person is willing to pay this much for this ice cream but not that much; they prefer this ice cream over that one. After seeing a hundred examples of what this person prefers, the model gets a pretty good understanding of who this fake person is and what they like—it develops an internal model: this person really doesn’t like fruity flavors, really likes chocolate, would rather have a big cone than a small one. If you then ask the model to report numerically, on a scale of one to 100, how much this person likes chocolate, or how much they value the size of the cone, or what penalty applies if they have to have a waffle cone, the model will actually report: this person values this at 99 out of 100, and values this other thing negatively—say, negative 50. The text we use to read this information out is very different from the text used to reveal the information to the model in the first place. The model has only seen ice cream choices and has never been asked to give a numerical assessment of anything, and yet when you ask it to think about what it knows and put some numbers on it, it will explain its rules—even though you trained it on examples, not rules. Large models are able to do this.

David Atkinson asked whether there’s a way to tell the difference between models that can do this and models that can’t—when a model can accurately self-report its rules, how is that different from when models don’t accurately self-report? His work is still ongoing and very preliminary, but it does have to do with whether models seem to be storing their information in a part of the neural network they’re able to report on. If you put the information in a layer too close to the end, the model doesn’t seem to be able to reflect on that knowledge. But if you train the information deep in the model, in early enough layers, the model does seem to be able to reflect on it.

When you ask whether a model has a sense of self, whether it has self-awareness, it’s a somewhat strange question—what does self-awareness mean, exactly? But what these neural networks give us, for the first time, is an experimental platform where we can try to make that question a little more precise, a little more scientific. We can ask: is the network able to describe its own thinking if that thinking is happening at layer 50? Is the network able to describe its own thinking if that thinking is at layer 20?

Mounk: This is part of a more general question: how good am I, natively, at understanding what’s going on in my brain? I’ve read a little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of psychology, and so I now have some sense of what’s going on in my brain—but obviously humans for thousands of years had an extremely limited sense of what went on in their brains, at least biologically, because they didn’t know neurons existed.

Bau: You have some self-awareness. You know what ice cream you like—if I asked you, you would be able to predict your preferences. If confronted with some new ice cream, you’d say, oh yeah, I like this one better than that one. If asked to describe what it is, you could contemplate your preferences for a moment and read out to the world what you think your internal rules are, and there would be some faithfulness to that—you’d really be introspecting.

Mounk: It depends on the level of description. Five hundred years ago, two thousand years ago, humans were also able to articulate their preferences and were able to be very self-reflective about their personalities and the ambitions of their lives—and to write beautiful texts about those things—but they were not able to understand at a biological level what was going on, because the understanding of that was very limited. The question is: if I ask a chatbot how it came up with a given answer, it’s not clear to me that it has a reliable answer to give. There are really two different sets of questions here. One set is about whether chatbots have personalities, whether they have preferences, whether they find some tasks satisfying and other tasks boring, whether they have desires about the world, whether they might possibly want to take over the world and destroy all humans—some of those questions are straightforward and concrete, some are very abstract but potentially extremely interesting. The other set of questions is about how self-aware they are about what’s actually going on within the model as they’re trying to answer a question. Those two sets of questions come apart in interesting ways. It could be that the models have total self-transparency—they really know what’s going on with each neuron—but don’t have a sense of self in the way humans have. Or it could be that they’re like humans, in the sense that they have a strong sense of self, introspection, and preferences, but don’t actually fully understand what’s going on inside the neural network that produces those. Or they could have both, in some combination we don’t yet understand.

Bau: That’s right. Multiple labs have tried to ask whether neural networks can actually read out their own neurons—fine-tuning a model and asking it: are you aware of your own neurons, say neuron number 73? So far, we’ve largely failed at that. The neural networks don’t seem to be well configured to understand their own internal computations at this level; at least they can’t articulate it if they can. But at a higher level, it’s been very striking that they do seem to have some ability to describe, at a logical level, the actual mechanisms of what they’re doing—under certain conditions and in certain cases. This is similar to humans. You might not be able to describe all of your reflexive, last-minute decisions—why did you jump into the street? You have no idea; that was a split-second decision. In the same way, when these networks make a split-second decision at the very end of the process, they don’t seem to be able to reflect on it. But when they make decisions early on, there is some evidence of awareness of what’s going on.

We’re using all sorts of words here—sense of self, what does a network want to do, do networks even have wants, do they have goals. One of the things we are trying to do in our lab and in our field is put a finer point on some of these questions. What does it mean to have a goal? What does it mean to want something? What does it mean to have a sense of self? What does it even mean to have a sense of other?

The beautiful thing about cracking open these neural networks and looking at how their neural representations are organized is that we can ask these questions in a way that could not be measured before in humans. We can ask not just whether a model professes to have a sense of self in its output words and self-descriptions, but: when it’s using those words, when it’s saying those things, what is it looking at inside its neural network? What is it actually representing? Are there proximal causes? If you change the thing it’s looking at—if it says I really like cherry ice cream and you can see where it’s looking and you change that, and now it says, I really don’t like cherry ice cream anymore—is that changed utterance actually accurate? Do you actually get the model to not like cherry ice cream? Is this the same thing? Is there grounding for a concept that you’re self-aware of?

This idea of a grounded concept was just a philosophical abstraction a few years ago. Let me put my model—and maybe this is an ill-advised idea—in charge of military logistics. It’s doing something and says, should I move some weapons from one place to another? I would never do that. It’s very dangerous; you can’t trust this target locale with these types of dangerous weapons—they might lose track of them. I’m just a logistics AI; I’m not trying to kill anybody. I know I would never do that. Not even for a short layover. You can then ask: when the model tells you that, when it assures you this is how it’s thinking, is that really what it’s thinking? Is this really like the cherry ice cream—is there genuine grounding for it?

Mounk: Is it really thinking anything in that kind of sense? And if it really is thinking something, is it telling you what it’s thinking, or is it misleading you? That obviously goes to one of the purposes of this work. We were talking earlier about wanting to know whether encoding your gender changes how the model treats you or what decisions it makes about an application. That’s one very concrete application where we have reason to want to know what’s going on under the hood. The even larger question is: if what the model tells us in its output, in the little things it displays about its thinking, in the scratchpad—if all of that might conceal some deeper set of preferences, values, or desires, could it potentially be misaligned in a way that is really dangerous?

Bau: That’s correct. You can see the clear need for trying to get to the bottom of these things. What I’d love to do, if we have time, is give you a sense of where we are on being able to answer these questions. Let me categorize a couple of them.

One is: does a network even want to do something? Do they have goals? Do they know what they’re trying to do? Another is: does a network have a sense of self? I want to back that up a little—does it even have a sense of person, a sense of other? If it’s talking about Bob, does it know that’s different from talking about Alice? Does it keep these things organized and separate? I have a student who believes that one of the reasons you have sycophantic behavior in networks is that the network may be getting confused about who is itself and who it’s talking to—just mixing these things up. It’s a fantastic idea, and it may be that these things are all related.

The question is: can we look inside models and see how they’re organizing their internal representations, their internal thoughts—to see if those representations are crisp and clear and correct, or if they’re falling victim to certain problems? If they are, then how, why, and in what situations? That will give us a better understanding of what’s going on inside these models, moving beyond the very vague question of whether a model has a sense of self or whatever, toward asking what that would mean computationally.

Let’s take a look at goals and wants. There’s a way of inducing a large language model to do something very creative, invented by researchers at OpenAI when they first devised the GPT-3 model. It’s called in-context learning. Let’s say you want a model to do some really useful task for you—say, read a restaurant review and tell you whether it’s a five-star review. You could just ask the model to do this, but it won’t do exactly what you want; you probably have a slightly different idea of what a five-star review is than the model natively has. It’ll be okay, but it won’t exactly hit the mark. The right way of doing it is to seed the model with ten examples—ten restaurant reviews, labeled one-star, five-star, three-star. Better yet, give it a hundred examples.

Now, we’re not talking about training the model—just having it read these, without training. What you do is have the model read them as if the model had said them itself: you load them into the same inference buffer that the model uses to predict the next word. After all of that, you say: okay, now the last restaurant review is missing a star rating—just fill that one in. It’ll be really accurate, because now it’s saying: we have 99 examples, the 100th should fit into this context. This restaurant review thing isn’t really about the food, it’s about the atmosphere—I had a misconception, but having read all these examples, I get it. It’ll be accurate because it’s seen 99 examples and it would just fit into them.

This is called in-context learning because the model is learning how to do this, but not by training its weights or changing its neural connections—it’s learning by noticing all the input it was given and reasoning that the next one should fit in. Before 2020 or so, people imagined in-context learning as a theoretical possibility, but when GPT-3 came out it was clear the model was very good at this, and it really revolutionized the field. In-context learning is a type of meta-learning—a way of showing that models have learned how to learn. They can learn things without changing their neural weights.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and David go deeper into how models learn and explore existential risks. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Rebecca Haw Allensworth is a David Daniels Allen professor of law at Vanderbilt Law school. She is the author of The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work and Why It Goes Wrong.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Rebecca Haw Allensworth discuss why one in five American workers need a professional license, how licensing boards create modern guild systems that exclude immigrants and limit mobility, and whether these requirements actually protect consumers or just insiders.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: When people think about professional licensing boards and the need to get a license in order to practice a profession, they probably think of doctors and lawyers, perhaps a couple of other professions. That is something of a misapprehension. There is a much greater number of professions, and a much greater share of the workforce than one might imagine, that are actually subject to these kinds of licensing requirements in the United States.

Rebecca Haw Allensworth: That’s right. My research shows that about one in five American workers has to have a professional license, which I define as a state-granted permission to do your work, obtained after some significant investment in education or a test. We’re not talking about taking a CPR course over a weekend to become a coach. We’re talking about going to a year’s worth of school to cut hair, for example.

Even with that kind of narrow definition of professional licensing, we’re talking about tens of millions of American workers—more people than are in unions in the United States, way more than are subject to the minimum wage. I say professional licensing is basically the most important regulatory institution we have.

Mounk: Fascinating. Tell us some more of these examples. What are some of the more absurd examples of professions where you need to have this extensive training, this extensive regulatory process, in order to be admitted into—let’s call it what it is—a guild?

Allensworth: The most ridiculous one is actually one that we’re very familiar with, which is the hair profession. To become a barber, you have to have more hours of instruction than are in law school. You have to take a full year, nine to five, to do your education. You have to put ten to twenty thousand dollars down, sometimes put it on your credit card, live with a family member, not earning any money—and all that just to cut hair.

The licenses for barbering and cosmetology are sort of brother and sister professions and are very similar. Then there are the ones that you don’t think of as being licensed—that aren’t licensed maybe in every state. Until recently in my state, you had to have a license to install alarm systems, even just ones that you bought at Costco.

Mounk: We’re not talking about a concert hall or anything like that. We’re talking about putting up a couple of extra alarm systems in your private residence, and you need to have a license for that.

Allensworth: The kind of thing that you would be perfectly allowed to do in your own residence. If you install one for your neighbor one time, you’re in violation of the licensing law.

Mounk: For pay or even if you do it as a favor?

Allensworth: Most of these are not to do with pay. Most of them cover even doing it for free, which is still considered to be providing the service. Of course, if you’re not doing it for pay, maybe the board will try to go easier on you. But as my research shows, sometimes the investigative and prosecutorial staff want to go easy, but the licensing board doesn’t even let them. So usually there’s no carve-out for doing it for free.

Mounk: What’s interesting here, thinking of this in comparative perspective, is that some of these professions are probably licensed everywhere, with differences in the precise details of how that happens. One interesting thing is what the Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions do, where they tend to have private bodies with some kind of official standing. It’s not directly a state institution that licenses lawyers, for example, whereas in Germany or France it would probably be a state-run institution that does that.

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For something like a barber, a lot of the continent would have a kind of apprenticeship system, which is a very different thing. Perhaps that shouldn’t be necessary either, and it might not be as permissive as it should be, but you’re getting on-the-job experience and earning some limited amount of money while you’re doing it. What we’re talking about in terms of barbers here is going to barber school for a year, paying tuition, not actually on the job, not earning. What does that look like?

Allensworth: In a lot of these cases, you’re still cutting hair and earning money for the school. So you’re actually in some ways paying the school twice: the tuition, and also the income they get from the people coming in to get their hair cut. It is different from an apprenticeship system. In America we have a few apprentice-based professions—tattoo artists, at least in my state, are apprentice-based.

But I would also note that even where you’re nominally making money on the way to your training, it can be really burdensome. An example in the United States is therapists. Therapists graduate from their degree program, usually a master’s, sometimes a bachelor’s degree. They take their exam and then have a provisional license that isn’t a real license. They have to do hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours of supervised therapy during which they’re making very little money, paying high fees to their supervisor who isn’t really doing a lot of work. This can be so daunting that we’ve learned almost half of people who go through the requisite education to become a therapist don’t go on to get their license. It’s just too much of an effort to go through that effectively-apprenticeship program.

Mounk: On the plus side, it’s a good income scheme for people who are qualified therapists, because they have all these aspiring therapists to supervise.

It’s fascinating. I wonder what the shape of the picture is. What percentage of all therapy provided in the United States is being delivered by aspiring therapists? Probably not that high, but it’s fascinating.

Let’s start perhaps with more standard professions and then work our way down to some of the ones where we’re more surprised. Even in the professions where we might agree that licensing is necessary, there are real problems with this system. Take doctors, take lawyers. Broadly speaking, I agree that we do need licenses for them. But part of what that allows is for these bodies to regulate how many lawyers and particularly doctors there are. One of the reasons why medical care is so expensive in the United States, and particularly one of the reasons why the United States actually has a strikingly low number of physicians per capita in international perspective, is that there are extremely onerous requirements for qualifying as a doctor. It’s very hard to found new medical schools in the United States, and incredibly hard to get into medical school. There’s a need for more doctors, but it’s incredibly hard for even big existing universities that don’t have medical schools to get medical schools approved, in part because the boards licensing physicians have a self-interest in keeping the number of physicians down, because that’s what keeps salaries up.

Allensworth: The role of state licensing boards, which is mostly the focus of my research and the book, in approving new graduate seats in programs is actually pretty limited. The bigger problem really is residencies, and that goes to other regulatory systems, including the AMA, that are very similar to the licensing system—it’s just not really what I wrote about.

What I would say is that they work hand in hand. The AMA and these other licensing systems are keeping down the number of American graduating physicians, while the boards are making sure that foreign medical grads can’t get their license and that no exceptions will be made, no loosening up of practice requirements that might, for example, allow nurse practitioners to do some things that doctors might otherwise do.

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They’re similar problems, but a little bit different, because it’s not the state medical boards that are determining what the approved schools or residencies are. But they all have the same mentality, and they are all, at bottom, organized by doctors. The boards are on the back end making sure that nobody does an international end run around what the AMA and other regulators have done.

Mounk: This is a problem that turns up again in lower-level professions as well. You’d think that part of the better outcomes of integrating immigrants in the United States compared to Europe is that America is more flexible: you can show up and on your first day drive Uber, and relatively quickly enter some other kind of profession. So it was surprising to learn how big the obstacles are even in many relatively blue-collar, working-class, middle-class professions. You can have been a hairdresser for 30 years in your country of origin, arrive in the United States, and in many states you can’t go and be a barber the next day.

Allensworth: There’s some reciprocity between states, but even that is pretty limited. As for international reciprocity in a profession like hair, there’s not much at all. Most countries don’t require the hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours that we require of a profession like cutting hair. It really tends to impact the lower-income professions, professions that would be good places for somebody who’s just starting out in the United States. Maybe they don’t speak English particularly well, so they’re going to go into a service-based profession where they don’t have to speak the language so well. Beauty would be a good example. We’ve seen time and time again licensing boards taking steps to keep those people out.

Some people think that licensing is progressive because if you have a license, you tend to have higher income and better working conditions, and that’s true even in the lower-income professions. But it’s actually regressive because within those communities, within those groups, it gives advantages to the ones that already have those advantages.

Mounk: I hadn’t even thought about the problem of reciprocity in this context. I’m obviously aware of it for lawyers, where some state boards have mutual reciprocity but a lot don’t, and that really limits the mobility of lawyers across state lines. I did not think that would be true of barbers: that if you are a barber in Tennessee, you may not be able to move to Michigan without having to retrain for a year or something like that.

Mobility in the United States has really gone down—people move a lot less now than they did 50 years ago, which goes a little against the intuition people have about those kinds of trends, but which is well documented. I wonder whether those kinds of rigid licensing requirements play a real role in that. If you’re a barber making a lower-middle-class income in one state and for whatever life reasons you need to move to a different state, you may be constrained from doing that because you’d have to give up your profession or go back to school for a year.

Allensworth: The reciprocity issue is a big problem with the lower-income professions too, and it’s especially problematic when you don’t have a lot of infrastructure behind you to help you figure all this out. If I’m a physician and I work for a health group at the border of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, my employer is going to handle all of that for me. I’ll have some assistant who’s responsible for figuring out all the continuing education I need to do every year, renewing my license—I’m not really going to see any of that. That’s an economic waste that gets passed on to patients and consumers, so it’s not great. But professionally, it doesn’t impact me as much.

I saw a case of a barber who was trying to move from Michigan to Tennessee and couldn’t get his license because Tennessee insisted on an English-language exam. He couldn’t pass it because he was not a fluent English speaker, but he had been cutting hair for many years, including in the military, and he had a license in Michigan—which he had obtained using an interpreter to help him understand the language. That was just a no-go. He didn’t have an employer or sophisticated people trying to help him through the process.

Mounk: I said earlier, in a slightly glib way, that these are really just guilds. This is the way that guilds have historically worked: it was incredibly hard to get in, and the point of making it incredibly hard to get in was to provide members with insider status, to make sure they wouldn’t have too much competition, wouldn’t have to change their methods too much, and could keep their salaries up. Is that the right analogy? Do you think this is basically a modern reenactment of the medieval guild system, or is that a misnomer? Obviously many guilds had hereditary elements that the new ones don’t, so there are going to be some important distinctions. But is that a helpful way of thinking about both the incentives at stake and the negative externalities, or not?

Allensworth: It is a helpful comparison and I think it’s apt, as long as we understand it as an analogy—it’s not a perfect one-to-one. As you pointed out, there are some differences. But some of the important things to keep in mind is that it is an inside-versus-outside mentality, and the psychology is very similar. I didn’t hear members of the profession or people on the board talking a lot about money and their bottom line, although I did sometimes. More often I heard them talking about identity and prestige, the importance of their work, and how not just anybody can do it. I think that is a major holdover from the guild perspective, where it really was about belonging. It was hereditary, but the same idea: we are in this group, we are in this family, this is what we do. Many of the benefits to members are very similar: higher earnings, less competition. It’s hard to get in, and once you’re in you’re kind of made. So I do think it’s a useful analogy.

Mounk: Part of the problem is that outsiders have a very hard time getting in. Medieval guilds often required you to be born into the right family—that’s not the case today, but there are these cumbersome barriers: you have to go to barber school for a year, which may be economically prohibitive, or go through years of supervised therapy, and many people drop off at that point.

The other idea, of course, is that you protect the insiders. In the medieval guild, if you’re the son of somebody who’s in the guild, you may not have any particular talent at that trade, but you’re going to be grandfathered in. You argue that there’s a kind of equivalent of that today as well, in the sense that even as these licensing boards make it incredibly hard for outsiders to get in, once you are in, you’re kind of set—often whatever you do.

Allensworth: That’s right. This was the most shocking part of my research, at least to me. I went into it with the idea that there’s going to be a lot of red tape, much of it unnecessary. I’m an antitrust professor, so I was looking at this through the lens of competition: they’re going to want to keep competition down, profits up. If you think about it that way, maybe when it comes to discipline, when a doctor or a lawyer does something wrong, you’d think they’ll be really hard on them, because kicking them out means one less professional to compete against. I saw the opposite. The self-regulation at the heart of these licensing boards resulted in second, third, fifth chances for practitioners who were just really incompetent and unsafe. That was harder for me to understand.

Mounk: Give us some examples, because from the book you’re not talking about somebody who gave a bad haircut once, or even had a safety violation once that is more concerning but was a one-off. You’re talking about people with a sustained pattern of blatantly illegal or blatantly immoral behavior.

Allensworth: I have so many examples it’s hard to pick one, but I’ll give a couple that illustrate it well. One is a real repeat offender. There was a doctor who was found to have a lot of marijuana in his home for sale, along with a bunch of drugs that he had clearly taken home from the hospital, either for recreation or because he was addicted to them. He took a state charge for it, pled no contest, and went on probation with a license. This is also a pattern I saw where the criminal system acts first, even though you would think the threshold for licensing action is lower—it’s easier to get a state conviction than to have real action on your license.

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The board, in response to this state criminal charge, put him on probation and mandated that he go to addiction treatment, as he was evidently addicted to benzodiazepines. While on probation and without the authority to prescribe opioids, which he had lost in that action, he found an end run: he had pre-signed scripts from a buddy, which he used to sell prescriptions for opioid use disorder medication and benzodiazepines out of his car for around three hundred dollars apiece. Totally illegal.

Mounk: Out of his car. God forbid a foreigner who’s arrived in the United States cut somebody’s hair, or your friendly neighbor help you install an alarm system—but giving people opioids or serious medications out of a car is totally fine with a licensed physician.

Allensworth: Keep in mind he’s on probation with the board. This is his second chance, and this is what he does with it. This is not just a violation of the licensing law—it’s a federal crime. He can’t plead no contest to federal charges; he’s going to have to do some time. In the face of this, the licensing board gives him another chance, and that chance looks an awful lot like the first: more supervision, more probation, please don’t do it again. He then finds another scheme, this time selling fraudulent COVID tests door to door. It’s a second opinion on COVID: if you have a positive test, he’ll sign a doctor’s note saying you don’t.

Mounk: Presumably, in order to be able to travel or do whatever.

Allensworth: Yes, travel—and this was high COVID, pre-vaccine, back when a positive test had real consequences. This is somebody who has manifestly no respect for the licensing board, no sense that it’s a real regulatory body. He’s kind of right: nothing really happened to him until he was finally sentenced to prison on the federal charges.

That’s one example, and he was a real operator—he found an angle on everything. But at the end of the day, I’m not sure he really hurt people. I also saw doctors who really hurt people get second chances. There was an OB-GYN who sexually abused eleven of his patients, traded sex for drugs with them, used drugs on the job, had extensive malpractice associated with his OB-GYN practice, ten peer reviews at the hospital, one stillborn baby. He got his license back. As far as I know, he still has one.

Mounk: A lot of the dynamics we’re talking about could be explained by Econ 101, or perhaps Econ 102. You have a club, that club is going to try to maximize benefits for its members, and it’s going to try to restrict access because if everybody can get in, the benefits for each member are going to be diluted. That explains why you make it really hard for an immigrant from Ghana or from Kyrgyzstan to become a hairdresser, and it explains why you want to maintain this licensing regime. Probably some of the people involved in the profession are also the ones running the barber schools, which explains why you want extensive requirements. All of that makes sense.

But on the discipline side, as you’re saying, there’s actually an economic incentive to throw people out of the profession. You might also think there’s a reputation management incentive to do so, since bad actors reflect badly on everybody. On the other hand, it makes sense that once you’re one of us, we’re going to protect you no matter what. You see that in other contexts, like police unions: once you’re a member of the club, the solidarity is unconditional. So how counterintuitive is this from a theoretical perspective? What does it tell us about what’s driving this behavior and how we should think about it?

Allensworth: This is harder to understand than the other side of things, the too-much-red-tape observations. You could tell an economic story, and I think the economic story is present when it comes to the associations. These associations are groups of professionals whose whole reason for existing is to protect and promote the members of the profession. This is not really supposed to be a public protection function. They want what’s best for doctors and lawyers, and what’s best for doctors and lawyers is having the most benefit of the doubt when they’re accused of something, having the most due process.

The reason why those more economic incentives work at the board level has more to do with psychology and sociology than economics. The associations provide the boards, which are made up of everyday working professionals who are not deeply expert in their field beyond what they are clinically competent to do, with narratives all about second chances and forgiveness. It’s also, ironically, about access to care and access to justice in the legal profession. If you take this guy out of circulation—and this was an important consideration in the OB-GYN case—he worked in inner-city Memphis, he worked with TennCare patients, which is the state’s Medicaid program. If you take him out of circulation, that’s a bunch of women who aren’t going to have any care. These narratives pull at the heartstrings of board members, and they also reinforce a sense of professional identity: don’t let someone else tell you what our profession is; we are the only ones competent to say what this profession is. So a little bit of psychology and a little bit of sociology, with some nudging from the associations.

The last point is that this was especially problematic in medicine, and I think it’s because doctors care a lot about making people better. They’re likely to see problems as attributable to sickness. Most of these physicians had struggles with substance use disorder, and so there was this temptation to see the whole problem as treatable, as fixable, even when they had really betrayed the trust of their patients.

Mounk: It would be interesting to dive into this case a little further. Given some of the things I know about the medical profession, including some of the behavior of the American Medical Association in recent years and some of the broader cultural trends among highly educated, affluent Americans, I wonder to what degree there’s also just ideology involved. The thinking that you can’t blame people for any form of addiction—which in itself I agree with—even when it leads them to act in highly dangerous and unprofessional ways. The argument that he’s treating a lot of women in poor inner-city communities is fair enough if he’s treating them well, but evidently he was not treating them well. This seems to me frankly like a bunch of identity politics and other forms of slightly credulous progressive ideas making it hard to exercise judgment in that context. Would that be fair to say about this case, which you know much better than I do, or do you think that’s not part of what’s going on?

Allensworth: The identity politics part of that particular case does map onto this. There was a lot of what you said in the first half—the idea that people can’t be held responsible for their addiction and their sickness—that was definitely present. But if anything, it was sort of the opposite when it came to the second problem. The inner-city, dominantly Black population that are his victims aren’t really the kinds of people the board sees itself as there to protect. The board’s mentality is really more oriented toward the mainstream patient who has commercial insurance and goes to a well-regarded hospital. That’s the world in which the licensing board members operate. In a lot of ways, I think they were throwing the less privileged patients under the bus with this decision.

Mounk: I certainly agree that they were substantively throwing those patients under the bus. But the way you framed it earlier was that he’s providing care to these inner-city communities and we can’t deprive them of that care. That sounds to me like a confused argument driven by a sense of: who are we to tell these women what doctor to go to, and who are we to deprive this community of the lovely doctor who has scores of malpractice suits against him?

Allensworth: The irony, of course, is that they don’t have a choice. The farther you go down the echelons of medical care, and for that matter legal care—because this problem is not unique to medicine, it exists in law too—the less choice you have about your provider. That’s why I think a lot of troubled physicians and lawyers end up serving the underserved: if they have a troubled, checkered history, patients and clients either aren’t going to know that, or if they do know it, they’re not going to have much of a choice. That was another thing that was really surprising in my research that I don’t think a lot of people are talking about: the caste system we’ve created through the disciplinary system, where we take people who are very problematic to begin with and shunt them towards the most needy patients, clients, and customers who don’t have a choice, including working in prisons and, in the legal world, representing immigrants and indigenous people.

Mounk: I’m trying to think through what the devil’s advocate argument for the licensing regime would be here. Presumably some of this sorting would happen in any case. If you had no licensing regime at all, doctors and lawyers with a particularly good reputation would be hired by the best hospital systems, and those with a very bad reputation would end up providing services that others don’t want to provide because they’re less lucrative—and the same in the legal profession. The argument for the licensing system, even if it isn’t doing this perfectly, is that it at least provides some protection even for the least privileged segments of the population, and that in the absence of licensing you would get that effect more strongly rather than less strongly.

Allensworth: That’s true, but there’s a real irony to the structure of that argument. On the one hand, you’re saying we need licensing to protect the people who don’t know what they’re getting—which is true of a lot of professional services—or who don’t have a choice, which is also true of a lot of people who consume those services.

Mounk: If we had no legal licensing, the problem isn’t that when Bank of America needs to hire lawyers, they’re going to hire frauds. Bank of America is going to be a big and sophisticated enough organization to figure out which lawyers are good and reputable. The problem is if Joe Schmoe, or an underprivileged Joe Schmoe, is in desperate need of a lawyer, they might end up with a real huckster.

Allensworth: When we’re talking about raising barriers to entry and the red tape issue, we care a lot about quality and protecting people. We do that by creating all these barriers to entry and making the population of providers smaller and smaller, which isn’t necessarily good for the public because it makes those services more expensive, harder to get, more rare, harder to access in rural areas. But for the people who are able to get them, they’re going to be above a threshold. Except that then when it comes to discipline, you totally abandon that threshold, and abandon what seems to me like the most plausible justification for the licensing system in the first place.

Mounk: Which is to make sure that the doctor who clearly has a substance use issue, who’s clearly not acting in the interest of patients, who has a score of well-founded malpractice suits, doesn’t get to keep treating patients.

Allensworth: Let me give you another example. Let’s say you could make one rule that said nurse practitioners can work up to the scope of their practice—they can do a bunch of things that they can’t do in some states, including Tennessee, without physician supervision. You’re going to expand access to care for potentially a million people through one rule. Then later in the afternoon, you can see a disciplinary case for one doctor who, that we know of, has killed five patients by prescribing them so many opioids that they overdosed and died, not to mention the hundreds of others he did this to. You keep that one doctor in play for access to care. It just doesn’t add up. You can do so much more for the access to care problem on the rule side than you can on discipline.

Mounk: This is perhaps not directly about licensing boards, but it’s part of a wider system where we’ve delegated a lot of self-governance to members of a profession. My example, which went viral when I wrote about it, is that I went kayaking on the Connecticut River a good number of years ago and ended up losing my glasses when the kayak turned over. I needed to get new glasses, and it was so difficult. There aren’t a lot of opticians around there, and it takes a while to get an optical test. Everywhere in Europe, you can just walk into a store and say, make me glasses with this prescription. Either a store employee uses the same machines an optician would use to test the strength of your eyes, or you just tell them your last glasses were this strength and they make them. In the United States, you can’t do that.

I called for a lifting of those restrictions, the article went very viral, and I was denounced for spreading misinformation by the president of the American Optometric Association or some such body. This is exactly the kind of insider dealing at work. The people making the rules about when you can produce glasses are the ones whose livelihood depends on giving people eye exams all day long, and they will find arguments, however spurious, for why that is absolutely medically necessary, when very few other industrialized countries consider it necessary under the same circumstances.

What’s the cost of that? The cost is the marginal person who struggles to pay for glasses for themselves or their child, who delays taking their child to the optician when they can’t see the blackboard properly, who has to wear the same pair of glasses even as they’re falling apart and their prescription has deteriorated—because that extra cost of the eye exam is the barrier that stops them. It has a really direct negative impact. It’s good, if you can afford it, to go to the eye doctor every now and again and get your eyes checked, and opticians absolutely provide a valuable service. But to make it mandatory in this way is just out of all proportion to the trade-off.

In general, I think it’s a very positive feature of Anglo-Saxon societies that there are private bodies with a real ethos of self-governance, as an alternative to having everything directed by the state. But on balance, would it be more rational to have a state institution make those decisions, one that is less directly beholden to the interests of the profession? The disadvantage of the way this is set up in the United States, the United Kingdom, and most Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions is that you create a direct conflict of interest: the people making decisions about who gets admitted to a profession, and about things like what is required to prescribe glasses, are always members of a profession with a very obvious conflict of interest.

Allensworth: The whole book is really about this problem of conflicts of interest, of handing it over to the professionals to regulate themselves. We have to go back to the medical profession to see how this happened. Medicine was the first profession to really professionalize in the way I’ve identified, where they said: this is our profession, only we know what’s safe, what’s good, what’s real medicine, and so we are going to decide who’s in and who’s out. The key move was to then get the state to say that you can’t practice medicine at all without their say-so. Every profession has basically followed this model of self-regulation, using the state to back it up. Much as it may make sense that medicine is only fully understood by doctors, that does not change the fact that there’s a huge conflict of interest between what’s good for the public and what’s good for doctors. You need guardrails, you need government involvement to make sure this kind of self-regulation doesn’t go too far. Moreover, it doesn’t make sense to reproduce the medical model all the way down to every profession, including alarm system installers, where that kind of expertise doesn’t really play in.

Let me give you an example of another area we all care about deeply, especially as parents: childcare. Childcare encompasses everything from the neighborhood kid babysitting all the way up to the fanciest pre-K in New York City. There are no laws saying you can’t babysit, no laws requiring certain qualifications, even though this is a very safety-sensitive activity. We do let the private market work itself out as far as what kinds of regulation you opt into and pay for. We also have mandatory regulation for childcare centers, but it’s not licensing—we don’t make you go to school for a year and pass an exam. It’s more about background checks, CPR certification, a few safety rules. This is what I would want to see for something like eyeglasses: a system where people may opt into a more expensive, more comprehensive option, while others can just get their kid glasses even if it’s not a hundred percent perfect. We have evidence from other countries that a much less onerous system works basically fine.

Now imagine you’re a legislator, this is a big deal for you, and you want to pass a bill getting rid of the licensing regime for opticians. They are going to make it such a headache for you. They’re going to come up with every possible example of some child who did or didn’t die of cancer because they did or didn’t get an exam from someone trained to recognize it. There’ll be nobody on the other side.

Mounk: What the president of the American Optometric Association was saying is that she wants Americans to be able to catch dangerous eye diseases, tumors, or other conditions that are sometimes discovered during a mandatory eye exam. I take that seriously—if you have the means to go get a professional eye exam, absolutely do that. But she wasn’t talking about all of the people who die in traffic accidents, or who don’t learn to read in school, because they can’t see properly—because glasses are far more expensive here than in any other country, and they haven’t been able to afford the glasses or contacts they need to go about their daily lives.

Allensworth: This is a common argument I hear about hair professionals too—that they can recognize diseases of the scalp, and I’m sure that’s true. That’s partly why I bring up the childcare example. There are lots of cases where somebody who is good at childcare could intervene in a way that would be really helpful for a child, or fail to intervene in a way that doesn’t turn out well. It’s something we all care a lot about, but it’s a problem we solve in a different way.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Rebecca discuss how to develop a professional licensing system that works and why the opioid crisis revealed the weaknesses of licensing. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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