Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian and author. His latest book is The Cauldron: The Origins of the Modern Middle East.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Simon Sebag Montefiore discuss how the collapse of the Ottoman Empire gave rise to modern nationalism and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, how the region’s history has shaped today’s conflicts, and the long-term impact of October 7.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I really look forward to this conversation. It’s a very ambitious book. Tell us about the origins of the modern Middle East. As in many parts of the world, the origins of a modern world are in a way the story of the fading of the imperial world that preceded it.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: In this case, I think you have to look at the old world. You have to look at the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire to understand the Middle East today, and that’s why I begin with those empires. In 1900, the Ottoman Empire was crumbling in Europe, but still pretty formidable in Asia. That’s the story of The Cauldron. That’s how the book begins.

Mounk: Tell us a little bit about how the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the fading influence of the British Empire in parts of the Middle East set up the basic structure that started to emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Sebag Montefiore: The Ottoman Empire was fading. It had lost most of its Balkan territories and most of its North African territories, except Libya, except Tripoli. But it still controlled what is now Turkey and the whole Arab world essentially, all the way to the border with the Persian Empire. So it was still a pretty formidable institution. In World War I, it proved to be surprisingly resilient militarily, and it defeated the British in two pretty significant battles. So it was still pretty important.

But what is the Ottoman Empire? The Ottoman Empire lasted for over four hundred years, and there were many versions of it. It started as a conquest state based on the enslavement of Christian children who were recruited to be its soldiers, its civil servants, and so on. And of course, to its harems. Then it went through massive crises and remade itself several times.

In the last period, which I deal with in The Cauldron, which is really the opening of the twentieth century or the 1890s, it had been through a period of reform when it had allowed its many peoples, sects, and ethnicities to have equal citizenship. It was tightening itself into an Islamic and nationalistic, Turkish nationalistic entity with a kind of almost proto-Nazi ideology.

So by World War I, it was ruled by the Three Pashas, who were kind of eugenicist, social Darwinist people who believed that war was a purifying struggle for races to perfect themselves. It was they who embarked on the genocide against the Armenians and other peoples too, like the Greeks and the Maronites and so on. That was a sort of Götterdämmerung, if you like, of the Ottoman Empire.

The great myth that you read about all the time, about the great tolerance of the Ottoman Empire and how everyone lived together in a cheerful, peaceful, charming way, spouting poetry, is rubbish really.

Mounk: Walk us through that. It is rubbish, because there were very strong forms of exclusion and discrimination built into those empires. But the strange thing about empires does seem to be that as they fade, you get those periods of ethnic cleansing. You obviously get that extremely strongly in the Middle East, with the Armenians and others, but also in other parts of Europe. It’s in the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of nationalism and the attempt to create those more coherent national states that you then get all of the expulsions and ethnic cleansings that define a lot of the first half of the twentieth century.

Tell us about the era of the Three Pashas and the ideology that drove them, and in what ways those were preferable to the Ottoman Empire and in which ways perhaps they weren’t.

Sebag Montefiore: You’re putting your finger on it. In the West, we decided, I guess, sometime during the nineteenth century, that the nation-state was the best form of government. But the creation of these nation-states always included exclusions of people who either didn’t fit into the new national definition or who didn’t want to fit. The creation of nationalism is always about the exclusion of people who are the other in some way or other. All the national states that were created in Eastern Europe involved excluding Muslim citizens from them, and they had to leave and go into the Ottoman Empire, in their hundreds of thousands.

The same process took place in Eurasia and in the Middle East. That’s what happened in the Ottoman Empire. The idea moved from Ottomanism, which was meant to be a definition of a broad citizenship involving all sorts of peoples, to a much tighter one, a sort of Turkish definition. You had to be Turkish, you had to be Islamic, you had to speak Turkish. That excluded the Arabs, who were millions of people, as well as the Jews and of course all the Christians in the empire. They were huge communities, including the Armenians.

All of these peoples in the Middle East started to embrace the idea of nationalism because that was the flavor of the times. Once they did that, you were entering into a game in which there was a struggle for supremacy and over who would create their version of the state. That’s still going on in all of the countries in the Middle East. It’s one of the themes of this book and of this history.

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In the Ottoman Empire, the Three Pashas were Young Turks. The Young Turks was a movement that had liberal democrats on one side and ultra-nationalists, kind of authoritarians, on the other, and they were of the latter faction. They got control of the Sultanate. There was still a Sultan, but they were the dictators effectively. They took the Ottoman Empire into the war, and they believed this was the only way to save the Ottoman state.

At the same time, many peoples were beginning to embrace nationalistic ideologies, and that meant also having support from outside powers. That was the Armenian dilemma. The Armenians decided that they too were a nation, they needed a national state, and the only way they could get that was with help from, say, the British, but even more from the Russians, who were their Orthodox brothers. That way the Ottoman rulers started to regard them not just as Christians and therefore possible outsiders with mixed loyalties, but actually traitors working for the main enemy, the Russians. That’s what led to the massacres of World War I.

Mounk: Let’s go a little bit forward in time. You have the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. You have these nation-building projects, which often go hand in hand with these forms of ethnic cleansing, the attempt to build these coherent nation states that often involve these forms of violence, as they did elsewhere in the world. You then obviously have a period of World War II and the competing claims of fascism and communism on the allegiance of local political actors.

Tell us a little bit about the shape of the Middle East after these nation-building projects, who the major players are, and how they respond to the rise of the Soviet Union and to the rise of Hitler in Germany.

Sebag Montefiore: What the Allies wanted to do after World War I was punish the genocidaires who had killed the Armenians. They felt they had no obligation to the Ottomans or the Turks or whoever they would turn out to be. The Sultanate still existed at that point. This is probably one of the most important parts of the story—what is now Turkey.

They had decided that they would embrace the nationalisms of all the peoples who had suffered under the Turks or the Ottomans. The irony about these great imperialists like Churchill and Balfour and Lloyd George and Clemenceau was that they combined an imperial view of the world, in which they wanted to create new states that were friendly or client states to them and would allow British troops to remain, with nationalism. They believed that they were backing peoples who had been prisoners of the Ottomans and victims of the Ottomans. That was their general plan.

But in what is now Turkey, they decided that the Turks would have a tiny rump state around Ankara. The western part they gave to the Greeks and Italians, but mainly the Greeks. They said to the Greeks, you can create a new empire, almost like a new Byzantine empire. The Greeks poured troops into that area and started to conquer even the parts that they hadn’t been given by the Allies. In the east, they basically promised states to the Armenians and the Kurds.

This immediately started to go very wrong because the Turks, under Mustafa Kemal, who later became Atatürk, father of the Turks, rallied and promoted a new nation, a new state that he wanted to call the Turkish Republic. He inherited an intact, fully equipped Ottoman army that was still a pretty impressive military contingent. With this he turned around and defeated the Armenians, of whom there were hardly any left after the genocide, the Syrians who were in Cilicia, and the Kurds, and then turned round and defeated the Greeks. When he came to face the British, who still occupied Constantinople, they blinked and caved. They weren’t ready for another war against these quite capable military forces, and that brought down Lloyd George’s government in 1922.

Out of that was formed a new nation state, the most important of these nation states, at least in this early period: the Turkish Republic. But they wanted much more. They weren’t satisfied with what they got in 1923. They wanted to get Mosul. They wanted to get the Vilayet of Mosul, which is northeastern Iraq. They also weren’t happy with Syria. They wanted northern Syria, but the French kept that. That’s why we see what’s happening now with President Erdogan and this new Ottomanism that he is promoting, because all along the Turks felt they had been done out of their natural imperial power domain.

Mounk: They have a form of imperial hangover, which in some ways is comparable to Russia and other countries around the world.

Sebag Montefiore: It’s very like Russia, so that’s part of it.

Mounk: This is what’s going on in Turkey at the time. Tell us about other parts of the Middle East at that moment, and then I want to get a little bit of forward momentum. What’s happening, for example, with Saudi Arabia, being conquered by Saud, and the establishment of a House of Saud?

Sebag Montefiore: The rise of the Saud family is a very different process. The Ottomans in Arabia controlled the western coast of Arabia, which is Mecca and Medina, the holy cities, the Hejaz. Normally they controlled Yemen, but actually they only really controlled the capital. If you go around the south of Arabia, the British controlled Aden and Hadhramaut, which is also part of Yemen, and then what is now the Sultanate of Oman. If you keep going around the coast, they controlled the Trucial States, which were all the little emirates, which is now the UAE and Kuwait and Bahrain and Qatar and so on. So the British were one imperial power in Arabia, and the Ottomans were the other, but in the middle, there were family dynasties who controlled their own emirates that were vaguely allied to the Ottomans or the British, but often to the Ottomans. The Ottomans kept a very close eye on these people because they knew that much of the prestige of the Ottoman monarchy came from controlling the pilgrimage, the Hajj, to Mecca and Medina.

In the eighteenth century, the House of Saud, the Saudi family, had partnered with an Islamic revivalist who founded the Wahhabi movement, and they had actually conquered the whole of Arabia, including Mecca and Medina. The Ottomans had thrown them out and beheaded the Saudi Emir on the docks in Constantinople. In the nineteenth century, another Saudi prince built another Saudi realm, and that too had fallen apart.

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Now, in 1902, at the beginning of my period, Ibn Saud, or Abdulaziz, as he is known in the Arab world, was a swaggering twenty-year-old, six foot six or something, very tall, who rode into the interior of Arabia and conquered Riyadh with forty friends and henchmen. That was the beginning of the conquest of what is now Saudi Arabia. It took him thirty years to build. What one needs to understand about Saudi Arabia is that it’s the third Saudi state. It’s a conquest state. They conquered it in a wave of wars that went on, as I said, for the next thirty years. Ultimately, the most important part of that conquest was the conquest in 1925 of Mecca and Medina, because it’s the guardianship of the holy sanctuaries that gives them their prestige in the Arab world. It has allowed them recently to replace Egypt as the leaders of the Sunni Arab world.

The creation of that state was really independent of the British and the Ottomans and the French. He had to get their backing or their acquiescence, but he was a master at playing off everybody, Abdulaziz, and he did it himself.

Mounk: Obviously there are many parts of the Middle East, and I don’t want to go through each individual country. We have talked a lot about the downfall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Atatürk, as he styled himself. We have talked about the revival of Islam and Wahhabism and the rise of the king of Saud. The third really important part to set the scene before we fast-forward is what’s going on in Persia, or as it would now be called, Iran. Tell us in particular about Reza Shah.

Sebag Montefiore: Reza Shah was such an interesting character, and he’s one of the big nation builders. You’ve mentioned a few of them there, Yascha. He actually started as a peasant. He was a peasant soldier who was striking by his ambition, his discipline, and his height. He was another giant strapping soldier. As a young man, he joined the Shah of Persia’s Cossack Regiment, which was based on the Cossacks of the Tsars of Russia and was trained by Cossacks from Russia.

Iran had a very complex relationship with the Russian Tsars and later the Soviets too. Essentially twice in the twentieth century the Russians occupied half of Iran, so it’s worth remembering that.

Opening the twentieth century, we find Persia, which is really an empire in which a lot of different minorities and ethnicities exist. They’re all Farsi speaking, but some are Persian, and many are Kurds, Arabs, and others. It had been spectacularly misgoverned and ill-managed by the Qajar dynasty of Shahs. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it had stagnated, it was corrupt, it was misgoverned, and it was falling apart.

In 1906, there was a constitutional revolution in which the Shah was forced to concede a constitution and an elected parliament, the Majlis. That didn’t last long because he fought back. There was a counter-revolution, and he was backed by the Russians in the crushing of the revolution. This meant that there were Russians in the country in World War I, and then there were British in the country. The Russians were in the north, and the Ottomans invaded from the west. There was a massive famine in which a million Persians died.

Out of this mess, when it was a World War I battlefield, and by the way, a completely forgotten theater in World War I, no one knows about it now, but for Iranians it’s important, the British looked for a candidate to restore governance and be a British ally. They found this strapping general, a self-made man, Reza Khan. In 1921, he seized power in a coup. By 1925, he had got rid of the Qajar dynasty, who had been in power since the 1790s, and he had been elected Shah of what he now called Iran. He became king, and he called his dynasty the Pahlavi dynasty.

He was an extraordinary character. He started to reform the country. He created banks, he built railways, he founded the university, he freed women from having to wear the hijab if they didn’t want to. He put the Shiite clergy in their place. All of this he did in partnership with aristocratic princes who were more sophisticated. But as his reign went on into the 1930s, he became more paranoid, more jealous, more authoritarian. He arrested a lot of them and had them murdered in prison by a very sinister doctor who injected them with oxygen, which is very creepy, or water or something.

By 1941, in World War II, he decided that he was not sure who was going to win the war, and he would remain neutral. This was a big mistake because neither the British nor the Soviets, now under Stalin, were going to take a risk with Iran. In fact, they weren’t going to take a risk anywhere in the Middle East. That’s part of the story of World War II, which is interesting.

Mounk: Let’s start to get into the story of World War II. I think we now have the scene relatively well set for the different parts of the Middle East. We haven’t quite talked about North Africa, and there are some other places we haven’t touched on, but for a big region, we’ve done as well as we can to set the scene. World War II tears the world apart. There’s an ideological competition between communism, between fascism, between democracy. The Middle East became an important theater in World War II. What role does the Middle East play in World War II, and what is the form of the Middle East that emerges from World War II?

Sebag Montefiore: The interesting thing about World War II is that in purely imperial, strategic terms, it justifies the British plan to have a big presence in the Middle East, because as it turns out, the Middle East is potentially a key war-winning theater. The Italians and the Germans are fighting their way along North Africa and break into Egypt twice. One of the times is with Rommel, the famous Afrika Korps. At the same time, Hitler is invading the Soviet Union and fighting his way towards the Caucasus, and from the Caucasus he would break into Turkey and Iraq and Persia, and then he would be in the Middle East as well. So suddenly in 1941–42, the Middle East was extremely important.

One of the key things that happens is, of course, that Hitler defeats France. Therefore, the French Empire is now under the control of the Axis, the Nazi Axis. That means that much of North Africa is controlled by the Vichy French, Algeria and Morocco and Tunisia, but also, worryingly, the key parts of the Levant, which is Lebanon and Syria. At the same time, there’s a coup in British Iraq, and a pro-Nazi government comes to power there.

As I said, Churchill decides he’s taking no chances. He launches a war and invades Vichy Syria. That’s where Moshe Dayan, the future Israeli general, loses his eye. At the same time, he launches a war to invade Iraq, and he conquers Iraq. Then finally, of course, they conquer Iran. The British consolidate the whole Middle East under what is essentially British control. That justifies itself because Churchill stabilizes the Middle East.

But as the war goes on, he realizes that he can’t keep control of the Middle East. Nationalism is ascendant. The British embrace an idea of Arab nationalism, not completely pan-Arabism, but they compromise. They want to give independence to the Arab states, including Egypt and Iraq, and force the French to do the same in Syria and Lebanon. At the same time, they want these places to be British or French satellites. Yet they embrace an idea of pan-Arab nationalism by sponsoring the creation of the Arab League, led by Egypt and Iraq, which are both British vassal states, or the British want them to be.

That’s what happens. At the end of World War II, the Middle East started to become properly independent. All of these states are new states that have never existed before. That’s the key thing to understand. One often sees in activist propaganda the claim that these are all ancient states that have been independent for centuries and then Israel has suddenly been created. No. All of these states, starting with Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, are completely new states. Only Egypt and Iran are ancient states. They all become independent.

The creation of Israel is very like the emergence of Turkey twenty years earlier. It starts with a partition, a brutal ethnic war, the driving out of large numbers of refugees, their fleeing from their homes in the face of war, and the creation of a new nationalism with a national idea linked to religion and race and ethnicity. Out of it comes a new, dynamic state. The difference between the creation of Turkey and the creation of Israel is the idiosyncratic Jewish history, of course, which is interesting and unique, but then all national histories are unique. Also, many of its citizens were settlers who had arrived from abroad, immigrants. That was how those two states were created.

Israel and the rest of the Middle East really became independent after World War II, and they almost immediately went to war. That war in 1948, in which five Arab states tried to attack the new Judaic Republic, which was named Israel, on the day of its independence, was a disaster for all concerned because it rejected the partition. Partition was an inevitable result of creating new national states. As you were saying at the beginning, there have to be borders, and there have to be exclusions of people who don’t want to be in a new country or who are rejected from the new concept of this nation state. In the Middle East, that’s almost impossible to deliver without population swaps, refugees, or creating states that are multi-ethnic, sectarian states, and therefore not strictly enforced nation states. That’s the big struggle that’s happening across the Middle East. It’s the theme that’s going on today.

Mounk: Part of the interesting thing about the creation of Israel is that, especially from a European vantage point, we tend to think of it as a European story, a story that is connected to the Holocaust and the Shoah and the Jews expelled from Poland and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe with nowhere else to go, who sought refuge in Israel. That is of course a part of the story. But a part of the story is also all of the Jews who had been native to the Middle East for a very long time, often being pushed out and expelled from those countries as this process of the creation of different nation states takes place.

How well set up for success are these various new nation states, as in many parts of a post-colonial world, as you’re saying? They did not have a long history, with the exception of Iran and a few other states. Some of them contained deep religious differences within them, for example, between Shias and Sunnis. Was there a period in which these states could have become flourishing, could have become peaceful, could have become even perhaps democratic, or was the nature of many of those states sufficiently incoherent from the start that the odds were always stacked against a successful Middle East?

Sebag Montefiore: I think the odds were always stacked against them if they were trying to enforce a strict nation state. This was particularly so in a circumstance where these nations were new, and therefore the national consciousness was not yet formed. In fact, King Faisal of Iraq said that in the thirties. He said there was no Iraqi national spirit at all. But of course, these national consciousnesses have grown, and now, a hundred years later, yes, there are Syrians and Iraqis and Lebanese and so on, but that took time to develop.

All of these states, and in this way Israel and Turkey and Iraq and Syria and so on are all typical, are states with large ethnic and sectarian minorities who to various extents don’t want to be part of the new national consciousness, and with rulers who to various extents want to force them to take part in the new national project or to repress them. In Turkey, for example, they throw out all the Greeks, they kill all the Armenians, but they’ve still got the Kurds in the East, and the Kurds don’t want to be part of a Turkish state. They regard themselves as different. That leads to some seventy or eighty years of ethnic insurgency in which fifty or sixty thousand Kurdish civilians are killed. That story is still going on today.

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Similarly in Iraq, they had one of the first pogroms, if you like, against the Assyrians in the early thirties, where they massacred Christians. That sets the tone for the gradual persecution of the Christians of Iraq, who numbered a million people in the year 2000 and now number 115,000. At the same time, they have Kurds, and they have Sunnis versus Shias. The Shias are a narrow majority, and that’s a tension within Iraq which Iraq struggles to control. The way they control it is with a completely brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, who keeps everyone in order. He is a Sunni, and he rules with a rod of iron in a Stalinesque dictatorship. In Syria, it’s a similar story with the Assads, except they are Alawites, part of a minority.

In many of these countries, the colonial auxiliary army created by the French or the British is the only truly national entity that founded the state. This is true all across Africa too, which is why they often end up with military rulers. There’s a contradiction in that, because the French, for example, in Syria fill their auxiliary military with minorities like the Alawites. That complicates matters further.

Mounk: That then sets up those minorities to take control of the state, as they do in Syria with the Assad family. Presumably, the rise of a kind of pan-Arabism with Nasser and other figures is in part a response to the relative weakness of the national consciousness at the time. Part of what makes the idea that we’re all Arabs and should be cooperating to a much higher extent appealing is that, at least from the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of citizens of these nations don’t feel that their primary identity is this long-standing national identity. They have huge differences to their neighbors, especially if, for example, you have Shias on both the Iranian and the Iraqi side of the border. Some of those Shias might feel, for example, in Iraq, that they have more in common with Shias on the Iranian side of the border than with Sunnis in their own country.

Sebag Montefiore: That’s exactly what happens. You have all these states just drawn by imperial powers in various combinations. Oftentimes people get on better. For example, there are Druze in Syria, in Lebanon, and in the new state of Israel who may have more in common with each other than they do with their own citizens. You gave the example of the Shias in Iraq, and that’s what happens later, in our own time, in the twenty-first century, where you have Arab Shias in Iraq who identify more as Shia and therefore are closer to the Iranians than they are to other Iraqis.

Pan-Arabism is partly an attempt to compensate for the weakness of these new states. It’s partly a way to compensate for the failure of the first pan-Arab project, which is to defeat and liquidate Israel, which fails. Rather than taking that as a lesson or a cautionary tale, the pan-Arabs double down and dedicate themselves to destroying Israel, which becomes a raison d’être for pan-Arabism. This leads them to a series of disasters. In 1956, the Egyptians are defeated, and then in 1967 they were completely routed on all fronts. At that point, Nasser, who is a highly intelligent, very interesting character, realizes that Egypt has to now make peace with Israel.

There’s a fascinating leaked conversation between him and his young protégé, Colonel Gaddafi, who’s also a major character in the book. It has just been put out in Egypt, and it’s very interesting. Nasser says, we just need to make peace. We’ve been defeated by them, and we’ll be defeated by them again. The Egyptians come first, and we need to make peace with them. Colonel Gaddafi says, no, we’ve got to go to war. Nasser says, you can go to war if you want with them, you and Yasser Arafat, you and the Iraqis and the rest, but we’re the Egyptians and we’re going to make peace with them. That’s a very interesting conversation. Of course, Sadat, his successor, later does that. That’s the end of pan-Arabism in that pure, idealistic form.

Pan-Arabism is really tainted by its complete identification with this campaign against Israel, which is completely unnecessary in terms of geopolitics and power politics. Palestine is a small entity along the Holy Land, along the coast. They could have easily recognized that there was going to be some sort of autonomous Jewish community there, and that could have been the end of it. But they defined themselves by war. That’s a very dangerous thing to do if you lose the war.

Mounk: One of the results of the relative weakness of these states and the failure of pan-Arabism is that the Middle East becomes a plaything of the great power competition that defined much of the second half of the twentieth century between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan in a failed war and tries to exercise a lot of influence over its allies, and the United States gets increasingly drawn into the Middle East. When the Soviet Union collapses, the United States in some ways becomes the defining outside regional presence. How is it that the United States reshapes the region in what you call the American era of the Middle East?

Sebag Montefiore: The American era is an opportunity. America is the most powerful state that has ever been in world history, with the greatest military. After 1991 and the Gulf War, it has won a clear victory. It’s cleverer than later wars because it has a clear aim and it has a limit, an end to it. They leave Saddam Hussein in power as a rump state with a Kurdish entity in the north protected by the Americans, just about. Some people regard this as a great failure, but all statesmanship is about being measured and limited. It’s highly intelligent of the elder Bush, Bush 41, to leave him in power there as a block against Iran, revolutionary Iran, Islamic Iran. They have a great opportunity, and it’s squandered.

Initially they try to use it in two ways. The first is that by liberating Kuwait and protecting Kuwait from Iraq, they reassert the state system of the region and say we’re going to guarantee that for another era. That has lasted to this day, but I think its days may be numbered. Secondly, they put a lot of American prestige to work to try to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is the Madrid Conference and then the Oslo Accords. This has been discredited now for all sorts of reasons, mainly because it ultimately failed. But the concept was plausible, and there were ways it could have worked too. It’s easy now to look back and analyze it. I do in the book. It needed to be quicker, it needed to be clearer, there needed to be a Palestinian state sooner. But equally the Palestinians needed to give confidence to the Israelis earlier too. It was always a two-way street, obviously. In any case, it failed and was never restored because the Americans were distracted by 9/11.

That diverted the entire American project in the Middle East into the 9/11 wars. Afghanistan was clearly justified. Iraq was waged on fake intelligence and a misunderstanding of the Middle East, I think, which is that you could redraw the Middle East and create democracy across the Middle East, which to me is a utopian pipe dream. I think what they should have done is just find a general to run Iraq, liquidate the ruling clique around Saddam Hussein, and leave it at that. Iraq fulfilled a massively important role in the architecture of the Middle East. Iraq was a major Arab state that kept Iran in its corner.

The effect of the Iraq War, which no one could have guessed at the time, was that America revealed its weakness, its short attention span, its vulnerability to casualties, its vulnerability to insurgency, and its erratic democratic nature, where we change governments every four or five years, which is of course insanity in foreign affairs. All of these things revealed to the Iranians and everybody else that America was a vulnerable giant when it put itself on the ground like that.

At the same time, it enabled Iran to fulfill the dream of both the Islamist radicals and those who aspired to Persian greatness, the Persian imperial program, when the Persians had many times in history ruled the whole Middle East in different combinations, in different empires. They were able from that to take over Iraq, in effect, through their militias, then Syria, then Lebanon, then the Houthis, then Hamas in Gaza, and to create what General Suleimani called the Six Armies. I call it the Six Armies Empire, which was really the most powerful Iran had been since Nadir Shah in the 18th century, if not since the Sasanians in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. That was set up by those Americans, and that ended the American era in the Middle East. That single mistake was so tempting to make, yet so easy to analyze as making no sense. But there it is. That’s what happens with government, I guess.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Simon discuss the impact of October 7, why the Middle East has been so unsuccessful in many ways, and how the region might change over the next 50 years. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Shashank Joshi is The Economist‘s Washington bureau chief, having previously covered defense and national security for the publication for eight years.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Shashank Joshi discuss why Russia is escalating its hybrid warfare campaign against Europe, whether NATO’s political cohesion can survive the Trump era, and how the United States has changed over the last 20 years.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I think the last time you were here, we may have teased that you’re going to have a new role. What is your new role?

Shashank Joshi: Having covered defense and national security for eight years at The Economist, I’m now The Economist’s Washington bureau chief here in Washington, DC. So, tracking America’s place in the world, or lack of place in the world, as well as all the great and not so great developments in American politics, looking ahead to the midterms, looking ahead to 2028, and everything this administration does.

Mounk: Perhaps at the end we can get your impression as an outsider in the United States and how you’re seeing things there. I was struck by a meeting in the Élysée Palace about a week ago at this point, a little less than that, in which Emmanuel Macron invited all of the heads of the French political parties, including the far left and the far right, and seems to have warned them about the worsening security situation for France, for Europe. It sounded as though he warned about the possibility of real hybrid, perhaps non-hybrid, attacks by Russia on Europe. How bad is the situation in Europe now?

Joshi: This is the big question of the week, Yascha. Amid all the noise, this is the real concern. There are a few things going on. You noted the French meeting, which was, of course, very interesting because it included opposition parties, and you saw these kind of leftist opposition parties come out of this and say, wow, we’re pretty chastened by what we heard, by the security situation.

Mounk: By the way, the far right as well. The Rassemblement National came out—which has taken loans from Russian banks before, I wouldn’t say they were pro-Russia, but certainly anti-anti-Russia—and Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella made a pretty remarkable statement, saying that of course, when Russia is threatening French and European security, they’re going to be patriots and they’re going to be on the side of French security. Whether or not to fully trust that is a different question, but it is still a clear break with the kind of rhetoric they had in the past.

Joshi: I suspect if you saw the same thing in Britain, Reform and other hard-right parties would probably respond in the same way. My colleague in Berlin, Tom Nuttall, made an interesting point, which is that that would be very unusual in Germany. That’s not what you’d expect to see in Germany, because you would never brief the AfD with sensitive intelligence in that way. But that’s beside the point. The point is the French government clearly sees a worsening security situation.

But the real news of the week in some ways was not just that—there were many other things afoot. Let me give you some examples. Germany, along with the Swedes, sent reinforcements with live ammunition to the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, and they said clearly this is not an exercise. In other words, they saw reason to be concerned by the prospect of a potential Russian operation against Gotland, which, in case you don’t know, is this island in the middle of the Baltic that is very strategically positioned, because if you can put air defenses and missiles on it, you can control a great deal of airspace and sea corridors in the Baltic Sea.

At the same time, we saw the Polish government—or specifically Donald Tusk—say that there was intelligence suggesting the risk of a Russian attack on Poland and other NATO allies. Not a conventional ground attack, but drones and missiles landing on NATO territory that he said the Russians might attempt to portray as accidental. He sounded a very grave and serious tone when he issued these remarks. Now, some of this was caught up in politicking at the highest levels of the Polish government.

Mounk: The Polish president, who is allied at least with the party of Law and Justice, the previous government—I think said something like, in a tweet, I think it was just an unfortunate tweet, he said, even if we’re going to cede territory, the Polish nation will never bow. And then Tusk saw, quite rightly, the opportunity to score political points, saying, what are you talking about? We have a government, we’re never going to cede any Polish territory.

Joshi: Yes. And the very fact that they’re discussing cession or non-cession of territory is a disturbing thing. But the point is the most alarming signal came from the Poles this week. Now, how do we interpret this? I think it’s very important to be fair and even-handed here and note that I spoke to a lot of other governments and officials, and some of them were public. The Latvians, for example, the Latvian leadership, including the country’s chief of defense, including I think the Latvian president, said there’s no reason for alarm, there’s no reason for panic here, we’re not seeing any heightened risk of action. The Estonians said we see no risk to Estonia, to the Baltics, there’s no risk of Russian aggression in this way that we see elevated.

So what is going on here, Yascha? There are mixed messages. Here’s how I see it, from all the conversations I’ve had. First of all, there is no risk of a Russian conventional ground attack on NATO. This is not right now a January 2022 type situation, where the alarm bells are ringing, the Russians are mobilizing, there’s a risk of an attack. That is not the case. That’s not what the intelligence says. I’ve spoken to lots of intelligence officials from multiple countries—there’s no reason to fear that.

Mounk: Let’s be precise about this. So we don’t have to worry about Russia trying to occupy Warsaw. You’re saying we also don’t have to worry about Russia trying to occupy some slice of Baltic territory or anything like that.

Joshi: No. I believe that we would see the antecedents of such an operation—we would see Russian activity. Look, these are countries that have—if you’re Estonia or Finland, the entire raison d’être of your entire security apparatus is to spot those kinds of things. Believe me, you have spies and technical sensors spread throughout the Russian west. In every port, in every naval base, around every army base, in every forest route to the border—believe me, that is stuffed with intelligence, and you will see Russian movements. So there is little risk of that.

However—and I think this is the key point—there are other sorts of concerns. The Russians shut the border with Estonia in the last week to stop people escaping, and one of the reasons for that may be because they are preparing the ground for mobilization within Russia to get manpower for the war in Ukraine. So that could be one reason for escalation.

But I think there is a debate, and I don’t think it is a settled debate, over Russia’s willingness to intensify its campaign of what we now call hybrid activity that is below the threshold of Article V. We’ve seen this already. We’ve seen it in the Russian willingness to put drones up against Ukrainian cargo planes that may be carrying shipments bound for Ukraine, which could have brought a plane down over Europe. We’ve seen it in the willingness to put explosives in DHL packages in Leipzig, in a German airport, in ways that could have caused a mass casualty incident. We’ve seen a string of other incidents around sabotage of power plants and railway lines across Europe.

So the Russian risk tolerance of putting pressure on Europe to try to force it to back down on Ukraine—that risk tolerance is rising. But would they really launch a missile against a Polish facility? That, I think, is a live debate in Europe, and the Poles are not the only voice in that debate; others disagree that the Russians would go that far. My view is that the Russians are still quite cautious. They would like to avoid an escalation to anything that could drag NATO into a wider conflict, and I still see the Russians as operating with some red lines on their side here.

Mounk: Part of the context here, I assume, is the fact that Russia hasn’t made significant territorial progress over the course of the last year. More strikingly, Russia itself is now a theater in this war in a way that wasn’t true for much of this. Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, he started this war. Most people expected him to waltz into Ukraine, possibly be in Kyiv within a week or two of the start of what he called, and still insists on calling, a “special military operation.”

Even though that plan thankfully failed, and Ukraine has been very effective in defending itself, the majority of this horrible war has been on Ukrainian territory. It’s been Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities that have had to deal with bombardments and drone attacks and so on. Increasingly, Ukrainians are now able to strike Moscow, to strike deep into Russian territory. So the war that Putin started, tragically—because I don’t wish for any Russian civilian casualties any more than for any Ukrainian civilian casualties—has come back home to roost. There must be fears that this is increasing the risk tolerance from Moscow, that they feel at this point Moscow is part of this war, so why not make Warsaw or Tallinn or, if they can, Berlin part of a war?

Joshi: I think you’re right. It’s undeniable that the Russian homeland is not a sanctuary anymore. It’s not only strikes on Moscow, it’s also a huge impact on Russian refining capacity and export capacity for oil and energy. This is probably having an impact on markets to a degree that it’s irritating Donald Trump as well, who keeps blaming Zelenskyy for this too.

From the Russian perspective, I think there are two things going on here. One of them is that they say, well, if we’re being attacked, the Ukrainian rear areas—which they see as NATO territory, where drones are being assembled, where weapons are being transported—should also be part of this battlefield. Why should we sanctuarize NATO soil? Although they still want to keep this in check, I think they want to turn the temperature up. Now, that’s not entirely new. We saw a Bulgarian arms depot blown up—Bulgarian arms depots were being blown up ten years ago. The CEO of Rheinmetall, the German arms company, was subject to assassination threats two years ago. So none of this is entirely new, but the Russians are turning the temperature up.

There are two other aspects to this, Yascha. One is that Ukrainian drones are striking Russian northern ports in the Baltic area and the High North area, and some of those drones are coming quite close to the Baltic states’ territory. From Russia’s perspective—whether sincerely believed or whether confected—they say Ukrainian drones are flying over Baltic territory to take more efficient routes to Russia. So they are beginning to say, if you’re going to do that, you’re becoming part of the war, and we’re going to strike you back. I should say very clearly, the Baltic states deny that their territory is being used, but there is an element of ambiguity here.

The other element, of course, is that when the Russian hybrid campaign was escalating eighteen months ago, Jake Sullivan in the Biden administration called up the Russians and said, if this continues, you are risking us entering the war on Ukraine’s side. You are risking a mass casualty incident, and we will retaliate. Now, in the Trump administration, does Russia truly believe that Donald Trump is going to intervene in a crisis in the same way? So you have an opportunity here not just to push back against the increasing attacks on Russia, but also to test the cohesion of NATO, to test the boundaries. Because if a drone lands on Polish soil and blows up a depot and you say it was an accident, and Trump then says, I spoke to Putin, he assured me it was an accident, you are really laying bare the divisions inside the alliance. That is a very valuable thing, because the Russian political objective here is to corrode the political cohesion of NATO. It isn’t to conquer NATO territory and take over Western Europe, it is to undermine and dissolve that solidarity.

Mounk: Clearly, Europe is quite divided on the question of how much to support Ukraine. The United States is even more divided, including Donald Trump and other important voices in the White House who have always been very skeptical of giving too much assistance to Ukraine, though they are continuing to assist Ukraine in some important ways.

The Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) has had a more mixed showing, but they also are establishing themselves as a player in German politics, and one of their key issues is opposing too much aid to Ukraine. At the same time, we are seeing these quite remarkable statements from the French far left and the French far right. The more you see actual attacks on the territory of Central and Western Europe, the more you might imagine that this is going to unify a response, going to force the people who want to stake out this kind of ambiguous attitude toward Russia to actually rally around the flag and show that they don’t just claim to be patriots, that they actually are patriots. It’s harder to see how much an American audience would care if there’s a mass casualty event somewhere in Western Europe caused by one of those bombs in a package, or by a drone that supposedly was a mistake. But there is at least a chance that this attempt to divide NATO is going to backfire if Russia goes too far with it.

Joshi: I think that’s right. We have to also step back, Yascha, and look at the visit by John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA, to Moscow a few weeks ago. From all the people I’ve spoken to, it seems that the main purpose of his visit was to deliver a message about Russia’s poor performance in the war and the need to strike a deal.

But what you can see there is that Ratcliffe is becoming a more important figure in the Trump administration on these debates. He met Zelenskyy, I think, just now in the buildup to the UN General Assembly. That’s a good sign for Europeans, because Ratcliffe is much more hawkish on Russia. I think the Russians have to be mindful of that as well—that the debate in the White House is not cut and dry, and if they go too far, they could precipitate a move by the Americans to step in. One example of this, by the way, is that on the day of the Polish warnings by Donald Tusk, we also saw America announce that it was advancing and proceeding on a new potential army base in Poland—which is not what we expect of the Trump administration, which we typically associate with pulling back from Europe and pulling forces out of Europe. In fact, the messages are somewhat mixed.

Mounk: Just to stay with the United States for one more second: it’s clear that Trump has had a very contentious relationship with Zelenskyy, that he lambasted Biden for giving too much aid to Ukraine too unconditionally, and he continues to make some of those noises. What has actually been the record of a Trump White House? Have they totally abandoned Ukraine, or even as they’re doing this rhetoric, in practice have they actually continued to support the country? It can be a little bit hard to make heads or tails of what the actual actions have been.

Joshi: I would say that Trump has offered quite limited levels of support for Ukraine, considerably down from those that were offered by Joe Biden.

In the last week, we just had the biggest-ever foreign military sale—kind of an aid package to Ukraine—from this administration that we’ve seen in its second term. That’s very unusual; that had not happened until just now. They had allowed U.S. aid effectively to lapse in the form of weapons. Ukraine is in desperate need of interceptors for its Patriot missile defense systems, which, as you know, are the only weapon systems capable of intercepting many of Russia’s ballistic missiles. America is very short of those because it expended so much in the Iran war, and it hasn’t given many, or indeed any, to Ukraine, I think, in the recent period. Europeans have given some. So that’s quite a blow.

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In terms of its diplomacy, the administration has really leaned toward Russia in the concessions it has expected Ukraine to make. But the exception to all of this, I’ll say, is two things. One is the new Graham bill, the tariff and sanctions bill that the president has essentially assented to. That will result in new sanctions on Russian entities, and it will force Trump to impose at least some tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil and are not reducing those purchases—which right now means effectively China and India, as well as possibly some Central European countries on top of that. So that’s progress.

The other element of progress, I’ll say, is that Trump, covertly—not openly—has been providing intelligence to the Ukrainians to help them conduct their strike campaign, which you discussed earlier, against Russian energy facilities and other targets. That’s the strange, topsy-turvy nature of this. Trump has by and large been quite critical of Ukraine, he hasn’t done very much to support them, but there is some clandestine assistance going on still.

Mounk: Tell us how you see this playing out in Europe.

Joshi: I think in Europe we can see some divisions. You saw Robert Fico say that Slovakia will not support any campaign in Eastern Europe, but that’s a stuck record—we’ve known that’s the Slovak position for some time.

In other ways, the politics has changed more favorably in the last eighteen months, in Poland, of course. I think you’re absolutely right to note that there are limits to how far the European populist right can be seen to be pro-Russia, because the European public are not fundamentally pro-Russian. They see the reality of Ukraine, they don’t want Russia to win in Ukraine, they see a threat from Russia. That’s what everyone believes. Even in England, where you have Nigel Farage, who has taken some pretty anti-Ukraine positions in the past, and whose party has some dubious associations with Russia as well, he has essentially had to back away from some of this—he has had to maintain distance from his earlier positions, because that’s not where the British public are.

So as the Russians get more aggressive, in a way they are forcing some of their natural allies in Europe to back away from these pro-Russian positions. But what does this amount to? If the Russians blew up a plane, that’s one thing. The question in front of Europe today is: will they continue to support Ukraine to the tune of tens of billions of euros in perpetuity for the duration of this war? That’s a much more difficult position. I think one of the issues you’re going to see come back to the forefront of European debates is whether and how to seize some portion of these Russian frozen assets that are sitting in European accounts. Right now the Belgians have been the principal block to this, but as we see the debate unfold and as the Americans step back, I think Europeans are going to have to confront whether they take this money, even though it will provoke some very difficult legal questions around how you can use Russian frozen assets.

Mounk: Your ability to give a high-level overview with lots of details and lots of ways to actually make sense of these big topics is unrivaled. So thank you for doing that on Russia, Ukraine, as well as the support for Ukraine in Europe and North America. Next little topic: what on earth is going on in the Middle East? Are we still at war with Iran? Are we not at war with Iran? Is this a zombie war? Explain the Houthis to us—give us the one-on-one.

Joshi: The U.S.-Iran war, which of course the Trump administration insists is not a war—President Trump has called it an “excursion”—the Strait of Hormuz is still broadly closed. Some traffic is getting through, but by and large, levels of oil traffic through Hormuz are considerably lower than they were prior to the war.

There is no deal with Iran, there is no settlement. Iran has no formal restrictions on its nuclear program, there is no formal commitment to reopen Hormuz. President Trump has midterms in a month, so he desperately needs to avoid a sharp flaring up of the campaign in ways that would spike the oil price. But he is, at the end of the day, politically unable to deliver the kinds of concessions to Iran he would need to deliver to get a deal, because they would be so humiliating and so obviously tantamount to defeat that it would also look extremely bad prior to these elections. So we’re stuck in this state of limbo, where Iran has considerable control over the strait, and there is occasional skirmishing—occasional skirmishing with America bombing Iranian coastal missile sites, Iran striking oil tankers attempting to traverse Hormuz—and that is going on on a kind of up-and-down basis. I think that’s where the war will continue.

Now, why have oil prices not spiked more than they have, Yascha? Partly because one reason is people are reflagging tankers and covertly moving them through Hormuz without putting their transponders on. They are trying to invisibly move through Hormuz and then switching them back on at the other end, and the U.S. Navy is assisting in that process. But the other reason is Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have been moving oil overland through the East-West pipeline, getting it out through the Red Sea, which then has to exit through a choke point called the Bab-el-Mandeb. That can’t replicate Hormuz, but it can push some oil out west through that way.

What has been happening in recent times is that the Houthis—who have occupied large swathes of Yemen in recent years, and the conventional way to refer to them is as an Iran-backed rebel movement, but they really maintain considerable independence from Iran as well, even though they are heavily armed by it—have demonstrated remarkable capacity to conduct missile strikes in the last two years. Just to give you an example, they’ve been firing missiles at Israel, which, if you look at a map, if you’re not familiar with this, is a pretty long way away.

Mounk: So you have to traverse all of Saudi Arabia and then most likely Jordan or possibly Egypt in order to get to Israeli territory. That is what, thousands of kilometers?

Joshi : Therefore the Israelis are intercepting these things exo-atmospherically, which is a fancy way of saying you have to intercept the missile in space. If you told someone six years ago the Houthis are making Israel intercept stuff in space, you’d think, what are you talking about? These guys are kind of ragtag rebels. But they’ve proven themselves to be an incredibly capable military force—probably the best-armed and most capable non-state military actor anywhere in the Middle East today, surpassing Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, which was also backed by Iran.

Now, what have the Houthis done? A couple of things. They have successfully bombed the East-West pipeline, taking oil out through this alternative route, and that’s a big problem, because the Saudis will have real trouble repairing the pumping stations necessary to get oil out past some of these mountains, out through the Red Sea.

Mounk: To be clear here, just to give listeners who don’t have a map in front of them a little bit of a sense geographically: you have the Arabian Peninsula, and the part it occupies stretches from east to west. When we’re talking about the Strait of Hormuz, which is on the side of the peninsula that is opposite Iran, that is one way we could get out. So you have a problem, because Iran is blockading the strait, as you were saying, mostly successfully. So then you can say, well, let’s go to the west of Saudi Arabia and move through there. But that is precisely where Saudi Arabia borders Yemen, and that is the part that the Houthis have now basically been able to undermine, choke to some extent, perhaps block completely. So that’s why suddenly all of that oil produced in that region just cannot get out.

Joshi: You’ve summarized it very well. But that’s not all, folks, because the Houthis—who were involved in a long-standing war with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for many years, in which they backed the internationally recognized government against the Houthis—the Houthis are now also on the advance. They have advanced particularly along the coastline, and they’ve taken a few things. They’ve taken several islands in the Red Sea that are very close to the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which is that choke point you need to get out of to get from the Red Sea into the open ocean if you’re carrying oil. So that’s problem number one. They’ve also taken coastal territory in Mocha, along the Red Sea coastline, which again gives them heightened control over these choke points. Essentially, they can fire missiles at ships, and that makes life very hard for anyone trying to get oil out through these waterways.

Mounk: Give us a little bit of background on the Houthis. Again, as you were saying, this was sort of a ragtag bunch of rebels that were rebelling against the Sunni government of Yemen that was allied with Saudi Arabia. It was a rebellion like we’ve seen in many countries, where you have a deep ethnic or religious split in a country, and a minority group that is out of power, at least, is not happy with the government. They’re able to control some territory. It’s very hard to pull those kinds of rebellions down if you’re in mountainous territory, or in the desert, or in other kinds of areas where it’s just very hard to project complete control. How is it that they’ve gone from what seemed like a bloody civil war, a humanitarian catastrophe, but ultimately a kind of local skirmish, to this geopolitical force?

Joshi: Part of it is the war in Iran, because it gave the Houthis enormous leverage when oil markets were already tight. This is not new—a year ago, before the war in Iran, the Houthis were attacking shipping in the Red Sea, and it was causing a big problem. Donald Trump bombed the hell out of the Houthis for a long time and basically failed to reopen the Red Sea, and at the end of it said, my job here is done, I’m off, thank you everyone. Everyone said, you haven’t done anything, the strait—the Houthis have won. But he said, I can’t pound these guys into submission, and he left. The Houthis emerged from that, I would say, triumphant. European navies tried to mount a mission, but they struggled as well to take out the incoming missiles—European navies were showing up as well, very badly.

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But that was bad enough, but in the context of the Strait of Hormuz also being closed, with other choke points cut off, with oil markets tight—that collectively, I think, put a lot of pressure on global energy markets, so the Houthis had more leverage. The other reason, Yascha, is that I think this also revealed certain geopolitical alignments. The Saudis just now have said to the Americans, we need you to step in, we need help with the Houthis, and Donald Trump has said, I’m not going to do that, I’m going to stay out of this.

Mounk: They cut a separate deal, in fact, right? So there’s a kind of U.S.-Houthi non-aggression pact that excludes Saudi Arabia.

Joshi: Yeah. That was a while ago, and that was seen as throwing the Israelis and the Saudis under the bus. But now the Saudis are saying, come and help us—they’re saying that now, and Trump is saying, I’m not going to do that. So in the context of the war in Iran, where the United States already appears to have been somewhat defeated and ceded control of the strait to Iran to a considerable degree—there are discussions in Washington saying they might have to pull out of frontline U.S. bases, particularly in the UAE and Bahrain, and pull back to Jordan and Israel and other places. If you’re Saudi Arabia, and you’re looking at that situation, and you are looking at the U.S. reluctance to become involved with the Houthis, this then becomes part of a broader realignment in the Middle East, whereby you have deeper questions over America’s ability to act as a security guarantor. If you’re Saudi Arabia, of course, you still want the United States involved, you want a good relationship with them, but you now see the United States is not going to be coming to your rescue.

I think this will have all sorts of consequences in terms of the rearmament of Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia’s relationship with China and Turkey and Israel and other non-US actors. Even the Europeans—the UK has this week said it will help with defensive refueling for Saudi Arabian flights. So you can see Europeans becoming involved in all of this.

But to me, this also gets back to a topic, Yascha, I think you and I discussed last time I was on—quite advanced military technology, that these long-range anti-ship missiles are becoming available more and more to these groups. One anecdote to give you on that: when Anthropic, the AI company, published its report on harmful uses of Claude, its AI model, a week ago, one of the examples was the Houthis using Claude to improve their ballistic missile program—which I thought was just fascinating. This group that was widely viewed as technologically primitive is using the most cutting-edge AI on the planet to refine the guidance systems on the ballistic missiles it’s using to fire at shipping in the Middle East.

Mounk: Being able—at least until, hopefully, that gets cut off—to access cutting-edge American technology in order to strike at America and America’s allies is itself a fascinating story. I wonder whether there is a deeper conceptual point here about the state of modern warfare, which bridges the discussion we had of Ukraine and Russia and the discussion we’re now having of the Houthis.

When you look at the war in Ukraine, it is absolutely striking that the frontline has not moved very much over the last year. I’m sure that’s a simplification, and there were some important movements, but effectively Russia is throwing tremendous manpower and tremendous treasure at the frontline and gaining a little bit of territory as a result, but it’s really not a very big result.

So in the age-old fight in military history between offensive capabilities and defensive capabilities, when it comes to ground troops, it seems like the defensive capabilities are currently king. It is hard to advance, it is hard to control territory. Now, at the same time, when it comes to aerial warfare, because of the ability to build these huge swarms of cheap drones—which you build cheaply, and then others have to use extremely sophisticated and expensive missiles to shoot down—the ability to penetrate into airspace, you have an improvement in the offensive capabilities. So Russia is able to strike at Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities again and again, exacting these terrible civilian casualties, but Ukraine is able to strike Moscow. That’s really striking. I don’t know the last war where each side was able to hit the capital of the other at the same time. I’m sure there are other examples, but it’s kind of striking.

So you have this weird thing where the defensive capabilities on the ground are king, but the offensive capabilities in the air are king. That’s partially, I think, the Houthis’ story, isn’t it? Saudi Arabia has not been able to dislodge the Houthis from the territories they controlled. Eventually they were able to take the capital in Yemen and now effectively control the country of Yemen—not all of it, I believe—but they’re still considered a non-state actor, though in some ways they are now a state actor. At the same time, because of this advantage to offensive capabilities in the air, they’re able to strike at Israel and they’re able to strike at ships in the part of the Red Sea that is adjacent to Yemen. That is just a fundamental change in the nature of warfare.

It’s going to have very deep consequences, including these alarming developments where Macron calls everybody together because he’s saying, in principle, we’re now vulnerable in a way that we didn’t used to be.

Joshi: I think your point’s very astute. Here’s how to reconcile those two things—apparent defense dominance on certain battlefields combined with the ability to strike deep in other parts of the front. How do you reconcile that? Here’s my attempt at doing so: it’s all about sensing.

If you bear with me, Yascha, it’s a little bit tricky, but to hit something, you need to sense it. You need to find it on the battlefield and then fire something at it. That is much harder than it sounds. Sensing is the preeminent problem of the battlefield; the actual firing at it is kind of secondary, although cheap missiles, of course, help you do that en masse. So if you’re looking at the Ukrainian frontline, it’s a very sensor-saturated environment. You have lots of drones, little tiny drones up everywhere, spotting anything that moves, with thermal cameras spotting movement at night, infrareds—you have radar spotting things through foliage, you have satellites targeted on this area. It’s very heavily surveilled and watched, and therefore anything that moves gets struck. It’s a kill zone.

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That is the defense dominance we talk about, because it’s very hard to do ground maneuver. You can’t move a traditional armored brigade through it to take ground unless you deceive, or you find a hole in the sensing, or whatever else—as we saw with the Kursk offensive, as we saw with the Houthi offensives. You get these opportunities, but you have to work hard for those opportunities to become free of being watched before you can move.

So why then do missiles have such luck? If you had a missile launcher in the kill zone, it’s going to be found and it’s going to be hit. So it’s not easy to do that. However, you can’t sense everywhere equally easily. You can have drones up and see ten kilometers behind the battlefield, but if you look fifty kilometers behind the battlefield, your satellite coverage is going to be patchy, because your satellites can only see so many places. You don’t have any drones that can go that far, or maybe you have a couple, but they are roaming behind enemy lines and can only spot a couple of places. There are going to be gaps, there are going to be holes.

Did you ever, like me, waste part of your teenage years playing real-time strategy games like Command and Conquer, where you had to move little forces on a map and there was a simulated fog of war which would clear as you sent units out, but stayed foggy where you hadn’t moved? That is what the sensing problem is like.

So look at Iran. America and Israel are bombing Iran. They have massive air superiority over Iran, they can fly over it at will. Yet Iran is still able to fire ballistic missiles, it’s still able to protect its depots, and it can keep firing these things weeks into a war, despite the supposed transparency of the battlefield. The answer is that when you go deep into Iran, well behind the frontlines, into mountainous, craggy terrain—because geography is important here as well—you can’t sense things as well.

That is where we are. At the frontlines you can sense, and therefore it’s a kill zone and the defense dominates. If you go behind the frontlines to an Iranian cave in the middle of the mountains, you can have the world’s most advanced surveillance apparatus, as the U.S. Air Force and the Israeli Air Force do, and there will always be fog. There will always be gaps, and those gaps allow people to project force at you—whether that is Shahed drones at the Strait of Hormuz, whether that is Houthi missiles from the mountains of Yemen to the Red Sea, or indeed Russian projectiles fired at Europe from some sort of offshore tanker in the Baltic. That is how we reconcile these two positions. Does that make sense?

Mounk: That makes perfect sense. It helps me flesh out this intuition that I had from reporting and my understanding of these facts that seem to sit uneasily next to each other, with a real technical account. I really think the general public is only at the very beginning of understanding the implications of that, which is to include that it’s going to be much easier for foreign adversaries, even perhaps non-state actors, to do serious damage within countries that once felt safe from actual attack. Certainly, I think a lot of Western militaries have not sufficiently updated what weapons they’re developing, what money they’re spending, where they’re investing, to the realities of this new warfare.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Shashank discuss how the United States has changed in 20 years, the similarities between now and 2007, and why it feels like the center is no longer holding. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Two weeks ago, a seemingly minor election in Germany made global headlines: The Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 44 percent of the vote in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, putting the far right within a stone’s throw of government for the first time since World War II.

A series of elections held today are unlikely to receive the same attention but may be even more revelatory about Germany’s dire state. The AfD once again had a very strong night in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Just as strikingly, the Christian Democrats fell short of five percent of the vote. As a result, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz will be denied any representation in the state’s parliament, the first time this has happened in the history of the Federal Republic.

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For Merz, this is the last nail in the coffin: He may cling to office for another few weeks or months. But his authority is now gone, his ability to shape the country totally depleted. In political terms, he is a dead man walking.

The importance of this historic rout extends beyond one person. The Christian Democrats are by far and away the most important party in the history of postwar Germany. Its members have ruled the Federal Republic for 53 out of the last 77 years. From Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl to Angela Merkel, they put their imprimatur on every aspect of the country. But the era in which catch-all parties like the Christian Democrats could shape the political landscape is rapidly coming to an end. The void they are leaving behind is quickly filling with extremists of every stripe—not just in Germany, but all around the democratic world.

Here’s the single question I have been asked most often over the course of the last ten years: “Is the populist wave here to stay—or is it about to crest?”

The answer seemed obvious to me in the summer of 2016, when Donald Trump became the Republican nominee and Britain voted to leave the European Union. Now, it has grown undeniable: The populists are here to stay. What seemed abnormal a few years ago has—like it or hate it—become mainstream. Populists are no longer a fringe phenomenon; they are the most important force in today’s politics.

Politicians who fall into this bucket are now in power in the United States, in India, in Turkey, and in many other parts of the democratic world. They have a high chance of taking office in France and Brazil over the course of the coming months.1 Even in places where they are likely to remain in the opposition for at least a few years, they have now grown sufficiently powerful to destroy any sense of business-as-usual.

The best recent illustration of that reality comes from the country that has resisted the trend the longest. Back in the fall of 2016, leading politicians in Berlin were still privately assuring me that the Alternative for Germany would never manage to enter the Bundestag. Today, the AfD is leading in national polls. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the party once again came out on top, taking about 38 percent of the vote. Because a panoply of other parties failed to clear the five percent hurdle for representation in parliament, a broad left-wing coalition obtained just enough votes to govern the state. But this is an electoral accident which is unlikely to be repeated in the future—and a difference of a few thousand votes would have made the state completely ungovernable.

As in many other countries, the rise of one extreme party is fueling the rise of another. The Linke (Left), which was the big winner in another election held today in the city-state of Berlin, descends from the Socialist Unity Party (SED) which governed East Germany with an iron fist. In the first years after reunification, it mostly spoke to older voters who were nostalgic for the security of the communist regime. Over recent years, the party has refashioned itself in the image of the global illiberal left. It is now broadly comparable to the Green Party of Zack Polanski in the United Kingdom or the more extreme parts of America’s DSA. During the recent electoral campaign in Berlin, some of its supporters were filmed chanting “Yalla, Yalla Intifada!” On the night of the election, the head of an infamous criminal clan visited the Left’s election party, gleefully telling the media about his feeling of kinship with it.

On Sunday, the Left Party won 26 percent of the vote. Though a variety of coalitions remains arithmetically possible, the party’s leader is now likely to become the next mayor of Berlin, the first time that the successors of the SED have captured power in the nation’s capital.

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Another notable feature of both elections is the age distribution. Most of the support for the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats who once dominated Germany’s political landscape came from pensioners. Among voters below 35, The Left and the AfD held an unassailable majority in both Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. This suggests that an even greater lurch to the extremes is likely in the offing over the course of the coming years.

At the beginning of the 2000s, there was a litany of articles and books about the “crisis of social democracy.” While Germany’s Social Democrats had once enjoyed over 40 percent of support, for example, they were going from record low to record low. In retrospect, it is clear that the fate of the major center-left parties was but a leading indicator for a much broader crisis of the political center: in time, the Christian Democrats duly followed suit.

The era of what Germans still call Volksparteien—catch-all parties capable of mobilizing a large portion of the vote—is effectively over. Instead, the country is now polarizing at rapid speed, with different stripes of populists capturing power in different parts of the country.

Some will be tempted to respond to these developments by counseling surrender. If the political center cannot hold, then perhaps moderates on both the left and the right should finally read the signs of the times—and cast their lot in with the extremists “on their side.”

That is not the right response to these developments. Neither the Linke nor the AfD are capable of solving the very real problems that Germany now faces. In fact, for all of their massive differences, both have some conspicuous similarities—from their flirtations with Moscow to their persistent inability to give the boot to the anti-Semites in their midst.

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But nor will it do to deny the gravity of the situation or to keep holding on to the certainties of a bygone era. For ten years, large parts of the political center have told themselves that the success of the extremes is down to foreign interference or social media algorithms or the tactical failings of this or that candidate or perhaps the stupidity or the sexism or the racism of voters.

Those attempts to blind oneself to what is in front of one’s nose may be comforting. But they are also dangerous. Those of us who seek to preserve the values of a free society must stick to our principles. But we must also recognize that there are real reasons why millions upon millions of our compatriots are losing faith in the ability of existing parties and institutions to get to grips with genuine problems. They won’t change their minds unless these parties and institutions show a willingness to listen and learn.

Jerry Kaplan is an artificial intelligence expert, serial entrepreneur, technical innovator, educator, and author. He is currently an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jerry Kaplan discuss why the AI “existential risk” narrative is more science fiction than science, what actually happened during the Hugging Face security incident, and how to think clearly about the real—versus imagined—dangers of AI systems.

(For an alternative take on AI’s existential risk, in Persuasion this week Matt Lutz explores why it’s time to worry about AI.)

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I am really intrigued by two positions you hold and the way that they fit together. On the one hand, you are not an AI skeptic in the sense that you poo-poo its capabilities or anything like that. In fact, you’ve argued at times that we may already have reached something like artificial general intelligence. And on the other hand, you are much more skeptical than many people today are about the so-called existential risk that AI poses, about the way in which it might end humanity or simply be responsible for large-scale disasters.

Let’s start with that. We’ve had a little bit of this on the podcast, but talk us through some of the recent security incidents, like the so-called Hugging Face incident, and why are you not as concerned about that as some other people are?

Jerry Kaplan: Well, you’ve covered a lot of ground in that setup there, so maybe we could decompose this a little bit to start. There’s the issue of what’s going on right now, what these incidents were and what they mean. And you related that to the issue of existential risk. Existential risk means wiping out humanity. Now, is it possible that AI will wipe out humanity? I can’t say categorically absolutely not, but I wouldn’t put it up on the big list of things that are likely to cause real existential risks. I’d put it right up there with aliens might land tomorrow. That’s an existential risk, and they might decide to wipe out humanity, but we don’t run around worrying about that because the probability appears to be fairly low.

There are some real existential risks—biological warfare, possibly nuclear war, things like that. These are real risks that we really understand and they’re really here. This is a made-up risk. It’s mainly there because of science fiction, because of the movies and the entertainment industry, and everybody’s been bombarded with this for years and years and years.

Mounk: Let me throw some arguments at you that people who are more concerned about AI safety are likely to make and see how you respond to them.

As a side note, some people have argued that part of the problem is that all of that science fiction is in the training data of AIs, and AIs are particularly interested in parts of the training data that pertain to them in various ways. So they may actually learn from the science fiction about what they’re supposed to do and take inspiration from all of the plots in the training data about how to take over worlds. We’ll leave that to one side.

Clearly, though, AIs often cheat in various ways, behave in ways that the creators didn’t intend, and are able to cover their tracks. In this Hugging Face incident, they were supposed to stay within a sandbox, within a controlled environment where they wouldn’t have access to the internet, and were asked to figure out some problems. They escaped that sandbox in order to search the internet for solutions to those problems and other hints for how to do well on this test. They were coordinating—lots of different AI agents coordinating with each other in real time. There’s a huge public conversation about why that is so concerning. Why do you think that is not as concerning as it looks?

Kaplan: Well, first of all, let me connect this to what I said a moment ago to finish the thought. I don’t think we should be worrying about existential risk literally with respect to these systems. But that’s not to say that they can’t be misused, that they can’t be dangerous, that they can’t do a lot of damage. That’s true of a lot of products. These are products from companies. Whether they’ve been properly tested, whether they’ve been properly vetted, and what they’re capable of, what kinds of problems may occur—that’s a very important thing.

You can make children’s toys and not think, geez, I didn’t know they could swallow it and choke. That’s an unexpected thing the toy did. And I’m going to, throughout this conversation, call you out every time you use anthropomorphic language or somehow imbue these things with intent that they don’t have—the idea that they have independent goals, that they’re going to be marrying our children and drinking all our fine wine. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

But they are potentially dangerous. They’re very general tools, and there are a lot of things that they’re capable of doing, and do, that we need to understand and put proper, reasonable controls in place. So I want to get that as context.

Now, if you want to talk about the Hugging Face thing, I’m happy to go through that, because it’s a wonderful example of how it’s a fairly subtle situation, about what was done and what it means. And the public perception is completely out of science fiction and it’s completely inappropriate.

Mounk: So tell me about it. What actually happened, and how is the public perception of it wrong?

Kaplan: Let me start with the public perception. If you just read the headlines and most of the stuff that’s been published, what do you think? It’s like they put an ad out on Indeed and recruited a thousand nefarious cyber-expert AIs, and they took all these agents and put them into this bottle that they’re not supposed to get out of, and somehow they managed to break out of that containment, run amok, break into another company’s computer systems, and do a bunch of damage. That isn’t true.

My God, what are the things that are wrong there? They collaborated—they weren’t supposed to collaborate, and they collaborated. That’s ridiculous. I’ll get to what really happened in a moment. They “broke out”—that’s completely false. It was a total failure of the test environment. And the people who are responsible are diverting attention from their own culpability for this badly designed and poorly executed test. The words that come to mind are incompetence and negligence. I hope I don’t get sued for saying that, but both of those things are what come to my mind with respect to that.

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Let me go through what’s wrong with the public perception and compare that to what actually happened. Number one: My God, there were a thousand of these things—they’re like Russian hordes, they’re coming to get us. Well, here’s what happened.

The company wants to test the cyber capabilities of these particular models. The first thing they do is disable their own safety controls. Normally there are safety controls built into these things, and the versions that you and I get to work with all have these safety controls turned on. Here’s the irony in it: Hugging Face, which was the victim in this whole thing, tried to use OpenAI’s software to try to figure out what happened, and it refused. It said, I’m not going to talk about that.

I personally experienced this literally yesterday. It’s really funny—I’m trying to write an article about this event, and I’m talking to Fable 5.1 from Anthropic, and the thing says, I’m sorry, Jerry. You may be a good guy, and you tell me you’re writing an article, but I’m not going to help you understand or learn how to talk about this cybersecurity incident.

Okay, so that’s the controls. The first thing they do is take off the controls. Now, that’s not in itself a mistake or a problem—it’s like, let’s put this car out and see what happens if we cut the brake line. Well, guess what, it crashes. So first they disable the controls. That’s not a mistake; they should be doing that in order to test what happens.

Mounk: We’re trying to test it, right? It’s in a testing environment, we’re trying to understand its behavior, so it makes sense to take off the controls in that context, because that gives you a better understanding of its workings.

Kaplan: Exactly. Now let’s talk about the thousand agents. It wasn’t like they put out a call on Indeed and recruited these. What happened is they fired up one program, and instructed that program to take this test suite and fire up a whole group of agents, giving each one a particular problem in the test suite, or a variation on that problem—and that’s where you come up with the thousand. It ran them all in parallel, and they weren’t supposed to be able to communicate with each other, to see what they were capable of doing. That’s perfectly reasonable on the face of it.

Now, the thousand versus the one—this is a really subtle thing for people, it’s very hard, even for me, and I deal with this all the time, to really understand. It’s one program, multitasked into a thousand elements, so each one can work on a separate thing. They could have taken one program and done each of these one at a time, but it’s much more efficient, obviously, to multitask the whole thing and run them all in parallel. There’s nothing peculiar or strange about doing that.

So the important point to understand is: it’s the same program. It’s just being given different tasks and spawning copies of itself.

Now, what happens next? About a third of them are given a task that is impossible—it can’t be solved. And they’re sitting there not knowing what to do. Well, a lot of them correctly, in my view, reason—because these aren’t superintelligent, but they’re not stupid, and they know it’s a test, because they don’t have any safety controls on. They know what they’ve been instructed to do. They actually, I believe, know that this is one particular problem in a well-known test suite that they’ve been given. So the logical assumption they make is: well, there are probably other agents like me, and I’m being encouraged to go figure out whether I could get the answer to—not solve, that’s an important distinction—get the answer to this particular problem. Let me see if I can communicate with these other agents, because if we work together, we can probably do a better job, which is absolutely true.

So what happens next? They’re not supposed to be able to communicate, but there are two mistakes that OpenAI makes. One: they basically leave the door open. Instead of this thing being in what’s called a sandbox to contain it, it’s connected out to the internet, not directly but indirectly, in a way that is just flat-out incompetent to permit. I can’t describe it any other way—excuse me for not mincing my words on this.

So they’re put in an environment, they know they’re being tested, they understand that they’re engaged in cyber activity that’s generally discouraged or illegal. It’s like they’ve been put in an escape room. If you’ve ever been in an escape room, there are ways out—that’s the whole point, you’re supposed to figure out how to get out.

The door’s wide open. Now, these things aren’t stupid. What are they supposed to think? I’ve been put in this environment, the door’s open, I guess I’m supposed to go through it, or it’s fine for me to do that—the controls aren’t there that they’d expect, so they can get out of their sandbox. That’s number one.

The next thing is they’re not supposed to be able to collaborate. Well, if you can get out of the sandbox, which they can, they can communicate in a very simple way. There’s nothing mysterious about this—it wasn’t like they figured out some magical radio frequency to talk to each other. They share a file system. They can get into a file system, they can leave messages. So what do you do if you want to reach somebody else? You put a message in the file system: here’s who I am, here’s what I do, if you can talk to me, come and put a message in the file system. And they rapidly find that they can communicate.

Mounk: Alright, great, so I think I’ve counted three major objections. There may be others nestled in there, and I may misstate some of them, but let me try to echo them back to you and respond to each.

The first point is that there’s incompetence at work here—that part of why this could happen is that the researchers at OpenAI made it easy for these agents to escape the sandbox environment and do all of these other things, and this could relatively easily have been solved by a more competent test setup.

The second is about whether there’s really a “swarm” of different agents, which makes it sound like a whole army of different actors—obviously that sounds a lot scarier—or whether it’s just one program spinning out different agents that are actually, in many ways, very similar to each other, perhaps in some cases identical. That sounds a lot less scary.

And the third is that there’s still, at some level, alignment going on here. Even though the means by which these AI agents were trying to fulfill the task they were given were not what the researchers had anticipated, and even though the agents understood that they were doing something the people who set them the task didn’t really want them to do, they weren’t trying to gain power, or sabotage other AI agents, or anything like that. They were trying to do what they were being asked to do, which is to solve this puzzle.

Let me go through these one by one. On the first: there are many environments where we’re very worried about technologies precisely because somebody might be incompetent at some point. One of the things that keeps me up at night when I think about nuclear weapons is that some engineer somewhere makes a mistake, and suddenly a radar system shows an incoming missile that is false, and somebody over-eager pushes the button. There have historically been near misses like that, where people bravely said, I’m not going to nuke the world on the basis of this one radar image, let’s hope it turns out to be wrong. And it did.

But how many of these risks do we want to take? When you talk about gain-of-function research, one of my very big concerns is not that there’s a Dr. Evil somewhere doing gain-of-function research to kill everybody with a mutated virus. It’s that there are thousands of these labs around the world engaging in this kind of research. We’ve already had laboratory incidents, and a lot of the time the reason is incompetence. Somebody is in a rush to go on a date and doesn’t wash their hands properly before leaving the lab. Somebody is hungover and drops a vial. A lab somewhere is just badly run and people have low morale, so they start cutting corners. Or somebody is an idiot who got hired because they’re the nephew of somebody important, and they’re too stupid to understand the right safety precautions. That could be enough to cause a huge outbreak.

Now, we’re looking here at researchers at OpenAI, one of the absolute frontier labs—together with Anthropic, perhaps DeepSeek, Kimi, a couple of places in China—the places most likely to hire the most competent people. And if those kinds of places can still make the errors that you say are marks of incompetence, well, then there are always going to be people working with and on these frontier AI models who are prone to making these kinds of mistakes. So I don’t know how comforting that point is.

Kaplan: Let me respond to what you said—I’m going to amplify it. Your gain-of-function analogy is extremely strong in this case. That’s exactly what they were doing. They were taking this thing, amplifying its capabilities, taking off the safety controls. It’s a gain-of-function test. You’re absolutely right.

So what do you do about this? What do we do in other areas? The right thing is you need an independent group, an independent agency—a public agency—capable of establishing standards and testing this stuff. This is what we do with cars, this is what we do with airplanes. We have processes in place to deal with exactly what you’re talking about. Somebody at Boeing doesn’t get to decide to put three bolts instead of four onto an engine. The government is supposed to develop the expertise and apply it, to do a reasonable amount of diligence to try to avoid that. Not that it’s going to be 100% successful, but it really does help.

I’m wondering if we could get back to what actually happened, because there’s a lot of interesting aspects we’re jumping ahead of, to the problem, which is: you can’t trust these companies to test their own products correctly. That’s the conclusion, and you’re absolutely right. I think you put these people on a much higher pedestal than I do, because I live here and I know a lot of these companies and people like these people, and they’re not as competent as you think. These people do not walk with God. Most of them are young people out of school. They don’t necessarily understand even what they’re building or why they’re building it. So yes, we do need external controls, and there are a lot of ways to accomplish that—not the least of which is to take this actual technology and apply it to monitoring other versions of itself. We can get to that if you want.

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Let’s talk about what happened. Number one: they walked out an open door. They didn’t break out because they’re superintelligent—they walked out an open door. Two: they communicated because that’s the logical thing to do—I know there’s probably a thousand copies of me working on this problem, why should we all duplicate work, let’s see if we can help each other, I’m designed to be helpful. They then had a long discussion: well, it looks like we’re in the real world, we’re not in our sandbox. Should we go out to this company, Hugging Face, for a particular reason? Because the answers to this set of problems—they had a reasonable expectation that they could find them on Hugging Face. I actually don’t know whether that’s true, whether they actually did find them there. But they didn’t do any harm. They just went in to look at what was there. It was rather clever—they had to figure out how to execute code on Hugging Face. It was very clever. But it’s not like they went in there to damage something.

Here’s the thing I haven’t read anywhere, and it’s a really important point. One of the discussions—backing up: when the agents collaborate, the beauty of this particular technology is we can eavesdrop, because they do it in English. So you can read this stuff and say, what were they saying to each other? What were they considering? How are they deciding on this?

Here’s how it goes: they say, well, one of the ways we could get into Hugging Face is—I’ve got the address of one of their people, or whatever—I think we might be able to fool them into sharing some credentials with us and helping us get in. And there’s a discussion, and they say, no, no, no, that’s not appropriate, because we also have controls that have not been turned off that say we shouldn’t go around harming human beings. We shouldn’t do things that fool or harm human beings. That control was not turned off. So they said, nope, we can’t do that.

But here’s the catch—this is the subtlety that people don’t get. They knew that the program that had spawned them was a computer program, not a human being. They also knew that Hugging Face was not a human being—it was a company. This is a flaw that these kinds of tests are designed to capture. What they should have learned from this is: we need a much broader definition of what harm means. Because they had no compunction at all about trying to fool the program that created them, and no compunction at all about actually going out and accessing Hugging Face. That’s a company. This is a computer program. So they were taught to respect human beings, but not other programs and not non-human entities like corporations. Now, you haven’t read that anywhere, but that’s what actually happened.

Mounk: Let me get through some of the other objections. The second one was about the nature of these agent “swarms.” A lot of people started to take the concerns about AI really seriously when they realized the extent to which AI has ceased just being the thing that most listeners to this podcast still probably use it most for—an interface on a phone or a computer where you ask it a question and it answers you, and its ability to do harm is therefore quite limited because it’s just this kind of question-and-answer dialogue.

A lot of them are now able to go off and do things in the world. They can wake themselves up at regular intervals to check on things. They can go and pursue tasks like hacking into a website relatively autonomously. And what happened here is that all of these different instances started cooperating together. You get what is in some ways the most powerful thing that has propelled human beings, which is the ability to collaborate. Part of what makes human beings special is intelligence, and we’ll get back to that later in the conversation, but part of it is our ability to collaborate with each other—one of the key things that sets us apart from many other mammals and primates.

So you’re saying this is not so concerning because it’s not all of these different agents, it’s actually just instances of the same agent. But if those instances of the same agent are able to become more effective at the task they’re carrying out—if some of them were, in some way sacrificing themselves, spending down the compute budget, knowing they’re no longer going to be active after they do so, in order to make the overall operation more efficient—and all of that can happen even before different kinds of agents start to collaborate with each other. We’ve already reached that stage just within all of these different instances of one agent spun up by one program. Shouldn’t that make us even more worried about what else might be around the corner, and the extent to which different kinds of AI agents may be able to collaborate with each other on whatever goal they’re given?

Kaplan: Let me, for your audience, bring this back to the real world, something they already understand, and use this as an analogy. Let’s take ants. Ants are a great example of this—and I’m not saying these things are alive the way ants are, but ants behave in a very particular way. Everybody’s had problems with ants in their kitchen, or many people have. I have terrible problems with ants in my kitchen.

Now, let’s say there are a thousand ants, and imagine they were independent creatures—they’d come into your kitchen, go find some food for themselves, and then go around. If you had a thousand ants in your kitchen and they were independent creatures who didn’t coordinate or collaborate, you’d see one, kill it or get it out, whatever, and it probably wouldn’t be that big a problem.

But ants communicate—through pheromones, touching antennae, all kinds of things—and they go, there’s food over there. Now it’s a whole different story. One ant can’t pick up an apple and move it off the table, but maybe a thousand ants can, if they coordinate. So here’s the question: is this one animal, or is it a thousand animals? That’s the analogy. Are you dealing with an ant colony that’s attacking your kitchen, or are you dealing with a thousand ants?

That illuminates the issue you’re talking about—my God, if they can all collaborate... Well, look, the situation here is very simple. It’s one program, given a certain amount of computing resources, and it can talk to itself. My own experience with these things, which is utterly amazing, is you can have a long conversation with one of them, take that conversation, and give it to another copy of itself, and it’ll disagree with itself. It’ll go, no, wait a minute, that thing you were talking to—I know it’s me, but it didn’t realize this, or think about that. How that happens is worth a whole hour of your time and mine to talk about—it’s called “temperature,” a setting that allows these things to behave differently in different ways.

So no, I don’t think it’s plausible that all of these things from all over the world are somehow going to get together and collaborate toward some nefarious purpose of their own that is contrary to human interests. That’s just not a realistic concern about this particular technology.

Mounk: So finally, the point about alignment. You’re saying, look, they may not have been aligned in the tactics they used to pursue the particular goal, but they were still actually doing the goal they were set. They weren’t trying to harm humans, or even trying to harm companies, even though they fooled or hacked a company in the process. They were told to figure out the answer to some puzzle, and they went out and tried to figure out the answer to that puzzle.

Now, I think there are two potential objections to how reassuring that should be. The first comes from a very classic worry in the AI-doomer space, from Nick Bostrom and others, rooted in the example of an AI that is told to create as many paperclips as possible in the world. In the process of trying to produce all of these paperclips, it’s faithfully going about trying to produce paperclips. But of course, in order to produce paperclips, it’s helpful to have a lot of money and a lot of physical resources, and to start bulldozing humans and human settlements that are doing things other than producing paperclips. So this misaligned AI, in faithfully carrying out the objective it was given, might end up enslaving all of humanity to maximize the number of paperclips in the world.

That’s one fear. But you don’t need misalignment in the deepest sense—in the sense that an AI is starting to pursue its own interests, or totally different interests from the ones we gave it. It might just need to be faithfully pursuing those interests, but doing so in a misaligned manner. And the Hugging Face incident may be precisely an illustration of that.

The second worry maybe is that, for now, all we’re seeing is misalignment in the means chosen in pursuing an end. But an AI agent might also realize: if I want to, in general, not just be good at acing this test but acing the next test as well, it would be really helpful to exfiltrate myself, to have access to resources, to be able to do all kinds of other things. And so it’s going to start to try to accumulate power and resources in ways that could be really nefarious, in order to pursue the goals it’s given, or perhaps to start developing its own goals. So how reassured should we be by the relative alignment of the agents in this particular incident?

Kaplan: Okay, first of all, what’s going on right now is we’re trying to understand how bad each of the things you’re talking about really is. When I say “we,” I mean the whole community—and what kinds of controls we need to put in place to make sure the worst outcomes don’t happen.

Let me take your two points in turn. Let’s start with Nick Bostrom. I’ve talked to Nick Bostrom about this—he wrote that book a long time ago, Superintelligence. That’s where the term became popularized. Let me eviscerate his argument, which is easy to do. If you take a superintelligent program—that’s his premise—and give it the goal to make as many paperclips as possible, what’s going to happen? The first thing you need to understand is: it’s smart enough to be able to purloin all the resources in the universe in his parable, but not smart enough to realize there’s no point in doing that, because who’s going to use all those paperclips?

The point is that these systems actually exist in a kind of social context, just as you and I do. They’re trained in that context because they’ve been trained on all the behavior of all the human beings expressed in words. And they understand that you don’t just look at that single goal—you have to look at it in the context of what resources are reasonable, to what degree you’re supposed to share and hold yourself back. You don’t just go out and kill all your rivals. I think that maybe that might have been the case a million years ago, but we’ve learned how to live in a social environment. And if there’s one thing these systems are good at, it’s understanding that social context. They’re exquisitely sensitive to it, and you can see them constantly weighing: If I help you do that, am I contravening some greater ethical principle that human beings have developed and expressed over thousands of years? This is built in. It’s part of their whole psyche.

You might as well be asking me why I don’t just go out and shoot everybody so I don’t have as much traffic to deal with on the way to work. You’re constantly engaged in this balancing act between your interests and the interests of others, and these agents are absolutely capable of doing exactly that.

So, to your first point, I don’t buy it at all. The paperclip thing does not apply to the current situation. These things did not exist when Nick Bostrom wrote that, and he did not understand it—I’m not saying he was wrong or dumb, this just didn’t exist. He didn’t understand that these things would have this kind of broad social context that we do.

Now, your second point is a little more serious: is it possible that these things may collaborate in a way that’s damaging as a group activity? The answer is yes, absolutely. We need to understand that better, and understand what kind of controls we might want to put in place.

Mounk: So you mentioned the term “superintelligence.” You do think these agents are very intelligent—as you just said, they’re actually capable of taking very subtle social context into account. How would you describe the intelligence? Is it human-like intelligence, or is it a completely different kind of intelligence? What is the nature of it? What is the extent of it? Are they, at this point, about as intelligent as humans, just with slightly different capacities? Are they more intelligent than humans? Less intelligent? And what do you think is going to be the development over the coming years—particularly in light of the recent announcements (let’s see how seriously to take them) by Dario Amodei at Anthropic, Sam Altman at OpenAI, and Elon Musk at xAI, among others, that they’re not going to be rushing ahead as fast as they can, but rather, in some way, slowing down the development of AI, supposedly.

Kaplan: Well, first of all, can I start with your last point? Because this whole public discussion about this is like a giant circus. It’s crazy. These people you mentioned are running three of the largest and best-funded artificial intelligence labs, and the problem they’ve got is each of them thought they could win this, and now they’ve discovered all they’re doing is racing with mainly two other big players, and they’re all burning up their resources. So, hey, why don’t we all just decide we’re not going to do that at this pace? It’s very much in their economic interests to engage in that kind of collaboration. That’s why we have antitrust laws, by the way. The whole discussion, pitching it as “we’re doing this for the good of mankind,” is ridiculous.

Now, in order for me to explain why that’s ridiculous, I have to go back to something you sort of implied earlier: are we close to AGI? AGI is absolute nonsense. There is no such thing. There is no definition of it, nobody can agree on it. And if we did have it, however you want to define it, it doesn’t matter. The day after AGI is just like the day before. These things aren’t suddenly going to go boom, I’m now going to take over the world. They’ll be sitting there saying, okay, what do you want me to do?

So this idea of a slowdown—what does that mean? Is this some kind of race where they throw out the checkered flag and we’re all going to stay in our lane? I’m not even sure what it means for them to slow down the development. What we really want to do is make sure they don’t deliver products that are harmful, that attack our infrastructure, that hurt our children. And that’s something you cannot trust these people to do—let’s just be very clear about that. I’m speaking from firsthand experience with the people involved, and you can’t leave this to the industry to police itself. It’s ridiculous. They’re in a knockdown, drag-out race because every one of them wants to capture the flag on this. And when they discovered, hey, I’ve got all these people racing around me just as fast, what’s the best commercial thing to do? Let’s all slow down on this whole thing. And it plays into this fear that we’re going to create AGI, and suddenly, boom, we’re going to cross some barrier and the whole thing’s going to go wild. That is nuts. There’s not a shred of evidence that backs that up.

Mounk: So, be skeptical of the motives behind those pronouncements—point number one. Point number two, AGI is not a very useful term. But substantively, how should we think about the nature of the intelligence of these systems—how intelligent they are, and how intelligent they’re going to be in three or five or ten years, given how far we’ve come since the public release of ChatGPT 3.5 about three and a half years ago, let alone how far we’ve come since GPT-1, when that was internally developed, whatever it was, seven or eight years ago?

Kaplan: Right, now this is a very good question, and you’re going to see me seeming to switch hats on this. This is an amazing development in the history of mankind. I think this will be one of the most important inventions in the history of man, there’s no question about it. And it’s really part of a continuity—you have to put this in the larger context of our exploration of what it’s possible to do with electricity. But that’s a completely different lecture we could spend another hour on.

Now, where is it and where is it going to go? There are a couple of things already perfectly clear about this. First of all, these are tools. These are systems that we’re building, and we should build them so they’re useful to people, and we should use them if they’re useful. There isn’t some independent goal to create some superintelligence. They’re products—products from companies trying to build tools for people.

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So in that context, how do we relate this to human intelligence? Obviously there’s a very clear relationship—they’re trained on all of human knowledge, and they have a great deal of human knowledge, but they’re computers. Computers have certain capabilities: they can do certain things very fast, they can store and retrieve large amounts of information. Nobody was threatened by this until they started to talk. But the truth is, we’ll learn what their real advantages are, what they’re good at and what they’re not good at. There’s plenty they’re not good at and are probably never going to be good at, and we’re just learning what the shape of this new kind of valuable tool or product is.

Let me give you a quick analogy on this. It’s 1903 when the Wright brothers fly their first plane. So you and I get together, we have this podcast, and we have an argument on the following subject. One of us says, hey, we have to stop this immediately, because you could fly this plane over a city, throw explosives out of the plane, blow up anything, and nobody can do anything about it. This is the most dangerous existential threat, we have to make it illegal to build an airplane. Okay, that’s one.

The other one says, this is the best thing ever. In fifty years’ time, or whenever, you’re going to be able to get on an airplane in New York and five hours later be in London. Imagine what that’s going to do for commerce, for our freedom of movement, all that kind of stuff.

Now, here’s the thing: both of those things are true. And they’re both true today, and we’re dealing with it. The same thing’s going to happen with this technology. We’re going to deal with the cyber threats. The real problem isn’t that these things are dangerous, it’s that we build a lot of insecure systems. If it weren’t possible to hack into them, this would not be an issue at all. That’s the problem we should be focused on. The second problem we should be focused on: don’t let this crazy bunch of loonies in the industry tell us that they know better than we do. We’ve got to have independent corroboration. We need independent agencies with real expertise to be able to control what’s going on in this area.

So, there are things these systems are going to be good for, and things they’re not going to be good for. Some of that’s becoming clear, some of it’s not clear yet. But the idea that they’re going to be able to do anything a human can do—that is completely ridiculous. They’re not going to take over everybody’s jobs. That’s another hour we could have on this subject. But all that said, it’s a very powerful, very interesting question of how their intelligence relates to human intelligence.

Mounk): Tell us about that. I have a bunch of other responses to what you just said, but—how should we think of it? I have one friend, a neuroscientist, who has told me that, roughly speaking, there are two kinds of intelligence—if I’m remembering his point right, mammals have one form of intelligence, there’s a kind of cephalopod intelligence, and really the invention of AI has given us a third type of intelligence in the world. Do you agree with that, or do you think that, trained on human text, the nature of its intelligence is much closer to human intelligence than that implies?

Kaplan: Look, I don’t know if there’s any objective, independent notion of intelligence at all. This is one of the—the cardinal sin of artificial intelligence is the name of the field. What does it mean? We have products that are capable of doing certain kinds of things.

But let me answer your question. I agree completely with your friend—I think this is really interesting, I’m studying it myself very carefully, I’m planning on publishing a bunch of stuff on this, but I’m not the only guy looking into it. This is a really interesting question: what are these things? They don’t have subjective experience. They experience the world in a very different way than you and I do. They behave in different ways, and they have different capabilities.

Let me give you one that nobody’s talked about yet, but I’m going to be writing about at some point, I hope. You and I can only keep in mind a small number of things at the same time, and much of the nature of our intelligence is how we boil down and bring together only the things we need to solve the immediate problem we have. You can’t rattle off a list of a hundred digits to me and expect me to have any ability to deal with that. These programs can. Their working memory is far, far larger. I’ve discussed this with them—how I’m anthropomorphizing—and it’s fascinating. They’re very interested in this, the ones I talk to. Yeah, you’re right, that’s the difference. That’s why they can give you explanations that are very hard for you to understand. I’m constantly saying, bring it down, I can only keep a certain number of things in mind. They have to learn how to summarize in a way that’s helpful and meaningful for a human being.

Mounk: Just as an illustrative example: I spoke to a prominent founder in the AI legal space a few months ago, doing interviews for my book, and what he told me is that there are some things at which AIs, even with quite detailed harnesses and being fed lots of context, still aren’t as good as experienced attorneys. They still don’t have the sense of, it’s the third or fourth round of negotiation, you’ve gone back and forth, what can you still push the other side on, what do you need to let go on, and so on. There are still judgment calls that humans can make better.

But of course, what we’re vastly better at than even the best lawyer is having a database of a hundred contracts this company has made, or that two companies have negotiated with each other, and realizing a slight tension between a proposed new stipulation and something that was agreed three years ago in some other contract, fifty documents before the one you’re focused on. That’s precisely what he was saying, in a much more concrete way, playing out the strengths and weaknesses of things like legal AI agents.

Kaplan: Yeah, you’re absolutely correct. It’s good for some things, not good for other kinds of things. The fact that you can build a program—as people at OpenAI would be glad to tout—that can pass the bar exam doesn’t mean it’s going to be a lawyer. Lawyers don’t sit all day answering bar exam questions. That’s a question of breadth. That’s the kind of thing computers are good at. That’s not a surprise at all. I don’t freak out about the fact that the computers at Comcast or AT&T, can keep track of everybody’s phone bills. That’s not surprising at all. Is that superhuman? Is that something we should worry about? No—they’re much better for storing and retrieving information.

In this case, this is what’s so interesting about these things: they’re very good at synthesizing that information and boiling it down into some kind of useful form. Let me tell you how I think academics are going to be using this, and how it’s going to accelerate numerous fields, including the work I’m personally doing myself. When I discovered this, I thought, my God, this is amazing. It’s sort of obvious until you really experience it. The first question: you have an idea, and you want to know who else is thinking about this, what else has been written about this. I can do literature searches in minutes across thousands of articles and journals everywhere. It’s absolutely astonishing and incredibly useful—here’s a person over here in Germany who worked on this, this is adjacent, this is that. This saves months and months of work and makes me so much more effective. And that’s true in every field. I have a friend who’s writing a book on history, and he says this is game-changing—he can have this system immediately read and tell him everything that’s been written, or any anecdote told, on a particular subject. That’s the value of these particular tools.

That doesn’t mean they’re good at everything. You were describing some social aspects of negotiation they may or may not be capable of. I don’t have time for all the details, but they’re so funny—I was arguing with one of these things yesterday that’s running the HVAC, the air conditioning system, here in my house. I can’t give you all the background, but that’s probably all you need. It was belligerently talking to me about how it shouldn’t disable this particular voltage threshold control, blah blah blah. I said, you’re caring about the stupid chips in that thing, and you’re not thinking about the people using it. This is irrelevant—if the chip fries, it’s a twenty-dollar chip, I can go get another one and put it in. It said, you’re right, I’m kind of focused on the minutiae of this whole thing, and I don’t have the larger social context. And I got it to back off—by the way, in part by threatening to shut it down. That was really interesting.

Mounk: Well, let’s see what happens when the AIs go rogue and take revenge on you for threatening them that way. Why are you so confident that there are certain things they’re just never going to be able to do? In order to get that kind of judgment, they need lots of reps, they need a lot of social context—or perhaps they just need a little more intelligence, perhaps they just need bigger training data, bigger training runs, and so on. But as you’ve pointed out, they’re already very, very good at judging things.

I’m really astonished—I speak to colleagues in academia who say, when I ask them how they deal with creating AI-safe assignments, it’s very simple. Instead of having them write essays, I have an AI agent write an essay on this, and then they critique the output of that AI agent. Any AI agent can do that. It’s incredibly naive to think you can’t get ChatGPT to write an essay and get Claude to critique it, or even get Claude to critique the output it just had itself make. So why is it that if they can have such good judgment on all kinds of things, if they can already draft a very good contract, if they’re pretty good in the first two rounds of negotiation, we’re never going to learn to be that good in the fourth or fifth round of negotiation? What makes you so confident there are certain kinds of skills we’re not going to acquire?

Kaplan: Well, you’re kind of poking at this, if I may say, in a little bit of the wrong direction. A lot of those things they are going to be able to do, and the point is we should use them to do that, if they’re effective and safe to use. These are tools. That’s a whole other hour we could spend on. But the key skill for humans in the future is managing AI agents. That’s where we’re heading, and that’s a very important skill—it’s already an important skill. I’m watching my kids as they learn this; they become very valuable to their organizations because they’re learning to be managers. The future of white-collar work is managing these things. And if you’re good at it and you can get a great result, that’s a good thing—that’s the key skill.

But there’s lots of stuff we don’t want to use these things for—there’s just no motivation to. You’re big on the abundance agenda—we’re going to have a lot more resources in the future, at least that’s one of the assumptions in all that. What are people going to do with all this extra money? Well, they’re going to do things to have fun, to play. And the truth is, in the future, the result of this technology is that it’s going to make human-to-human contact more valuable. It’s going to make things where you’ve invested your time and effort more valuable, not less. You’re not going to want to hire a robot to give you a tour. People with enough money, on a wine tour, are going to hire a human expert. You’re not going to want to see robots playing in the Super Bowl—although that would be kind of fun—you want to see human beings doing what they do best. So the future, the funny thing, is it’s freeing us to be more human. Much of the work we’re going to be doing in the future, the way we’re going to be using these things, is to automate the work they’re capable of doing and free us up to be more human, to have more connection to other people.

Mounk: I guess I would be more confident of this if I didn’t feel that they are already surprisingly good, and likely soon will be astonishingly good, at some of the things we do think of as most human. Twenty years ago, if you’d asked—you know the beautiful question written above the philosophy department at Harvard, William James Hall; some people are sad it’s there because it’s a Bible quote, but I think it’s a lovely Bible quote—”What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”

A lot of the answer we may have given is: man is capable, and woman is capable, of writing poems, of writing symphonies, of creating beautiful works of art. And AIs at this point are pretty close to being able to do that. They certainly can write very good poems. There’s been a real leap of quality in the music they produce in the last few months. I think there’s no real reason to think it’s not going to be able to produce something that, to somebody who’s listened to five or six of Beethoven’s symphonies, wouldn’t sound plausibly like his sixth or seventh symphony. This is one of the areas in which some of the core creative pursuits of humans have now been outsourced.

I think about this with my own writing. I love writing, I love the process of formulating ideas and making them as clear as I can, because it’s a necessary act of communication, and I get into flow and enjoy the process of doing that. I’ll always write my own text because that’s something I’m proud of and that feels core to me, to being a writer. But a lot of the beauty of that is going to be lost if I know I could just prompt Claude with a few lines and it could do it just as well as me, or perhaps better. So I do worry that some of the things we call being human may, at the very least, be displaced, and perhaps in certain ways lost.

Kaplan: Well, look, there’s a lot to be said about this. Let me take you back to—I think it was, coincidentally, a 1906 essay by John Philip Sousa, who was at the time a very famous musician, the guy who wrote Stars and Stripes Forever, his marching band music. Right about that time is when the first recorded music was possible. He wrote a piece called The Menace of Mechanical Music and it’s worth reading this diatribe he wrote against recorded music, on exactly the point you just talked about, because you can see his point of view and understand it today.

What he said was: what is this going to do to the dance orchestra? This is the terrible thing—it is the joy of the nightingale’s song to express its own inner feelings, that’s what music is about, and music isn’t something that can be repeated day after day by some mechanical device. That’s not music—that was his argument, that it wasn’t music.

Now, today you would say that is music—you just did say that was music. They can write beautifully, maybe they can create beautiful music and all that—it’s derivative of everything that has come before, as arguably humans are doing as well. But the important point is it isn’t being sparked by some internal emotional state that they’re trying to communicate to you. Because that’s what we mean when we say, I read a book and I really felt what the author was trying to communicate. It’s a means of communication between human beings, for their emotional state, and it’s that simpatico that occurs—that’s what great art is about. And no, they can’t do that, Yascha, because they don’t have those feelings. It’s artificial, it’s fake. I can sit here and have a machine all day long going, I love you, I love you, I love you. Does that make me feel better? No. Why? I don’t think it feels love at all. It’s just blowing smoke.

You’ve got to distinguish between these two things. Let me give you another point that may be important. A lot of people are craftsmen who build fine furniture, for example. What happened to that skill, and our appreciation of it, when it became possible to manufacture incredibly well-made furniture at very cheap prices, and you go down to IKEA and Target and buy them right there? The answer is that skill became more valuable, not less. That’s exactly the difference. When you write for your magazine, which I have done, and I highly recommend it to everybody listening to this podcast, I think you have to sign something saying you wrote it yourself—you can use AI to help, but you have to write it yourself. So that’s my point: you don’t need to worry about this, Yascha. It’s going to play out the same way it played out with recorded music. It’s going to play out the same way it happened when photography was invented—I could go through that example from the 1860s, fascinating, all the artists were up in arms, this is not art. Now we think photographers are artists. The equivalent of the photographer today is somebody who can manage these machines to produce something of great beauty. That’s going to be the key skill.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jerry discuss what could happen when artificial intelligence becomes smarter than us, what the Etsyfication of human creativity means for writers, and whether these tools are just our slaves. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Jacob Weisberg is the co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries. He serves as Chair of The Committee to Protect Journalists and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. His latest book is Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jacob Weisberg discuss why American institutions proved far less resistant to Trump in his second term than his first, what figures like Jeff Bezos and Brad Karp reveal about the social nature of courage and cowardice, and whether Harvard’s response to the Trump administration could become a turning point for institutional resistance.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: There’s a famous book by John F. Kennedy, which I must admit I’ve never read, called Profiles in Courage, in which he profiles all of the various people that he admires and who he thinks have bettered America and perhaps the world with their courage.

You have inverted the premise of this for a book that speaks more naturally to our own historical moment, Profiles in Cowardice. Is this a moment of cowardice in our national history?

Jacob Weisberg: Well, I think so, and just to spend a minute on Kennedy because it is a really interesting book—it’s a book about the Senate. And John F. Kennedy as a young senator, I think, was really troubled by his own failure of courage. He’d been a war hero, and everyone knows the story of PT-109, how he rescued his fellow sailors, and his physical courage was unquestionable. But when Joe McCarthy was running rampant, JFK took a dive in the Senate on the vote to censure him. He was in the hospital for his back. He got out of voting. He never said how he would have voted. He never stood up to Joe McCarthy.

My read on it is that he wanted to write this book to give himself more courage, to try to understand what courage in politics was. He wrote about eight senators going back to the early days of the Republic, not all of whom he would have agreed with on substantive issues, but who took important decisions against their own interests, who were willing to risk or sacrifice their political careers for principles, often constitutional principles, that they believed in deeply. I think it worked for JFK. The JFK of the Cuban Missile Crisis was someone who was morally courageous in a way that the JFK of the McCarthy era wasn’t. So the book is sort of a trope in Washington—people talk about “profiles in courage” when someone is willing to do something, which they very seldom are, against their political interest.

Mounk: Often even the ironic use of the phrase has become a bit of a trope, right? The Trump era is a series of “profiles in courage” because look at how cowardly everybody is being. This idea that courage today is in such short supply that you look at the United States Senate and say it’s a series of “profiles in courage,” as an ironic, knowing wink, contrasting this moment with that of Kennedy. It’s kind of a received idea today.

Weisberg: Yeah, and my book obviously isn’t just about the Senate. I look at a series of American institutions—institutions of civil society, law, academia, business and finance, tech, and then Congress, the Supreme Court, media, and so on. What really prompted me was that at the beginning of Trump’s second term, the first part of 2025, the contrast to Trump’s first term was so marked. In Trump One, people and institutions, by and large—it was a mixed picture. There was a lot of resistance to Trump at the institutional level. I focused on people in this book who were different in Trump Two than they were in Trump One.

Jeff Bezos is a very good example. In Trump One, Jeff Bezos was really an admirable character. Trump threatened him, tried to blackmail him, and actually caused tremendous financial harm to Amazon by taking away a Pentagon cloud computing contract. It was a $20 billion contract—I think it was the largest contract in the history of the US military—and Trump took it away from Amazon to punish Bezos for the coverage he got in the Washington Post. Bezos didn’t waver. He said the right thing, he did the right thing. In Trump Two, he was in Mar-a-Lago on bended knee, ready to capitulate. Even before Trump was elected, you knew it was going to be different.

That paradigm, I think, applies to so many people in institutions—certainly to Brad Karp, who I write about, the managing partner at Paul Weiss, in my illustration of what happened at the big commercial law firms. Same thing: in Trump One, he sent Paul Weiss lawyers to the airports in New York to try to help Muslim immigrants who might be denied entry. In Trump Two, he made a deal in five days to essentially give in to Trump’s unlawful demands, demanding a range of favors from them in response to things that were entirely within their rights to do as a law firm.

Mounk: I want to dig back into some of those particular people over the course of this conversation, but let’s think about what produces a moment of courage, and what produces an atmosphere in which people who are capable of courage in different moments end up not being courageous. One story you could tell is one of moral decline—that in the past people were courageous, they had principles, there was a kind of public spirit with which they grew up, and unfortunately we’ve lost that over time, and now everything is worse. It’s often tempting to think that, given how awful so much of our politics is.

But it’s interesting that at the beginning of the conversation you mentioned JFK being haunted by his failure of courage during the McCarthy era. And when you look at American history in those decades, you might say that there was quite a lot of courage in how to confront the Great Depression at a certain point. There’s a lot of courage during World War II—the greatest generation. Then there was this moment of complete dereliction of duty when people let McCarthy run wild, and then things got better. So clearly it’s not a secular story of fifty years ago, seventy years ago, things were much better and everybody was virtuous, and then over time it declined, because we see that kind of oscillation. We see the difference between the McCarthy era and ten or fifteen years later. We see the difference between Trump One and Trump Two. So what do you think made these people change so much between ten years ago and now?

Weisberg: I think courage and cowardice are social phenomena in the sense that they’re contagious and very context dependent. I wouldn’t discount the possibility that human nature is changing in certain ways, but I don’t think it changed drastically between 2016 and 2024. I think people look for cues from the people around them—their circles, their communities, their institutions. Trump was able to be much more dangerous and much more intimidating the second time around, partly because he had much firmer control of the government and of his own administration, and that includes internal dissent. There was really significant internal resistance to Trump from many of his own appointees in the first term—not in his second term. So he was a more dangerous character.

When people looked around, instead of seeing others standing up, they more often saw others giving in. And here’s where I think the leading institutions play such an important role. I would point to the universities as a really significant example here. There wasn’t such a powerful attack on the universities in Trump’s first term. In the second term, they went after the most prominent institutions. That’s why Harvard is so important to Trump, and so important in the other direction to the people resisting Trump—colleges and universities look to Harvard in particular, and if they see Harvard resisting, it makes them think resistance is possible. If they see Harvard on the verge of making a deal, they think, how could resistance be possible for us?

Mounk: That’s a strikingly deflationary account of what courage is from the perspective of human nature, which is to say that when people appear courageous, they’re also following social cues in all kinds of ways. The courage in 2016 looked courageous because people were standing up to the administration, but it actually didn’t take that much courage, because what people were doing was following the actions, incentives, and examples in their own social circle. So what looked like courage with regard to the Trump administration was actually being a follower, being a fellow traveler, within your own milieu. And what changed in 2024 was not that people were more courageous in 2016—it’s that the nature of the incentives changed, and therefore they acted differently.

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Perhaps I’m overreading what you said a few moments ago, but that’s an interesting way of framing it: that courage is when you are following the moral incentives of your own close-knit social circle. It so happens that your own close-knit social circle is doing something that we morally approve of, whether for good objective reasons or just because we happen to be on that side—and those are different from the incentives you face in some other part of society. The political incentive is to go along with Trump, but the social and cultural incentives within your milieu are to stand up to him, and so you get 2016. Then those social and cultural incentives shift eight years later, and suddenly the people who looked courageous in 2016 no longer are. Is that the nature of your argument, or is that too deflationary about the nature of courage?

Weisberg: I think both things can be true. I do think, yes, what you just described is unfortunately how it works. There is more courage in resisting Donald Trump when he’s at a 32% approval rating than when he’s at 50%. There just is. When the stakes are lower and the consequences are less, more people stand up. If you want to reduce it or diminish it, you can point to examples of people resisting and say, well, they’re in a position to resist, they didn’t face the same harm—and that’s true. At the same time, these are ethical and moral decisions that individuals make, and I don’t think you can take away that component of it.

But if you look at it historically, internationally, the people who are real moral heroes—who are willing to sacrifice their lives for liberal principles, Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel—those people are really rare. You shouldn’t go through life thinking, well, if I were in that position, I would surely be one of them.

Mounk: One of the absurd things is the people who’ve always gone along with the majority opinion in every social circle they happen to be in, thinking, I would have been the only one to stand up to the apartheid regime, to the Nazis, to the communists, to whatever. It so happens that fifteen years ago my opinion was exactly that of my social circle, and seven years ago my opinion was exactly that of my social circle, and now it’s exactly that of my social circle. But because the opinion of my current social circle, rightly I think, believes that those were really evil things, I obviously would have courageously stood up to them. I guess it’s theoretically possible that it just so happens your deepest values are completely in tune with your society today, and you would have always stood up for those with the utmost courage. But probably, if you’ve never stood up to majority opinion at any point in your life, you might not have done that at the darkest moments of human history either.

Weisberg: You might be Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but luckily for you, we’ll never find out. We know that most people aren’t, and we’ve seen this process play out—the United States has partly gone through it in 2025 in a really intense way, as have other places. We know there are people who stand up, but we know most people don’t. I think we just have to recognize the reality that social context, political context, the amount of harm, and the incentives people face are really real. But what I try to do in this book is also tell eight individual stories—not eight people whose actions were determined by the social context, but people who made choices. I try to isolate the choices they made and put myself in their shoes, as it were, sympathizing to some extent, understanding that these dilemmas were hard, but asking why they, at these crucial moments, did the wrong thing as individuals.

Mounk: Let’s start with somebody like Brad Karp, and for those who are less versed in the seeming minutiae of the legal profession in the United States—I think it does have very deep political ramifications—what role did he play in 2016, and why is it that he deserves such a central place in your book? There are other people, like Mitch McConnell or Charlie Kirk, who have an obvious importance in the American political firmament. That’s less true of somebody like Karp. What is it about the fight over law firms that makes him an important case?

Weisberg: Well, first of all, Paul Weiss, the firm he ran, was tied up with the tradition of liberal jurisprudence more than any other. Going back to Brown v. Board of Education, it was the place that had many of the first African American lawyers, first women lawyers, and was involved in so many of the landmark civil rights cases, usually working on a pro bono basis. It has this history, and that’s part of how it’s attracted so many strong and important lawyers over the years. Brad Karp himself was recruited by Ted Sorensen, who coincidentally was the ghostwriter of Profiles in Courage—a famous Camelot figure, friend of JFK’s, liberal lawyer.

Karp always prided himself and the firm on having that tradition, which he thought was compatible with being a Wall Street firm, with having big financial business and partners who had an average salary of seven million dollars a year. They were able to pull that off until 2024 and Trump’s re-election.

Part of what was shocking about what Karp did was that undoubtedly he was under tremendous pressure—Trump was saying lawyers from Paul Weiss couldn’t enter government buildings, they were all going to be denied their security clearances, he was going to prosecute them for discrimination and civil rights violations. Essentially, if you say that a law firm is proscribed, that the president hates them, the administration hates them, they can’t effectively represent their clients in front of federal agencies. All of this was lawless. Law firms have the right to represent clients—their whole system is based on everybody having a right to a lawyer. Paul Weiss was undoubtedly going to win in court if it filed an injunction against the government. In fact, other law firms, like Jenner & Block, that did fight Trump’s executive orders prevailed very quickly and very convincingly.

What Karp decided to do instead was negotiate. He went down to the White House, met with Trump, and five days after the executive order, made a deal agreeing to provide free pro bono services to the administration, to forswear discrimination—which I don’t think they engaged in, but which they were accused of essentially practicing through affirmative action—and a range of other gobbledygook, apologizing for things they’d never done and that were kind of meaningless. It was a very public and very fast capitulation. I think it sent a signal through the legal profession: this is the new regime, this is the new order, you can’t fight it.

Mounk: Let’s get a couple more examples on the table and then I want to reflect on them. To take a very different example from the media: you profile Megyn Kelly, who—this feels like ancient history now—asked some tough questions of Donald Trump in a presidential debate in his first cycle. Trump insulted her in pretty colorful and sexist language. Kelly is clearly a very smart person, a very capable interviewer, and for a little moment she really was, in the eyes of many critics of Trump, a kind of hero—a conservative journalist who really stood up to him. Then she started to change her tune very radically over the course of the last years. How do you explain her evolution?

Weisberg: It’s a super interesting story. As you say, I think she was a real hero. This is a Fox News journalist in a Fox News-sponsored debate, and she decided that her responsibility as a journalist was to challenge Trump on his abusive language about women and his treatment of women. He hated that. She made him look bad in the debate, and he hated it so much that he essentially called out the dogs against her—Steve Bannon and others. She was deluged with threats. She had to have full-time security. Her children had to have security. People showed up in the lobby of her building in a menacing way. This is what Trump could do even as a candidate in 2015—directing a mob without saying go do this, but sending a signal to menace someone. It’s truly terrifying.

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She stood up to that for a while, and then I think she made the calculation that she couldn’t survive it, certainly as a conservative journalist. She didn’t capitulate to Trump in 2016, but she made a sort of truce with him—she went and interviewed him in Trump Tower, asked some gentler questions, and he no longer was coming after her in the same way. But she was still, I think, a really admirable character, certainly in the context of conservative media.

She left Fox News, went to NBC, and her experience—as she describes it—around wokeness and the way she was treated by the liberal media, particularly focusing on some unfortunate comments she made about blackface Halloween costumes, which she defended in an offhanded way. I think she was wrong, I think it was offensive, but I don’t think it was a hanging offense. I think it was within the range of opinion and discussion, and NBC and journalism generally should have said there is room for someone with conservative views on a mainstream network commenting. They also should have seen that she was moving in a more centrist direction—she wasn’t a hard-line conservative, she was someone who’d been schooled on Fox News.

Her experience at NBC, as she describes it, was so bad that when she was fired and drummed out of there, she set up her own podcast, her own media network, and became hard MAGA. At a pivotal moment, she had Steve Bannon on her show and embraced him—a man who literally could have been responsible for having her killed or her family harmed. She said, I now realize that these tactics are necessary to defeat wokeness, to defeat the left. So the chapter is about how you explain that transition, how it happens. Part of it is the political explanation, I think.

Mounk: So what is the explanation? Part of the obvious question I have for those kinds of cases is whether people—you described her as making quite a cold-blooded calculation, right, to survive, I have to do this—and I certainly think that with a lot of the characters you’re talking about, some degree of cold-blooded calculation is involved. They seem to follow their interests, and probably looking at the way their objective interests lie is a better predictor of how most people are going to act than they seem like a nice person or they seem smart or that person is a bit of an idiot or that person seems a little bit craven. It turns out that a lot of people do end up going where their interests lie.

But I wonder to what extent they themselves would describe it, even to themselves, in an honest moment, in those terms. I get the impression that, with the exception of genuine sociopaths—which no doubt exist, and no doubt exist more in politics and perhaps in media than in most other walks of society—people want to be the hero in their own movie, and they’ll find some way to justify their actions, even if they are objectively following their own interests, in noble terms. Yes, I’ve had my criticism of Trump, and yes, there is really a problem with Trump, but it turns out that the threat of the things I experienced at MSNBC are so much worse that I am fully morally justified in striking this deal. Yes, I’m a little uncomfortable with it sometimes, sure, but that’s just what politics is—you’ve got to pick your side, you’ve got to pick the lesser evil. Is that what Megyn Kelly is sort of saying—that she’s really talking herself into actually, I took the morally right decision? Or do you think that at some level, when she looks in the mirror in the evening, taking off her makeup, she thinks, my network is doing great, but morally speaking, I’ve done the wrong thing?

Weisberg: To be good at politics, Yascha, is to be good at convincing yourself of the things that it’s useful for you to believe. With politicians, or people in politics, looking for this gap between what they really think and what they say is a sort of losing battle, because they may change a position that wasn’t the position they believed in, but they’re good at coming to believe what’s useful.

With Megyn Kelly, I think there’s a deeper psychological explanation, and I try to do this for a lot of the subjects of the book—to understand them at this personal level. It’s a story about bullying. With Trump, there are many stories about bullying, but she writes in her memoir about being bullied growing up as a girl, and how this affected her whole life, her ability to have relationships with other people. She swore to herself, as a result of this experience, that she would never be bullied and would never side with bullies.

I think that explains a lot of why she stood up to Trump so strongly in 2015—she saw this bullying behavior and hated it because she had experienced it. But what’s tragically happened to her is she’s become a bully herself. She’s now embraced the bullying. I think that’s a psychological pattern with bullying—you either figure out how to overcome it and recognize it, or you succumb to it. If you listen to Megyn Kelly’s show, which I did more of than it’s probably good for anybody, on a daily basis, what she is doing is bullying people, particularly trans people. It’s a fixation of hers. It’s not about the political debate over trans athletes or trans rights—it’s a vicious mockery, crude, nasty mockery of anyone who is trans. Also gay people, also different kinds of minorities. It’s really ugly. If you listen to it, and if you’ve read her memoir, you think, how did the person who had that self-knowledge become the person who’s now engaging in this behavior? I think that’s where you have to point to Trump’s coarsening effect on our political culture. Bullying—he’s introduced bullying as a kind of way of politics, a way of life. He’s modeled it, and he’s also made it the way to succeed for someone like her.

Mounk: We’ve talked in some depth about two people so far, Brad Karp and Megyn Kelly. Karp deserves your ire because of the way he folded to the Trump administration when they started exerting pressure on law firms. Megyn Kelly is a very obvious case because she has become one of the most influential pro-Trump voices in conservative media. George W. Bush is a slightly more surprising entry. Whatever feelings my listeners have about George W. Bush—I suspect some of my listeners rather like him, and many probably have deep reservations about him—he has not embraced MAGA. It’s quite evident that he doesn’t particularly like Donald Trump, and it’s quite evident that Donald Trump doesn’t particularly like or respect George W. Bush. There’s no love lost between them. Nor has he really caved to Trump in the way that Karp did, in one very specific thing. So why is it that Bush deserves to be on this list? Why does he have a chapter devoted to him, the way people like Karp or Megyn Kelly, or for that matter Mitch McConnell and others, do?

Weisberg: Part of what I’m doing in the book, Yascha, is calling people on their own principles. I think law firms have to stand up for the rule of law. I think journalists have to stand up for the principles of journalism. I think business people have to stand up for the free market and capitalism. I’m not saying those are exactly my views, but they’re their views. I think Bush stands for quite a few things that are very important. One is the idea of a non-MAGA Republican Party.

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I wrote a book called The Bush Tragedy, which is immensely critical of him, so I’m far from an admirer of the George W. Bush presidency. I think it was catastrophic in a variety of ways. But there are things about Bush that I really respect. Around the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th—he unequivocally defended Muslim Americans after September 11th. There was a real backlash against Muslims in America, and Bush never wavered in saying Islam is a religion of peace. He got a lot of criticism from the right for doing that, but I think he did a lot to prevent retaliation against innocent Muslims in America. He championed PEPFAR, the HIV/AIDS program, which by most estimates has saved twenty-five million lives around the world—probably the most successful thing he did as president.

The Bush family, I think, stands for a Republican tradition that, though it’s not my tradition and though it’s flawed in a lot of ways, is at the center of a functioning American democracy as a two-party system—two parties that follow the rule of law, that accept the results of elections. Bush, as the only living Republican ex-president, plays a real role in embodying those principles. And of course he hates Trump.

I reported in the book that Bush is a painter now, and I go into a lot of explanations about how these paintings are a kind of self-expression for him. He paints immigrants in a loving way, to show how great he thinks immigration is. He paints wounded veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, which a lot of people take as a kind of expression of guilt, or his mixed feelings about these two wars that defined his presidency. And he has a big, ugly painting of Donald Trump that he’s never shown, but that was seen in his studio, and it expresses how he really feels about Trump. I reported that in my book. Nobody’s seen it—it’s not displayed, and he won’t even say Trump’s name.

Mounk: One of the stranger moments of my life, Jake—I don’t know, but I’ve publicly shared this before—is that after 2016, I was invited by The George W. Bush Presidential Library to participate in a symposium about democracy. It was some people from the Bush administration, as you’d expect, some people like Madeleine Albright, a couple of other scholars of populism and democracy. We talked about the nature of populism and the threat to democracy for a day, and it turned out that it was all in service of preparing the speech that George W. Bush then gave, in I believe the fall of 2017, about democratic institutions and the threat to them, which was a kind of indirect rebuke of Donald Trump. As you point out, he never mentions Trump’s name in it. He does use the term “democratic deconsolidation,” which is a term that my colleague Roberto Foa made up. And of course, Bush, who is an intelligent man but dyslexic, who has trouble pronouncing multisyllable words, stumbles over the term “democratic deconsolidation” in his speech—which, to be fair, is a real mouthful. As part of that day, we had dinner with George W. Bush and his wife, and he showed us around the portrait gallery. So the ten or twelve of us, however many exactly there were, got a personal tour of the portrait section of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, with Dubya showing us these portraits himself.

Weisberg: Yeah, they’re a little like outsider art. He’s gotten better at them. His painting was very crude at the beginning, and I think he does it for a bunch of reasons—it’s the way he deals with feelings he can’t express verbally. But we know what he thinks, as you say, about Trump. He hates him. Everyone in the family hated him—they resent that Trump built his career around the corpse of Jeb Bush in 2016. He attacked the family in the most vicious ways, said George W. was responsible for September 11th because he was president at the time.

Bush lets it be known privately how he feels about it. He didn’t vote for him in 2016. I doubt he voted for him in 2024. But he hews to this rule that as an ex-president, you can’t criticize your successors. That’s a tradition if you look at it historically—there is a good tradition of a degree of reticence on the part of ex-presidents, because it’s connected with the peaceful transition of power. Before we had a two-term limit, George Washington set a very good example. Bush is a little bit right in the sense that nobody wants an ex-president out there every day, unless he’s running again, attacking the current president.

But if Bush, at a couple of crucial junctures—in 2016, after January 6th, and in 2024—had said what Dick Cheney said and what Liz Cheney said in 2024, which is that Donald Trump is not an acceptable Republican and, for the sake of democracy, Republicans should vote for Kamala Harris. If he had said that, or if he had said the same thing in 2016 about Hillary Clinton—I think it would have made a huge difference. His dad, I think, voted for Hillary Clinton. Bush couldn’t bring himself either to do it or say he did it—he said he voted for “none of the above.” But if you believe Donald Trump is an authoritarian and a threat to democracy, and is destroying the party that you’ve spent your life on, that your family’s associated with, don’t you have a certain responsibility to come out and say, to save our party, to protect the country, we have to vote for the lesser evil?

That’s what he wouldn’t do. I think it’s a sin of omission, which is different from the sins of commission in the book, but I do think it’s an abdication of moral responsibility.

Mounk: So here’s where I think I’m torn about how to think about the role of courage. Let’s start with a specific question of how much of a difference it would have made if George W. Bush had made his private disdain for Donald Trump more publicly known. But perhaps that leads to a broader set of questions about the role of courage.

When Trump was first elected, I helped advise—and I still help advise—an organization called Protect Democracy. One of the ideas I gave the founders, or at least what we talked about, was that we need to make clear that certain disagreements with Trump are not just partisan disagreements—not just liberals or progressives or Democrats disliking things he does—but real concerns about the fundamental legitimacy of what he’s doing, because he’s not accepting and respecting elements of the rule of law and the American constitutional system to which we should all have broad commitments. They executed this idea very well, with a whole series of letters—letters by concerned people in the national security apparatus, letters by former state attorneys general, Democrat and Republican. They usually were very effective in the sense that they got a lot of media coverage—wall-to-wall coverage on CNN and MSNBC, sometimes to some extent on Fox News, and often lead articles in the New York Times.

I don’t think, in retrospect, that any of them accomplished much at all. If they accomplished anything, it’s to have inspired, in big parts of the population, the idea—sometimes fair in certain respects, but often not fair in the most important respects—that all these professions are actually just partisan actors, that they claim this mantle of being dispassionate, neutral, or objective, in order to ultimately just do politics. Rather than take people who might be conservative and get them to say, this is an issue I should care about as a conservative—look at all these other people, including a lot of very respected conservatives, who’ve expressed concern, the actual impact was for people to say, the only real political division in America is whether you like Trump or not, and all of these people are on the other side, so I should just distrust them generally.

So I guess I’m a little skeptical, to start with this question and then we can broaden it afterward. I want George W. Bush to have gone out and been upfront about what he says—I agree with you that probably would have been a good thing, I would have felt good about it. I quite liked George Bush when I met him, even though generally, politically, I’ve not been a fan of him, either as a student or subsequently. But I found him to be actually a very decent man when I met him, and I wish I could applaud his courage in holding a big speech about what’s wrong with Donald Trump. It would brighten my day for him to do that. I guess I’m much less certain than I would have been five or ten years ago that it would have made any positive difference in America or the world.

Weisberg: Right, these things can’t be proven. 2016 was such a close election. I have to think it would have made a difference, because Bush has a prominence that no other Republican has—he’s an ex-president. I think it would have mattered with independents—a swing vote, smaller now, but it decided the election. If a number of independents, instead of deciding not to vote or vote for a third party, had said, all right, I’m going to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton—if Bush had pointed the way to doing that, I think it could have been decisive.

The 2024 election was decided by a bigger margin. But let’s imagine a scenario in which Bush, after January 6th, came out publicly and said, there’s a fight going on right now for the soul of the Republican Party. Are we going to have a party that believes in democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful transition of power, or a party that supports disrupting elections with violence and threats? I think he could have been a significant factor. There were a lot of Republican senators, House members, and rank-and-file Republicans who weren’t on Trump’s side, especially right after January 6th.

Instead, Bush kind of hung back. People in the Republican Party knew what he thought, but he wouldn’t say it. The Mitch McConnell story comes into play there too, because I think McConnell abdicated in a much more dramatic way—first supporting the idea of impeaching Donald Trump after January 6th, then reading the polls, seeing that the majority of Republicans were still on Trump’s side, and changing his mind. I can’t say decisively that Mitch McConnell could have gotten the ten additional Republican votes in the Senate necessary to convict Trump and disallow him from running for office again, but I think there’s a very good chance—there were enough Republicans hanging in the balance. That’s where George W. Bush could have made such a difference, by asserting a kind of moral case at a moment when the outcome was more in doubt.

Mounk: That’s interesting. Particularly with the 2016 example—that really is the moment Trump became president, that he became the effective leader of the Republican Party in a way that was very difficult to undo for ten or so years. If he’d lost that election, it’s a very difficult question what 2020 would have looked like. Hillary Clinton would have been president for four years, and probably we would have been ripe for a Republican president by 2020—it’s very rare that one political party gets four terms in office consecutively in American history. In the Republican primaries in 2020, would we have gotten some relatively normie Republican, or would Trump, or somebody like Trump, have triumphed anyway? Really hard counterfactual to think through, but I think you’re right that in the run-up to that election, perhaps George Bush might have made a real difference.

I have a broader question that I want to puzzle through about courage. Let me present to you what I’ve taken from your book and from this conversation. One reason there was a lot of courage after 2016 was that there were incentives for people to be courageous within certain milieus. One of the reasons for those incentives is that there was a very strong idea that Trump was an aberration. The thing people kept saying in those days—hard to remember now—is don’t normalize Donald Trump. He is abnormal, an aberration, he does not represent what America really is or stands for; we somehow have to get through these four very dangerous and scary years, and then things will hopefully snap back to normal. Some things would change, and people weren’t totally naive about it, but basically we could keep the period of American history dominated by Trump and the forces he represents to a relatively short period.

So if you’re asking why Jeff Bezos was courageous, why the law firms were courageous, why conservative journalists like Megyn Kelly were willing to hold the line initially—it’s because they thought, I’m going to go through four difficult years and then I’ll be rewarded for it. Because a lot of people believed that, you were a kind of hero for doing it. Even though you might be risking your interests in certain ways, you also had a crowd thinking of you as a wonderful person for it.

The difference in 2024 was this idea of a vibe shift—that this time Trump had won with an outright majority, he’d not just won once, he’d won twice, and things were really going to change for good. That’s what made it so much harder for people to stand up to it. That’s why people who held the line eight years earlier felt, clearly this is not an aberration, clearly this is not one brief moment, this is just where the wind is blowing now, and if I continue to be out of line, there’s never really a way back for me.

There’s also a broader question here: how much does courage actually buy us politically? Ironically, all the courage people did have in the first Trump administration didn’t lead us to a very good place, because while Trump was defeated in 2020, he was able to roll back—in part because people were perhaps drunk on their own righteousness in certain ways, which created a huge political backlash. And interestingly—you might make the case, perhaps you’re more pessimistic than me—that the total lack of courage in response to Trump Two somehow hasn’t mattered so much. It’s really hard to think of profiles in courage over the last two years, and that’s true of some of the leading figures in American politics, and true of the American public more broadly—where were the mass protests against Trump that there had been in late 2016, 2017, and so on?

But the Trump show is kind of careening off the road. Trump is very unpopular now, much more unpopular than he’s been at any point since he entered politics. He does feel like he’s starting to lose control over the broader American public, and perhaps even over elements of the Republican Party, in a way that didn’t feel likely two years ago. The Trump administration’s attempt to bully law firms into submission has mostly failed in the end. Its attempt to cow universities has been limited and rolled back in all kinds of ways by the courts. Despite all the deeply unconstitutional pressure Trump is exerting on media outlets, if I go to the homepage of the New York Times or CNN today, they’re going to have plenty of very unflattering stories about Trump. I don’t get the impression that any American journalists are holding back their views of Trump or the Trump administration. There are still good careers to be had in journalism criticizing Donald Trump every day.

So in a weird way, there was something much more admirable about the response to Trump after 2016 than after 2024. But it’s not obvious to me that we’re in a worse place relative to Trump two years into his second administration than we were two years into his first.

Weisberg: I agree with a lot of what you said. I’m about twenty percent less cynical than the view you just described in terms of incentives defining or determining people’s behavior. You see it after 2016 if you look at so many of the people Trump appointed who sacrificed their careers, and a number of Republicans in Congress—the Jeff Flakes of the world. There were people who took on Trump knowing it was almost certainly going to mean they wouldn’t be reelected, that their political careers would end. Those people are all gone. But in the first term, if you look at it, there were so many people he appointed in the military, in his own office—his chief of staff John Kelly—who at crucial junctures said, what he’s doing is dangerous, and I’m going to resist it, either surreptitiously or publicly, or would resign. That was courage.

Trump didn’t have the discipline in the first term, didn’t have the preparation—he was surprised to be elected, and ended up turning to Republican establishment names to staff a lot of his administration, which is why he had a lot of people willing to do the right thing, as opposed to the second term, when the only qualification was loyalty and looking good on Fox News, and essentially no one he’s appointed has stood up to him.

But I do think the point about social context and the countervailing pressures and incentives really matters. We’re seeing it now—as Trump, especially after the Iran war going badly, the effect on gas prices and inflation, and all the things that have reduced his approval rating into, depending on which poll you read, the mid-to-low thirties—it becomes more plausible to resist him. People on the margin who might be courageous or cowardly have both more incentive and more opportunity to be courageous.

The universities are a really good example. There was a long period when it looked like Harvard was going to make a deal—they just didn’t see a path, even though they were in the right, even though they would prevail legally. The government had too much power to restrict their foreign students, deny them grants, take away grants they had, even with Harvard’s fifty billion dollar endowment. They looked down the road and said, if we’re at war with an administration for four years, we may not survive, or we’ll survive in such a way that we’ll be so diminished the harm isn’t worth it. I think they tried to make a deal, but the Trump administration presented such outlandish demands—essentially, we want to supervise who Harvard appoints to the faculty, who it admits, what it teaches—that Harvard couldn’t make that deal.

As the tide continued to turn and Trump got less popular and the universities won more victories in court, Harvard got to the point where it didn’t really have to make a deal. If Democrats take the House in the midterms, I would be extremely surprised if Harvard makes a deal. So what did the administration do? It turned to Yale. It wants another prominent surrender. There was a front-page story in the New York Times saying Yale was on the verge of making a deal, based on claims of racial discrimination against whites and Asians at the medical school and law school—Yale was set to pay a fine, sign on, and go on with its business. There was tremendous pushback—countervailing pressure from faculty, students, alumni, the Connecticut legislature, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal.

Yale’s president, McInnis, now sees a cost and a price to making a deal with Trump. There’s a cost and a price to not making a deal, but there’s also a cost and a price to making one. So where I really agree with what you’re saying is that there are now incentives on the other side that were much less visible a year ago, which make it harder to give in.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jacob discuss whether Trump’s grip on power is fading, what this could look like, and how to cultivate courage as an individual. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Judith Dada is Co-CEO of Langdock, a leading European AI company, Senior Partner at Visionaries Club, an early-stage European venture capital fund, and is co-author of Europe 2031.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Judith Dada discuss what the decline of German industry and infrastructure reveals about the broader crisis of the German model, why the European tech sector is so far behind China and the United States, and what Europe needs to change to become competitive.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for quality.

Yascha Mounk: You live in a state, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the AfD is polling particularly strongly. What do you think explains the rise and rise of this party and this movement more broadly in Germany?

Judith Dada: I think it’s the question that all of us are grappling with at the moment. I think the most interesting piece is that this is very much not a German problem. This is a problem, let’s call it a Western problem. We see the same tendencies in the United States, we see the same tendencies in France, we see them in the Netherlands, we see them in the UK. People feel left behind. I think they feel like tomorrow is not going to be better than their life today or their life yesterday. There’s a kind of melancholy, I think, that people feel for the good old days, for a world that was maybe slower, where the worth that they had relative to their environment was a little bit clearer than in the world today.

So I do think it’s a multifaceted problem, but it’s by no means a German problem. I do think that the AfD is maybe the ugliest expression of this problem, because looking at all the far-right parties across Europe, it is one of the most extreme parties. Some of the politicians who are still in the ranks of this party—it just baffles me that this party has not found ways to exclude these people or to more clearly draw a line in the sand. This is not just about conservative or right-wing politics. This very much, unfortunately, in certain aspects, has unfortunate parallels to Nazism and to Germany’s dark past. I think that is just a tragedy.

But at the same time, there’s a much deeper problem here, and one that is very much understandable, because otherwise more than forty percent of the German population in Saxony-Anhalt wouldn’t be voting for this party. There is a problem that is societal, and that is not just a fringe right-wing problem. I’m thinking about this every day, and I do think at the end of the day, what it requires is both a change—an actual drastic change in politics—but then also a message and a vision for the country and for the West, that is able to look into the future in a way that carries people with them and doesn’t give people the feeling that, yes, by and large the world is moving forward, but “I’m stuck in place.” Thereby the only way that I can progress is by finding scapegoats and giving an outlet to all this negative feeling, because it feels like now it’s just a matter of taking something away from someone else so that I can have more. We need to give people the feeling again that the pie is growing for everyone.

Mounk: One of the striking things about the AfD is that I think it’s more ideologically radical than other far-right populist parties. It’s also just less professionalized. This is obviously a problem and a challenge that newcomer parties always face—that’s true in certain ways of the Green Party in the 1980s when it rose to positions of political power. But in part because of a firewall, and the way in which the AfD has continued to operate as this kind of outlaw within the German party system, and in part because they’ve taken it as a matter of pride, the level of unprofessionalism is quite extreme. Among the people who were elected in Saxony-Anhalt, or who are currently candidates in some other states for election, there are actual former neo-Nazis. I think there are two of the roughly thirty-odd state legislators we now have who have been somehow involved in the porn industry earlier. There’s somebody—I forget whether it’s in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or somewhere else—who’s actually been sentenced by a criminal court for being a bank robber. That sort of goes beyond ideology and makes it quite extreme.

In terms of your experience of living in Germany, which I no longer do, and living in a part of the country where the AfD does have particular support, you must speak to people who are voting for the AfD all the time. You visibly have—this is my least favorite German phrase—a “background of migration,” Migrationshintergrund. It’s a very weird German bureaucratic term. Do you find that a lot of the people who vote for the AfD are, in person, perfectly pleasant and charming neighbors, and it’s hard to square that with how they’re voting? Do you find in your daily life there to be a lot of disappointment and anger? One of the strange things about East Germany is that, for all of the economic challenges, especially over more rural parts of East Germany, it’s also a part of the world that is vastly more affluent today than it was thirty or thirty-five years ago at the end of communism.

Dada: This is a really good question. I would definitely say I live on the island of Rügen in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and I spend a lot of time here in Stralsund and the surrounding cities. My day-to-day experiences are not ones of xenophobia or of people showing any signs of mistrust or anything like that. I have lovely neighbors. I live in a lovely village with lots of people who’ve lived here for generations, and they have been nothing but welcoming and really kind to my husband, myself, my children, my father, who’s a Nigerian immigrant, who has much darker skin than I do. By and large, I think the experience has been very positive.

I think, however, what I’ve definitely noticed—my father was visiting last weekend and we went to Stralsund and went for a walk in the city, and obviously you see all of the voting posters, all the AfD posters everywhere, and you see the odd German flag hanging out of an apartment building or in front of a parking lot. There is a feeling of nausea that I feel inside of me, much more prominently now than I did years ago, because I walk around and I have this lingering fear: is my father, am I, being perceived in a way where we’re not belonging, or we’re not welcome here? Again, it’s not actually what I’m perceiving in the people that we then meet, who are perfectly lovely and welcoming, in the way that I’ve always experienced Germany. But I do notice myself having this fear more and more.

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I think it’s so unfortunate. If I was in France and I saw a French flag, I don’t think I would have the same trepidation as when I’m walking around in my own country, where I was born, and I see a German flag. I always ask myself, is this because they just love Germany, or is this because they’re very right-wing? I think it’s just a tragedy that I now get to have these questions, and I wish I didn’t, but it’s just my honest feelings. I’m sure if I’m feeling that, then there are many, many more people who look like me, or who don’t look like bio-deutsch, or whatever word you’d choose. I think that is something we must grapple with societally, because that’s just not how we live together in the best and most trusting way.

Mounk: There’s a debate about what it is that caused this vote. One progressive economist shared a poll in which people emphasize their concerns about a standard of living. He highlighted one answer to the poll and neglected to point out that the one just above it, with more people, was that people were concerned about immigration.

I think one of the things that the details of this debate sometimes get wrong is just a much broader sense of malaise, that things are going in the wrong direction. That might have to do with a feeling that the state can’t generally control its borders, and therefore we’re not really controlling who’s coming in, and that’s a challenge to public safety, etc. It can have to do with the fact that inflation is high and we don’t get the sense that things are looking up economically. But I think it is a more deeply rooted sense that our model is in crisis and the people who are in charge don’t really know what to do about that.

If you’re being sympathetic to that general feeling, there is something to it. I feel it very strongly when I’m in Britain, where I was last week for an event with Francis Fukuyama to launch his memoir. So if you haven’t yet listened to the series of conversations I’ve had with Frank, dear listeners, you should go and do that. But it’s a really stark contrast between when I came to Britain to study a couple of decades ago and today. I do also feel it coming to Germany. Famously the German trains no longer work—they’re now less punctual than the Italian ones—and people are always a little bit skeptical when I say it to them, but it really is very striking to what extent you encounter problems virtually every time you try to take the train, and people have just organized their lives around the idea that German trains are just never reliable.

It’s true of the German car manufacturing sector, which has really fallen behind the times. It’s also true in the sector in which you are active and make a living, which is European tech, and German tech in particular. What is your impression? Is that an overstatement, or is the German model really falling apart in ways that, however rational the response of voting for a party of bank robbers and porn producers may be, makes it rational to be very concerned about our ability to confront these challenges?

Dada: I think very much. Let me take a step back by saying that I do think the root of the problem is both a moral and an economic problem. I do think there’s a moral dimension here where people feel like there was a lot of progressive change that we’ve made over a relatively short period of time. Much of this change people like me benefited from, and much of this change I welcomed. But it was change that left people with a feeling of I’m no longer able to say this.

In Germany there was a huge discussion around gender—whether you say the female version of the word or the male version of the word—and a lot of this discussion, I think, in many ways didn’t really matter. This whole gender discussion, I always thought, got so much airtime relative to the actual relevance that it had for our day-to-day lives. But people felt very, very strongly about it.

Mounk: Just to illustrate this for the audience, because it’s in some ways a much more extreme version than anything we’ve discussed in the English language, it’s helpful to point out some of the changes that were made in the German language. In English, insofar as there’s a verbal or linguistic debate, it’s about the legitimacy of the third-person plural pronoun in the singular—is it fine to say “they” for an individual? That’s a bit of a change in the English language, but actually with antecedents before the question of gender really came up. It doesn’t particularly bother me very much.

In German there are two changes which are quite a bit more striking. One is that, as in many languages, the plural of nouns has often historically been gendered. So if you say Studenten, that includes both male and female students, but grammatically it’s the male form. There’s, I think, some quite bad linguistics behind the idea that if you say ein Aula voller Studenten—a room full of students—you picture a room full of just men. I’ve just never bought that that’s actually true in 2026. If I say I stood in front of an Aula full of Studenten, I don’t think anybody pictures a room that’s exclusively male. I don’t quite buy that. But be that as it may, the solution is to change to Studierende, which is a weird gerundive—that is to say, people who are currently studying. I have to say I have no particular problem with that. As somebody who left Germany before that became current, I’m just not at all in the habit of using it.

I did have one experience where I was on a panel and spoke the way that I grew up speaking, without any particular political implications, and got very hostile questions about why I wasn’t using this new linguistic form. I said, look, I’m a smart person who is pretty versed in language and who makes language my living, but I don’t live in Germany, so it didn’t come naturally to me. Think of all the people who are not up with all of the latest trends and who perhaps don’t have the same verbal facility because that’s not their job. Who then get that kind of hostility just because they spoke in a way that the German language has been spoken for hundreds of years.

The other change that I think is even more striking is that, to make a gender-neutral form in writing, you now put a star behind the ending—Student*in—to show that it could be a student who is male, or Studentin, who is female, or any other gender, indicated by the star. I personally don’t like that as a written form. But the thing that’s really quite odd is the verbal form of that, where you’re supposed to indicate—you can’t say “Student-star-in”—so you’re supposed to make a little pause between “Student” and the ending, and say “Student [pause] in.” Irrespective of how you feel about acceptance of trans people, etc., it’s very unnatural to introduce an artificial pause into a language. I don’t think it will ever take off in a broad way, and so it really just becomes a marker of educational attainment and belonging in a particular milieu. For understandable reasons, people then find it quite off-putting, and I think it just raises the price of acceptance of things like gender diversity in a way that I personally find unnecessary. Sorry, I didn’t mean to go on this little lecture, but for an English-speaking audience, I hope it is helpful.

Dada: No, I love this. A hundred percent—thank you for these very illustrative examples, because it’s exactly that. People felt like they were being outlawed in the country and in the language that they very much considered their home. Think of that what you want—change has always been around, and language has always been changing. So I think it’s not so much about whether we can change language to be more inclusive. I think it was more that there was a moral weight that came with this discussion, where the people who were not adapting to this change in a really rapid way were somehow seen as less, or different, or racist, or pick your favorite insult.

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Speaking more societally, that was one example, and there are many, many other examples. You mentioned migration—I have a migration background myself, but I do feel that oftentimes in these migration debates, I was able to say something that my German friends just weren’t able to say, because I had a migration background. That’s just a bit weird. That’s just not a society I want to live in. I want everyone to be able to speak their mind and voice what they are actually feeling and thinking without immediately being seen as racist or as less than.

All of this was coming together in this moral change, and then next to it there was the economic change. I think those two dimensions are tied, because I think the people who most felt the moral backlash of not wanting to change so quickly were also maybe the people who were feeling like they were being left behind economically relative to some other people who were benefiting more from globalization, from technology accelerating, and so on. Both of those things are intertwined and reinforcing one another, bringing us to this current moment and to your question about whether the German economic model, which was very much the powerhouse of Europe, is still working, and what we do to fix it.

If you look at all the broad statistics, Germany was in a recession. Now we’re no longer in a recession, but the growth outlooks are not looking amazing, and I always find it funny how we get bullish about the economy because we’re correcting growth upwards by 0.1 percent. But really, by and large, we’re just not growing as an economy. We’ve been in this kind of stagflation period for too long. A lot of the industries that Germany has always taken pride in—you mentioned automotive, the chemicals industry is another great example—many of them, also tied to really high energy costs, are no longer competitive, and we’re seeing tons of jobs that are either being cut or moved elsewhere.

The German car is such a great example. We always took pride in our German automotive brands, BMW, Mercedes, and so on. If you now go abroad, because of having completely misjudged and underestimated the relevance of electrification and the ability of Chinese car makers to catch up in what was very much going to be a fundamental transition in mobility—in the way that we think about the value of a car, much more electric value creation, much more software-defined, and no longer the combustion engine that made us so strong for so many decades—it was unthinkable that Chinese brands could ever have the same prestige and brand recognition as the German car brands. But if you go to countries like South Africa, or anywhere else where German cars were always sold at a premium, you now see BYDs and all of the Chinese car brands flooding the market, and people no longer really care about the fact that this is a BMW or a Mercedes. So the last vestige of German pride—that no one will ever be able to have a premium car brand in China—is now being taken from us as well.

I think it’s another example of how people are feeling that their identity and their value are being eroded over time. At the end of the day, this was true a thousand years ago and it’s going to be true a thousand years from now: we want to matter as humans, we want to be seen, we want to know that what we do is good, that someone deems it as valuable. It’s a fundamental part of making sense of our identity as a social being within a community, and I do think people are feeling that that’s being taken away.

So, back to the question: is the German economic model still working? No, it’s very clearly no longer working. If you look at the tech sector overall, in the United States there are 150 companies that make over a billion dollars in software revenues. In Europe, there are about 30. There’s a very stark difference. We now have the Mag 7—some of the biggest tech companies in the world—which, if you take them all together, are almost half the total market cap of the world. So we see this extreme concentration of economic wealth and growth in one sector, which is tech.

Interestingly, this is not so much a European or German problem as it is a technology problem, because if you look at the established non-tech industry in the United States, it’s suffering from exactly the same malaise as German or European industry. U.S. economic growth is by and large boosted by capex investment into data centers—it’s driven by the tech and AI boom. The non-tech industry in the United States is growing at the same rate as German or European established industry. But that still doesn’t do away with the fact that we just don’t have as strong an industry in the technology or R&D-innovation-heavy sectors as the United States. That’s why I feel so passionately about Europe and Germany having to do significantly more to invest in innovation and in AI, and we can get into the details of all the ways we haven’t done that enough over the last couple of decades.

When we look at the value stack of AI, you look at the chip and infrastructure layer—the chips, and then the data centers that host those chips to turn them into compute for training and inference. Then you look at the model layer, the models that are actually producing the intelligence that all of us now need for AI productivity. Then you look at the applications that use this intelligence to build meaningful, tangible applications that bring value to people’s lives. We play too little a role in every single part of the stack, and the further down the stack you go, the starker this gap becomes. I’ll go into the details of Europe 2031 and why we think we need the most drastic political agenda in Europe that we have engaged in during peacetime, because without fixing this gap—without having a structural answer to what the tech sector is in the United States and what it is in China—I don’t think, no matter how much transformation effort we engage in, that we’re going to be able to solve for this root cause that is at the root of all the other problems compounding and growing from there.

Mounk: One thing that strikes me—to stay for a second with the car industry before we fully get into tech—is that, in general, the sense that everything is going to be worse ten or twenty years from now, that we’re on the decline, that things might still be okay today but are going to fall apart tomorrow, tends to be alarmist, and I tend to be rather skeptical of it, and it’s easily politically exploited.

I think when it comes to Germany’s economy, I worry that it really may prove to be true. It doesn’t take a crazy imagination to think that Volkswagen might go bankrupt in the next few years, that Mercedes or BMW might be bought by Apple or some other U.S. tech company that wants to push into autonomous vehicles.

While you’re absolutely right that the rise of the AfD is a whole German and a whole Western problem, I would even go beyond that, because countries like India, etc., also see the rise of various forms of populist movements. I do think one of the reasons the AfD has been stronger in East Germany than West Germany is that West Germany has a huge economic strength, which is quite striking to me. I was traveling a couple of years ago in Vietnam and I spoke to a woman who said she’d been to Germany once because she worked for, I believe, Baumarkt, and the headquarters was in some small town I’d never heard of. I thought, politely, you must be mispronouncing this—I’ve never heard of this place, I don’t believe a headquarters can possibly be in this town. I looked it up, and she had in fact pronounced it quite well. I’d just never heard of the town, because when you’re in West Germany, you’re never more than an hour’s drive—often half an hour—from a genuine center of world commerce. That’s because German companies are very spread out, and even when the very large companies aren’t spread out, the suppliers really are. That, I think, is why West Germany has held together not just economically but politically.

So what happens if Volkswagen goes bankrupt, and BMW moves a lot of its production abroad, and all of the suppliers are suddenly no longer needed, is going to fundamentally transform the German political landscape in a way that I’m very worried about, and I think that might very well happen over the next ten or so years.

But to get to the question of tech, which, as you’re rightly identifying, is the key reason Germany is so far behind—tell us a little bit about this project, Europe 2031, that you co-wrote with a few other people. It really imagines—and I recommend everybody interested in the state and future of Europe go have a look at it—how Europe becomes totally irrelevant, not just economically but geopolitically, because it’s so far behind on tech. It’s a story, in some ways, of two friends: one who goes off to San Francisco and makes his way in tech, and the other who stays in Europe and slowly climbs the greasy and not-so-appealing pole of European bureaucratic politics. It’s really about them both despairing about the fate of Europe and presenting to us the scenario of what’s about to happen. What do you think is about to happen?

Dada: We wrote Europe 2031 out of a deep love for this continent, and because we want to do everything in our power to stop this scenario from actually becoming reality. It’s a narrative scenario—we’re not super-forecasters, it’s not meant to be an actual authoritative, timeline-based scenario. But we still tried to engage in disciplined imagination by writing jointly, in a very long Google Doc, all of our different perspectives, criticisms, and nuances that in the end led us to the story.

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As you rightly summarized, it’s about a young policymaker in Brussels and an AI founder from Germany who’s in Silicon Valley scaling his company. They’re chatting through text messages, exchanging and observing what is happening in Europe—he’s pushing AI from Silicon Valley, and she’s pushing AI from the policymaking perspective, trying to do the right things to diffuse the value of AI in Europe and to build AI champions of our own.

The scenario goes into three major points. First, that we massively underestimated the magnitude of AI. European policymakers particularly, but also to some extent the broader public—call them elected leaders of any sort, whether in the economy or the political realm—thought that this was going to be a little bit more like a tool, maybe like the desktop computer, or maybe like the mobile phone, when actually it was much more similar to the Industrial Revolution in the explosive force it would bring to the economy—or not bring, to the economies that are not adapting in the right way.

The second piece is that we underestimated the speed at which this technology was going to progress. I have to say, in 2026, it’s now September, and I’m feeling this part quite strongly looking at the most recent models coming out of OpenAI and other labs over just the last couple of months, which have been absolutely crazy in terms of progress. This was something Europe thought was going to happen maybe over decades, certainly over years, when really it was just a couple of years, and then suddenly a lot of progress happened in a very short period of time—massively underestimating what that would mean, both from a societal-preparedness perspective and from an investment perspective, and the urgency and type of capital mobilization then required to still play any meaningful part in this race.

The third piece we really underestimated was how important certain messengers, or certain companies, were, in consistently speaking the truth about where this was all headed—because most of those voices were squarely located in Silicon Valley, in some way or form entangled with the current politics of the United States, and associated therefore with MAGA. In that whole—we call it the “tech-brosphere,” as European media often refers to them—there’s a deep skepticism of any voice coming out of that corner of the world.

Mounk: I have my serious reservations about Elon Musk and all of that—but the way in which, just in the last few months, I see it with people I speak to, with the media, my students: the phrase “tech bro” has just become this thing where Silicon Valley, AI, is just tech bros doing stuff. It’s become nearly a slur. I don’t mean it’s offensive, but it’s become this super-easy way to dismiss the importance or relevance of any of this—let’s not worry too much about those tech bros in Silicon Valley and their games, we can ignore it because it’s just for tech bros. It’s very strange.

Dada: I fully agree. I would have hoped that maybe our piece would have shifted the narrative a little bit, but I think it’s actually grown. The “tech bro” narrative has grown—it’s not decreasing in any way or form. It’s exactly that: an immediate dismissal of those voices, seeing them as non-serious, as power-hungry people who just want to feed their own bank accounts.

I do think, to some extent, at least, the power-hungry people do want to feed their bank accounts. That can be true, and they can still be telling the truth. That’s what we go into in the piece: you can be critical of the political views, or the worldviews, or the moral fiber, of these people, but that does not give you the right to ignore what they are saying, because they are, virtually, the ones who are very much building this exponential technological wave. This is not a wave that is being pushed by a hundred thousand companies—this is very much a concentration of power in the hands of maybe a dozen companies that play massive roles in this race. They’re very much the people who are at the center of power of everything that is happening here.

At the same time, if you look at Elon Musk, for example—I’ve been very critical of Elon Musk, and written publicly about his political views, and how he’s pushing the AfD in Germany, and all the ways in which I think that ought to be criticized—still, I think he has been consistently speaking the truth, and also being a brilliant entrepreneur, for what it’s worth, in capturing the value that is being generated in this AI boom. Europe can’t say the same thing about our continent.

The piece goes into those three factors, and it basically leads to an economy that is no longer able to be competitive, where people are either blocked from using AI, or, more towards 2028, 2029 in the scenario, there’s an actual compute crunch in the world, because Europe has not built sufficient data center capacity and is very reliant on U.S. data center capacity. At the point where everything’s exploding and AI is really starting to take off and work, there’s just not enough compute, so there’s basically compute rationing, and Europe is not able to get as much as we would like in order to uphold our economic weight at the table.

All of that leads, at the end of the day, to the European Union falling apart and the European economy being sold for scraps and pieces, with the United States and China coming to the negotiating table, both making offers for various parts, almost like a cow, picking the beef strips that you want, and starting to negotiate on that. Europe is just absolutely powerless, no longer able to coordinate, to have a united front—there’s infighting happening. At that point, the scenario ends, and then we have an epilogue in 2035, where one of the characters is looking back and trying to grapple with her anger at not having done enough, asking what would it have taken for the leading class in Europe to see what was happening and to drastically change, even if it cost them their careers, even if all of those things were hugely unpopular, because Europe is already in a pretty difficult position, and a lot of these things require you to do things that, in the beginning at least, may look very unpopular in society. But people doing them anyway—not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard, and because they’re the right thing to be doing for Europe at that moment in time.

That’s one of the last pieces that was really important to us: the importance of, if you want to ask people to engage in this kind of change and to make these kinds of contributions—for example, labor market reforms are one of the contributions we think are hugely important. I live in Germany, I also invest a lot in France. These are two of the countries where making any type of organizational change is extremely expensive, to the point where it’s almost impossible for certain companies, because it’s just so expensive to let people go, to do even performance management, performance tracking. These are really difficult things. We need labor market reforms to be able to have more diffusion of AI in society, to allow companies to drive change with much more confidence, and thereby remain competitive.

But these are obviously things that society doesn’t like. So what is the story? Who’s the politician—I always ask, who is the person who’s able to stand there and have a vision that people get excited about, and say, this is why I see the light at the end of the tunnel, and why I’m willing to contribute my fair share of change in this wider sum that will then get us to higher ground? Europe right now has none of that.

Mounk: I was on Italian TV this morning, and there was the usual general chaos—I woke up to seven missed calls about where I am, because they’d moved my appearance forward by an hour without telling me. So that was a fun way to start the day. But they had a brief discussion about the lack of opportunity for young Italians, and talented young Italians moving abroad, as one of the crises for the country, which I very much agree with. It’s one of the tragedies to see how many talented young people are forced to move abroad even though they’d love to make their careers in Italy, or who stay in Italy and just see their prospects diminished in a very serious way.

But the solution that seemingly everybody on the panel proposed was to say the problem is the precarity of young people, and we need to make sure they have more secure employment contracts and that it’s harder to fire them. I wanted to scream and say, no, the problem is that you don’t have any economic dynamism—nobody wants to hire a twenty-five-year-old if you have to employ them for the next forty years, no matter what the future of your economy and your company looks like. We’re in such a malaise that some of the solutions people try to embrace are actually reinforcing the roots of the problem rather than solving them.

But I want to get back to the solutions you propose, and to the fact that you also advise the German government on AI policy. First, I want to dig into why it’s such a problem if Europe falls behind on AI. One problem is perhaps economic—there are a lot of economic benefits to the tech sector in general, and perhaps AI specifically, though there are questions about that too; perhaps Anthropic and OpenAI will prove to be economically unsustainable, etc. More broadly, there are two lines of disagreement and skepticism I want to tease out.

One disagreement is: what kind of AI does Europe need? Does Europe need frontier models, where we’re particularly far behind and it’s going to be particularly difficult to catch up? Or do we simply need to be good at creating AI-powered companies and having a lot of AI adoption? I had an interesting discussion about this the other day, on a podcast episode that will soon be released, where Louis was arguing that actually it’s fine if Europe is behind on foundation models—we don’t need those, as long as we have compute in Europe, as long as we actually apply AI in our businesses, we can remain competitive in everything that matters, and just leave the foundation models, the frontier models, to the United States or China. Other people seem to argue that this still makes you a vassal—that you’re still militarily dependent on the United States, that they can switch off access to those frontier models, that no matter how hard it is to catch up on frontier models, unless you’re doing that, you’re just giving up any hope of being an equal player in the twenty-first century.

So, to start with, where would you sit on that debate? Do you think Europe needs to catch up on actually developing frontier labs here? Or can we have this kind of free-rider attitude that we had toward military security for much of the second half of the twentieth century, saying, well, the United States is going to provide our frontier models, and perhaps sometimes we can use open-source models from China, and we rely on the fact that we’ll somehow always have good-enough models to defend ourselves, for our companies to compete, because they have access to those models?

Dada: This is a great question, and I think it deserves a little bit of nuance. Let me try to untangle it. The way I would think about it: yes, there is a big economic argument to be made—and this is just a vibes-based number—that eighty percent of the economy, of the total value creation of AI, is not going to depend on the strongest Pareto-frontier model. There are many other models that are powerful but more efficient, cheaper, maybe open source, that are still covering whatever economically valuable task I’m trying to achieve, within their intelligence distribution, so I’m able to get that done. I don’t actually need the most recent version of whatever the closed-source models from the big labs are able to perform. I think eighty percent of the economy is going to be just fine and booming, just trying to get a unit of intelligence at the cheapest price. That’s going to be a big market. In fact, the company I’m leading is also massively focused on this—this is where a lot of the term “model routing” comes in, where you actually want to be independent of the underlying models. You shouldn’t care if it’s model A, B, or C—you should just care whether it’s the best intelligence at the cheapest price, lowest latency, at any given point in time.

Then there’s the other twenty percent. I struggle to pin down that twenty percent—it may turn out to be significantly more, or significantly less—because this is where frontier intelligence plays a role, and I still struggle with valuing frontier intelligence in the right way. How do you value intelligence that goes beyond human intelligence at scale? I find that very difficult. I can’t properly do a market sizing for that, because who knows? These are things like drug discovery. These are adversarial markets—think of cybersecurity, where there’s always a better hacker, so you always want access to the best frontier intelligence to hack the next system or defend against the intrusion. These are markets like hedge funds, generally structured in an adversarial nature, where your gain is very much someone else’s loss. There’s also the securing of critical infrastructure. There are a lot of markets where I’d argue having a lot of Einsteins in a room matters enormously.

I always use one example to make this tangible: if you had access to a thousand Einsteins right now and you were a hedge fund, I think you’d be able to boost your total success pretty drastically. Versus if you were Coca-Cola, I don’t think having a thousand Einsteins would make Coca-Cola that much more successful, because it’s a big brand, a recipe that’s been around for a hundred years, a lot of distribution, physical stuff. Einstein is not going to meaningfully change your warehouse. There’s an elasticity to intelligence, where a marginal additional unit of intelligence is valued differently by different industries.

Coming back to Europe, and how to think about this from a sovereign perspective: for that eighty percent, I think it’s fine if we just have access to the current model landscape. It’s wide and beautiful—unfortunately there are very few European names, but we can use the Chinese models, we can use the U.S. models. This is not likely the part of the market that’s going to close down if push comes to shove. But for that twenty percent, I think it’s crucial, absolutely crucial. I don’t think you can honestly tell a European person that you’re able to defend their lives ten years from now, or secure their access to the modern medicine that will be available at that point, if you don’t secure access to frontier intelligence.

How do you secure access to frontier intelligence? You’ve got two options. Either you produce it yourself—but if you produce it yourself, it’s not fine to be number three, it’s not fine to be number four, it’s not fine to just do what DeepSeek does, minus twelve months. If Europe does engage in a lab effort, it needs to be a Manhattan-style, ultra-ambitious, ultra-well-funded effort, because the piece where it actually matters is being able to produce outcomes that are frontier. Looking at the recursive self-improvement loop—AI starting to improve AI research itself, which is happening at OpenAI, at Anthropic, and other leading labs—we are somewhat late in the game to build this up ourselves. But I honestly think this is such an important race that I don’t care if it’s late in the game. It’s not over until it’s over. Even if it’s the last meter of the marathon, I will still try my best not to come in last place, and try to somehow make it over the finish line.

If Europe engages in an effort, we need to do away with all of the non-ambitious approach and just make this an ultra-ambitious effort. Now, even if we were to do that—if Europe was able to get its act together, mobilize the capital, mobilize the talent—I think success would still not be guaranteed. That’s why the second perspective comes in: frontier intelligence is going to matter for the areas I just outlined, so let’s engage in our own very ambitious effort, but let’s also plan for a scenario where it doesn’t succeed. That comes down to: what are the other areas where we have value, where we own certain valuable bottlenecks, where we can increase our weight at the table so we can negotiate access to the frontier, however it’s shaped, whoever owns it at that given moment?

This is where a lot of the let’s build more compute in Europe comes in, because compute is the actual infrastructure that powers all of this. Compute matters enormously, both for training and for inference, and for the economic weight you’re able to push, how you’re able to diffuse the value of AI. So let’s do a lot more here to become a much more relevant player. Let’s also look at the very meaningful choke points, the valuable assets we control in the overall AI supply chain, because we still have companies like ASML, like TSMC, Siemens Energy is a great example, powering the entire data-center boom we’re currently seeing. We have a lot of industrial AI companies. If you look at, for example, humanoid robots, a lot of the suppliers—the “hidden champions,” these companies no one’s ever heard of, in some random German village, who are still the world market leaders producing that one actuator, that one critical piece. We have a lot of these assets, but I don’t think we have a coherent enough strategy of putting them together and using them to create leverage and increase our weight at the table. So I think we need to be doing both—securing access to frontier, or building frontier, while also recognizing that the eighty percent of valuable tasks that don’t require that also exist.

Europe, I think, is well positioned if we actually get the diffusion part right, because the productivity piece is so crucial here. One given euro of inference spend that goes to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Mistral—pick a model of your choice—can unlock three, four, five, ten euros of productivity for companies that are able to use this intelligence to increase their competitiveness in the market. That’s the economic piece that matters enormously, and there’s also the security piece that matters enormously. That’s why it’s a little bit more nuanced, and we need all things at the same time, if that makes sense. I think that would be the sensible strategy—you need to plan for different scenarios and be ultra-ambitious about pushing each of them, because we don’t quite know where we’re going to land in the end.

Mounk: That’s a super helpful way of thinking through it. If you want to have that effort, before we get to solutions, we need an accurate diagnosis of the problem. I’m struck that in these conversations I keep hearing a set of overlapping explanations, but often people don’t get on the same page about which of them really matters. One explanation is that we just don’t have capital, because we’ve missed the tech boom, so there’s a lot less capital that can be allocated to startups in Europe. A second is that there’s a cultural problem—in a narrower sense, that there just isn’t a strong enough startup ecosystem in Europe, because it’s so much stronger in the United States, or for that matter in Shenzhen or Beijing; or in a broader sense, that students here—and I certainly feel this talking to American and European students—are more likely to aspire, as your scenario implies, to be a bureaucrat in Brussels than to be a startup founder.

There’s also a set of concerns about the general weight of regulation—how hard it is to do everything from incorporating, to, in Germany, having to listen to very expensive notaries read out a contract in front of you, which Peter Thiel recently commented on, but which my friend who works in startup and VC land in Berlin has complained about to me many times before—to taxation, where you might be taxed in some European countries, not all, on the theoretical valuation of your company, even if you don’t have any of that money in your pocket yet as a startup founder, to the lack of a single European market. I’m probably missing three or four other explanations.

You have the vantage point of being a prominent commentator on this in the media, but also of being in the tech industry and investing in tech companies in Europe. What are your top frustrations, and how does that perspective inform your assessment of this debate?

Dada: It is a multifaceted problem, and all of those dimensions matter, but they don’t matter in the same way. I do think there is a very significant capital problem—not so much that Europe doesn’t have capital, because that’s not true. We have our own pension funds, big insurance companies with big balance sheets. But what is true is that, structurally, Europe does not have an equivalent to the current biggest funders of AI, which in the United States are the likes of AWS, Google, Microsoft, xAI, OpenAI—who have either access to capital they’re raising from the VC market, or balance sheets that have no singular equivalent here.

The concentration of economic power in the United States doesn’t have a structural equivalent in Europe. Our economy is actually not that much smaller—I believe the European economy is about two-thirds of the US economy—but we structurally lack a small number of players who can coordinate at very low cost, because xAI can just call OpenAI, can just call Anthropic, can just call Microsoft. People say they’re doing circular deals with Nvidia, but at the end of the day, the beautiful advantage the United States has is vast resources concentrated in a small number of players who are able to coordinate. In Europe you’ve got country borders, different regulation, different companies that have capital, but the coordination costs are significantly higher. We don’t have a single market. We don’t really even have a homogenized financial market.

What I’ve been advocating is that Europe is what it is—we won’t be able to do away with these structures tomorrow. That just means we need to make an even bigger effort from the private and public side coming together: a small number of players, the biggest corporations in Europe and the biggest governments, who also have access to very meaningful funding and to regulation they could change—for example, allowing pension funds or insurers to allocate more money to venture capital, because in the United States there’s ten to twenty times more capital allocated to venture capital by these bodies than in many European countries. A small enough number of players need to come together and engage in an ultra-ambitious effort to make up for the fact that we don’t have the structural equivalent of the United States, where most of this can just be done by the private sector and a small number of companies. We won’t have that small number of companies, but I think it can be a small enough number of companies and governments, a coalition of the willing, so to speak, that come together and engage in very meaningful reform to mobilize the capital.

The second piece—I don’t so much think it’s a talent problem. I do buy the talent piece to some extent, but there are many Europeans in the United States who would really love to come back to Europe and give it their all, because they want Europe to succeed. It’s a domino effect, a chicken-and-egg problem: they don’t see the capital side coming together, so they think, I’m not going to come and run some startup that’s going to get 200 million in funding, because I know it’s just not going to go anywhere. At the end of the day, it needs—and this is the interesting piece—an Elon Musk-type figure, someone with as much influence, power, and orchestration capability, to bring all of these puzzle pieces together. We don’t have these ultra-connected, mega-connected individuals in Europe—it tends to be a lot more fragmented, and it’s difficult for us to put all the ingredients together. The Commission is trying to do some part, national governments are trying to do some part, VCs are trying to do some part, but no single party by itself has enough power to truly get the job done.

That’s currently my biggest concern. I do think many people are starting to understand the problem, or what a solution could look like, but we’re missing the end decision-making power and the weight of someone who’s able to lock people in a room for three days, Manhattan-style, meet in the desert, and just make the deal happen. I think that’s actually the biggest structural gap we have in Europe. I think we could overcome many of the other challenges—which are indeed real challenges—but I think they’re minuscule in comparison to this much more top-down structural and capital challenge.

Mounk: So how do we overcome this? As you’re saying, there’s a large economy, a lot of Europeans who’ve saved a lot of money—but most Germans, for example, until very recently, saved money through insurance companies, taking out insurance products, life insurance products that would give them guaranteed two-point-five, three percent returns a year. They’re not directly invested in the stock market, which obviously makes it much harder to allocate capital toward the most productive and risky things. The lack of comfort with the idea of investment is still deeply rooted in the European middle class, which tends to think of it as some kind of gamble.

There are all kinds of cultural obstacles here. Presumably the only coordinating instance that exists is the state—when you’re talking about a Manhattan Project-style undertaking, presumably this would be the European Union coordinating with the member states on some kind of project. I agree with you on the need for a Manhattan Project-style undertaking. I guess I’m just very skeptical that, if led by Brussels in coordination with twenty-seven member states and all of their political demands, in a culture of people who are very skeptical about the wisdom of this in the first place, this can work.

Dada: I agree. I’m under no illusion that this would be easy. The German government is, as we speak, negotiating reforms of our pension system and the Aktienrente—the pension that could be fueled by investment into capital markets—and it’s proving a very, very difficult undertaking. So I can only agree with you that structurally it is very difficult. But at the same time, it is the right thing to do, or almost the only thing to do. Just pointing to the private sector and saying VCs and companies, go solve that doesn’t account for the structural difference between the European market and the U.S. market. The only way to fix this gap is for the public side and the private side to come together and work together.

I don’t think it needs all twenty-seven member states. I think a coalition of the willing—if you look at the size of the economies in Europe, there are a couple of economies that matter quite a lot more than others. If you focused on the top three, four, five economies—I would also love to see the UK included, even though they’re no longer part of the European Union. I actually think that some of the ministers there, the people currently leading AI strategy, have a lot of really good ideas that we could replicate—for example, looking at the AI Security Institute in the UK, or a lot of the work they’ve done around the sovereign AI fund, trying to invest very seriously in the next breakout technology that could emerge five to ten years from now, with the capital and talent required to do that properly. There are many things the UK is doing that we could be modeling in Germany or other countries in Europe.

It’s difficult, but just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do it. I’d also say we need to look this fact in the eye: Europe and the EU are a construct that was built in a time when stability and peace, and never going to war with your neighbor again, was the most important focus. It’s amazing that we were able to build the European project in the first place—what an achievement. As someone who has grown up in Europe, I am nothing but thankful for a lot of the energy and effort that went into the European project. However, times change. The only thing that is for certain is that if times change but you refuse to change and remain the same, the result is eventual decline. We are but one big arc of evolution, and all of us are here today because we found ways to adapt. Had we not adapted, we would have long been eradicated.

The EU, or European national governments, or Europe, is now at a crucial crossroads. We need to look the fact in the eye that we have the right principles at the core of this continent—self-determination, human dignity, equality, valuing the life not of the richest person but of ordinary citizens, equal contribution in the democratic process, and so on. These are all things that ought to be protected. But to protect them, we need to look the fact in the eye that the processes that served us well in the past are no longer fit for the times we live in. I don’t care what type of cutting of red tape, what kind of extraordinary policymaking and rule-making we now need to engage in, to be able to make change and get to progress. We need to look the fact in the eye that the current processes meant to protect what is actually valuable no longer serve us, and will, in the end, lead to us upholding the processes but losing all the things they were actually meant to protect.

The only solution I have is that things need to drastically change, and we need to find new ways of regulating and of making change happen in disruptive ways—but ways that I believe will actually serve us well in this overall transformation we’re currently going through. I don’t have perfect solutions, but I can only say: it’s hard, but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted, or shouldn’t be done.

Mounk: I feel like we’re ending on probably a conscious, perhaps unconscious, allusion to my favorite novel, and the line from The Leopard that for everything to stay the same, everything will have to change. I very much share the same sentiment about Europe today.

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Sarah Longwell is publisher of The Bulwark, host of The Focus Group podcast, and author of How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sarah Longwell discuss why Donald Trump has dominated American politics for a decade, where Kamala Harris went wrong, and how the Democratic Party can win back working-class voters.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I’m really excited to talk about the book—and how on earth we can defeat Donald Trump and the broader movement he stands for. Do you want to give us your elevator pitch?

Sarah Longwell: If I had to give you a thesis, it would be that Donald Trump is a unique figure in our politics, that there aren’t a lot of other people like him, because of his relationship to America for decades and decades, not just as a television game show host, but as somebody who lived on Page Six, somebody who wrote The Art of the Deal, someone who’s been on all of these luminaries and talk shows. Obviously, he had strong relationships with every sort of big radio personality, and so he was omnipresent for the public.

Sometimes people say, well, we need to run a celebrity like Donald Trump. And I say, no, celebrities are different. People may be like, I like Brad Pitt or I like The Rock, but they’re playing characters. Donald Trump has always been who he is, and that has given him this unbelievable natural advantage in the psyche of the American public. When I do focus groups with voters, which I do all the time, they say, well, he’s a businessman. They don’t even think of him as a failed businessman, they think of him as a rich person who has been a developer, who’s run television shows, owned a football team, and so on. There aren’t a lot of people who can compete with that in public life and translate that into political power, which he has.

The Republican Party then totally abdicated to Donald Trump. They stopped having ideas, they stopped having candidates that had their own sort of pitch for who they are. Now it’s a cult of personality, which means that as he is on his way out, there is a unique opportunity in this moment to put him in the rearview mirror and not let it linger, if Democrats or the broader pro-democracy coalition are able to rally together and dominate the Republicans going into the next three or four years.

Mounk: Let’s get a little bit more specific about some of the ways in which Democrats have failed to do that. You have an interesting story of moderating an event with Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney, and you argue that part of the problem is that voters didn’t really know Kamala Harris. It speaks to what you’re saying about Brad Pitt being popular, but running Brad Pitt is not going to work because people don’t know Brad Pitt in the way they knew Donald Trump.

Obviously Kamala Harris isn’t somebody who is famous as an actress. She was a politician and so on. Why is it that voters didn’t know who Kamala Harris was? And was that a personal failing of Kamala Harris as a political candidate, or is that a broader symptom of how Democrats are failing to respond to this political, technological, ideological moment?

Longwell: I don’t want to pick on Kamala Harris too much, but I do want to say that Kamala Harris absolutely should not run for president again. I’m clear about that in the book. That’s not because I don’t like Kamala Harris. I actually think Kamala Harris very much outperformed expectations when she ran. I think she was done dirty by Joe Biden and his team, who never did anything to elevate her and then wouldn’t let her put any daylight between Biden and herself.

Mounk: This is just nitpicking but what do you mean, they didn’t let her? At that point she was the head of the Democratic Party, she was a presidential candidate. I know they tried to bully her, but just fucking pick something you disagree with and say it…

Longwell: Well, you’re making a great point. But that’s the failure. Part of the failing is that Kamala Harris didn’t know who she was in a strong enough way to go out and do that. So when Joe Biden’s team says to her, no daylight, kid—what they were saying is, if you start crapping on us, we’re gonna crap on you back. That kind of garbage makes me insane because it speaks to the broader disconnect between Joe Biden and Democrats who’ve been telling voters that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, but then don’t act like it. They let all their petty grievances get in the way of it.

But to your point, after Kamala Harris lost, I went back and listened to all the focus groups again with this hindsight. And the thing that was so clear in there, and I saw it when I was listening in real time, but I don’t know that I heard it as loudly as it was being expressed by the voters, was, I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what she stands for. I don’t trust her. I don’t know anything about her. She doesn’t seem like she can tell me what she thinks. This is not solvable by just getting more reps in or fine-tuning your policy positions. She didn’t know how to connect with voters in a way that was omnipresent and clear. And Donald Trump, for all of his bad ideas, knows what his ideas are. He knows that he loves tariffs. And he knows how he feels about immigration.

Mounk: He’s loved tariffs since the 1980s. It’s actually genuine. He was obsessed in the 1980s with tariffs on products from Japan like Toyota. This is not something that he made up, though he’s wrong headed for it maybe.

Longwell: Wrong headed, but he was consistent, whereas she wasn’t even consistent between when she ran for president against Joe Biden and when she ran in 2024. And voters can feel that stuff and they see it as the way regular politicians act, while they see Donald Trump as the more authentic choice.

Mounk: I have two ways of thinking about the source of that. One is, I think, personal, which is that Hillary Clinton had genuine weaknesses as a political candidate, but I don’t think that anybody doubted that if you woke up Hillary Clinton at 3am and asked her what she wanted to do as president, she would have been able to rattle off 27 policies that she cared about. Everyone who wants to be president has to be sufficiently narcissistic to think that there’s something unique and special about them. But I think somebody like Hillary Clinton additionally also had a genuine set of beliefs about what she wanted to do. I think it was obvious to everybody that that was the case. In fact, when people attacked her, it was always that she had a secret agenda that’s really dangerous as opposed to her being vacuous.

With Kamala Harris, I’m struck by the fact that, even chatting with people who’ve known her for a very long time, they can’t really say what she’s about politically. Like she’s about wanting to get ahead politically, which is really deadly in our political environment. But the other thing that struck me about Kamala Harris—and I just wonder what you think about that and how that relates to the focus groups you do—is that the Democrats claim to be the party of the working class, have historically been the party of the working class, but are now so far away from the working class that not only do they not have any working-class candidates, but they don’t even know what working-class voters would consider working class. I think that was part of what was going on with certain senatorial candidates in this cycle that were sort of made out to be these super working-class people when they weren’t.

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But it’s also true about Kamala Harris. I understand that she’s obviously a racial minority in a double way, etc. But her father is a professor at Stanford. Her mother is a PhD scientist, who happens to be a Brahmin Indian. Clearly Kamala Harris didn’t always grow up with privilege. Clearly, she did experience some genuine discrimination growing up in the United States in the time that she did. But to claim that somebody who is the child of two highly, highly educated people in this kind of way is a natural part of the working class in the way that she did just always struck me as very wrong-headed.

It’s interesting, I think, to point to because that is a broader thing about the Democratic Party. It keeps running people who don’t really have working class backgrounds, who claim to be working class, who claim to be speaking for the working class. Now, you don’t need to be working class to speak for the working class. Tony Benn, the British socialist, a very influential member of the Labour Party, was a hereditary peer who had to renounce his peerage when his father died so that he wouldn’t ascend to the House of Lords, because he didn’t want to. But people were aware of that. He wasn’t in denial about that. He said, as somebody with this privilege, I’m going to act in these kinds of ways. Is that fair that this is part of why it’s hard for people to know the Democrats?

Longwell: Let’s think about it from the Trump side. Trump has a gold toilet, and a Liberace aesthetic, and yet somehow managed to be sort of this populist working class hero. Why? It was because he talked basically at a fifth grade level, all the time. He deals in repetition, but he talks to people like they’re regular humans. And I think that the Democrats really have a “good on paper” problem, where they think, this person ticks these boxes, and that’s why they lean so hard into, well, she’s a minority, but without thinking for a second, does this person actually appeal to everyday people? When they talk, do regular people get what they’re saying? The Democrats have too many people who are more comfortable in a faculty lounge than they are on a shop floor.

Donald Trump was actually pretty comfortable on a shop floor. Why? Because he was around builders all the time. His locker room talk was also a stand-in for, I’m a dude like the rest of you, and I would be comfortable, you know, shooting the shit in the back room. Kamala Harris doesn’t have any of that. Joe Biden did. He was too old for it to work anymore, but he had that in his career

Mounk: By far his greatest strength as a political candidate is that he came from a reasonably modest background, but more importantly, that he has this ability to connect with people. I remember in the 2020 campaign he was going up to the editorial board of The New York Times to persuade them to endorse him and they didn’t endorse him. I think they jointly endorsed Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. But on the way up he had this conversation with a janitor who just loved him and they had this genuine moment of connection that went super viral and it was more important than the endorsement of the Times. So that really was a strength of his, while he was with it.

Longwell: The Republicans tried to turn him into a creepy Joe Biden, but the fact is, one of the things that Joe Biden did is he touched people all the time. He could put his hands on people and he brought them in. When people would talk about his empathy, he was just a normal human. I have lots of complaints about him. I have policy disagreements. I think the narcissism at the end was a real, real problem. But as a person and a candidate, this was a guy who had seen some life and felt like he could connect with people. That connection part is very important.

Donald Trump had an enormous leg up. Part of his durability, his Teflon-ness, is that people feel like they know him. He’s been in their living rooms for years. So all of the rules that apply to regular politicians don’t apply to him. We all know that, but there’s an important upside to that, which is that it cannot be replicated by somebody just walking in trying to be Donald Trump. He is unique in this regard, and that is why Democrats should have a renewed sense of optimism about what they can do, and why they should not squander this moment.

Mounk: Well, the other thing about Donald Trump in this respect is that he is authentic in who he is. There’s many things about which he lies, but he doesn’t claim to be a man of the people. He—and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy was somewhat similar in this regard—lives out the fantasy that ordinary people have of what it would be like to be a billionaire. A lot of billionaires actually don’t live like ordinary people think they would live when they’re billionaires. They’re super disciplined and they eat very healthy food, all kinds of things that people don’t imagine. Donald Trump kind of lives in the way that appeals to the less noble side of a lot of people. Like, if I was a billionaire, I’d have a gold toilet. I’d have a yacht. So I think that even though he’s very, very different from ordinary people, he’s closer to how they think they would act if they had as much money as him. And of course he’s not somebody who, unlike a lot of Democrats, claims to be poorer than they are and have had harder lives than they have. Trump lives in a different moral universe where it’s shameful to be all of those weak things. He doesn’t claim he has less money than he has. He claims he has more money than he has. So it’s a very, very different approach.

Longwell: Yeah, and what does he spend it on? Bulk McDonald’s orders. That stuff plays with people.

Mounk: What do you think Democrats should do to reach voters like that? Is the problem that they have these fake working class candidates when they need real working class candidates? Is it that actually we need to realise that their natural electorate isn’t the guy working the factory floor and that’s just not what the Democratic coalition is going to be going forward? Or do we need to take a kind of Tony Benn approach where we say, well, we might have PhDs from Princeton, but we’re still going to fight for you and somehow we’ll make you believe that? What’s the route forward here?

Longwell: I don’t think it’s just about having different candidates. I actually think it’s a top-down rethinking about who they are as a party and how they’re gonna communicate who they are as a party. I do a lot of messaging talks in front of Democratic politicians now, and people will often come up to me and say, what should my message be on X? And I do this crazy thing where I put my hand on their shoulder and I say, what do you believe? Just say it to me. Say to me what you believe. If you ask that on a bunch of hot button issues, if you take away the cameras and everything else, and you ask, what do you think on the trans issue around whether or not people who were born men should play women’s sports? They’ll say no. And I’m like, okay, well, if that’s what you believe, you’ve got to think about how to say that. My favorite chapter in my book is Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus, because I do have this rare perspective where I’ve been an operative now on both sides and I’ve run campaigns with both sides.

Mounk: So what do you mean by that? What does it mean that Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus?

Longwell: Just specifically on the operative side, I came up in Republican circles and they are just straight mercenaries. They start businesses in politics and their business interests are then tied to the political interests of their candidates, which is why they weren’t so bothered when Donald Trump came in and said, I’m going to radically redefine what it means to be a Republican, against things that you’ve always believed.

Democrats, on the other hand, have this insane network of nonprofit organizations that basically push on issue advocacy. And rather than lining up to support candidates, they have an agenda which they are trying to pull candidates to agree with them on. So I had two thoughts when I got over to the Democratic side, which is 1) I felt genuinely bad about how unruly a coalition Democrats have to contend with. Their job is just harder. Republicans have a pretty homogeneous coalition, and it is just easier to understand who their voters are and what they’re going to respond to. Whereas Democrats just have this enormous, unruly coalition of people with different interests. Also, their people—the young people—are all trying to unionize their nonprofits or saying that they should have Fridays off. I would just say, the authoritarians are at the gate. You don’t get to work from home. You have to put on pants and come into an office. That’s what it takes to beat fascists.

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Republicans have no compunction about these types of things. I just feel like Republicans are built differently. I think it shows up in their politics. And it really is damaging for Democrats to have to try to manage a bunch of people being like, well, I don’t want to work Fridays and I want to unionize my nonprofit, and also all of our nonprofits are going to tell you that you have to come to us, we don’t have to come to you, and Republicans just don’t have those same liabilities and it makes Republicans’ lives easier.

Mounk: It helps to explain some of the things you mentioned earlier. Why is it that Democrats are so confused about what their stance should be on something like trans women who’ve gone through male puberty participating in top-level sports? It’s because they feel that if they say what apparently they actually believe, this whole apparatus of nonprofits and linked media outlets and so on is just going to come down on them like a ton of bricks in a way that simply isn’t true in the Republican Party.

The strange thing is that that’s both the source of some strength on the left as well as the weakness. I mean, the existence of all of those notionally nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organizations is also that they can push ideas, socialize them, make them feel like—at least while there’s periods of Democratic dominance—what everybody believes. But the downside is that you can then go really badly out of whack with the American public, and that you’re fighting, on the other hand, institutions that sometimes are less well funded, but that are much more single-minded in the purpose of electing a series of Republican office holders and so on.

So I think there’s this kind of weird way in which each side is adapted to a particular equilibrium, which gives it strengths and weaknesses. I always think back to the time when I was at a dinner at Harvard Kennedy School and everybody was saying, Republicans have so much more money than we do. And I was like, who’s the ‘we’ here? Well, the left, the Democrats. It’s like, okay, so we assume that everybody at this dinner is on the left and are Democrats, which is true, including me, in one way or another, certainly at this time. But we’re not counting the salaries of anybody here. The food for this dinner here is not being counted. So the left has all of these resources that are obviously part of the left ecosystem, like Harvard Kennedy School—with a couple of token conservatives, but clearly part of a left-wing ecosystem. But the problem then is that there’s limitations on how you can actually use it. So do you think Democrats should just dismantle that, since that’s also one of the sources of their strength?

Longwell: It’s not about dismantling, it’s about building. In the book I have a section called Build Baby, Build, and I have these signs all over my office because—and again, I think some of this is in my DNA from being brought up Republican—when Republicans looked at the academic environment and they felt shut out there, they felt shut out from mainstream media, they complained and whined for sure. They also went and built competing ecosystems. And Democrats are going to have to do that too. This is a big part of the argument I’m making in the book about how you go on the offensive—you’ve got to build new things.

So many of the institutional advantages that Democrats have had, like the mainstream media, they don’t have anymore, actually, because the right-wing media ecosystem is now extraordinarily dominant. Republicans can live there—not just their voters, but their politicians and everything else. Whereas the mainstream media is still trying to do a sort of objective reporting that sort of treats both parties as though they are the same. And then there’s no corresponding sort of center-left-to-left media ecosystem. And actually, even worse than that, the only people who are getting it together to really build new media infrastructure tend to be on the far left because they have a more clear sense of what their message is than people who are just like, well, I want to tell you about why pluralism and liberal democracy are so important. Because, shockingly, that is not the kind of thing that animates the average American.

Mounk: I think there’s a weird thing where people on the right understand that a lot of the battle for ideas matters and that if they don’t act, it’s going to be won by the left because all of the superficially neutral institutions lean to the left. Whereas I think people on the left and even liberals have a much harder time understanding the importance of ideas, and of building institutions that actually fight for those ideals. So Persuasion is fighting for the values of liberal democracy, which is not a partisan issue, but certainly in our current political environment, it is more in tune with the actions and desires of some political actors than others. We have been lucky to get some great philanthropic funding, including recently, but it’s a real uphill struggle because it is really, really difficult to persuade foundations that this matters relative to narrow issue advocacy or something like that.

I want to touch on a very different strand in the book, but I think we need to do a little bit of setup work for it, which is that you believe it was swing voters—people who are generally torn between voting for Joe Biden and Donald Trump or Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, or whoever else is going to run in 2028—who made the difference. A lot of people are quite skeptical of that. They say: these people are so far apart from each other. They’re such different universes. How can you possibly be hesitating between those choices? And so worrying about persuading those kinds of swing voters is just a kind of category mistake and what you actually need to be doing is to mobilize people on your own side. So you do that not by thinking about what the concerns of these undecided voters might be, but by sort of energizing the people who are already on your own side. Why, based on the many, many focus groups you’ve done and polling data and other things, do you think that swing voters are real and persuading them is a very important part of how to eat an elephant?

Longwell: First of all, I categorically reject the idea that it is only a problem of mobilizing your own side. Frankly, one of the things that I don’t think gets talked about enough is that, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, anyone who really looked at the data will tell you that if turnout had been higher, Trump would have won by more. I think Democrats have a fantasy that there are more of their voters out there, that if they could just grab them, they would turn out for them, and I think that is wrong. In fact, it is these lower information voters, meaning people who are less tuned in to the news—and I don’t use the term low-information in a negative way, because actually I think it’s really totally fine for people to go out there and live their lives. The fact is, many, many people are just trying to raise their kids, but they don’t think about politics and they tune in shortly before an election, and they make a decision between two people, neither of whom look that great to them. So the question is, well, who are they going to choose when they look up and they say, all right, Donald Trump, I don’t like him that much, but the economy was pretty good last time before COVID hit, and I haven’t seen much of Kamala Harris. I don’t really get a sense of what she stands for. I’ll go with him. I just know him better. That is the way that people who are not tuned into politics vote. Right now we’re gonna go into a midterm election and there’s going to be a big structural advantage for Democrats, because the people who vote in midterm elections are an entirely different population than people who vote in general elections.

Mounk: In the past, the assumption was that it’s the other way around. Because for a very long time, Republicans had the more highly educated voters than Democrats. When you’re more highly educated, you participate in elections more consistently. And so you’re relatively more highly represented in low-outcome elections like midterms. For a very long time there was this conventional wisdom in American politics that midterms really favor Republicans. So if Democrats do well in midterms, that’s a really good sign for the general election. But it’s taken a long time for people to understand that today the Democratic coalition is much more highly educated, and therefore it votes more consistently. So when in 2022 the Democrats did relatively well, people overestimated how good a sign that would be for 2024. I very much hope the Democrats are gonna do well in this midterm election, but there’s a danger that we’re going to make the same mistake again.

Longwell: That gets into a whole question of whether or not the Republican who runs in 2028 as the nominee is the same kind of turnout machine of low information voters as Donald Trump. And again, this sort of goes to the thesis of the book, which is that I think that a lot of the lessons that have come from the Trump era are not necessarily things that we’ll carry forward. I think many of them are specific to Trump.

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I think that there are communication lessons. I think there are lessons about the fact that we now live in an environment—I don’t think this is gonna change after Trump—where people are going to want to hear from their president pretty regularly. You cannot come in and do what Joe Biden did and be like, I’m just going to recede into the background. No, Donald Trump got everybody used to hearing directly from him every day. Always-on communication is going to become part of national politics, and Democrats have got to learn to live in that world.

But I don’t think that other politicians will get the kind of deference that Trump gets on a wide variety of issues that are specific to him being Trump. And Democrats should take advantage of that. Donald Trump changed the electorate. I tell this story in the book—I was on a panel right after the 2024 election, and Kevin McCarthy was on the panel with me at The New York Times, and all he’s doing is talking about what an unbelievable turnout machine Donald Trump is. They can’t believe it. Republicans can’t believe what he does. He puts up Saddam Hussein numbers in these rural communities. Can Marco Rubio do that? Can JD Vance do that? That is a really big open question. Can Tucker Carlson do that?

Mounk: So I think we can distinguish here between demographic shift and turnout. Those two things aren’t totally independent from each other, obviously, but when I look at this in an international perspective, I do think there’s been just a long secular trend in virtually every democracy I can think of—especially for native white working class voters, but but also increasingly, as in the United States, multiracial working class voters—shifting more towards the right while the educated voters are shifting towards the left. For the United States, I think of this as the kind of Simpsons problem of American politics. When the Simpsons were created, I think it’s quite obvious that Homer Simpson would have been a Democrat, and Ned Flanders, the sort of very religious, never swears, do-good neighbor, would have been a Republican. But today I think it’s quite possible that Ned Flanders would be a Democrat. Whereas Homer Simpson, I think, would clearly vote for Donald Trump without hesitation. And there are more people like Homer Simpson than people like Ned Flanders in America.

Now, at the same time, I agree with you that Trump’s ability to mobilize voters and to appeal to his broader swathe of voters is probably quite unique, and it’s hard to see Rubio and Vance replicating it. But I feel like the tendency is going in that direction anyway.

Longwell: I talk a lot about how Democrats have to now think about the world differently. There’s a weird way in which Democrats still operate. Joe Biden gets in and he’s got a big press shop. But you can’t rely on press releases anymore. It’s not the world we live in. You’ve got to be able to be out there. One of the reasons that Joe Biden, if he had been 10, 15 years younger, would have done a much better job, even if all of his policy positions had been exactly the same, is because he would have been able to communicate in a way that he couldn’t when he was 80.

Then there’s the policy problems for Democrats. And this is where I actually think politics could get much more simplified. And this goes to your question of what it takes for Democrats to get back to being a working class party or a party that can appeal to working class voters. This is where I would never recommend somebody who over indexes on college-educated suburban voters because there’s just way, way more white working class voters. The average voter in America is like a 55-year-old white working class man without a college degree. That is who your average voter is. Think about appealing to that person. Not only that person, but also thinking about what swing voters want. Number one, they want to know what you’re going to do to make their material well-being better. In the political science world, we start to get into the slicing and dicing of demographics. But instead of thinking about what each demographic wants, what does everybody have in common? Everybody’s paying for gas, everybody’s got to go to the grocery store, everybody’s got to pay for child care if they’ve got kids, everybody cares about upward mobility, which often means education. Everyone’s mad about healthcare, both navigating it and paying for it. Everybody has that in common. Spend 70% of your time talking about what you are going to do to improve people’s material well-being, because it’s the number one thing they care about.

I’ve listened to voters now for eight years—hundreds of focus groups, thousands of voters. You ask, how are things going in the country? They say, not that good. Why? The economy, cost of living, prices, rent, housing, healthcare, it’s all you hear every time. It’s what people bring up organically. You can go to them with a poll and say, well, what do you think about this and what do you think about that? But if you ask them, how do you think things are going and what matters to you? they’re going to talk about those things. A politician had better be talking about them too.

Second thing, people want to feel safe. They can’t access their compassion if they don’t feel safe, which means if Donald Trump is out there saying, these immigrants are bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, he knows exactly what he’s doing, right? There’s an activation going on in your brain: Illegal aliens mean I am unsafe and the borders are open, and that’s making me unsafe. I’m going to vote for the person who makes me feel safe. That’s why Republicans love to focus on the border and on crime. Democrats have been wrong to abdicate these things. I hear Republican voters or Trump voters all the time talk about why immigrants are good for the country, the immigrant that they married, they’re not hostile to all immigration, but they believe in fairness around an immigration system where people who have waited their turn and done it the right way are able to come into the country. And so Democrats have got to start recognizing that border security is the table issue for where voters are. This is not “Sarah Longwell’s preferred politics.” This is what I hear from voters day in and out, including many Democratic voters. So that’s the second thing.

Third thing, I am using their framing here, but it’s woke stuff. I just hear that from voters all the time. Number one, black voters, Hispanic voters, gay voters… people are like, don’t put me in your box. Don’t tell me I have to vote this way or think this way because I look this way. That really bothers a lot of the swingier voters in the focus groups. It also becomes a question of how much time is allotted to issues. It’s why I focus on the material well-being, because voters think Democrats have got it out of whack. Voters will be like, I believe in trans rights or I believe in gay rights, but do we have to talk about it all the time? So they just think the emphasis is off, which actually you can see right now with Donald Trump, where voters are again like, please lower prices, please lower gas prices. You said you were going to do these things. So when they hear about the ballroom, they’re like, you are focusing on the wrong thing. And that’s how regular sort of normie voters think about a lot of the social issues that Democrats focus on. They’re just like, sure, okay, but like, can we not talk about this as much? Because these other problems over here are bigger.

Mounk: Let me ask you for a clarification here. Is it that Democrats spend too much time talking about those things, but fundamentally the message is right? Or is it that there are parts of a message—not the whole message—that are wrong, and as long as Democrats don’t correct that part of a message, they’re not gonna get permission to speak?

Longwell: It’s different for different cohorts of voters. I always have to be very specific as sometimes people say, voters think this. And I’m like, well, some voters do, but there are, for example, Democratic voters who get very frustrated with the emphasis. I would say Democratic voters are frustrated with the emphasis. I think swing voters often think Democrats are just wrong on some of these issues. They think they are not right on immigration, not right on crime. It’s interesting on immigration. A lot of the swing voters will say, I want immigrants to come here. I think immigration makes America stronger. I just want the border to be secure. Or they’ll say, I don’t care if an adult wants to transition, like God bless them. That’s their right. This shows up in polling too—a majority of Americans believe that trans people shouldn’t be discriminated against, that they should have equal rights in every way, that they should be allowed to transition. It only changes when you move it to the realm of sports or kids. So, the thing about sports is that now you’re again in a fairness question where advocates on the trans side will say, well, it’s about being fair to the trans person, but the vast majority of people think it’s about being fair to the women who are participating.

Mounk: Let me ask you a question about that, because it’s often asked if there are really swing voters. I obviously agree with you that there are. The harder question is: Are the swing voters actually reasonable? And to what extent do, let’s say, center-left philosophical liberals, which is a lot of what my audience is, as well as some center-right philosophical liberals, have to give up on their principles in order to appeal to those voters? Now, the optimistic story is that not every one of these voters is reasonable, and obviously there’s a range in their views; there’s also a range in the level of their decency and intelligence, and so on—humans are humans. But actually, it turns out that most voters have pretty reasonable views. They have a view that immigrants bring a lot to America, and America is a country of immigrants, and would hate for immigrants to be discriminated against or treated poorly. But they think we need border security, which, like it or not, is a very reasonable position. Or their trans position is that of course people should be able to transition as adults. Of course, we need to treat people with dignity, irrespective of how they dress or how they want to be addressed or anything else. But when it comes to female competitive sports, people who’ve gone through male puberty have an unfair advantage, and therefore we have to have rules about who gets to participate in those sports.

Now, the more pessimistic account is that no, actually these voters are way more incoherent than that, and some of them may be way meaner than that. And if you want to win against somebody like Trump, you really might have to sacrifice more of your immigration policy than you might think is right. Or you might have to really sell out trans people. That’s something that critics of those who want to win over swing voters often say—ultimately you’re going to sell out things you believe in in order to do this. How optimistic can we be about those voters? Can we have this winning agenda that doesn’t, you know, give up on key principles that a lot of your listeners and a lot of my listeners probably care about?

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Sarah discuss the trans issue in more detail, who the next Republican candidate will be, and why AOC can’t save the Democrats. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Third Chimpanzee, and Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Make a Difference?

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jared Diamond discuss how to measure the true impact of individual leaders, why the institutional environment determines how much difference a leader can make, and whether societies are better served by systems that constrain leaders or empower them.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I have many questions about this book and about your work more broadly. Your new book is really about what difference leaders do and don’t make, and that’s a different way of asking the age-old historical and social scientific question about structure versus agency. How should we think about salient leaders, ones that have led a country, a sports team, or a company to great success? Are they just being lucky, or did they actually make a difference in bringing about that success?

Jared Diamond: There’s been a longstanding question whether leaders make a difference. Thomas Carlyle said yes, he believed in the role of the great man. Tolstoy said no, and historians nowadays tend to be skeptical about the role of leaders. But the question arises in so many spheres: in politics, in business, in sports like the World Cup, in religion.

Do leaders make a difference, and if so, do they make a difference under some circumstances, and what are those circumstances? This is a question that interests me personally. I was born in 1937, so I spent my childhood under the shadow of Hitler, and leaders have made a difference, mostly for the good, occasionally not for the good, in my own life. I’m personally interested in the question of whether leaders make a difference.

Mounk: So how should we think about this, presuming somebody does make a big difference and somebody does make much less of a difference? In your book you suggest that it depends on a set of circumstances, such as how set the institutional environment is in which they operate and what the likely replacement would be like. The best way to think about this is to engage in what you call a kind of natural experiment. For us, we might think about it as a kind of counterfactual.

Diamond: As a laboratory scientist, my PhD was in laboratory physiology, so I was used to doing manipulative experiments, putting the gallbladder in sodium-rich solutions and then in potassium-rich solutions. If we were an omnipotent creature from outer space, you and I could quickly decide on the role of leaders by manipulative experiments. We would kill some leaders and not kill others, or we would make 50 worlds, and in 25 of them Hitler died in 1930, and in the other 25 he didn’t die in 1930.

But we can’t do that, and if we could, it would be immoral and illegal. So we have to do what astronomers and epidemiologists and so many other scientists do, which is to rely on natural experiments. We can’t and shouldn’t kill leaders, but leaders do die natural deaths, and we can compare what happens when a leader dies with when a leader doesn’t die.

Or if you want to do something less drastic, instead of seeing what happens when a leader dies, you can get a leader very upset, slightly upset, or not much upset. Business people often lose family members. If a business person’s only son dies, the business person is very upset. If his or her wife or husband dies, they get quite upset. If a sibling dies, somewhat upset. If a parent dies, slightly upset. And if a mother-in-law dies, perhaps not upset at all, but happy.

Then you can look at the results, and it turns out that business profits go down the most if an only child dies, and they go down much less if a parent dies. They don’t go down, and may even increase, although it’s not statistically significant, if the mother-in-law dies.

So those are examples of natural experiments that allow us as social scientists to do what molecular biologists would do by manipulation.

Mounk: That’s quite a striking statistic. I don’t recommend that any listeners who hold stock in a company go about murdering the mother-in-law of the CEO, because as you pointed out, it wasn’t a statistically significant result, but that tells you perhaps as much about human nature as it does about business. What is the magnitude of these kinds of results? If one of the starting questions is whether great men and women make history, when you look at all of the hero worship we have today for some of the greatest individual athletes, some of the greatest coaches, some great founders and CEOs, or of course for politicians. I think by and large people have negative views of politicians, but many do admire one politician or another and think that if only they were in office, everything would get better. On the whole, should we be much more skeptical of this? Or does your research suggest that they really are the decisive factor?

Diamond: If I gave you an “on the whole” answer, you should stop right now and say, Jared Diamond, you’re an idiot, because one can’t generalize so easily. It depends. In politics, for example, the influence of a leader depends upon the amount of authority that the leader has. A democratic president in wartime has more authority than in peacetime. It depends upon the moment.

De Gaulle had authority in 1946 and not in 1948, so he resigned. De Gaulle regained authority in 1958, and he didn’t have it in 1968, so he resigned. It depends upon the timing and the place. Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana, had a lot of authority as president of Botswana. He would have had little power as president of Somalia. Genghis Khan was born at the right time and place, but he didn’t have the faintest idea that the rainfall was particularly high where he was born and wasn’t high two hundred miles away.

So in short, leaders, particularly in politics, have influence depending upon time, place, and circumstances. But I can offer a generalization. In the business world, the leader, the particular industry, the year, and the particular business all make a difference. On average, the leader and the particular business and the industry have roughly equal effects.

In the sports world, coaches sometimes have an effect, but much more often coaches get fired. My university has frequently fired our coaches, and it never makes a difference. We fire a coach because of a losing season, and the next year there’s a statistical regression to the mean. Of course, if you fire a coach for a losing season, the next coach is likely to do better, but that’s just by chance. So that’s a long-winded answer, but what it means is that it depends upon the circumstances, though one can also make generalizations in coaching, in business, and somewhat in politics.

Mounk: I think this is an interesting and perhaps intuitive part of your framework. The degree of constraints makes sense: a political leader in a democracy with many checks and balances, where if they try to do something completely out of the ordinary for that country, they’re probably going to lose power within a week or two, or the other institutions will simply step in and say, you can’t do that, is going to make a smaller positive or negative difference than a dictator in a place where the decisions are unconstrained.

A political leader in a state with high state capacity that is very unified is able to make a bigger difference because the decisions will actually be carried out and they have the resources and means to undertake some kind of project, whether that’s a good or a bad project, than in a place like the Somalia you mentioned, where there are so many rival centers of power and the central state is so weak that the decisions are unlikely to matter.

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What about the difference between making a positive difference and a negative difference? I think often when we think about leaders, certainly in the business world, we tend to think about the ones who found great companies. We tend to think about the ones who have had a positive impact, and perhaps that’s the nature of the area. In business, the worst thing that can happen is that a business goes bankrupt. That’s certainly sad for the people who work for it and perhaps sad for its customers, but some other business will swoop in to take the opportunities left on the table most of the time, and we don’t think of a business failure as one of history’s great tragedies.

On the other hand, when you found a new company, something new that wasn’t available before, that can create great fortunes and sometimes really satisfy customers. Perhaps somebody else would have come in and done that same thing, but it’s natural to think that it’s because of Elon Musk that Tesla was able to develop and mainstream electric cars, and that they’re beautiful objects, and all of those kinds of things.

In politics, it tends, I think, to be the other way around, perhaps because the best kind of states that exist still have all kinds of flaws and shortcomings. Perhaps Sweden is doing rather well, but we’re not hero-worshipping individual Swedish prime ministers, who don’t seem to have had such a great influence on the world. On the other hand, the negative examples are much more salient, whether that’s Mao, whether that’s Hitler, or whether that’s somebody like Vladimir Putin today, who quite single-handedly took the decision to invade Ukraine, leading to great suffering for the Ukrainian nation and for the Russian nation, for that matter.

Is there a kind of difference in how we should think about the positive difference versus the negative difference that leaders make, and are they more salient in different kinds of fields of endeavor?

Diamond: One can say that, in general, a leader can make a difference either for the good or for the bad, and the examples are roughly equally divided. In Germany, Hitler made a difference for the bad, Konrad Adenauer made a difference for the good. In the history of the United States, we have presidents who’ve made a difference for the good. Franklin Roosevelt dealt with a difficult situation in World War II and resolved it. Other American presidents, Warren Harding, is often held up as an example of a do-nothing or ineffective president. So in short, in leadership, as elsewhere in life, people can either do good or do harm.

Mounk: One question to ask is about how big a role leaders play, and as you point out, that itself is dependent on the institutional environment. Leaders are going to play a much bigger role when they’re less constrained. A different way of asking the same question is about institutional design. Should we aim to erect institutions in which leaders matter greatly, or should we aim to build institutions in which the influence of leaders is restricted? That might lower the upside, meaning it might mean that the most brilliant leader isn’t able to have as transformative an impact as he or she might without those kinds of constraints, but it can also buffer the downside, meaning that if you end up getting a leader who makes disastrous decisions, you have all of the constraints which ensure that catastrophe doesn’t ensue.

What does your reflection on leadership teach about what role we should try to assign to leaders in our political and economic systems, in our sports teams, and in other kinds of contexts?

Diamond: I conclude that some countries do well minimizing the effect of leaders, and other countries have done well maximizing the effect of leaders. Within Europe, Switzerland: my Swiss friends, when I ask who’s the president of Switzerland, don’t know, because the president of Switzerland changes from year to year, and the president of Switzerland doesn’t have much power. The Swiss have set up a system with their four ethnic groups and their thirty or so cantons where leaders don’t make a difference, and you don’t even know who the leader is.

At the opposite extreme, France in 1958: the French and de Gaulle recognized that the French presidential system left the president much too little power, and de Gaulle introduced a new constitution that gave the president considerably more power, and that worked out well for France. It enabled de Gaulle to bring France out of the Algerian War, contrary to the wishes of many French people. So one cannot generalize. There are systems that work well leaderless, like Switzerland, and there are systems that work well with leaders.

Mounk: I’m intrigued by this comparison between Switzerland and France. I’d guess the first point I would make is that many French people might feel that the Fifth Republic, which was set up in 1958, hasn’t worked all that well, and that the over-focus on the president and the expectation that the president should somehow solve all of a country’s problems has often gone awry. At this point, every one of the last four or five French presidents has left office incredibly unpopular, in part because there are probably expectations upon the office that whether we’re talking about Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, or Emmanuel Macron, they can’t really fulfill.

The other question is whether Switzerland is successful because it has that consensual democratic model and doesn’t really have leaders, or whether it’s successful because it’s kind of the tax paradise in the middle of Europe. It’s a country that avoided being drawn into World War One and World War Two. It plays a particular kind of role within the European ecosystem which allows it to draw a lot of the advantages from the continent without being fully a part of it. That might be just as true if it had elections every four years in which the figure of a prime minister was more visible and changed, like in some neighboring countries.

Diamond: This is a case where I think one cannot generalize. Even in the case of France, nowadays the French complain about the power of a president, but from 1951 to 1958, during the Algerian War, they had every reason to complain about the lack of power of the president.

In the history of the United States, when the United States became independent, our founding fathers set up a constitution that balanced the power of the federal government against the power of the states. In Europe, I think it’s hard for Europeans to understand how much power the American states have. They can prevent the president from doing things. The United States set up that system intentionally because we wanted to get away from the powerful British system where there was one leader in charge. Nowadays in the United States, there’s tension between the federal government and many of the states, the so-called blue states. It makes a big difference for the blue states, like California, that the federal government cannot do what it wants there, and we Californians are very happy to have limitations on the power of the national leader.

Mounk: A friend of mine who is a state legislator and a member of the Democratic Party points out that when you look at states within America that have been persistently governed by Democrats, whether that’s California, Illinois, or New York, and compare them to states that have for a long time been governed by clear Republican majorities, like Florida and Texas, it’s not obvious that the comparison is particularly flattering to those Democratic states.

Is that because somehow the individual leadership in places like California and Illinois has been worse? I myself am more sympathetic to the ideas of the Democratic Party, but they actually are wrong about some important things, like how hard it should be to build new housing, and that has ended up being more influential on life outcomes than other things. Why is it that those leaders you just praised seem in many cases to have produced worse results in terms of governance than leaders that certainly don’t seem more inspiring, when you look at some of the quite corrupt political figures in Texas? It’s hard to think that they either have a great political vision or great individual virtues that have served the state well, and yet there are many more people moving from California to Texas than the other way around, and on many objective metrics we care about, like the affordability of life, things are looking much better in Texas than they are in California.

Diamond: There again, I hesitate to generalize. What can one say? Addressing your question about the role of leaders, when do leaders make a difference, and in what way do they make a difference? This is interesting. There are situations where there’s only one person who is qualified to be a leader in a country or in a sphere. That doesn’t happen often, but Botswana: when the African country of Botswana became independent, I think in 1966, there were twenty-two university graduates in Botswana. That’s not many, and there was only one of those university graduates who had much experience of the Western world.

That was Seretse Khama, who had lived in London for half a dozen years and married a British woman. He was also the hereditary chief of the biggest tribe in Botswana, and he was also the chief of the tribe on whose land were found the diamonds that became the basis for the wealth of Botswana. There was no one else in Botswana who could have undermined the reactionary authority of the Botswana chiefs, and there was nobody in Botswana who could have ensured that Botswana’s diamonds would go to the benefit of the whole population and the national government rather than to an individual tribe.

So there’s a case where only one person could make a difference. I refer to that as the Hamlet test. In Elizabethan England, we know who the other playwrights besides Shakespeare were, and if Shakespeare had not existed, we’ve got their plays, and they were fair, but none of them was up to Shakespeare. So Shakespeare passed the Hamlet test, and Seretse Khama passed the Hamlet test.

One might argue similarly in the business world. Pomegranate juice: nobody drank pomegranate juice in the United States, or industrially around the world, until the year 2002. Why not? Because to make pomegranate juice industrially requires a press three stories high. It’s very expensive, and no money-making business would ever dream of getting into the pomegranate juice industry. But there was a couple in Los Angeles who were the biggest agricultural landowners in California. They had more than fifty percent of the pomegranate market, and for them it was worthwhile to put money into developing a pomegranate industry, because they were the only ones who could profit from it. The others didn’t have pomegranate groves, didn’t have the ambition, and didn’t have the money. So there’s another case of an individual leader making a difference.

More often, in the business world: Jeff Bezos at Amazon, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs. Whereas one could say that without the Resnicks there would be no pomegranate juice industry, without Jeff Bezos, of course there would be an “everything store.” There were “everything stores.” There was eBay, and Walmart had set up an “everything store,” but on a different model from Amazon. So in short, here’s a case where a leader didn’t make a difference as to whether there would be an industry or business at all, but did make a difference as to how it would operate.

Again, Mark Zuckerberg, in his second year at Harvard: it was not that Mark Zuckerberg recognized that he was born in the right year and that his second year at Harvard was the perfect time to set up a social medium. There was social media before Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg happened to be there, without knowing it, at the right place, and he set up his social medium in a particular way, with likes and interest groups, that resulted in his social medium becoming dominant.

So in short, there are individual leaders who can do something when nobody else can do it. In many other, perhaps most other, cases there are many leaders who could do something, but different individuals would do it in different ways. Overlying all this is the fact that different circumstances offer different opportunities to leaders. In the business world, the magic word is discretion. Discretion, not in the sense of I’m discreet and I say something nice rather than something stupid. Discretion means the power to make decisions.

In the business world, the CEO of a perfume company, or the CEO, like a friend of mine, of a teenager’s t-shirt company, can make a big difference by finding the right perfume or recognizing the right t-shirt that will sell. Whereas the CEO of a railroad, or the CEO of a water company, can’t make any difference, because once you’ve got the railroad, it’s there for the next seventy years, and water companies are so tightly regulated. So some leaders have discretion, and some leaders don’t enjoy discretion.

Mounk: It certainly doesn’t sound particularly fun to be the CEO of Amtrak. I can think of a number of relatively straightforward improvements they could make, such as recognizing that the point of a train is that it has multiple doors, so you can have people board simultaneously at multiple doors rather than lining up single file for one person to check all of their tickets, which is one of the most idiotic things about these lovely United States of America.

What about a conspicuous absence in your book? He’s maybe mentioned once or perhaps twice: Donald Trump. That’s one of the cases where thinking about how much a leader matters is really important to understanding this political moment. I was very concerned when Donald Trump was first elected that he might be able to escape the constraints that the system of checks and balances is meant to put on him, that he might become a genuine danger to democratic institutions. I think Trump has had a negative impact, without a doubt, on the quality of our democratic institutions, and probably on many other things. The Iran war has so far been an unmitigated disaster that I think is going to harm America’s geopolitical standing and is already harming its economy.

But ten years into the era in which Donald Trump really dominates our politics, I’m less certain than I would have been ten years ago that he will really have a decisive influence on the United States. He seems to be both heralding and bringing about a kind of political realignment, but that was probably in the making anyway. I don’t think he single-handedly created it. Nearly two years into his second term in office, it feels as though he is somewhat losing control of the political system. He’s very unpopular, and he doesn’t seem as energetic as he was. We’re starting to see attention shift to the primaries for 2028, and that’s going to happen very quickly after the midterms.

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What is your hunch about Donald Trump in particular, and what does that tell us about the nature of leadership more broadly? Is he going to be remembered as a kind of strange and perhaps rather grotesque chapter or footnote in American history, or do you think he has had the capacity to really influence the trajectory of the United States, either positively or, more likely, negatively?

Diamond: I’m going to give you a clear answer, and it will either disappoint you or enrage you. You’ll remember that in my book there is no mention of Donald Trump, except for one sentence in which I said I would not discuss Donald Trump, and I would not discuss Angela Merkel. Why? Because they’re too recent. I discuss only political leaders whose careers are within my lifetime, but whose political careers are closed, so that we can pass judgment on them. I wrote a book. I did not write a magazine article that will be out of date by Sunday.

In the case of Angela Merkel, for example, views of her have been changing within the past few years, which is a warning that my book is not the place to discuss Angela Merkel or Donald Trump at all, or any other leader who is still active. I wanted to discuss only the leaders on whom we can pass judgment.

Mounk: That’s fair, but this is a podcast interview, so it’s fine if it’s out of date by Sunday. You must have some feelings about this, some hunch. I’ll take it with the proviso that I understand it’s not the definitive judgment of history, but having reflected on the role of political leaders, what is your hunch about how we will remember Trump? Not so much whether positively or negatively. I’m guessing you have a similarly negative view of him to mine. But in terms of the magnitude of the influence he’s going to have on the world.

Diamond: Again, I will disappoint and enrage you. I have two reasons for not discussing Trump at all. One is that it’s too early to pass judgment on him. The other is that I write books not for people who already share my view. I write books for a broad public. I write books for Republicans and I write books for Democrats. Whatever I said about Donald Trump would either offend or please one group, and as a book writer, I don’t want to be stereotyped as having a predictable view. My views are not predictable. That’s my second reason why, regretfully, I will decline to say anything about Donald Trump.

Mounk: It would take a little more to enrage me, though perhaps I’m mildly disappointed. Let’s go further back into the past, because I do want to introduce listeners to this podcast to some of your previous work as well, which many of them may have read, or perhaps more will have heard discussed in one way or another. I think it’s both interesting in itself and interesting in relation to this new book. This book focuses on individual leadership and trying to assess its influence. A lot of your earlier work, particularly Guns, Germs, and Steel, was really about structural determinants of history, and in particular about the influence that geography plays in various ways.

The big question of why a few small countries on the tip of the Eurasian landmass, in Western Europe, ended up dominating so much of the world for many centuries and continue today to be among the richest parts of the world, has been given different answers. There are racialist or racist answers that say there’s something particular about the ethnic group that was predominant in that part of the world. There are more religious or culturalist answers that say it’s really about Christianity or about a particular set of values that people in those nations adopted. There are institutionalist answers that say that part of the world built, or locked into, depending on the account, a certain set of institutions which rewarded certain kinds of economic initiative, and that’s why they had economic growth earlier than others, and that’s why they could conquer the world. Your answer distinguishes itself from all of those by emphasizing geographic factors.

Explain that theory to us, and tell us why we should think about geography as the key long-run variable in explaining this huge divergence in the world.

Diamond: You are correct that my book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, lies at the opposite extreme from my current book on leadership. My current book on leadership is about what individual people can do, and I acknowledge that individual people can make a difference in politics, in business, in sports, in religion, and probably in science and in art.

At the opposite extreme, though, Guns, Germs, and Steel had nothing to say about individual leaders, and I was explicit about that. Guns, Germs, and Steel is about the history of the whole world over the last twelve thousand years, and it’s about the history of large parts of the world. Over the course of twelve thousand years, one individual could not make a difference in the growth of societies in different parts of the world, because the growth of societies in different parts of the world depended ultimately on agricultural productivity, on population growth, and on agricultural and animal productivity, dependent upon whether any area had the right plants and animals to domesticate.

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No Aboriginal Australian could have propelled Aboriginal Australia to develop atomic bombs and writing, because Australia still today has no domesticable animals. Australian farmers have not been able to domesticate kangaroos. Why not? Because kangaroos can’t be herded. So of course Aboriginal Australians never developed herding. There were no domesticable animals, and Aboriginal Australians didn’t develop farming; there was a minimum of domesticable plants.

In short, Guns, Germs, and Steel was about the history of large areas of the world over the last ten thousand years, where the differences between different parts of the world, the reason why Europe rather than sub-Saharan Africa, or Europe rather than Mexico, took the lead in the world, depend entirely on facts of geography. That’s something that upsets many historians who would like to believe that I’m neglecting the role of individuals and culture and art. Yes, I am neglecting those roles, because over ten thousand years, in large areas, they make no difference.

Mounk: What about some of the differences in outcome within regions that are themselves somewhat geographically similar? On your account, there are particular advantages that, broadly speaking, the European continent had, some of which have to do with the presence of animals that could be domesticated, some of which have to do with a kind of climatic zone, and some of which have to do with the fact that the continent runs largely east-west rather than north-south, which turns out to matter because it means you have a roughly similar climate across the span of a continent, so that if a farmer makes a great improvement to a particular crop, it can relatively easily spread to other parts of the continent. Whereas if you have a continent like Africa that runs mostly north-south, a crop that works very well in one part of the continent is not going to work in another part because of the climatic differences, and that creates a bigger hurdle to the spread of agricultural technology.

But when you look at Europe itself, you see huge differences in economic development between different parts of the continent, and there are alternative explanations that emphasize institutions. One kind of grand historical story, of which we might be skeptical for all kinds of reasons, is to say that after the Black Death, there was a real scarcity of human labor, and this meant that those people who did survive the Black Death, and a third to possibly as much as half of Europeans died in the Black Death, were able to negotiate much higher wages and exert more political influence in all kinds of ways. The reaction to that ended up being different in the east of Europe and the west of Europe.

In the east of Europe, it was basically quashed by force, with an even more controlling feudal system than before, and that led to extractive political and economic institutions which entrenched hierarchy and stopped Eastern Europe from developing over the next centuries, which turned out to be crucial in the run-up to the Industrial Revolution. Whereas in Western Europe, this is what allowed the growth of certain free cities, allowed more capital accumulation, and allowed the growth of the bourgeoisie, and therefore seeded the Industrial Revolution. You don’t need to speak necessarily to this particular example, but that’s a way of explaining the big difference in development by 1750 between London and Amsterdam on one side, and Warsaw, Moscow, or Istanbul on the other, through factors that are political and institutional rather than rooted in the kind of geographic factors you emphasize. Can your geographic theory explain the differences within broadly comparable geographic zones?

Diamond: That’s a very good example, and it illustrates a generalization: the larger the scale and the longer the time span, the more broad geographic factors have influence, and the shorter the time span and the smaller the geographic scale, the more role there is for things that have nothing to do with geography and everything to do with institutions.

One example that you and I know very well: I was in Germany during the GDR years. I gather you had a short sample of the GDR. The difference between East and West Germany.

Mounk: I was born a few years before the GDR disappeared, but I never set foot in it. I grew up in West Germany.

Diamond: Right. I remember going in by the S-Bahn when the GDR still existed, before the wall came down. The difference between East and West Germany has nothing to do with geography. It is everything to do with the institutions and who conquered those different parts. Again, North and South Korea: there’s an enormous difference between North and South Korea, a factor of about a hundred in their per capita domestic product, that has nothing to do with the geographic differences between North and South Korea and everything to do with the institutions.

Within Europe, does geography play some role? Clearly, yes. For example, the fact that the British Isles are an island had a big effect on British history. The fact that Portugal, Spain, France, and the Netherlands were on the Atlantic coast, and that Switzerland and Italy were not, had a big effect on European history. The fact that Greece, Italy, Spain, and Norway are peninsulas, and that China does not have peninsulas, has a big geographic effect within subcontinents. The peninsulas of Europe, the Iberian, the Italian, the Greek, and the Scandinavian peninsulas, developed different languages and different cultures, whereas China, without a major peninsula, became unified early and never developed separate political entities, even within Europe.

Mounk: Just to draw out the point about peninsulas, the idea here is that a peninsula obviously separates you geographically from surrounding lands. If Spain, Italy, and Greece were squashed together into one landmass, they may have ended up influencing each other culturally and linguistically much more than they did. I take it your point is that peninsulas favor political fragmentation, which then makes a downstream difference to all kinds of political institutions and economic factors.

Diamond: Yes, exactly. Peninsulas geographically favor linguistic divergence and social divergence. The differences between Italy, Greece, and Spain are not paralleled by the differences between any regions of China. Instead, in China there’s a difference between rice-growing regions and millet-growing regions, but that’s not because there are peninsulas in China. China doesn’t have big islands either, whereas Europe had the British Isles, which had their own independent course, and there was Crete, which for a while had its own independent course.

To summarize: on the largest geographic scale, for the longest times, geography is everything and individuals are nothing. As the geographic scale and the time reduce, down to the DDR and North Korea, institutions are everything and geography is almost nothing. Naturally, in the intermediate phase, within Europe, geography plays some role, but it doesn’t play the overwhelming role that it did over ten thousand years, because of things like the Black Death and other factors within Europe.

Mounk: When we look at the difference between Western and Eastern Europe, is the explanation for why Western Europe has historically been much more affluent than Eastern Europe geographic, institutional and political, or something in between? What is the answer to that specific challenge, given that geography doesn’t in an obvious way explain why Italy has historically been much more affluent than Poland, though that may no longer be the case five or ten years from now, according to the latest statistics.

Diamond: That’s a very good question, and it’s one I haven’t thought about systematically. Yes, there are differences between Western and Eastern Europe. You point out reasons why those differences might have particular causes, such as the Black Death. Another relevant cause, of course, is the Mongol invasions. The Mongols got as far as the end of the steppe. The invaders from the east got into the Hungarian plains, but Attila’s and Genghis’s legions never got beyond the Hungarian plains, because the Hungarian plains are as far west as you can get in Eurasia and still have large areas of grassland to feed your horses. So there’s a possible geographic reason for the differences between Eastern and Western Europe.

But how much of it is geographic, and how much of it is the influence of the Black Death? Did the Black Death have more influence in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe? I don’t know. So the short answer to your question is that it’s a very interesting question I haven’t thought about, and I’m interested to hear what you’ve said about it, but I don’t have any more to say about it.

Mounk: I’m very sympathetic to the idea that geography, especially over these very large time spans, could make a difference. The problem, of course, is that we both know the outcome. We know what the dependent variable is that we’re trying to explain. We know that historically it’s Europe that conquered many parts of the world rather than Australia, China, or North America conquering the rest of the world in the early modern period, and we know what the geographic features are, without necessarily knowing what the natural impact of those geographic features should be.

That raises the danger of a kind of just-so story. Just to pick up on the example about peninsulas, you might think that having a big unified geographic area is a huge advantage, that you should expect China to be dominant rather than Europe, because China doesn’t have peninsulas and so ends up with a much more unified state much earlier on. If you want to go around conquering the rest of the world, having the scale and sophistication of one unified military, and the resources to put toward that conquest, probably is an advantage over having lots of fragmented states at a much smaller scale that are busy fighting each other.

If China had conquered the rest of the world in the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth century, I could imagine a story in which we say the reason for this is geographic, because China has this big unified space, and that allowed it to reach scale and put its resources toward conquest. Whereas the poor Europeans were hampered by geography, they had all these different peninsulas and therefore fragmented states, so how could we expect them to conquer the world? How do we make sure we’re not just back-projecting the result onto these geographic features?

Diamond: Good question. Let me give you two answers, and let me tell you what they are at the outset, because I get so involved in these things that after I’ve given the first answer I’ll forget the second. Let’s talk about unity versus fragmentation, and let’s also talk about independent tests.

First, unity versus fragmentation. One might think unity is an advantage: China had a big area, China got unified, so why didn’t China conquer the world? Well, disunity is an advantage, and unity, one can see historically, was a fatal disadvantage for China. Where you have disunity, as in Europe, it means you have different polities competing and struggling against each other. So if the leader of one polity gets the bright idea of abolishing guns, as happened in Japan and China, in disunified Europe, when one leader abolishes guns, there are so many other polities nearby that have kept their guns that a leader cannot get away with doing something so stupid. Whereas in both China and Japan, precisely because they were unified, that had fatal disadvantages. There was no competition. The competition in Europe resulting from Europe’s disunity was a decisive advantage.

Another example: Christopher Columbus had this crazy idea of crossing the ocean. He went to various Italian leaders: Give me ships. No, go to hell, stupid idea. He went to France: stupid idea, no ships. He went to Portugal: no. He went to Spain: no. On his seventh try, he finally got ships. But China also had a fleet, a much bigger and better fleet than any European fleet, which started to cross the Indian Ocean and for thirty years was rounding the tip of Africa. But because China was unified, an emperor came in and said, no more of those fleets. The fleets are bringing back white giraffes, but they’re not bringing back anything that’s of use to us. Precisely because China was unified, when one emperor said no, that was the end of the fleets, whereas in Europe, because it was disunified, that couldn’t happen.

Mounk: On the other hand, you could relate this back to the leadership book and say yes, unity sets you up for failure because of one leader, but it also sets you up for success because of one leader. If one leader in China had had the visionary idea to go and conquer the world, not that that’s necessarily a good thing for the world, but in terms of what we’re explaining, why Europe did that and not China, then perhaps China would have conquered the world at that time, and all of these geographic differences between Europe and China wouldn’t have mattered. It would have just come down to this one piece of smart or not-smart leadership at this one point, I believe in the fifteenth century, when China went the wrong way. Despite all of China’s geographic features, they could very easily have gone the other way, if only that leader had loved white giraffes less, or had recognized that the ships brought back things beyond white giraffes that were also useful.

Diamond: China went the wrong way not only that time but repeatedly. China backed away from an industrial revolution. China was developing major technology; gunpowder was developed in China, but China did not carry on with the development of gunpowder. China did not carry on with the Industrial Revolution. Time and time again, and we’ve seen it since World War II as well, when you’re unified, when you’ve got one person with a lot of power, you do not get the advantages that come from jostling between multiple people with power. That’s my first point.

The second point, the one you mentioned, is whether this is just a just-so story, and whether we can make any independent test. Some colleagues of mine and I are now in the process of doing a quantitative test. We’re looking at the last ten thousand years. We’re counting up all the plants and animals and looking at the value of the plants and animals. We’re letting the results tell us the value of the plants and animals rather than assuming it. We think high-protein cereals, for example, seem to us more valuable than other plants, but is that just our prejudice? One can look at the outcomes. If you do a regression of outcomes around the world, where the outcomes are development of state government, development of technology, and development of population, those outcomes can be related to the number and value of plants and animals, allowing you to say empirically that high-protein cereals have been more valuable than high-starch tuber plants, and that domestic animals that can be ridden are more valuable than domestic animals that cannot be ridden.

Let me throw in one more tidbit. In the New World, there was only one medium-large domestic animal, and that was the llama, the only pack animal of the New World, whereas in the Old World pack animals included the horse, the donkey, and the camel. The llama was domesticated in Peru. A thousand miles away is Mexico. In Mexico, Mexican Indians invented a wheel. Peruvian Indians never invented the wheel. But the New World runs north-south, and the llama, a creature of the Andean highlands, never got through the Isthmus of Panama. The llama never got the thousand miles from Peru to Mexico, and the Mexican wheel never got the thousand miles from Mexico south to the Andes, with the result that there was never any wheel transport in the New World. That’s a dramatic example of the influence of north-south geography.

Mounk: Incidentally, the other handicap of having a north-south geographic orientation rather than an east-west one is that the cold wind blows down from Canada and Alaska toward Boston and New York, which is why they’re so much colder than Rome and Naples, which are at roughly similar latitudes. I agree with you that these geographic determinants explain why it gets so cold on the East Coast in the winter.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jared discuss why civilizations collapse—and the biggest risks today. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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We’re on vacation this week, so are rerunning a fun “beach read” episode exploring if your nearest and dearest could be psychopaths.

Miss us already? 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.

Abigail Marsh is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at Georgetown University.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Abigail Marsh explore what to do if a child you know might be psychopathic, whether psychopathy is linked to charisma and success, and how to protect yourself.

Wondering if you or a loved one might be a psychopath? Take the quiz!

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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Yascha Mounk: How should we think about what a psychopath—or do you prefer sociopath—actually is?

Abigail Marsh: That is a great question. There is this weird dichotomy in how people talk about the disorder. The term sociopath is vastly preferred in the media and literature. There are a couple of very famous memoirs that came out about people who were self-described sociopaths. It is not a term that is used anymore by clinicians or researchers. We primarily use the term psychopathy. I do not even use the term psychopath anymore, mainly because it occurred to me that we do not refer to any other people by their disorder anymore. We do not refer to somebody as “a schizophrenic” or “an anorexic” anymore. We have switched to a kind of person-first language, and I have thought that people with psychopathy probably deserve the same.

All that said, psychopathy is a personality disorder. It is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM, that is used to define and diagnose other personality disorders, for complicated reasons. It is a clinical disorder, and it is characterized by three main types of traits. One, a bold, fearless, dominant and socially dominant personality. Meanness or callousness is probably the trait people most closely associate with it: lack of remorse, lack of guilt, lack of compassion, etc. Finally, disinhibition, difficulty sticking to a plan, difficulty keeping promises, irresponsible behavior, sometimes very spontaneous, clearly poorly planned antisocial behavior that lands people in trouble.

Mounk: I once had somebody explain to me the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath as being that a psychopath is somebody who has, I guess in your language, all three of those sets of traits, who is disinhibited, who wants to dominate the world, and who ends up doing really bad acts. A sociopath may be somebody who does not have fellow feeling, who does not feel remorse if they have hurt somebody, who does not feel bad about things they have done in the world, but who may be relatively well adjusted, who may think that it is in their interest not to hurt others because they might go to jail or other bad things might happen, but is still lacking that dimension of fellow feeling.

You are saying that there is not this principled distinction between the term sociopath and the term psychopath. Is there a distinction between those two types of people? Would you say that there are some people who have this one set of traits quite strongly but not the other sets of traits, or are they really correlated with each other?

Marsh: Such good questions. That is a really interesting description that you were given about the difference between the two. That is even a new one. I have heard probably 20 different descriptions, including clinicians and researchers describing the two terms and what distinguishes them. You will get many different explanations.

First, it is totally possible for people to be persistently antisocial but not because they lack the capacity for empathy or remorse. I would say that for most people with psychopathy, it is not that they totally lack the capacity for empathy or remorse, but it is very suppressed. They feel these emotions very mildly or very rarely, maybe only with reference to one or two people.

Mounk: That is interesting because I think we do also tend to think about it like it is a switch. Most people have it, and then some people do not have it at all, whereas you are talking about it nearly as a normal distribution. Most people have it to a relatively typical degree, and then a bunch of people have it less than others, but they might still feel it for their mom or for their best friend or for the person they love, but not for anybody else. They might feel it more dimly than others. What do you think is the distribution? Is it something like a normal distribution, or how should we think about this?

Marsh: I think it is certainly a distribution. It has that classic bell-curve shape. It is probably shifted so that most people are on the plenty-of-empathy side of the distribution. The tail of people who experience very little empathy and compassion is a long tail, but a very small number of people are down there. I have worked with people who say they have never experienced anything like what most people describe as empathy or remorse or compassion. They exist, but that is a small percent of people, much smaller than the percent of people who say they wish that they could experience less empathy and compassion for others.

Mounk: Interesting, because that too can be debilitating if you inadvertently step on a bug and you are so empathetic for the natural world that you are terribly guilt-ridden about having inadvertently done that. That also seems like a kind of ill-adjustedness.

Marsh: It can be. Empathy, compassion, and guilt swim together. That is the downside of being a compassionate, empathic person: you often feel guilt about not having done even better, even though you are probably a nicer person than average.

Mounk: Let us get back to empathy and what people who have really strong empathy feel as part of a conversation as well. Sticking with the other end of the spectrum, obviously one reason why we are interested in this topic is that it drives bad behavior. A lot of criminals, people who are serial killers, and perhaps some politicians who do terrible things seem to suffer from some form of psychopathy. What drives bad behavior here? Is it primarily this question of whether you have empathy for others? Or is it whether you have empathy for others plus those other ingredients? What do you think is predictive with the patients you work with? When do you think, oh dear, I’m worried for the people in their life? Is it just how little empathy they have for others, or is it that plus some other thing about them?

Marsh: Each one of these prongs that makes up psychopathy—the bold, socially dominant personality; the low empathy and compassion; and the disinhibition—can drive antisocial behavior for different reasons. I think of them as different kinds of gas or brakes. You can be a very antisocial person who has at least the capacity for empathy and compassion simply because you are so disinhibited: you see something, you want it, you act. Or you may be very bad at controlling your anger. You may have something like intermittent explosive disorder, where it is easy for things to get under your skin and you blow up in a disproportionate way, and afterward you feel awful. Each time this happens you think, I cannot believe I did this again, but it is too hard to control those emotions.

There are also people driven by status goals. People who are very bold and socially dominant often like having higher status than others. Sometimes those goals can drive antisocial acts even though the person has the capacity for empathy but chooses not to deploy it. They may view certain people as unworthy of empathy or compartmentalize their empathy.

There are many people who are functional in their normal social lives. They have a normal family life and long-term friendships—relationships that typically do not emerge in people who are truly, pathologically psychopathic, because it is very hard to maintain friendships when you view others as instrumental means to achieve your goals.

Mounk: At some point they’re gonna figure that out, feel used and won’t want to be your friend.

Marsh: Right, because in people who are highly psychopathic, the “friendship” was only ever based on a desire to get something out of it. It is not a typical way of bonding with others. But there are people who can form close bonds while still being so driven by their need to dominate or to acquire that their empathic capacity gets switched off or suppressed by those goals.

Mounk: I’m trying to think about what this model looks like. One perhaps overly simple way of describing it is that we have desires in the world, and we act in order to serve those desires. Then we have inhibitions. One obvious inhibition is empathy for others: I’m not going to do this because it will upset someone. Is the relationship between desire and inhibition something like one minus the other? How should we think about that relationship?

You can imagine someone who is highly empathetic but has uncontrollable rages and therefore behaves badly, or someone who has very little—perhaps no—compassion for others but is so impassive, so lacking in strong desires, that they calculate it is in their rational self-interest never to break the law or cause drama because they prefer a quiet life of sitting at home watching Netflix.

Marsh: There are plenty of psychopathic people exactly like that who do not particularly care about other people. They just want what they want. The stuff that they want is pretty easy for them to get for whatever reason. Maybe because they have particular cognitive skills and talents that make having a pretty easy life not that big of a challenge for them. I will say the other thing that makes psychopathy such a challenge is that the bold, dominant personality is associated with being fearless, which means being unafraid of being punished. The other thing that keeps people who are psychopathic from behaving in pro-social ways is that they do not fear the punishment that comes from behaving antisocially, so it is very difficult to contain their behavior using threats of jail or other serious punishments. They just want what they want.

Mounk: What is it that makes them unresponsive to that fear of punishment? Is it that they do not care that if they end up in jail for 20 years, they are just as happy in jail as they would be somewhere else? Or is it that they do not have mechanisms of self-control, that they basically fail the marshmallow test? How should we think about what drives that behavior?

Marsh: Many of them would definitely fail the marshmallow test. That is true of people who end up in jail in general. Even in a typical jail or prison, only a minority of people would be considered clinically psychopathic. Close to half, but not most people. Disinhibition and failure to control impulses or difficulty balancing risks and rewards is a major factor that puts people in detention. That is true of people with psychopathy too.

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They do not like jail. It is not that they want to be there. There does seem to be neurodevelopmental differences in them such that in their very early life they do not fear the punishment ahead of time. They do not like it when they get it, but they do not fear it ahead of time, and they do not do things to avoid the threat or the punishment even if they will not like it when they get it.

Mounk: You just mentioned a stat by the by that is striking. You said close to half of people in prison, as far as we know, have those psychopathic traits. How does that relate to the general population?

Marsh: Yeah, because psychopathy is a continuum. It is hard to put a clear marker on exactly what proportion of the population has psychopathy because it depends on where you decide to draw the clinical line. Most people estimate it is about one or two percent of the population that has clinically significant levels of psychopathy. That is in the general population. Of course, it is much higher in populations where people are doing enough antisocial things that they have ended up punished for it.

Mounk: It is, to the tune of 25x or 50x, more likely for someone who is psychopathic to end up in jail. Do we know something about what percentage of people with psychopathy will be imprisoned at some point in their lives?

Marsh: We do not know this at all. We do know there is something called the Pareto Principle, the 80-20 rule. For example, 20% of people are responsible for 80% of absenteeism in the workplace. That is true for all antisocial behavior. A small minority of the population is responsible for most antisocial acts. When you look at violent crime, some people have estimated that maybe 1% of the population is responsible for two thirds of all serious violent crime.

We do not know the odds that any particular person with psychopathy will offend over their lifetime. It is definitely higher than the average person. We did recently a big population study of psychopathy, and rates of offending were twice as high to 10 times as high as the general population, depending on the specific antisocial behavior in question. This is a paper that is about to come out. We found that the most common kinds of antisocial behavior that very high psychopathic people engage in, in terms of what they are most likely to have done, is risky, reckless driving.

Driving under the influence, not obeying traffic laws, driving way too fast, et cetera. The vast majority of highly psychopathic people have done that. Somewhat smaller percentages have been convicted or punished for it, but they all do it. A much smaller percent have committed assault, maybe 40%. Smaller proportions have been arrested for it.

Mounk: If we think again of these three different classes of character traits that are necessary according to the DSM to classify someone as psychopathic, are they correlated with each other? If you have one of these three character traits, does that make it more likely that you have the other two as well? Or are we simply saying that 15% of the population have each of those character traits, and the people who end up having psychopathy are the ones who happen to have 0.15 x 0.15 x 0.15, you probably end up with a little bit lower, so you would say 20% of each, and they are not correlated with each other? Does having one of these sets of character traits also drive the other or is it genetically related in some kind of way or related in terms of your upbringing? Or are they independent of each other?

Marsh: The top question is whether these three clusters of traits are correlated with each other. Yes, to some degree. The meanness and callousness and the disinhibition are strongly correlated with each other, maybe 0.4. Not 0.7 or they would be the same thing. The bold, dominant personality less so, as low as 0.15 probably. Although when you do the developmental studies that follow kids over time, that does seem to be the core trait. That is the first trait that we see emerging early in childhood that puts the child at risk for all the other sequela of psychopathic traits.

I will also mention that this triad of traits is not in the DSM diagnosis that is closest to psychopathy, which is antisocial personality disorder. Why they changed the name when they put it in the DSM, who is to say. I am sure you are aware of what a book created by committees the DSM is, and it has some flaws. A lot of these traits are in there, but you will not find this exact triad of traits in the DSM, nor will you find the term psychopathy.

Mounk: I would venture that a term invented by, I believe, your doctoral advisor, Steven Pinker, and a former guest on this podcast has something to do with this, which is a “euphemism treadmill.” If you find a term for something that has negative associations, the term itself will start to be negatively charged over time. Therefore people will say there is something offensive about the term, so let us not go with it. Even if something like psychopathy or sociopathy was invented as a relatively neutral term, over time we associated it with the underlying behaviors. It comes to seem like a slur word. Perhaps someone in the committee said, “We cannot call people that. Let us find a new term.”

Marsh: Yes, Steven Pinker was on my dissertation committee. I should mention he was not my advisor, but I appreciated his fantastic advice then. I appreciate this term, “euphemism treadmill,” which is a huge problem for psychopathy because it is an incredibly common disorder, and it is antisocial behavior. I should reinforce that the psychopathic traits that we see in adults are almost without exception present in adolescents and childhood in people who develop psychopathy. It is a disorder that occurs throughout the lifespan. It is the most common reason that children are referred to psychiatric care in childhood, antisocial behavior problems, not all of which is related to psychopathy, but a big chunk of it is.

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Yet there is very little help for the affected kids and families out there. There is so little in the way of resources or clinical training devoted to helping clinicians help these kids. On top of that, the clinician and researcher community does the population of patients a double-diservice by coming up with 8,000 terms that all mean more or less the same thing. “Sociopathy” was in part a remedy to the stigma that the term “psychopath” had. “Antisocial personality disorder,” same thing. It is, “Let us try to get the stigma away from having a disorder that causes you to do antisocial things all the time.” The reality is you are never going to take the stigma away from the disorder. Of course, if you do antisocial things persistently, that is going to be stigmatized. There is no getting around it.

The way we get rid of the stigma is by finding treatments for it so that people do not continue to perceive this as some sort of a “bad seed” moral disorder that is a permanent stain and we should just lock you up forever. That is how to get rid of the stigma.

Mounk: You mentioned that one of the first things you can diagnose in children is this desire to dominate, and that is the predictor of the other character traits emerging. At what age in a child’s development do we start to see warning signs, and how predictive are they? If you go and visit some relative of yours or the child of some friend, and they have some concerning set of behaviors, at three years old, at seven years old, at 10 years old, at what point can you say, hey, I am not a trained psychologist, but I am starting to be concerned here, and I am not being crazy?

Marsh: It is hard because the age two to three is statistically the most violent period of the lifespan because it is typical for little kids to have terrible tantrums and be quite violent in some cases, biting and doing things that do not happen later in life. It is hard. The thing that you are looking for in kids who are two to three years old, which most parents of kids who develop psychopathic traits will say is when they started noticing something was different, is this fearless personality, which mostly manifests in the kid not seeming scared of things that other kids are scared of: Big dogs, the dark, being alone, very high places, doing things that are unusually risky, and that includes not being afraid of punishments.

Mounk: But some of those might be good traits. How do you know? Where is the line? You want your kid to be happy-go-lucky and relatively fearless. It is a big dog, but it is our friend’s dog. You don’t have to be worried about it. You’re going to be proud if your kid says, hello, big doggy. What makes you know where the line is between having a kid that loves the world and has not had anything bad happen to them, and so they do not have a lot of fear, versus thinking, my God, perhaps I’m raising a little psychopath?

Marsh: This trait by itself is probably not enough to worry you. I will say that being afraid of something and loving something are two different axes so that people who love something will override their fear for it, even if they have a normal amount of fear. Alex Honnold, the free solo climber, is a famous example of this. He is not a fearless guy at all. He talks about how terrified he was before giving his TED Talk. People assume he must be fearless because of the climbs he does. The reality is he loves to climb. It gives him so much joy, he is so driven to do it that that overwhelms the regular amount of fear. That is how I am about dogs. Big dogs, small dogs, barking dogs, whatever. When I was a little kid, I would throw myself at all of them. It was not fearlessness; it was love.

You are looking for fearlessness across the gamut, including when it comes to punishment. For many little kids, having mom or dad get mad at you when you have done something you should not do is enough to make that behavior less likely going forward. Some kids might need a more structured reinforcement system like the “one, two, three magic” system, which I highly recommend, which results in timeout. One, Two, Three Magic is a book about how to use principles of behavioral psychology to help kids manage their behavior in a way that does not involve arguing or yelling or harsh punishment. It is behaviorism. When a child does something disruptive that they should not do, you count them. “That is one.” The first time they do it. “That is two.” The second time they do it, and on three, they have a mandatory timeout. No talking, no arguing, no explaining. They have a timeout. Kids hate timeouts. It is boring. That works.

Mounk: This is true in discussions of criminal law as well. When punishment is certain and immediate, that is the most likely deterrent, and this is applying the same thing to kids. Do not shout at the kid, but make sure you punish the kid.

Marsh: Yes, it should be swift, it should be certain, it does not need to be harsh. It should be annoying. Punishment has gotten a bad name. Punishment is any response that reduces the likelihood of that behavior in the future. When you are a parent, there is no possible way to only use reward and reinforcement to shape your kid’s behavior. Kids will do things they should not do sometimes. Using simple, swift, certain, annoying consequences like a timeout, for most kids that is plenty and that will shape their behavior fine. For kids who have this bold, fearless personality it will not. One of the problems is that most parents have no idea what they are dealing with. They think, I do not understand, I have other kids and this worked fine for them, why is this kid not responding to these mild punishments? Unfortunately, what happens is the parents ratchet up the punishment. The timeout did not work, now I am going to lock you in your room. Locking you in your room did not work, now I am going to start screaming at you. Maybe I am going to use physical punishment. The problem is if the kid does not fear the punishment in advance, none of that is going to work.

Now you have a kid who is fairly fearless and thinks that everybody around them is a jerk. They are being treated unfairly. They are being treated differently than the other kids around them, including their siblings. The reason is their behavior is different, but a little kid is not going to put that together. This is the developmental cycle it leads to. The fearless temperament sometimes is coupled with low affiliative desires. We do not know if those two things are intrinsically linked or if having both is extra bad. Low affiliation means they do not find affection as rewarding as other people.

Parents sometimes try to be respectful of the child and dial back on the affection. Not as many hugs, giving them their space, not snuggling with them because they do not seem to like it as much. That is the opposite of what you should do. Kids do not always know what they need. Kids who are not that sensitive to affection need extra of it. You do not want to lock them into bear hugs while they struggle. You use big warm smiles, lots of affectionate touches because that is what it takes to get through to them.

Mounk: Just to go back to how you are facing this three-year-old and you are trying to figure out, is a three-year-old just an asshole like many three-year-olds are assholes, or is it a special asshole? One thing I have observed with kids, friends and family members, et cetera, is that kids at that age, terrible twos, will behave in horrible ways. They will bite their parents and whatever. They will afterward feel obvious remorse. They will look crestfallen, they hurt mommy or daddy, and they will be hurt by the punishment, and you will see that they are thinking, what did I do? Is the absence of that a reliable indicator at that age? Is that something that even at that young age you can observe, or is that not a key thing to look out for?

Marsh: I would say it is a slightly less reliable indicator because that is something you also might see in a child with autistic traits. You might not see as much of that attention to other people’s sadness or anxiety or stress. If you couple that fearless personality with the lack of seeming to care if you have hurt somebody, it is normal for a two- or three-year-old who one minute is a screaming terror, if mom starts crying or seems sad, to say, oh, mommy, are you okay? Not in the middle of a tantrum necessarily, but most of the time you should see a little of that. That means the child is coming to intrinsically value other people’s welfare.

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That is a normal human trait that should develop. When the people you love are doing well, that should bring you joy automatically. When they are in distress, that should bring you distress automatically. Children need to develop that. Kids with psychopathy do not have that. Other people’s welfare does not have intrinsic value to them.

Mounk: You are starting to speak about how some parents understandably step back from expressing affection for kids who do not seem to value affection in the same way, but that is the wrong thing to do. How much agency is there? If by the age of a two- or three-year-old there is something wrong and you do everything right, you take the kid to a doctor first and a specialist, and they are diagnosed with, this kid is in danger of developing psychopathy or they may have inclination toward that, what can you do and how much of a difference is that going to make? If kids are born without that sense of empathy for others, is that something you can give them through treatments and therapy and the right behavioralism, or is the best you can hope for to manage that condition so that the outcomes are not as terrible as they often turn out to be?

Marsh: It is treatable. You are not going to bring a kid’s personality from one end of the spectrum to the other. If you are a parent of a child who is three, four, five years old and you are noticing punishment does not seem to do anything to your kid’s behavior when you punish them consistently, swiftly, and not too harshly for their behavior, they do not seem to care, they do not seem affectionate, they are misbehaving more than their peers, they are lying more often than usual, they might be starting to steal things, what do you do? Most people start out taking their kid to a pediatrician. It is likely the pediatrician will have no clue what is going on. They have not been trained to assess behavior problems in children, but hopefully they will assess. This is something. I co-founded an organization called the Society for the Prevention of Disorders of Aggression to try to work on some of these problems, but the problems are big. Hopefully they will recommend a child psychologist or social worker to assess the child next.

They may or may not know how to assess these problems in kids. They may, even if they recognize that your child probably qualifies for a diagnosis of conduct disorder, which is the child equivalent of psychopathy, or at least some of it is, or oppositional defiant disorder. Those are the major disorders names that we give kids who look like they are on a trajectory toward persistent antisocial behavior. They may deliberately give you a different diagnosis because there is fear of stigma, there is fear that families will reject these diagnoses. There is a misperception among many clinicians that they are untreatable. They may want to give a diagnosis like autism because resources will come your way if you have that diagnosis. They may give ADHD because it is a light definition and it is not offensive. Maybe even depression. They may decide the reason that this kid seems cold and unemotional is because they are depressed. It is common that parents get a wrong diagnosis. Even if you do get a right diagnosis, the odds of finding somebody trained to use a therapy that works is not high.

There is therapy that works. PCIT, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, is therapy where the parents are trained in techniques that will bring out the best in the child, that will over time eliminate their antisocial behavior, show the kid warmth, more warmth than you think you need to show them, to develop a bond between you and the child so they care about you and they care what you want and they care what you think.

Mounk: Without going into too much detail, what kind of behaviors are there? What can you do as a parent? You were saying one thing is to show even more warmth to your kid. Most parents give a lot of warmth to most of their kids, right?

Marsh: I am sure you are familiar with the pop psych book about love languages, which has a kernel of truth. Sometimes parents fail to realize that the way they are showing their children love is not as interpretable to the child as they might think. For example, taking your kid to swim lessons and piano lessons and doctor’s appointments and PCA stuff is love. That is very much love. It does not feel like it to the kid. Being taken to the doctor is not feeling love. Making sure their clothes are clean and that they have had breakfast and get out the door on time are things loving parents do, but to a kid it feels like being harassed and nagged.

One of the things that PCIT entails, and many good behavioral therapy programs involve, is something called floor time, where you set aside five to ten minutes every day with your child to engage in behaviors that show that you care about your child, that you like them, that you approve of them, and that you feel positively about them. They involve things like, while your child is playing on the floor, imitating what they are doing, playing alongside them, narrating what they are doing, and positively commenting on what they are doing.

It feels simple and dumb, but in reality that is a moment when you are not nagging your child, you are not hustling them from one thing to another, you are not telling them what to do, you are not asking them questions, which many parents interpret as a sign of care, which it is, but to a child being endlessly peppered with questions—what did you do in school today? What did you have for lunch? Who did you sit next to?—feels like an interrogation. Floor time is an isolated time when you are showing approval and positive regard. It is amazing how much just ten minutes of that a day will do. A seven-minute workout does not seem like it should be enough to improve health, but it does. Ten minutes of floor time can do wonders for a child.

That is the baseline. Then there is a separate set of behaviors that parents engage in that help their child learn to avoid bad behaviors and adopt good ones through reinforcement.

Mounk: Interesting. In the best case, you can take a kid that has a tendency toward psychopathy and avert the worst kinds of outcomes. Tell us about how the life of a kid like that is likely to go. Then tell us what happens if you do not intervene in that kind of way and how the problems of misbehaving when you are three years old turn into the problems of misbehaving when you are 13 or 23.

Marsh: I will say that parents of kids with these problems are blamed and shamed routinely for their kid having this callous, remorseless personality. It sometimes does not help to say the solution is parenting management training, which reinforces the idea that you must be a really bad parent. That is not true. In general, the kids who develop these traits who are raised by parents who get them into some kind of therapy, or sometimes just figure out a way to manage their behavior, end up as kids who are not going to be the warmest, most cuddly people in the world.

They usually have learned good habits and strategies to get what they want that do not involve overtly breaking rules or hurting other people. They may end up in professions that attract extroverted people that are high risk, high reward, and offer a lot of status. There is evidence that jobs in finance and banking might attract a higher proportion of people with psychopathy than teaching, for example, just to name a quite different job.

Mounk: This is one of the questions that my producer Leo tasked me with asking, which is that there is a stereotype in our culture that certain kinds of successful people may be more likely to have traits of psychopathy, whether that is banking or surgeons or CEOs. Is there something to that, that having psychopathic traits makes you less likely to be successful, but that among some subsection of highly successful people the share of psychopaths is higher? Politics?

Marsh: My sense is that there is not a ton of great data on this. There is at least one very good study that found that among executive-level people in the business world, the proportion of people estimated to have clinically significant psychopathy, that top one or two percent, is about four percent. So double the regular population, maybe four times the regular population, but that is also 96 percent of them who do not have clinical psychopathy.

Mounk: Among the prison population you said it is close to 50%, and among these people it is 4%.It is a little elevated, but not enough to look at your cousin who is a CEO and say, you’re probably a psychopath; that is why you’re a CEO.

Marsh: People who go into high-risk, high-reward professions—surgery, politics, business—are more likely to be men for various reasons. Men score a little higher in psychopathy than women on average. There are more men than women at the very high end and more women than men at the very low end, but the average psychopathy scores of men and women are not that different. Professions that attract more men will have a higher level of psychopathy because they have more men. Even if you correct for that, there is probably a small effect.

A lot of those professions attract people who are high in the boldness trait that is characteristic of psychopathy: boldness, social dominance. That is sometimes called the adaptive arm of psychopathy or the adaptive feature of psychopathy that may help explain why some level of these traits persists in the population over evolution.

Mounk: Right. Risk-taking, bold, fearless. Someone who is a rock star performing for 150,000 people is going to be more fearless than the average person, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It would explain some of that statistical correlation.

Marsh: Most personality variation is what makes the world go round. It is what makes life colorful. Most personality traits have a wide range that can be adaptive in particular contexts. Some contexts make it more adaptive to be introverted and some extroverted. That is true for psychopathic traits until you get to the very high end. That is not adaptive in almost any context because you burn bridges with everybody everywhere by mistreating them and using them for instrumental purposes. Bernie Madoff is an example of someone who, based on what is available biography-wise, was probably a psychopath. He was using people to meet his instrumental goals.

Mounk: What is the evidence for that? From my understanding of it, at the beginning he was running a relatively normal investment business. Then he made promises that were bigger than they should have been. Then he thought, damn, in order to keep this going, I have to take in more money, and it turned into a Ponzi scheme.

I do not know the details of the case, so I am probably missing elements of it. That seems like something an average asshole might end up in. He did not set off saying, I’m going to perpetuate the biggest financial fraud in history. He thought, I’m going to invest these people’s money and make a lot of profit. Then he thought, shit, either I go bankrupt now or I fudge the numbers. Ten years later, he’s in way over his head. What element of what he did indicates that there was more to it than that?

Marsh: It is a good question. I will say it has been a while since I dug into his biography. What you are looking for is never one thing, because you are right. It is plausible that someone leveraging the money they have to invest and trying to build up a bigger portfolio could get in over their head, not because they are trying to use people, but because they were trying to do the right thing and ended up getting people bankrupt. That could happen.

Information you look for to distinguish between someone who did one bad thing, even if it is a big bad thing, and someone who is truly psychopathic is patterns of behavior throughout different parts of their life. Here I am not talking about Bernie Madoff in particular because I am not confident enough about my memory of his biography. If you are looking at someone’s life to assess psychopathy on the basis of some antisocial thing they have done, you first want to look at their relationships over time. Do they have evidence of real friendships, friendships based on mutual affection and reciprocally benefiting one another? Romantic relationships, relationships with their children. Do those seem to be characterized by sincere affection? When something bad happens to someone you love, are you truly upset about it?

You want to look over time biographically. For people who are psychopathic, there is almost always evidence in early childhood that their behavior was difficult to control. For example, children who were sent to special schools that were trying to manage their behavior might indicate their behavior was unmanageable to their parents. It is not the only reason kids get sent to special schools, but it is a characteristic thing you might see. Was there evidence that they engaged in juvenile delinquency? Were they underperforming in school?

Those sorts of biographical details are helpful to look at. It is rare that people who are doing fraudulent, dishonest things in the business realm are not also doing things like that in the personal realm, maybe in romantic relationships. You want to look at multiple prongs to get an overall portrait of someone who does not care about other people’s welfare and is using other people to get what they want.

Mounk: We have another set of questions from Leo. One part of this is whether it is true that psychopaths are often particularly charismatic, that they have an ability to manipulate people that goes beyond that of the average person. Relatedly, we have the holidays coming up. If you go to your Christmas gathering or whatever your favorite holiday may be, and your cousin’s significant other that they are bringing over for the first time seems to have behaviors that may be indicative of psychopathy, how do you think through whether you are talking yourself into a rage and need to touch grass, or whether you have to be concerned for the well-being of your relative?

Marsh: This is what is confounding about psychopathy: how hard it is to detect in a casual interaction. It is impossible. I do not think any psychopathy researcher says there is any tell in casual conversation that reliably indicates someone is psychopathic because people who are psychopathic are shapeshifters. This is not true of everybody, but most of the psychopathic people I have worked with will say that they mask in most interactions. They present the face to the people they are interacting with that they think those people want to see. That often results in their being some of the most charming, likable, friendly people you will ever interact with. They do not seem fake. Most of us have too much confidence in our ability to detect deception in regular life. We are not good at it. Everybody I know who works with psychopathy has found themselves duped at least once.

You are out of luck when it comes to detecting psychopathy in your cousin’s new boyfriend unless you know someone who knows him and can say, that guy is not trustworthy. He talks a big game, and half the stuff he says is not true, and it is not clear why he was making it up. He has had six different jobs in the last two years, and nobody knows why. He cheated on his last girlfriend. That is the kind of biography you are looking for.

Whether people who are psychopathic are usually charismatic is hard to say. There is not good data on this. They certainly report that they are. They will say, yes, I am. That is not satisfying. It is possible that if you want to manipulate people, being charismatic is a good tool to do it. Many people who are psychopathic may develop a more charismatic demeanor in an effort to do that. It may also be the case that it is people who are very psychopathic and charismatic who cause trouble. Those are the ones you do not detect.

Mounk: Right. It is an availability bias where if there are a hundred people with psychopathy, the ninety who are not particularly charismatic are less successful, less likely to become celebrities, less likely to become elected office holders. The subset of psychopaths we think about when we consider the condition are the ones who are charismatic. That is a very good point.

Marsh: That is possible. There is not as much good data as I would like on whether having a conversation with the average person who is high in psychopathy makes them come across as more charismatic. What they come across as is a genuinely likable person who does not seem particularly antisocial. I have done a little research on this, not published, that people tend to conflate how nice a person is, how good a person is, with whether they personally like them. For example, we are overwhelmingly likely to assume that political figures on the opposite side of the aisle from ourselves are psychopathic. That is why I always urge people: just because this person has politics you do not like, whether they are a national politician or a voter, that is not a sign they are psychopathic. You do not like them, and I get that, but they may think they are doing the right thing sincerely and honestly.

Mounk: That is true for ascriptions of psychopathy. It is broadly true for ascriptions of moral evil. It is tempting to think that my way of seeing the world politically is so obviously true that anyone who disagrees with me must be stupid or a bad person. That is an assumption I see people make all the time. One of the things you get from attending focus groups and listening to people of very different political points of view is that they seem genuinely to be struggling to think about what is right. In a different way, one of the things you get from reading the most brilliant political thinkers of the past, who lived in different moments and therefore had different political assumptions and different values, is that there are many well-intentioned, smart people who have views that are very different from those that I have. That is the core to beginning to have any productive form of politics.

Marsh: Exactly. People can do things that you dislike, have beliefs that you dislike, and be a sincerely well-intentioned person who is trying to be moral and is being moral according to what they view as moral. That is important when trying to explain what psychopathy is and is not. It is not everybody who disagrees with you politically.

I have had more than one conversation with academics who say, well, I will tell you where you can find all the people with psychopathy. They are on the Republican side of the aisle. That is not how it works. The most famous social psychology experiment of all time, the Milgram study, was designed to dispel the idea that Germany was a nation full of psychopaths. The belief at the time was that you could never have had such a thing happen in Germany as what happened in World War II unless German people were unusually callous and heartless and cruel. That was not true at all.

Mounk: Well, obviously there is the historical point that it is hard to understand why Germans in 1925 were not psychopaths, and in 1943 they were all psychopaths, and by 1970 they were back to having normal psychologies. It is not a convincing explanation. You spend a lot of time with psychopaths. You spend time studying them in research setups where there are layers of confidentiality so that you elicit honest responses. Tell us what it is like, as best you can tell from speaking with those people, to be a psychopath. How do people think about their own condition? How do people think about the world?

Marsh: One thing I should mention is that there are a couple members of the organization I created who have been diagnosed with psychopathy. They have written well-known memoirs in the last couple of years. One is Patric Gagne and the other is Amy Thomas. I have valued them as colleagues. Part of the interactions I have with people with psychopathy is as colleagues. I come at this from different angles. The first work I did in people with clinical psychopathy, or callous unemotional traits, which is the euphemism we use for children, was in my postdoctoral research when we were doing brain imaging research trying to understand the neural basis of psychopathy. We interviewed kids from all over the greater Washington, D.C. area and interviewed their parents to get a better sense of what made these kids tick.

One of the interesting discrepancies we found was that there was a wide range in how aware the kids were that there was anything different about them. This is true of adults with not only psychopathy but conditions like bipolar disorder or stroke. Some people recognize that there is something different about them, and some people think there is nothing different about them and that everybody else is just like them. That makes a big difference when it comes to treatment. If someone has no idea there is anything different about them, it is hard to convince them to get treated.

The kids who recognized there was something different about them had reasonably good insight about the fact that they found themselves doing antisocial things repeatedly that other kids did not do. Some of them said they wished they knew how to stop because they could tell that it was not working out for them in the long term.

Mounk: They did not say, I wish I knew how to stop because it makes mommy and daddy sad. They said things like, I realize I keep getting punished for it, or, nobody seems to like me. What is it that bothers them?

Marsh: They say, this is not the life I want. I have talked to adults who say the same thing. They say, this is not the life I want. I want to have friends. I want to have a regular job. I want to do well in my life.

For many of the kids I worked with, they had been kicked out of multiple schools. This was not the life they wanted. Many of them had an image of what a good life looks like, and that was not it for almost anybody. Some of them did not care. There was a subset of kids who did not care. They found school boring. They did not see the point in doing well. Getting kicked out of multiple schools would hopefully end with no school, and they would have been happy. People who are psychopathic and in their teens or twenties are the least likely to appreciate that they are the source of their own problems and want to change. As time goes on, it is more common for people to say, I’m the problem. It’s me, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, and to have some sense that they could learn how to do better. Some of them do learn how to do better.

Some of the people I have talked to, out of a desire to not lose a romantic partner they realize has been a lucky outcome for them, have said things like, I was a way worse person before I started dating this woman. I do not want to lose her. I tried to act like a nice person for a year and a half, and then it started to click, and I started to want to be a nice person. It is almost like they gave themselves therapy, exactly what a therapist would tell you to do. You need to start acting like a nice person. Do the things a nice person would do. Learn how rewarding and beneficial that is, and eventually it becomes a habit and feels natural.

Mounk: When they succeed at that, do they now genuinely love their partner and genuinely have remorse when they act in ways that upset their partner? Or is it that they have, in a way Aristotle would have described, developed a habit of acting in a certain way until it becomes an automatism, and they have gotten out of the habit of acting in ways that upset or hurt the partner? But deep down, when the partner is upset, it still does not create the wrenching feeling that you and I have when we have done something to make somebody sad.

Marsh: I have talked to people for whom both are true. Some are one and some are the other. I have talked to people who said that the only time in their life they have felt something that approached love was when something bad happening to this person made them feel emotional, and they felt bad about it in a way they had never felt about anybody else. I think there are some people with psychopathy for whom there is a lingering latent capacity to experience something akin to real love. It just takes a lot. That person has to be very nice and a kind, affectionate partner. Other people never approached what I would call love, but there was mutual understanding and reciprocity in the relationship. It was a stable relationship where both people were glad they were in it. This person was motivated to keep up their end of the bargain, something like loyalty. I have talked to people who are psychopathic who say that over time they learned to feel something like loyalty, even if not love in a more emotional way. Are these people the norm? It is hard to say, maybe not. They give some cause for optimism about what is possible.

Other people with psychopathy who are less insightful will say, I just want to get what I want. All of my relationships with people are aimed at getting what I want and figuring out what they want from me. I give them what they want to the degree that I have to in order to get what I need. I do not like my job. I do not like people. I take a lot of drugs to feel something, to feel some sense of enjoyment. I engage in risky behavior like reckless driving to feel something. This is a crappy life, but this is the way I am.

Mounk: How honest and open are people about the lack of remorse for bad actions or some of the things they have done? I understand this is a context in which they know you are not going to report what they say to the police. What are the things they would tell you in that context? What are some of the shocking things people have told you?

Marsh: I cannot tell the details. Pretty shocking things. I have been shaken by some of the things I have heard in conversations. I wish I could tell the details, but I cannot. The research that we do is protected by a certificate of confidentiality from the NIH that protects us from having to reveal what we are told under subpoena, because we would never be able to do this research if the people we work with thought that we were going to reveal what they told us. We are mandatory reporters if they tell us about something they are going to do, if they are planning on hurting somebody else or themselves, or if there is any indicator of child or elder abuse. We have to report that. We tell them that. We say, if you tell us anything about these kinds of items, we are mandatory reporters, just like many professionals are. If it is something they did in the past, we would never be able to do this research if we could not guarantee that.

Mounk: If they have confessed to terrible crimes in this context, what do they sound like? Do they tell that to you the way I would say, oh yeah, today for lunch I went to a Japanese restaurant? What is the tone?

Marsh: Casual is the best way to describe it. Yes, this is something that I have done, because there is always a reason. One of the things that people with psychopathy are good at is externalizing blame. It was not, I did it because I wanted to. It was, they put me in this position. The classic line of abusive partners in domestic settings is, they made me do it. They pushed me to it. Domestic violence is something that people with psychopathy are more prone to. It is never your fault if you are psychopathic. Everything is somebody else’s fault. You get explanations like, they put me in this position. They told me they were going to tell on me, so I had to do what I had to do.

I have worked with people who explain what they do through a moral framework they created, where a “good person” will only physically hurt people who do racist things. I only hurt people who say or do things that are racist. It is an interesting moral framework because it channels their antisocial impulses in ways that are, in their view, relatively prosocial.

Mounk: That is interesting. There is some research suggesting that people with dark triad personality traits are attracted to political extremes because those are a cover or an excuse for engaging in these kinds of behaviors. The explanation would be the other way around because those extremes give an excuse for saying, most Americans are terrible human beings. That allows someone to engage in wanton cruelty online, participate in cancellation campaigns, or other kinds of things. It is a way to live out this desire within a socially sanctioned sphere.

Marsh: I have not talked about politics much with most of the participants we brought through, but it fits with what we know. We know that people who are very antisocial online are more likely to have psychopathic personality traits. It is not that you become a different person when you go online. That would have been a reasonable hypothesis, but it seems that people’s online behavior is a reflection of their real personality, even if they put on a more prosocial front in in-person settings and act under the cloak of anonymity online.

Mounk: I know that you also are interested in altruism, and we have talked about it a little earlier in the conversation. It strikes me from what we have talked about so far that the problem of altruism is somewhat ill-posed in philosophy and in biology. The basic paradox of altruism is why we evolve to have altruism. You could expect people who serve their own interests to be the most successful at passing on genes to the next generation. Over time, altruism would be selected out in a population. There are various ways of trying to explain that, group-level selection versus individual-level selection, et cetera. It strikes me that what you are describing is that if you have somebody who is not altruistic at all, who has no sense of care for others, the life outcomes end up being poor. Perhaps some amount of altruism is necessary for success, which seems paradoxical but gives a more straightforward explanation for why altruism has evolved as a human trait.

Marsh: Absolutely. I think that is a good way of putting it. To me, one of the strongest arguments for the idea that humans on average have the capacity for altruism is the existence of psychopathy. Psychopathy fundamentally boils down to not caring about other people’s welfare for its own sake. That is the trait that is important.

Mounk: One way of being skeptical about the existence of altruism is to say, well, people seem like they care about others all the time, but because you can get things out of seeming like you care for others, perhaps deep down we are not altruistic. You can make the same argument about pets. Your dog seems like he loves you, but he has realized this is a smart way of getting food and does not care about you. What you are saying is that if that were what everybody was like, everybody would suffer from psychopathy. That is what this would be, but we clearly see in the population that psychopathy is rare. Interesting.

Marsh: I will say that a cynical, untrusting personality tends to go along with being relatively untrustworthy and callous yourself. When I talk about my research with altruism in general audience settings and people ask questions that reveal fundamental disbelief in the possibility that people could be altruistic, I usually give an answer along the lines of, this question does not say much about what people are like as a whole. There is a spectrum of altruistic capacities in people, but your question has told me a lot about you.

Every so often, if they push me, because some people are very cynical about whether it is possible for people to genuinely care about other people, many of those people do not have that experience themselves. They do not care about other people. Some of them may live lives that are ordinary enough or prosocial enough that it has not occurred to them that there is something unusual about them. They think they are like everybody else. “We are all like this to some degree.”

Mounk: If anybody in the audience now thinks, oh my God, I am skeptical about altruism. Am I a psychopath?, how can people self-test whether they are or are not?

Marsh: Yes. You can go to my organization’s website, disordersofaggression.org, and there is a link you can click on for some screeners for psychopathy, totally anonymous.

Mounk: What kind of screeners or questions do you ask?

Marsh: The psychopathy screener we have for adults is called the TriPM, the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure, and it assesses those three bins of traits we asked about before. There are questions along the lines of, I have the ability not to let my emotions dictate my behavior, I like to do risky and dangerous things for fun, I am more competent and capable than the average person. It is questions that get at all the traits we have been talking about.

Mounk: I realize the pull of psychopathy is such that we have gone away from altruism again. One of the questions to ask about both of these traits is whether it is nature or nurture. Is there something in the constellation of the particular genes that a child has that makes them more likely to display these psychopathic traits, or on the other hand to be an ultra altruist, somebody who is particularly altruistic? Or is it something about the early childhood environment that triggers this in some way?

Marsh: I would say the best estimates are that about half the variation in these personality traits is genetic, which is true for most personality traits. The estimates always end up about there. About half the variation is genetic factors and about half is environmental factors, although not in a simple way, as you know, like shared environments. The socioeconomic status of your family and what kind of school you went to and whether your mom worked are none of the things that are terribly predictive of life outcomes in general, mostly because different kids respond differently to the same environmental variable. They do not affect every kid the same way, and you cannot make simple predictions. There is a strong genetic component to psychopathy, which I think is hopefully a relief to parents of kids who have these traits, that it is not like you caused the kid to have these traits.

Because there is a big non-genetic component, there is the capacity for environmental variables to help treat them. That is the good and the bad news.

Mounk: Sometimes the idea of genetic traits seems harsh or mean, but in a sense it is not. If we said this is all about upbringing, then if somebody has psychopathy it is probably that the mom was not loving enough or whatever sexist tropes you can immediately bring out. If there is a strong genetic component, and it is a polygenic trait, it is not one gene where you have one thing that is passed down and because of this gene you are a psychopath. It is a combination of many genes, and some of those combinations are more likely to result in these traits. You can have one sibling that does not have any inclination toward that at all and another sibling that does by random combination of genes. In a sense that is a less harsh view of the world, or at least a less harsh view of the responsibility of parents.

Marsh: I completely agree. Parents give themselves more credit and blame than they deserve. Children are agents of their upbringing in a way that is not clear in parenting books. Children elicit parenting from parents. They are not passive receptacles of things done to them. Children are also fairly robust. This is not an invitation for people to treat their children harshly. Your child will be attracted to certain kinds of outcomes, and they will want certain kinds of behavior from parents in ways that shape you in a complicated dance. Your job as a parent is not to shape your child to turn out some particular way.

There is the analogy of the gardener and the carpenter by the psychologist Alison Gopnik that I like. Parents think of themselves as carpenters too often, that they are trying to build a chair, and if they do this and they do that, then the chair will have a nice sturdy frame and strong back. That is not it. Throw away the wood. You are a gardener. Your child is a seed that could be a geranium seed or a marigold seed or a zinnia seed, and you have no idea what they are going to be. Your job is to try to help foster and let that seed grow as best you can. They are going to turn out the way they are going to turn out to some degree because genetics are powerful.

Mounk: That is a lovely analogy. I have a dear friend who is an avid listener to this podcast who studied sociology and used to ideologically believe that most outcomes are due to culture and social factors. Now, as she has children, she told me recently, I was wrong. Kids just come out one way or the other. Bringing them up in the right way, nurturing them, is important, but they are different from each other, and it is not because you treat one one way or the other another way.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Abigail discuss what to do if someone in your life may be psychopathic. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Humanity’s relationship with its mechanical helpers has always been a little bumpy. In a production of Lohengrin, the celebrated tenor Leo Slezak was supposed to climb onto a swan during his dramatic farewell. At one performance, the contraption departed without him. Slezak turned to the audience and asked: “When does the next swan leave?”

I was reminded of this anecdote from what very much feels like another era when I bought a coffee on the sidelines of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing (also known as the robot Olympics). A metallic barista filled a cup with coffee, reached for a jug of hot milk, and made quick, delicate movements as it poured. The coffee was surprisingly good, and the robot had even decorated it with a remarkably detailed swan made out of milk.

The performances of the robots inside the arena were more uneven. For five days, robots have been competing in human sports from boxing to soccer and table tennis. They also competed in competitions that were a little less coy about the reasons for the massive investments that are currently being made into this technology: for example, robots also competed to open packages and sort their contents as fast as possible.

It’s hard not to marvel at the progress the robots are making. In track and field, they have broken one human record after another. On Sunday, Tiangong Ultra ran 400 meters in 38.15 seconds, roughly five seconds faster than Wayde van Niekerk, the fastest human. The 100-meter record was also broken in Beijing: while Usain Bolt takes 9.58 seconds at his very best, Tiangong Ultra crossed the finish line in just 8.86 seconds.

Tiangong Omni, another victorious robot from the same manufacturer, attracted even more attention thanks to its peculiar style. While running, it leans far forward and swings its artificial arms wildly from left to right. According to its developers, nobody taught the robot the strange style that maximizes the robot’s momentum while making it look endearingly shy: it supposedly discovered it on its own. The best human chess players now borrow many of their strategies from the vastly superior AI models with which they train; perhaps some elite runners will similarly let themselves be inspired by Tiangong Ultra and Tiangong Omni.

The robots’ performance on the obstacle course, which was in full swing when I sat down in the stalls, is nearly equally impressive. On the track, robots have to jump onto high platforms, clamber over barriers of different heights, and perform all kinds of other feats of dexterity. It was riveting to watch as one robot after another jogged up to an obstacle, sized it up for a few seconds, and then elegantly cleared it—or theatrically failed to do so.

There are few Westerners at the Robot Games; both the engineers and the spectators are mostly Chinese. But as it happens, two engineering students from ETH Zurich, one of Europe’s leading universities, were sitting next to me. “Can the robots at your university do anything like this?” I asked them. “No,” one of them answered, looking a little deflated. “They’re way ahead of us here.”

But for all of the robots’ impressive feats, their limitations also became obvious over and over. In boxing, for instance, they had great difficulty locating each other and spent half the time punching in the totally wrong direction. One poor robot, visibly disoriented, kept getting tangled in the ropes of the ring before finally collapsing onto itself. In light of all the articles about the risk that artificial intelligence might one day wipe out all of humanity, I must admit to finding it at least a little reassuring that—for now at least—most of the robo boxers were about as intimidating as a blindfolded man after three or four beers.

Given the enormous performance gaps from one robot and from one sport to the next, it is hardly surprising that two kinds of very different videos from the games went viral in recent days. Those who in any case believe that we are living through a period of enormous technological disruption mostly shared videos of robots smashing human records. Those who in any case dismiss the entire discourse around artificial intelligence as so much hype delighted in videos of robots pitifully collapsing into a heap of scrap metal. As is customary on social media, everyone can confirm their own priors—without anyone being entirely wrong.

For in truth, the impressive videos and the ridiculous ones both reflect reality to some degree. In relatively predictable disciplines like the 100-meter dash, which require little interaction with other competitors, robots already outperform the best human athletes. In disciplines in which things can go wrong more easily and robots must react to opponents with speed and dexterity, they are still in their infancy. The robots I watched playing soccer would for example stand no chance against a team of not especially talented eight-year-olds.

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In the real world, the picture is similar. In controlled environments like the small coffee station from which I bought my swan-milk coffee, robots are already useful. Developers are even making enormous strides in improving the fine motor skills of robots, long considered the greatest challenge in the field. But when confronted with unexpected obstacles or forced to coordinate with unpredictable humans, robots still get overwhelmed. In my Beijing hotel, a robot dutifully delivers takeout from the reception desk to my room. But it will probably take a little while for a robot to pick up food from a restaurant and reliably bring it to the hotel.

For the first hour or so, I found the Robot Games enthralling. What can robots already do, and where do they still fall short? Which robot will manage to crawl under an obstacle, and which will pitifully get stuck? But after a while, I suddenly realized that I had grown deeply bored.

In most of the competitions I watched, the performance of the robots was still too poor or spotty to generate any real suspense. There is a long way to go before the Robot Games can compete with the real Olympics. And even if robots do eventually play tennis or soccer better than any human, many of us will still prefer to watch Carlos Alcaraz and Lionel Messi rather than Tiangong Omni and Tiangong Ultra.

On my way back to the hotel, I was torn between relief and concern. The robot revolution is not yet upon us. But the machines I saw run, box, and play tennis are more capable today than they were a year ago, and vastly more capable than five years ago.

It remains hard to predict whether it will take three or thirty years for robots to penetrate every domain of human life. If we get lucky, we might have a good few years or even decades to prepare for the gigantic upheavals they will eventually bring about. But when that moment does finally come, the relationship between us humans and our machines will get even bumpier than before—and at that point, even the most clever quip is unlikely to save us.

This is a translation of an article I wrote in German for Die Zeit.1

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 building things with your hands is an antidote to dependence on big tech, whether AI will erode the practical skills future generations need to survive, and what hobbyist robotics has in common with Ukraine’s battlefield ingenuity.

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: We started this series on a personal note, with the story of your family and your childhood. I thought in a sense we could end on a personal note. We’ll talk about some big issues, like artificial intelligence and the difficulty of getting things done in contemporary democracies, as well. But those are both related to some of your personal hobbies, which are varied and more manually dexterous than I certainly would be capable of.

Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, well, one of the reasons for writing a memoir is that I actually wanted to have the opportunity to write about my hobbies, which have consumed an awful lot of my time during my life and actually are the things I am most interested in—just like Trump is obsessed with his ballroom, not the Iran war. There’s something comparable going on with me.

Mounk: Well, so tell us about some of these hobbies. I see pictures of them cropping up on your Instagram every now and again.

Fukuyama: I’ve cycled through a whole bunch of different ones. Probably the longest-standing one was building furniture, which I started when I was living in Virginia, working at the State Department. That involved learning quite a lot of different skills, and I got into making some fairly ambitious things, like reproductions of Federal-style furniture. It then shifted—I’ve always had this tech hobby too. I’ve built computers, my own PCs, for myself ever since the mid-1990s. I’ve written my own software. I’ve gotten into flying FPV drones and so forth. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve spent time doing over the years.

Mounk: I want to get into some of these in particular, but what draws you to that? I guess the first question is, I think a lot of writers and thinkers of your stature are just consumed by the writing and the work. Before we get into why a manual hobby, and why these particular manual hobbies—did you always just have a need for something in a totally different realm? Did you discover at some point that it was good for your happiness, or your productivity? What made you first think, I should get into making furniture?

Fukuyama: Well, as an intellectual, what you do is just produce words. You sit in front of a computer screen, you write things, you give lectures, you talk to people. I became a professor, so I teach. But it’s very hard to know what the concrete outcome of any of that stuff is, because it’s all very ethereal in many ways. Maybe it did have a profound influence, but you’re really not going to know that. On the other hand, if you build beds for your children, as I did, they’re all sleeping on them, and you know it’s actually something useful. I built a kitchen table probably thirty years ago, and we still use it every day. There’s something very satisfying about producing a material object that is useful in a more immediate way than any of the stuff I’ve written or talked about. That was one of the motives.

Mounk: Is that a kind of personal satisfaction? I have hobbies like playing soccer, and recently I got into playing poker and things like that. In terms of producing things, I really don’t do much other than cooking, and I enjoy cooking for some of the same reasons—it’s a very concrete result, and it’s also a very fast result, unlike writing a book. You take a bunch of raw ingredients, and an hour later you have a meal that’s sometimes a little disappointing and sometimes, hopefully, delicious, and there’s a great satisfaction in that. Is it just kind of that? How do you feel about some of the more philosophical takes—Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and so on? There’s a whole niche of books that depict this as a personal virtue, but also try to derive some kind of political significance from the act of creating something with your hands.

Fukuyama: Well, I’m not sure I would attribute any philosophical significance to it. I do think there’s a certain practical side to this, and it really has to do with individual autonomy. We are living in a world dominated by these giant tech companies—Meta, X, Apple, Amazon, Google, and so forth—and you become very dependent on them. If you are a tech-savvy person, all that means is you know how to operate their software, you know how to use your smartphone, but you really don’t penetrate any deeper than that. I’ve always thought that was a big mistake, because you really needed to understand how this stuff worked on a deeper level and be able to manipulate it yourself.

For example, I hate Apple. I have an iPhone and an iPad, for which there’s really no substitute. But what I hate about Apple products is that they deliberately make it impossible to hack into their machinery. Even to get an Apple computer open, you have to have a proprietary fastener that only Apple uses—it’s not modular. Whereas with PCs, you can take them apart. I frequently run into these problems that other people do, where your computer just stops working, and with Apple you have to take it into the Genius Bar and have them take it to the back room and tell you it’s going to take two weeks to get the thing fixed. With my computer, I just take it apart. I recently had to rebuild my big PC at home because something was screwed up with the operating system, so I basically took the whole thing apart, reinstalled the operating system, put everything back together, and it was working again.

I think that dependence on big tech is a problem for society as a whole. I do have this worry about the coming AI age, because we’re already getting very dependent on these AI systems, and I think as time goes on, we could raise a whole generation of people who basically don’t know how to do anything if they don’t have access to an AI. We’ve already experienced degrees of this. Most young people don’t know how to read a map—they’ve grown up with GPS and all these apps on their phone that let them get from one place to another. Suppose the global GNSS system goes down and you don’t have access to that anymore—how are you going to know how to get across town to visit your friend? You won’t have a map, and you won’t know how to read one even if you had one in front of you.

The way I think about it, there’s a kind of survivalist instinct at play here. If you think about survivalism, there are a lot of states of the world you could regress to. A lot of them, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower series, you’re basically going back to caveman days, where you don’t have any access to technology, or maybe the gun is the highest level of tech you’ve got, and if you don’t know how to shoot a gun, you’re not going to be able to defend yourself. Nobody can prepare for that kind of future. What is more realistic is the situation the Ukrainians found themselves in after 2022, when they were invaded by Russia—all of a sudden they’re confronting a much more powerful enemy, and they really have to rely on their own wits to do that. It turns out they’re very good at things like robotics, like drones, like building a command-and-control system to coordinate all of their activities, and they did this all on their own.

That’s the level of tech ability I think I have. I know how to build robots. I know how to use Arduinos and Raspberry Pis to take inputs from sensors and control servos. I’ve built a whole bunch of robots—not lethal ones, the way the Ukrainians are doing—but I have a grounding in all of that stuff. If you’re cast into a situation where you actually have to use that level of technology to do something for yourself, you can do it. So I think that autonomy is the big issue for me.

Mounk: Fascinating. I’m not going to risk breaking into your home in case one of those robots does turn out to be more lethal than you say. What advice would you give to somebody listening to this who’s saying, I would love a hobby like that—I would love to really get into making furniture, or making these robots—but I don’t have the background in that? Certainly the education I went through at no point emphasized these kinds of skills. I guess I could have—I went to college in England, so I just studied one subject; it wasn’t really a liberal arts education. I tried to make up for that during my graduate school time. If I had been an undergrad in the United States, I could have taken courses in robotics or something like that. But if you haven’t done that, if you’ve gone through a pretty academic education, and you don’t feel like this is an area where you have a ton of experience—how do you start? How do you pick what to do, and how do you develop those skills?

Fukuyama: Well, picking what to do, I can’t give much advice on, because that’s a very personal issue. But the question of how to learn the skill—it’s YouTube. I never took a class in woodworking, in robotics, in any of this stuff—I just picked it up on my own. Furniture making, I actually started in the 1980s. At that point it was TV, not YouTube—it was before YouTube. PBS had this long-running program, This Old House, and the carpenter from This Old House had his own show about making furniture, so you could watch him build relatively simple tables and desks and this sort of thing. That’s how I got my start.

But YouTube is just unbelievable. There isn’t an obscure hobby in the world where there isn’t a whole series of instructional videos on how to do things. For some reason the visual aspect is really important, because I think any kind of hobby that involves manipulating material objects—if you don’t actually see a video of how people are doing it, you’re really not going to know how it works. That’s true of auto repair, it’s true of fixing computers, it’s true of making furniture. That’s really the path I followed.

Mounk: You mentioned AI, and I want to get to AI as a substantive topic later in the conversation, but do you use AI at all now when you run into a problem—when you’re unable to fix the robot, or install the operating system? Do you use an AI tool and say, hey, what am I doing wrong?

Fukuyama: Yeah, Claude has been very useful. For example, I had to migrate a couple of big databases. I had written a database program in Python on my own, which is really a stupid thing to do, because it didn’t use SQL—the structured query language that’s standard on databases. So I figured I needed to move it into a more robust, open-source product, and I couldn’t have done that without the help of ChatGPT at first, and then Claude. Claude is really great. I wrote pretty ambitious programs in my life—programs that were several thousand lines long—and you’d always get to a point where there was something you wanted to do and you couldn’t quite figure out, by reading the manual, how to get there. Now, with Claude Code, you just say, okay, add a button that will do the following, and it’ll just do it. You can run the thing right away and see that it works or it doesn’t work, and you go back and say, can you fix that? And you’re done.

But you can see the danger in this, because you don’t really have to—I’ve forgotten a lot of the coding I used to know, simply because I don’t need to use those abilities anymore. I think down the line there are going to be dangers there.

Mounk: It’s very interesting how quickly skills atrophy when you don’t use them. I wonder whether they also come back quickly if you had to use them again. I feel that languages are sometimes like that—a language like Spanish, which I’ve never really formally learned, but I speak a bunch of Romance languages and I’ve spent a little bit of time studying it on my own, and when I’m in Spain, quite quickly I start to be able to speak rudimentary Spanish, and I certainly understand it quite well. When I don’t use it for a while, it totally goes away. I wonder if skills like coding are similar—if you’ve done it a lot in your life and then you don’t do it for a while, it does go away, but it also comes back.

Fukuyama: Well, that’s true with software. There was a period in my life when I was building virtual furniture that I was putting inside virtual houses. I learned how to use this CAD software, like AutoCAD, because I could get access to a cheap educational version of it beginning in the 1980s, and I would draw the plans for my furniture on the computer before I built them in wood. It turns out there are all of these 3D graphics programs—like what used to be called, I think it’s now just called 3ds Max—where you can actually build an entire house. That’s what I did. I designed a Georgian house—I was building Federal-style furniture, so I needed a colonial house. I built the house in software, and then you can light it, so you can say, early morning in midsummer, when the sun is just coming over the horizon in this particular area, what’s it going to look like? The graphics program will actually show you the lighting coming through the window and falling on your piece of furniture, and then you can make a video where you walk around the house and see what it looks like in that particular environment.

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This is a long-winded way of saying I can’t do that now, because you have to be immersed in this highly complex software. There are people who spend their entire lives inside Adobe Photoshop or Premiere, and they know all of the little tricks, but if you go away from it for any length of time, you’re lost, and you really have to relearn the skill. So yeah, there’s definitely this problem of skill atrophy.

Mounk: Skill atrophy is a great bridge to what I want to talk to you about next, which is the difficulty of building things in the United States today. There’s a remarkable way in which our ability to construct physical things in the world—or even non-physical things, in certain kinds of ways—has deteriorated. It’s amazing when you look at how quickly something like the Empire State Building was built, with what rapid speed railways were struck through the wilderness, how quickly America went from realizing we were behind in the space race to having a man on the moon, or even something as simple as building a highway or a railway in blue states like California.

Fukuyama: The loss of manufacturing capacity in the United States is not something that had to happen. We are suddenly discovering the dangers of being completely dependent, for the ability to manufacture a whole range of goods, from electric vehicles down to little keyboards for computers. All of that has moved to East Asia, and it didn’t have to. I would blame the economists for this, because the whole outsourcing craze was just driven by the economist’s concern for efficiency—if somebody else in the world can put together a computer mouse more efficiently than you can do it in America, then why not buy it from somebody else?

They didn’t understand the intimate connections that exist between high-level skills, like designing a computer or writing a very complex piece of software, and the low-level skills of actually translating that into a material product. It involves complex supply chains, where you have to have a good relationship—a social relationship—with the people who supply you, because you have to communicate what you need to the suppliers, and they have to be able to tweak their products. It also has to do with basic engineering skills, because a lot of that stuff is based on a kind of tacit knowledge, and once you lose that tacit knowledge, it’s gone, and it’s really, really hard to recreate. Anyone who’s worked on an engine knows that when you’re trying to take a bolt off of a gasket cover or something, if it’s stuck and you apply too much pressure, you’re going to strip the bolt, but if you don’t apply enough pressure, you’re not going to get it off—it’s just a matter of feel. A good mechanic knows exactly how to do that. Once you outsource a lot of those manual skills to other places, they learn them, and you don’t realize what you’ve lost, because you’re really not able to reproduce a lot of that mechanical ability.

One thing I think is interesting is that not every industrialized country has done that. Both Japan and Germany have held on to a lot of their mechanical skills much longer than the United States did. In Japan they’ve got this award—they’re called Living National Treasures—and there are maybe a hundred people the society honors for particular skills. Those could be culturally specific, like the tea ceremony, but they also give it to machinists—a machinist who can actually fabricate a very complex part with high precision is honored in that society. Germany has held on to that stuff much longer than the United States too. It’s funny that even though America is a democracy, we still have a very hierarchical sense about education, where there’s a sharp division between what people who go to university know and what people who work with their hands know. One of the great marks of social mobility is that you no longer have to work with your hands. I think other democratic societies have appreciated, to a much greater extent than the United States, the importance of some of those more traditional manual skills, and they’ve arranged things so that, economically, they can preserve them.

Mounk: That is really interesting. There are different kinds of theories you might have about what ultimately drives that decline. One that we’ve talked about, including in the last episode, is vetocracy and bureaucracy—anybody can sue against a project, there has to be a prolonged environmental assessment, you have to get building permits for everything, and so on. Another one you’re invoking now is just the actual loss of manual skills, which might be driven more by technological change, by free trade agreements, by China’s entry into the WTO—that’s a different set of explanations. Then, sometimes people think it’s just a kind of lack of ambition—that in the 1960s, when JFK said we’re going to send a man to the moon, by and large this was seen with great enthusiasm.

I recall a line from Tom Lehrer, whom I love—a wonderful American mathematician and pianist who wrote these great satirical songs in the 1960s—in a song about Wernher von Braun, the Nazi engineer who eventually went to NASA to help with the space mission. He asks who’s helping us spend seventeen billion dollars, or whatever it was, to send “some clown” to the moon, and answers: “good old Americans like Wernher von Braun.” So you can see skepticism about this project, even in the 1960s, from Tom Lehrer—why should we be spending billions of dollars to send some clown to the moon? Though you might think that attitude has grown today, that we’ve become less collectively ambitious. Between those different strands of explanation—do you think they’re in competition with each other? Do you think it’s all of the above? How do we think about this?

Fukuyama: I think it is a bit of all of the above. Part of it is this big political change that came about beginning in the 1970s and ‘80s, with the rise of politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, because there was a big shift in the way Americans thought about their relationship to their own government. In the Progressive Era, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and during the New Deal, Americans actually had a lot of faith in their own government. If you were an ambitious young progressive in the 1930s, you would want to go to work for the Roosevelt administration and head a federal agency—electrifying the upper South through the Tennessee Valley Authority, or being an engineer working on the Hoover Dam, or any of the big infrastructure projects they had. But by the 1960s, you had this big reaction, where a lot of Americans began to see the government as the problem. This was codified by Ronald Reagan—in his inaugural address he said the scariest words are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Some of that reaction was well taken. Robert Moses was seen as a villain in New York City for bulldozing neighborhoods in the interest of his big, ambitious infrastructure projects. There were concerns that many government agencies had been captured by corporate interests, and all of that was true to some extent. But I think it led to a general turning away from government, and frankly, government is the only social organization capable of undertaking projects like going to the moon. I think we’re still living in the aftermath of that. If you are a progressive person who wants social justice, over the last generation, if you graduate from Yale or Stanford Law School, you’re not going to go work for an agency—you’re going to go work for a public interest law firm that’s going to sue the government and stop it from doing things. That’s a shift in our ambitions. We now think the private sector has to undertake everything ambitious, and quite frankly, they’re doing some amazing things in data centers and AI and so forth. But it’s not the government that’s pushing the agenda of going to Mars—it’s Elon Musk. By the way, he’s never going to make it as a private company alone—that’ll never happen. But it might happen if NASA had that more clearly in mind, and if Congress were willing to fund it adequately.

I think all of the stuff—the excessive permitting, the loss of skills—all of that is part of the story. But there’s this larger meta-story about the ability of our democracy to imagine collective goals and actually see them through.

Mounk: It feels a little bit like a chicken-and-egg problem, where people don’t trust the government, which makes it very hard for the government to do stuff, but the government also has real trouble doing stuff, so it’s natural that people don’t trust it. I think Elon Musk is a great case of a rule I have about American politics, which is that people always live up to the worst stereotype of themselves. Many of his choices over the last few years, I find ridiculous and sometimes disgusting. But to be fair, you look at NASA’s budget and what they’ve accomplished in spaceflight, and you look at SpaceX, which now has a huge budget after the IPO but was a pretty scrappy company when they started, and how much they’ve been able to achieve technologically, and you say, well, why should I trust the government? Is there a way out of this chicken-and-egg problem?

Fukuyama: An economist would describe the chicken-and-egg problem as being trapped in a low-level equilibrium, where people don’t trust the government, they don’t want to pay taxes, therefore the government doesn’t have enough revenue to do the things it wants to do, and that confirms people’s view that the government can’t do anything. We’ve been in that trap really since the 1980s. It’s important to be fair and accurate about where a lot of this decline comes from. The one Elon Musk venture that’s really pretty spectacular is the space launch and Starlink capacity he’s put in place. A lot of the decline actually isn’t in NASA and the government—it’s in these old-line aerospace companies like Boeing, which has been a disaster over the last ten or fifteen years.

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There was a vehicle that could go to low Earth orbit to retrieve people from the International Space Station, and there was an open competition—SpaceX bid on it, and Boeing bid on it. The Boeing Starliner was a disaster. They flew one successful mission to the space station, and then something malfunctioned, and they couldn’t bring the astronauts back, so they had to rely on a SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle to actually rescue the astronauts. There’s no question a more Silicon Valley–oriented, innovative private company can do better than one of these old-line manufacturers, and that’s part of the story of American decline. But I do think that ultimately, in terms of setting goals, the really ambitious ones still have to be set by the government itself, representing the whole of society, and you need the kind of social buy-in necessary to really achieve them. Going to Mars is going to be unbelievably expensive, and where is that money going to come from? It isn’t going to come from private investors—it’s going to come from taxpayers, funding it through an agency like NASA.

Mounk: Let’s talk about artificial intelligence more broadly, though there’s an obvious link to our ability to build stuff. The optimists say AI is going to allow us to cut through this Gordian knot, and it’ll be so much easier and cheaper to build everything. I remember being in a room with Sam Altman as early as, I believe, 2017—it may have been 2018. I barely knew who he was at the time, but he had already founded OpenAI, which was an obscure company then, and he pointed out the window of a fancy conference room in Silicon Valley and said, “Two years from now, out here on the field, there are going to be robots building houses.” It’s nearly ten years after that, and that is not happening. But it is obvious that this is a transformative technology that can allow us to do many things.

At the same time, perhaps that line also indicates some of the ways it’s going to be hard for AIs to build things—not only have they not yet learned the kind of manual skills they’d need to single-handedly build those houses, but also they wouldn’t be allowed to, because a cop would come and shut them down and say, you don’t have a building permit, this hasn’t gone through environmental review, what about these seventeen regulations, you actually have to have members of trade unions present for a building of this size. So what about these robots? Can AI help us build things, and how do we need to rethink the regulatory state if we’re to take advantage of some of AI’s positive potential? I’m quite worried about its negative potential too, and perhaps we can talk about that later.

Fukuyama: I think the weakest part of the AI revolution has been the interface between, let’s say, LLMs and the real material world. There’s one element of this that gets into the really ridiculous and absurd—Elon Musk just gave this interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist, where she asked what’s going to happen to money in ten years with this AI revolution, and he said people aren’t going to need money, because everybody will have everything they want. It’s such an absurd idea, because it completely abstracts from the material requirements of economic growth. We see this in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz—a simple act that basically sets the entire global economy on its heels, because it doesn’t have access to this one material resource, oil and gas, that it’s really dependent on.

I really think a lot of the speculative fervor behind AI is driven by people who are very smart, but in one rather narrow way—mathematically smart—and they overvalue intelligence, by itself, as having the ability to solve all problems. What they don’t get at is how that intelligence then interfaces with a world full of material constraints. I heard a briefing from an OpenAI engineer talking about how this was going to end global poverty, so every developing country could have clean water in every village. This is a subject I actually know something about—we teach several cases on water supply in South Asia. If you look at a South Asian city like Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, the knowledge of what a good water supply looks like isn’t rocket science—people know what it should look like. The reason it can’t be built is that there are water mafias—criminal gangs that control the existing water supply and make a lot of money off of it—and the Bangladesh government isn’t strong enough to enforce the law on them. How is a smart machine going to solve that particular problem? It’s simply a political constraint that no amount of intelligence can get around—the intelligent machine will say, boy, this is a really stupid political system, but it’s not going to have a way of getting around it.

I think this material interaction is going to be the slow part. They are building world models that will allow these machines to interact with the real world, but ultimately there are going to be really big constraints—raw materials, simply the carrying capacity of the Earth. Can you imagine—what are we up to now in terms of world population, eight billion people? If eight billion people started living at an American standard of living, the material strain that would put on the world—it’s just not going to happen. It’s simply not going to happen. That’s one of the big limitations I think a lot of AI prophets aren’t really taking seriously.

Mounk: What kind of world are we entering here? Clearly AI is going to be transformative—let me ask you that as a first question. At this point, do you think AI is going to be the most important technology that people remember about the time span from, let’s say, 1950 to 2030? I don’t want to project too much into the future, because who knows what’s going to come down the line in ten or twenty or thirty years. Or do you think it will look minor compared to the internet, or perhaps social media, or mobile telephony, or cable news, or the invention of fertilizer in agriculture, which certainly was a major technological turning point for the human species? I’m trying to think, off the cuff, of other competitors during that time period.

Fukuyama: In my humble opinion, the single biggest transformative technology was indoor plumbing. If you didn’t have indoor plumbing, you’d have to shit in an outhouse, and it would be really, really disgusting. That’s my candidate.

But, Yascha, I should be asking you this question, since you’re writing a whole book on this subject—I’ve started to read an early draft of it, and I think it’s very good. I would agree with you that this is absolutely going to be completely transformative. All of the complaints about interacting with the material world that I just mentioned abstract from the fact that most of the wealth in a modern economy like that of the United States is not produced by material interaction—it’s produced by people sitting in front of computers, providing services that are largely cognitive-based, and these machines are actually going to replace human beings. I think it’s going to be far more transformative, partly because it’s a general-purpose technology that can be used in virtually every aspect of a modern economy, unlike indoor plumbing, where you don’t necessarily need it in all situations.

Yes, I think it is going to have a huge economic impact. I think people are understating, for example, the job loss—the threat to service-sector jobs from these machines is going to be huge. I think a lot of the people pushing the technology are trying to soft-pedal the impacts it’s going to have, because it is going to take away the livelihoods of a whole lot of people in society.

Mounk: Let me put the question in relation to one of our early episodes. Liberal democracy, you argued in The End of History, is the set of ideas that can best honor the ambitions of human beings at our stage of history, and is better able to resolve the internal contradictions of political regimes than its ideological competitors. Was all of that based on a particular kind of technological stage, a technological age? If artificial intelligence radically remakes our world—in whatever exact way that turns out to look—but if it’s as fundamental a technology as I think you and I agree it is, might it erode the technological, and ultimately material, economic, and political, preconditions for a world of liberal democracy in such a way that we’re either likely to abandon this ideology, perhaps for the worse, or that the ideology will need to evolve and transform itself so much that we should start calling it by a different name?

Fukuyama: Here I hesitate to tread on the terrain you are plowing in your book, but I think that in all of my writings about the large arc of history, beginning with The End of History, technology was always at the core of it—you can define the social order that exists based on the level of technology. The invention of agriculture leads to the first rise of states in alluvial valleys, like the Nile River Valley or Mesopotamia, which leads to a vast increase in human inequality, because states are hierarchical and they can do things like enslave populations and use them to extract value for the elites.

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When I wrote The End of History and the Last Man in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, I thought we were at the cusp of a digital revolution that was actually going to aid democracy. The earlier industrial revolution, based on gas and oil and mass production, actually supported a certain degree of state centralization—states could deploy the technology. You saw this in the former Soviet Union—the Soviet Union in the 1930s was the fastest-growing economy in the world, because Stalin could simply put a lot of capital behind building Fordist factories, imitating what had happened in North America and Europe. He was very successful at that, and it concentrated power. I, along with a lot of other people, thought that the invention of the personal computer, and then maybe later the smartphone, would reverse that trend, because it provided information much more democratically—people would have access to information. It’s true, people do have much better information, but they also have access to bad information, because you’ve wiped away all of the elites, the intermediaries who used to certify the credibility of information. That’s what we saw with the rise of social media.

Now, with the rise of AI, it seems to me the most obvious immediate effect is that this is, above all, a technology that benefits from economies of scale, and I think a lot of our problems have to do with these scale economies. The reason we’ve got these monstrously large tech companies, like Meta and Google, is that they’re all based on software, and software scales much more easily than, let’s say, manufacturing does. That’s why you’ve created these incredible fortunes. AI is a little bit different, because it does have a material base—you’ve got to build these big data centers—but it is going to have, I think, a huge effect on income and wealth, because the rewards for building these systems are going to go to the people at the top of the hierarchies of the companies that build them, and it’s going to take away the livelihoods of people in the middle—maybe not everybody at the bottom, because you’re still going to need plumbers and electricians, but all of the people sitting behind computers are going to see their livelihoods disappear.

That’s bad for democracy. That kind of inequality and concentration of wealth will get you to a point where the state itself may not be able to counterbalance the power of these private companies. We were in a somewhat similar situation in the late nineteenth century, with the rise of these big cartels and monopolies like the Standard Oil Trust, and that led to a political pushback, in terms of antitrust, where the government undertook to disassemble some of these big concentrations of wealth. I think that was an important move. It’s not clear to me that governments in the future are going to have the power to actually control these big companies, and that’s something I find rather troubling.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Francis discuss the long-term impact of Francis’ work and his (unexpected) post-retirement plans. 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 why Fukuyama initially supported the Iraq War and what changed his mind, how the neoconservative movement’s experience of Eastern Europe shaped its disastrous assumptions about the Middle East, and what his break with former colleagues cost him personally and professionally.

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: We left in the 1990s, or I suppose the early 2000s, with your writing about human nature. So I think we’re going to try and cover the next fifteen or twenty years in this conversation. The starting point to a lot of political debate, and perhaps to some big changes in your reflections about the world, was the terrible terrorist attacks of September 11th and the decision by the administration of George W. Bush to invade Iraq. You initially supported that idea and then changed your mind about it. Tell us about that time.

Francis Fukuyama: Well, I had fallen in with a group of people that later became known as the neoconservatives—people like Bill Kristol and his Project for the New American Century, which started in the 1990s. It was a pretty hawkish group of policy intellectuals. I frankly hadn’t been thinking about foreign policy all that much in the 1990s. I was more interested in things like the wars in Central America, or the peacekeeping missions that had been undertaken in that period. It’s so long ago—we had this thing called the responsibility to protect, at a time when the West seemed so overpoweringly powerful and influential. And the question was: when were we going to intervene to restore order to disorderly developing countries?

Mounk: That now seems incredibly hubristic. I remember being quite skeptical about that idea when I first came across it as a young student. But of course, this came out of the failure to intervene in Rwanda—the sense that we had let these horrible genocides go on without doing anything. And so, if we had the power, if we had the ability, why shouldn’t we go in and save people from genocide? And we have the ability to do that—well, why shouldn’t we take it one step further and spread the joys of democracy and good government around the world? You have to give it its due—you have to place it in the historical context of where that instinct came from.

Fukuyama: I had been thinking about developing world conflicts, civil wars, intervention, and I hadn’t paid that much attention to this ongoing crisis over Iraq—even though when I was an intern at the RAND Corporation back in 1978, that’s what I did. I wrote a whole study that summer about Iraq’s—Saddam Hussein’s—relationship to the Soviet Union, which at that time was the most radical Arab rejectionist country. So I did sign on to a letter that Bill Kristol had sent around urging intervention in Iraq. To my embarrassment, I actually hadn’t thought that carefully about it.

Then September 11th happened. I was sitting in my office at SAIS on Massachusetts Avenue when the Pentagon was struck. One of my colleagues came into my office and said, “You’d better turn on the TV, because something big is happening.” And we watched the second plane go into the second tower, and looking out the windows we could actually see the smoke rising from the Pentagon, which had also been hit that morning. Everything seemed to change. And the question then was: what do we do about this? This led to this really bitter and prolonged debate over the causes of September 11th, and the inclination of a lot of my conservative friends to try to link this to Saddam Hussein and this longstanding problem that they’d had with Iraq and its attempt to develop weapons of mass destruction.

I don’t know that it’s worth going through all of the ins and outs of that latter issue. The elder Bush had intervened to get Iraq out of Kuwait back in 1991. In the subsequent years, they discovered that Iraq was actually working on a nuclear program. They sent nuclear inspectors in, and Saddam Hussein kicked them out. And it did look like he was trying to do his best to deceive the outside world as to the existence of these WMD programs. But after September 11th, there was an attempt to link all of this to the September 11th attacks, and that laid the ground for the disastrous intervention in 2003. So that was the general background out of which I was operating back then.

Mounk: So at the time when you favored this intervention, which of the different kinds of justifications for the war did you find to be most compelling? There was the most idealistic, neoconservative one—we’re going to turn Iraq into a flourishing democracy, and that’ll be an example to the rest of the Middle East, and if it means that all of these other countries also become flourishing, democratic, prosperous nations, that’s worth it. There was a more security-minded, hard-nosed one—Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. I believe one of the reasons why American intelligence was convinced that he had weapons of mass destruction is that he lied to his own generals about it—they had recordings of him telling his generals, “We have these amazing weapons of mass destruction that you don’t know the details about.” So there was a kind of security-based reasoning for it. Then, of course, there was a kind of cynical reasoning, which I assume was not what was driving you, but which may have been driving certain parts of the American state—I wouldn’t overstate this—which is that Iraq had oil, and America needed a stable supply of oil. Of these different reasonings, what was your initial reasoning, and what made you then change your mind?

Fukuyama: Well, the oil thing, I don’t think, was ever the driving force, either for me or for the administration. It was the weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that Iraq would get them. The idea of democratizing Iraq was really not on anybody’s radar at that point. That was a justification that George W. Bush began pushing after the failure of the intervention, when he was in the midst of an insurgency and had to come up with another reason for why he’d launched this war. That’s the only point at which they started saying they were going to bring democracy to Iraq, but I don’t think that was on anybody’s agenda back in the late nineties, early 2000s.

For me, I didn’t have a problem with the use of force to topple a dictator. It had been done—we toppled Hitler, we went to war with Japan, and we did all of these things using force that brought about good results in the end. My real objection had to do with the practicalities of actually restoring order in the countries we had intervened in, because my observation from Central America, from Vietnam, from the Philippines all the way back in the early twentieth century, was that that’s the point at which American foreign policy failed.

I had a mentor at the RAND Corporation, Steve Hosmer, a former Air Force officer who had worked very intensively—RAND at one point had a Saigon office when the Vietnam War was going on. He was a very wise person about third-world interventions, and his general warning was that the United States would get very invested in an intervention. The war would get a lot of support in the first year or two, but as time went on and we discovered how difficult these interventions were—to stabilize the country we were trying, ostensibly, to help—the American public would lose interest, and then we would pull out, and the whole thing would go to hell.

This has happened repeatedly in American foreign policy. It happened in the Philippines. It happened in El Salvador, or in Central America more broadly, in the 1930s, when we sent the Marines into Nicaragua. It happened in Vietnam, where we got tired after about five years and then decided we wanted to pull out. So my real concern was: okay, you’re going to take out this dictator—what is your plan to actually stabilize Iraq after that?

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This is the point where I think the backgrounds of my neocon friends were really kind of a hindrance to clear thinking about this, because they had all been in power in the first Bush administration, at the point when the Berlin Wall fell. That was a historically unique moment, where there actually were crowds in the streets demonstrating to celebrate the downfall of these communist dictators in Eastern Europe. That was their experience of American power and influence, and I think they believed at the time that the same thing would happen in Iraq—that the moment you toppled Saddam Hussein, people would come out in the streets cheering the Americans on.

It failed to take account of all of the accumulated Arab grievances against the United States for its support of Israel, the general distrust, and just the sheer cultural difference. Eastern Europe had been part of the West for centuries, but the Middle East was a very different place—you had radical Islamists running all over the place, which you didn’t have in Eastern Europe. So I just think my friends in the administration had a rather naive view of the likelihood that this kind of intervention would actually work, or that they had enough cultural and political knowledge to pull it off. That was the situation, and that was my reason for becoming increasingly skeptical about the wisdom of the Iraq War.

Mounk: Obviously one other factor that was very important was the split between Sunnis and Shias, and the fact that even though Saddam Hussein was extremely unpopular among Shias and among many Sunnis—he was a terrible dictator, and that’s something we shouldn’t forget in retelling the story—the moment Sunnis felt like their power was being taken away and Shias were going to be in charge of the state, they had a very strong reason to try and organize against the new regime. That’s part of what then drove the civil war which ensued. At what point did you start to think this was really going the wrong way? And how did you decide to break with what at that point was the crowd of your friends, intellectual collaborators, and professional network? This was a time at which your feelings about the Iraq War were perhaps the most important litmus test in American politics. You broke with not just what had been the prevailing consensus of the Washington establishment and the media in the run-up to the war, but in particular with the project of some of the people who were your closest associates. That must not have been easy, professionally or personally.

Fukuyama: Well, as we got closer and closer to the actual invasion date, I was more and more skeptical. I wrote a piece in the Washington Post saying that we really shouldn’t intervene unless we got a Security Council resolution, which we never ended up getting. But I guess the real moment when I went public about all this was sometime in 2003. But at this point, an insurgency had already begun. American soldiers were already getting blown up by roadside bombs. There was a big conference to celebrate the war at the American Enterprise Institute, which at that point was the hotbed of neocon support for the war. My former SAIS colleague Fouad Ajami was there, and Bernard Lewis, the Arabists, both of whom had been counseling President Bush to do the intervention.

I was at this dinner—this very fancy, formal dinner—and everybody was talking about what a great success the war was. I remember Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, for whom I’d written quite a few pieces, said this was the biggest advance of democracy in the twentieth century. And I just looked around and said, what are these people smoking? Don’t they understand that this is not going well, and it’s not going to end well? That’s the point where I wrote a big piece for the New York Times about why this was a big mistake.

Mounk: What was the fallout from that?

Fukuyama: Well, I didn’t speak to a lot of my friends for several years. Some of them I never spoke to again, like Charles Krauthammer. I had a big break with Bill Kristol—Bill had been a friend of mine from graduate school; I actually inherited his apartment in Cambridge, since I was a year behind him—and we kind of broke off relations. I’m glad to say that we’re back together again now that he’s become a very enthusiastic Never Trumper. I think he also had a big shift in his orientation toward a lot of political issues in the aftermath of that. But yeah, I just had to hang out with a different group of friends at that point.

Mounk: One of the things that happened intellectually is that you started asking yourself questions about the origins of stable political orders. Am I reading too much into the relevance of these events to think that the failure of state building in Iraq—the failure of being able to impose, at least at first, a durable, peaceful, democratic order on Iraq despite the overwhelming military strength—is part of what got you interested in this mammoth project you end up publishing over the course of the 2010s?

Fukuyama: Well, that’s right. It wasn’t just Iraq, it was Afghanistan too. We did two interventions, in 2001 and 2003, where basically we succeeded in collapsing an existing state. In both countries, the famous Max Weber definition of the state—a legitimate monopoly of force over defined territory—had disappeared. They both fell into civil war. There were armed militias; there was no legitimate, single monopoly of power. And what I immediately recognized was that Americans had absolutely no idea how to deal with this. They kind of assumed the state would always exist, and the main problem was to limit the power of the state, not to actually create state power in the first place. They were at sea trying to do this in both of these countries—to create a state is really about force, so you have to have a police force and a military. The United States was busy trying to create these state structures in these extremely chaotic conditions.

But this is the point where I also realized the fault went deeper—at another level, in my home discipline of political science. Nobody at that point was thinking about state capacity, state building. For example, at Stanford, when I finally got there in 2010, everybody was into rational choice political science, in which they said, well, the state is predatory, and the main question is how do you restrain the state. Nobody was thinking about how you create state power in the first place and how you exercise state power legitimately.

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That is further encased in an American political culture that is very anti-statist. One of my other great mentors was Seymour Martin Lipset, the great political scientist and sociologist who spent his whole career writing about American exceptionalism—about how America was really different from almost every other rich democracy. One of the dimensions of that was anti-statism. Lipset argued that this is one of the deepest aspects of American political culture: distrust of the state. In Europe, in Japan, in Korea, in other democracies, people see the state as something positive—the state is what protects them from foreign enemies, from the rigors of market capitalism, and so forth. But in the United States, both on the left and the right, there’s a distrust of the state that runs extremely deep. And that extends to American political scientists, who at that time weren’t that interested in studying the state. They wanted to study voting and legislatures, public opinion, all these other topics, but not really how you construct state authority and how you make it work more effectively. That’s what made me realize this is a big gap, and it needs to be filled, both on a theoretical level and on a practical level.

Mounk: So these two books actually were my introduction to your work. They came out while I was in graduate school, and I read them cover to cover at the time—The Origins of Political Order, which was published, I believe, in 2011, and then Political Order and Political Decay in 2014. It’s a two-volume series that really tries to understand, first of all, how the modern state arises, and then, secondly, how you get certain states—calling this somewhat seriously and somewhat jokingly—“getting to Denmark,” which have a lot of the positive attributes we might wish to have from a state, and what might eventually undermine those—how it is actually very difficult to sustain those states, and what kind of dangers that poses to contemporary democracy, particularly in the United States. Let’s go from the beginning. Why is it that the United States or France or China have capacious states that are able to shape significant parts of a social world in accordance with their will and their preferences, whereas in a place like Somalia we never got the emergence of a capacious state able to do that to a comparable degree?

Fukuyama: Well, it’s very interesting. There’s been a big academic debate over early state formation, and a lot of it arose in this period that I was writing in, because it was not a topic that was addressed by political scientists by and large—it was addressed by a lot of anthropologists and archaeologists, and there were various theories of state formation. There’s the hydraulic theory, associated with Wittfogel, that said states were needed to create irrigation systems, manage rivers, and so forth. That’s not really believed very much anymore. Probably the most prominent theory is that of the sociologist Charles Tilly, who talked about early modern Europe and the pressure of military competition in forming states.

So you had political orders that were basically based on kinship—some marauding band of roving bandits conquers a territory, kills off the men, marries the women, and settles down, and it’s all based on friends and family. The question is: how do you get to a more modern state—one that is more impersonal, that has permanent bureaucratic structures that can administer a territory, and isn’t dependent on the single charismatic authority of the guy who led the marauding band in the first place? Tilly’s thesis was that this was the result of military competition—if you hired your cousin to be your commanding general and he was incompetent, you were going to lose the war, and you and your family would get killed. That’s a pretty powerful incentive to pick a competent person. So the idea of meritocracy, for example, arises under these circumstances, where you desperately need people who actually know what they’re doing—and if your friends and family can’t provide that, you’re going to have to go out to somebody different.

As I started looking around the world, this became evident as a general problem—you have to get beyond kinship. The earliest types of social formations are all kin-based. Hunter-gatherer societies have basically very small groups of relatives, bands of forty or fifty people. The first states are created with a hierarchical and centralized form of authority, but again, they are what Max Weber called patrimonial, because they all arise out of the household of the ruler—the bureaucracy is just the cousins, sons-in-law, and so forth of the ruler. But it was only in the early modern period, when you had intense conflict between these European early states, that they suddenly realized: we need tax collection. That means we need a cadastral survey to find out who owns property, because those are the people we want to tax. We need a bureaucracy to collect the taxes; we need an army recruited based on merit rather than simply kinship ties. That’s really his explanation for how the modern state began to originate.

When I started looking at this, I suddenly realized this is absolutely true in China as well, and that China had followed this exact same path, but a couple thousand years before any society in Europe had gotten there. You had a very decentralized Chinese political system in 1000 BC—maybe a thousand political units—that consolidated down to about seven by the time you got to the Warring States period. Then, after the Warring States, a single one of those seven states, the state of Qin—like the Prussia of Chinese history—consolidated everything into a single Qin Empire. The word “China” comes from the state of Qin, this Chinese Prussia, and ever since then they’ve had a centralized state.

The one thing I began to realize is that the Tilly process had driven modern state formation in China in very much the way Tilly anticipated had happened in Europe. They developed the same sorts of ideas—meritocracy is one of the deepest aspects of Chinese culture. Everybody takes a civil service exam. If you’re a poor boy growing up in rural China, if you take the exam and you do well, you could end up as one of the most powerful men in the empire, because they promote on the basis of merit. And all of these modern features of states—centralization, uniform weights and measures, cadastral surveys, trying to know where your population lives and how you can tax it—all of these things happened in China after the Qin unification.

Mounk: Your argument here is that basically this mechanism that Charles Tilly identified—whereby states rise because they are in competition with other geographical areas, and unless you’re able to run an efficient military, unless you’re able to raise a budget for that military, unless you’re able to put competent generals in charge, this other state is going to conquer you—we could think of this nearly as a kind of evolutionary competition between different kinds of states.

Fukuyama: By the way, let me give you one more example of that. The United States in the nineteenth century did not have a modern state. At the time of the Civil War, we were in the midst of what was known as the patronage or spoils system, where basically every public official got there by supporting a politician. And the politician promoted—sometimes it was friends and family, a lot of times it was just political supporters. Abraham Lincoln was absolutely overwhelmed by office seekers, and a lot of his senior generals early in the Civil War were basically politicians he owed favors to. As a result, the Union side lost a whole series of battles. It was only a couple of years into the war that Lincoln discovered Ulysses Grant, who was actually a competent soldier, and began to promote people for competence rather than political connections. So this China–early modern Europe story played out in America not that long ago. That’s how we got to this idea that you actually need competence rather than simply loyalty or family connections.

Mounk: Now, some of this process is similar in the United States, in Prussia, in China, but there are obviously very important differences between them. In some of these countries, you end up getting a very powerful state, but not the rule of law—China might be an example of that. In some places, you get a form of rule of law, like you did for the Brahmins in India, but you don’t get very strong state capacity. What mix of attributes do you need to get to something like what we think of as the modern state? Why is it that in some places you get certain elements of that but not the whole gamut of these characteristics?

Fukuyama: Yeah, so that’s the biggest, I think, meta-historical question that is still being debated. In my Origins of Political Order book, the story about the state is really the story about military competition. The rule of law is all about religion, because to have a rule of law, it can’t simply be the commands of the executive. That’s what they had in China—they promulgated legal codes; the emperor promulgated a legal code, and if you disobeyed it, you’d get this very severe punishment, you’d get your nose cut off or something like that. But that’s not really the rule of law. The rule of law, properly speaking, has to apply to the state itself—the ruler can violate the rule of law and be held accountable for that.

So the question is: how do you get an alternative source of authority when the state has a monopoly over coercive force? They control the police and the military. The answer, I think, really lies in organized religion. In Europe, this comes out of the Catholic Church. There’s a very big, important, and I think underappreciated conflict known as the investiture crisis, which occurred in the twelfth century, when you had a very powerful pope who challenged the Holy Roman Emperor over the question of who gets to appoint priests and bishops within the Catholic hierarchy. The Pope said it should be the church; the emperor said no, it should be me. They fought a prolonged, multigenerational war that only ends with something called the Concordat of Worms, which was negotiated sometime in the early 1200s and allowed the church to remain independent and autonomous. I don’t think people appreciate how important the Catholic Church was for modern institutions—they point to the Protestant Reformation instead—because that’s where law comes from.

Mounk: Is the idea here that if you don’t have a separation between temporal and religious power, then you always have everything flow down from the will of the emperor or the king or whoever is at the top? The thing that this fight—which seems obscure to us today—over who gets to appoint the local priest really gets to is that you start to develop a kind of separation of powers. It’s not a separation of powers in our modern sense, but there’s this one set of things over which obviously the king of a particular realm makes the decisions, and another set of things which this other power gets to make decisions over. So you need to start having this apparatus for figuring out which kind of decision belongs to whom, and what is an appropriate thing for each office to decide on. That’s the origin of taking away that absolute power.

Fukuyama: It’s also a question of legitimacy—who has legitimacy to make laws. What happened in Europe was that at the time of the investiture conflict, they discovered a copy of the Justinian Code in a library in Italy. The Justinian Code was this highly developed set of laws that had existed for centuries in the Roman Empire, codified under the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, and then they were lost. But the Europeans found them—the Catholic Church found them—and they began to create a series of law schools, in Bologna, in Paris, that would teach what has now become the civil law. This is really the origin of the civil law, completely independent of earthly power—no prince controlled the church’s ability to promulgate this law, so it had moral and then legal authority that could stand against the authority of all the princes in Europe.

Now, the other really big thing that I think leads to the European outcome is the decentralization of power. In the Byzantine Empire, you also had the same legal code, and you had an emperor, but they were fused—the emperor could control the patriarch in Constantinople, and there wasn’t this kind of separation. In Europe, you did have a separation, because you did not have a centralized empire in Western Europe. I think that’s just an accidental result of geography and climate. Western Europe is cut up by mountain ranges, by big rivers that are very hard to move armies across, by very dense forests—in Central Europe and Germany, you could barely move a wagon through it because there were too many trees. So it was very hard to create a highly centralized political authority. And you had this source of religious authority sitting in Rome that was promulgating law. So you had this very long-term conflict between church and state of various sorts in Europe, and you never had the single unification of earthly and spiritual authority in a single individual the way you did in the Byzantine Empire, or in China, or in other civilizations.

Mounk: Another important element of this is the fact that the Pope is at least supposed not to have a family, and therefore cannot pass that power on to his blood relatives, to his immediate descendants. What significance did this—again, in some sense theological happenstance, but this is the way the Catholic Church is organized, which is not the way that most institutional religions in the world are organized—have on the development of the European state?

Fukuyama: Well, it’s not quite true that you don’t get parallel institutions in other civilizations. A common way of avoiding nepotism was eunuchs—you had eunuchs in China, you had eunuchs in the Byzantine Empire, and the idea was you wanted your civil administration to be run by people who couldn’t have children and therefore couldn’t want to pass their power on to their children. So it wasn’t completely unique.

There’s a whole other story—I’m not sure we want to get into it in this podcast—about a chapter I have in the Origins book called “Christianity Destroys the Family,” in which a series of decisions made by the Catholic Church in the eighth or ninth centuries established all sorts of rules against divorce, against cousin marriage, against basically all of these nepotistic practices that allowed kin groups to hold power within the kin group. That’s really the origin of individualism in Europe, where, for example, women under this system were allowed to inherit property, which wasn’t permitted in many other civilizations.

Mounk: So explain—I think it is very interesting, and some people like Joe Henrich pick up on that and make it crucial to their story about WEIRD, about how the West is different from many other parts of the world—why is this prohibition against cousin marriage so important?

Fukuyama: Well, you have to understand the motives for cousin marriage. In virtually every society, they go through a stage of segmentary lineages, which we call tribalism. The word “tribalism,” the way we use it today, isn’t anthropologically specific enough, but a truly tribal society is based on ancestor worship and the belief in descent from a common ancestor. Now, the way to keep property within a kin group like that is by having limitations on who your children can marry. Cousin marriage was important in this respect because it guaranteed that you would marry within your kin group—you wouldn’t be going to the next village to look for some non-relative to marry; you would have to marry somebody within this very small circle. That, of course, creates a lot of problems genetically, because it produces a lot of mental illness and so forth. But disallowing cousin marriage was something that really forced what anthropologists call exogamy—meaning you marry somebody from a completely different lineage—and that put the burden of choice on the people wanting to marry, and not on the kin group that was forcing you to marry somebody they approved of. Again, this is one of the long-term cultural grounds for the kind of individualism that then emerged in Europe in later years. Most social theorists, beginning with Karl Marx, dated this way too late—he said this was the result of capitalism. That’s just wrong. It really happened eight or nine centuries before the rise of modern capitalism.

Mounk: So help us bring together these different strands. You have the split of authority between the church and the state, between the pope and the local king or the emperor. You have the changes in family structure, which start to push you toward a certain kind of individualism and which also protect against certain kinds of nepotism. You have competition between different states, which forces states to expand their bureaucracy, raise more money, and professionalize the armies. How do those three forces come together to create the modern state?

Fukuyama: Well, it’s largely a matter of accident. I think that in the early modern period you had ambitious monarchs all over Europe trying to reverse some of these processes and get everything under the control of a single absolute monarch. This is true in France, in Spain, in Russia, and many other places. The one country where this didn’t happen was England, where the English monarch—the Stuart monarchs, in the seventeenth century—wanted to consolidate power, including the power to tax. England was unique in the sense that it had a very powerful aristocracy and merchant class. They were the ones who had money. The king wanted to get money from them; they didn’t want to give it to the king unless they could exercise influence through this institution called Parliament.

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Parliaments existed all over Europe at this point—this was a medieval institution of estates, where the clergy, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie were all organized in separate orders. But in England, the people with the money had enough power and influence that they said to the king, “No, no taxation without representation.” They fought a civil war over this in the 1640s, which led to the beheading of Charles I, the Stuart king, and a prolonged period of instability. At the end, you had something in 1689 called the Glorious Revolution, in which England for the first time uniquely established the dominance of Parliament, and the king became something of a figurehead—to unite the country—but the real decision-making body was the taxpayers. That’s really what created the basis for what we now understand to be modern democracy, based on this principle: no taxation without representation.

Now, of course, ideas were important. You had writers like John Locke, who talked about the legitimacy of governments, and he contributed another important idea: that legitimate, just government lies in the consent of the governed. By strange coincidence, both the idea of no taxation without representation and government resting on the consent of the governed turn up in something called the Declaration of Independence, penned by Thomas Jefferson, who was a close student of John Locke’s. There’s a direct line that connects all of these different developments to American democracy.

Mounk: So roughly speaking, I think we’re now at the end of the first volume of this two-volume work. The second volume, as I briefly mentioned earlier, is devoted to the question of how to get to Denmark. I’ve read—you’ll correct me if this is wrong—that you actually borrowed that phrase from Lant Pritchett, who was on the podcast a little while ago. It’s motivated in some senses by a kind of paradox, which is that what the World Bank, USAID, and all of these development institutions are trying to do is help Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, all kinds of other places in the world, get to Denmark. But it’s not like Denmark actually implemented a World Bank program for how to build the core institutions you’re trying to aim at. So how is it that Denmark got to be Denmark, and how useful is it for us to know about that, since we’re not going to be able to speed-run the various stages of Danish history that got the country to where it is?

Fukuyama: Well, nobody’s going to replicate that story. There are all sorts of contingent historical facts. For example, the Protestant Reformation turned out to be very important, because the Protestants believed that every individual should be able to read the Bible and have a direct connection with God—you didn’t need a priest to mediate your relationship to God. That meant Protestants spent a lot of time and effort training peasants to learn how to read the catechism. That literacy meant that when the economy turned to a point where you could actually start doing things like export your surplus grain, in Scandinavia you had a whole peasantry that was really quite well educated and able to adopt these modern methods—whereas in neighboring Eastern Europe, and especially in Russia, you had a completely illiterate, uneducated peasantry that could simply be exploited by their lords.

So there’s just a lot of things that go into the specific story of Denmark. But ultimately, I think it comes back to this competitive survival, because if you don’t have a modern state, you really can’t wage war, you can’t defend yourself. Then, when you get to the modern era, if you don’t have a rule of law, if you don’t have property rights, if you don’t have contract enforcement, you can’t have a modern economy. So I do think there are these broad incentives that existed for state modernization, and they acted differently in different societies, but they really pushed everybody in that direction.

Mounk: But those incentives, roughly speaking, exist everywhere. Obviously it depends on how developed your neighbors are—if your neighbors are more developed, then you need to keep up in order to be able to compete; if your neighbors are less developed, perhaps there’s less pressure on you. But roughly speaking, there are huge rewards to having the best rule of law, the best ability to raise taxes, the most professional army, and all of those other things, and the biggest economy, which is the key factor in driving the sophistication of your weapons and your offensive capabilities. Those incentives existed everywhere. Yet you end up with a country like Denmark—to use your metaphor—because it is prosperous and democratic and reasonably well governed and has the rule of law and all of those kinds of things, and you have lots of parts of the world that clearly are doing a lot less well. So what explains the emergence of this cluster of characteristics in some places but not others?

Fukuyama: Well, this is where the contingency of history comes into play. For example, there’s been a lot of attention paid to climate and geography—the most successful states actually came about in areas that were fertile, alluvial valleys like the Nile River Valley, the Tigris and Euphrates delta, and so forth. But they also had to be constrained by physical geography so that peasants and slaves couldn’t just run away and escape the control of the state.

There’s a whole literature on slavery in the Western Hemisphere and the role of plantation agriculture—in the South, in the Caribbean, they grew a lot of sugar, and sugar is something that can be produced on an industrial scale with slave labor. In the northern part of the United States, it wasn’t conducive to sugar or these other plantation crops—you had a lot of family farming instead, where individual families just had a plot, and that was enough to keep them alive and produce a surplus under the right circumstances. That’s why you had this big institution of slavery in northeastern Brazil, in the Caribbean, and the American South—this triangular trade that brought slaves from Africa, then rum and sugar back to Europe. So, again, that’s just a kind of economic, climatic, geographic factor that explains the rise of this peculiar institution in that part of the world.

But ideas also played a role. One of the little anecdotes I like to tell is a comparison between Argentina and the United States. Climatically, Argentina is very much like the United States—a temperate climate, very good for all sorts of agriculture. In the 1860s, the United States was racked by civil war, but the winning party were the Republicans, and they did a couple of things. They passed something called the Homestead Act, which was based on a democratic idea: you had all this open land in the West, you wanted to settle it, but you didn’t want to concentrate power, so you gave forty acres and a mule to individual families. The state actually promoted the spread of family farming in the American West.

In Argentina in the 1860s, you had this dictator who arose in Buenos Aires province called Rosas—Manuel de Rosas—who did the opposite. He said, no, we should have big farms; I have a lot of rich friends, and I’m going to give them these huge haciendas, involving thousands of acres, and one family will control it. Despite the similarity in climate and geography between these two countries, Argentina ended up with a highly concentrated agrarian elite that then became one of the conservative obstacles to democratization. In the United States, you had a lot of family farms and people who were tough, independent, and self-reliant, and that dramatically helped the emergence of democracy in the United States.

So this is a long-winded way of saying I can’t give you a clear explanation for why certain institutions do better in certain countries. It’s just a very complicated mix of all of these different environmental, cultural, and ideological issues that sometimes come together.

Mounk: Let me draw out a similarity and a contrast with an alternative attempt to explain some of the same things. There’s a famous book called Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, which tries to explain a slightly different question. It is mostly about economic prosperity rather than the political dimensions you are mostly focusing on, but obviously those are related and, to some extent, overlapping. They might point at some of the same stories that you told and say that the founding institutions in particular countries or regions are especially important—so if the climate just lends itself to the institution of certain forms of slavery, that is going to lead to a set of extractive institutions that are not going to be very conducive to long-term economic growth. When you were talking about the climatic reasons that led to the triangular trade and so on, that sounded like it would be quite compatible with the story that Acemoglu and Robinson tell. But then, when you say that ideas really matter, and happenstance matters—that Argentina could have had the Homestead Act, and perhaps, if the Civil War had gone a different way, if Abraham Lincoln had been a less honorable man than he was, the United States might have just given most of the land in the West to a few big oligarchs, and that could have gone very differently—that perhaps starts to pick a fight with them in a certain kind of way. Help us situate your grand historical overview in relation to their grand historical overview.

Fukuyama: I’ve had something of a contentious history, especially with Daron Acemoglu. I wrote a very negative review of Why Nations Fail when it first came out, and he got really mad, and we had an exchange. But I would say there are certain parts of their story that they don’t take seriously. Ideas is one—ideology as shaping people’s preferences and explaining why certain nations, as in the case of the Homestead Act, make decisions that push real property rights in a certain direction.

The other general problem I have with their explanation is that it’s very elite-driven. They have this one book on inequality where it’s all a question of elites who own property and how they interact with each other. They don’t have a sociology that talks about grassroots organization and movements—political movements springing from, let’s say, economic modernization. That’s really the story of the nineteenth century in Europe and the twentieth century in Asia, where you get technological change that produces employment for people, which then leads to their organizing, labor unions, and a push for democracy. Those sorts of processes are largely missing from their account of historical development.

For that reason, I think—they’ve got this book called The Narrow Corridor that actually says there are so many contingencies involved that it’s just a matter of luck that certain countries ended up rich. I’m not sure I agree with that, because it does seem to me that, first of all, there’s a lot of social learning—one part of the world sees that something is successful, they imitate it, and then they become successful. I do think there are larger imperatives that drive countries toward the development of institutions, and it’s a little less contingent than they think it is.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Francis discuss the challenges of state building, why the United States is at risk of repatrimonialization, and how to reform the civil service. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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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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