Democracy in Crisis

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from Annenberg Auditorium on the Stanford University campus.

John Perry
Our thinking originates a rather long stone’s throw from here at Philosopher’s Corner on the Quad. That’s where Ken teaches philosophy, and I did for 40 years.

Ken Taylor
Welcome, everyone, to Philosophy Talk. Now today we’re thinking about democracy in crisis.

John Perry
Well, Ken, if you mean American democracy, I’d say that’s a pretty optimistic topic.

Ken Taylor
Optimistic? Why?

John Perry
Well, because the title presupposes that there’s an American democracy to be in crisis. If you told me that the passenger pigeon was in crisis, I’d say, “Whoa, that’s good news. Everybody thought the passenger pigeon went extinct a century or so ago.

Ken Taylor
John, you brought out the gloomy old John today, huh? You really, you really think the American democracy is that bad off? It’s extinct, over done with. But that’s that’s way too strong.

John Perry
Well, Ken, we just had an election, and the Democrats actually won a majority of the votes in the House of Representatives, and yet the Republicans took over the House of Representatives, and they’re making a big deal, like they have some kind of mandate. Is that democracy?

Ken Taylor
Well you know, you’ve made a point there. That’s not exactly democracy, but there’s an issue there. There’s gerrymandered districts. That’s a problem. I grant you that, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a democracy at all. It’s just a problem.

John Perry
Well, in 2000, Gore got more votes than Bush, but Bush became president. You traveled to Washington D.C. to to protest that. Does that sound like democracy?

Ken Taylor
You know what you’re sounding like to me, John. You’re sounding like a dyspeptic, depressed, desperate Democrat with a small D. Sore loser. You don’t sound like a philosopher worried about democracy with a capital D.

John Perry
Well, I am dyspeptic and depressed and disillusioned and disgruntled too. While you’re at it, but the problem isn’t just the impotence and incompetence of the Democratic Party, nor is even that plus the ignorance and venality of the Republican Party. I hope I’m not disclosing my opinions too clearly, but the problem is the structure of our supposedly democratic institutions.

Ken Taylor
Well what do you have in mind exactly, John?

John Perry
Well, democracy is supposed to mean majority rule, but even in the House and Senate, the majority doesn’t rule. In the last term, the Democrats were the Senate majority, but they couldn’t get Obama’s appointments through because of the filibuster.

Ken Taylor
You’ve got a point there. I have to admit, and it’s even worse than you think. Even in the House, this supposedly majoritarian House bills that would have easily passed by a bipartisan majority weren’t allowed to come to a vote unless a majority of the Republican caucus favored them because of their Hastert rule. So yeah, you’re right about that.

John Perry
Exactly. Does that sound like democracy to you? According to the Constitution, the president is supposed to have a veto, one that can be overridden by a supermajority, but a veto, and that’s it. That’s the only veto in the Constitution. But in reality, every senator has a veto that can be only overridden by a supermajority voting for cloture, and the majority leader in the House has a veto that no one can override because the bill never even comes to a vote.

Ken Taylor
These are all good points. I grant you that, and that’s why it’s worth saying that American democracy is in crisis. But that doesn’t mean it’s gone the way of the dodo bird or the passenger pigeon. Please, let’s not exaggerate here. It’s bad enough.

John Perry
Well, at least the passenger pigeon and the dodo existed for a while. Did we ever have democracy in America? Not in the beginning. In the beginning, the vast majority was comprised by women and African Americans who didn’t have the vote. The Senate was intentionally undemocratic. The president not elected by a popular vote, and the whole thing’s gotten worse. As Californians, with respect to the Senate, our influence on the Senate is statistically insignificant-zero zilch, not a nil compared to someone from Delaware or Alaska.

Ken Taylor
You know, I’ve heard this rant of yours about the Senate being anti-democratic a lot. Spare me, okay? You know, the founding fathers did that on purpose. They were trying to protect minority rights, but you know they also gave us something else. They gave us the amendment process in case we wanted to change anything. After all, back to African Americans and women’s. It was amendments that gave them the right to vote. So it’s kind of a self-correcting system, don’t you think?

John Perry
Do you think we can get rid of the Senate with an amendment?

Ken Taylor
Probably not that one. Probably not. But that doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. It doesn’t seem hopeless. We might get rid of gerrymandering with an amendment, or even limiting the filibuster, or or having direct elections for the presidency. I bet you that one just might win, or or overturning the godforsaken Citizens United. I understand your pessimism, but it’s not useful in a crisis. Buck up, dude.

John Perry
Well, you want to cheer me up? Just convince me that the Koch brothers and the other rich people who buy our elections are in favor of those amendments, and then I’ll cheer up.

Ken Taylor
You think we’ve turned into a plutocracy, don’t you?

John Perry
That’s a nice word for it. I would say it sucks from the top to the bottom. Even if an intelligent, honest politician somehow sneaks into office, he or she has to spend all of their time raising money for the next election. We’ve set things up so that intelligent, competent people will be discouraged from seeking office, and then to the charlatans who sell their souls and get elected, we pass out vetoes.

Ken Taylor
I can see. I’m not going to cheer you up today, John. But maybe our roving philosophical reporter Shuka Kalantari can help. Maybe she’s unearthed some fact that will improve your mood because we sent her to find out what the research has to say about how well democracy is working here in America, she files this report.

Shuka Kalantari
In December 2014, a Russian immigrant in San Francisco turned 100 years old. For his birthday, he wanted to circle the bay on a cruise ship. The guy’s name is Georgy Sobolev, and he was in the Russian Navy during World War II. I asked Georgie while on the boat, “What do you think about democracy in America?

Georgy Sobolev
Well, yeah, it’s great as long as you’re well off. If you don’t have money, democracy or no democracy, it’s bad.

Shuka Kalantari
An international commission also recently weighed in on democracy in America. They say it sucks, especially the Citizens United ruling. In 2010, the Supreme Court made it okay for corporations to spend as much money as they want to convince people to vote for or against a candidate, the commission wrote “the ruling has shaken citizen confidence in America’s political institutions and elections.” Another critic of Citizens United? President Obama.

Barack Obama
I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people.

Shuka Kalantari
But it’s not just Citizens United that’s the problem. Another study from Princeton and Northwestern universities shows that Americans’ opinions don’t really matter. The report says the U.S. isn’t a democracy or a representative democracy; it’s actually an oligarchy.

Princeton study
In a huge study looking at over 2,000 surveys of people’s policy opinions. Whether people were on the left side of the line, which meant they opposed something happening, or on the right side, which means they all wanted it to happen, it didn’t matter. Once you controlled for the opinions of affluent Americans and interest groups and other lobbying organizations, average people, their voice was not heard at all, or at the very least, their voice didn’t appear to matter at all.

Shuka Kalantari
Princeton professor Martin Gi

lens is one of the study’s authors. He says things are only getting worse.

Georgy Sobolev
We now spend collectively over $3 billion a year by lobbying organizations in Washington, trying to influence the federal government, and that’s not per election; that’s per year.

Shuka Kalantari
But all is not lost. Gilens says there are ways to mend America’s broken democracy. On the top of that list, campaign finance reform. We need to stop the flow of corporate dollars in our political campaigns.

Georgy Sobolev
How we respond to these. Challenges will depend on whose voice government policymakers listen to. If enough people care enough, we can reform our political system. We can break the vicious cycle in which the concentration of economic power and political power reinforce each other and are increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. If not, then we’ll have a government that responds only to the interests of the powerful few. We’ll have a democracy in name only.

Shuka Kalantari
The research is bleak. The U.S. isn’t doing too well when it comes to democracy, and there’s no silver bullet. But some people, like Martin Gillens, think there is a ray of hope. If we can strengthen civil societies through things like unions, citizens’ groups, and the actions of everyday people, then maybe we can salvage democracy in America. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Shuka Kantari.

John Perry
Wow, Shuka, that that really cheered me up. Thanks for that report. I’m John Perry, along with my fellow Stanford philosopher Ken Taylor, and we’re coming to you from Annenberg Auditorium here on the farm.

Ken Taylor
And our guest today is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He’s author, most recently, of Political Order and political decay, from the industrial revolution to the globalization of democracy. Please welcome to the philosophy talk stage Francis Fukuyama.

John Perry
Frank, you’ve you’ve written this recent book. Hold it up, Ken. So I guess it’s probably a little larger than a monograph. I think we’ll call it a book. You had another similarly sized book in 1992, *The End of History* which, in a way, was kind of optimistic about democracy. You argued that democracy had emerged victorious. So, kind of a twofold question: How did you get interested in these heavy political topics? I understand you start off as kind of a philosopher, more of a light-hearted profession. And secondly, in between these books, has your view changed?

Francis Fukuyama
Well, I started out really wanting to do philosophy. I was a classics major when I was an undergraduate at Cornell. I wanted to be able to read Plato and Aristotle in the original, and then I took a turn to what I regard as a misspent year in France, where I studied with Jacques D’Alidas, Roland Barthes, and a number of French postmodernists.

Ken Taylor
Definitely misspent.

Francis Fukuyama
Which then, I guess, at that point in my life, it led to this reaction where I immediately wanted to go to the opposite end and do something very practical, so I went into policy studies, and that’s when I went into political science. And my first job was in a think tank and not in a university. With regard to the question, my views change. Yes, of course. I mean, it’s stupid to have 25 years go by and you think exactly what you thought back then. I think in my new book I talk about things that didn’t occur to me when I wrote the end of history. So, for example, the topic of political decay is one. The idea that once you become a consolidated democracy, the idea that you can go backwards is not something that I was very conscious of, and I think that we have in many respects.

John Perry
Okay, so now let’s think about this later, 25 years later point of view. Everything we’ve heard so far indicates that American democracy is in a bad way. Ken and I agreed on that, even though my view was a little more dire, and certainly your book wouldn’t cheer us up. But your your books also take a more worldwide perspective. Is true democracy in better shape in other places than it is here?

Francis Fukuyama
Well, there are some democracies that I think have been doing fine. So in Scandinavia, in Germany, in the Netherlands, and so forth, the EU as a unit has not been doing well, as we I think are pretty much aware. Globally, you know, democracy has actually done pretty well because since 1970, we’ve gone from about 35 electoral democracies to about 115 in the year 2015. So, you know, overall, I think normatively, that’s really the default political system that’s out there.

Ken Taylor
So, and in the end of history, you thought democracy was like this culmination of, and we’d won, we’d beat out the totalitarians. So you still kind of believe that, right? It’s just that it’s not a finished final state, and you can fall back from. I mean, it’s not like you completely change your mind. I mean, you still think democracy some kind of optimal political system,

Francis Fukuyama
and I also think that there’s some reason that as societies get richer and they have bigger middle classes, that there’s probably going to be more political pressure for participation. That’s what democracy is about, and I think we’ve seen that in Turkey, in Brazil, in. India, even in China, where you’ve got a rising middle class. So I think there’s some reason to be optimistic in the long run about the future of democracy. This is

Ken Taylor
philosophy talk coming to you from Annenberg Auditorium at Stanford. Our guest is Francis Fukuyama, author of Political Order and Political Decay.

John Perry
What makes for a healthy democracy is a parliamentary system the answer. Can democracy succeed when the culture is highly polarized, like our society?

Ken Taylor
In a world where wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, can we have successful democracy? Democracy, decay, and human destiny, along with questions from our democratic audience, when philosophy talk continues

The Pla’tōnes
Let’s go voting, get in line, don’t set off the warning bell.

John Perry
Thanks to our live musical guests, the play tones. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of Political Order and Political Decay.

John Perry
How bad off is American democracy? Is there hope? Is a parliamentary system or something along those lines. The answer is the issue: the structure of politics today, or is it the polarization of our citizens? Join the discussion after we get started by coming up to the microphones.

Ken Taylor
So, Frank, you’ve studied democracies around the world. You’ve studied the history of democracies. I’m sure you’ve learned all kinds of lessons and have all kinds of wisdom. I know we want to talk about the K, but I want to start with the positive before we get into the the K. What would a healthy democracy look like?

Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think that part of what it means to be a human being is to have agency, meaning you make decisions not just about your private life but about your public life as well, and I think that’s the fundamental meaning of a democracy-that you get to participate in the political system, not just by every four-year act of voting, but by thinking, by debating, by participating in public debate, and that I think is what completes a human being. We we don’t want to simply be the passive recipients of good government from somebody else.

Ken Taylor
So you think a healthy democracy would be one in which kind of the agency of all is extended through the means of political participation, and it’s open to all comers and right, and we can all kind of be political actors. So is there a place like that?

Francis Fukuyama
Well, no, because I think there are limits actually on the degree to which people are capable and interested actually of participating. So I think we settle for a kind of compromise where we say we want to give people access. If they want to participate, they ought to be able to, and I think most of our democracies actually you know succeed in doing that.

Ken Taylor
So let me ask you a question. So crisis, talking about crisis and democracy, I want to ask you to give me, you know, a diagnosis of how bad off this patient that is America and its democracy is. I mean, there were times in our history in which our polity came crashing down. I mean, there were the Articles of Confederation. That was a reboot, right? And then the Civil War. That was an existential crisis to America. You know, the depression probably was an existential crisis to our way of life. So, are we in a kind of crisis in which this polity is on the verge of just breaking and fragmenting, or is it like we’ll we’ll get along, we’ll we’ll still be around, maybe not thriving, but we’ll be around? How bad is it?

Francis Fukuyama
I think that it’s not. I mean, we’re not anywhere near where we were before the Civil War, so the Republic is not going to die in the next few years. I think the problem is just that we get very low quality government when we should be getting high quality government. We cannot make decisions on things like immigration reform or, you know, limits to surveillance that we ought to be able to make as a country where you have actually fairly strong majority opinions that would like something, you know, Congress has really not passed a budget since 2008 by its own rules, and that’s one of the most basic functions of of a democratic political system.

John Perry
So I’ve heard various diagnoses of what our problem is, and probably there’s no one answer, but if you look at a pretty successful place like Sweden, you see two big differences stand out in in many other European countries. One is they have a much different way of financing elections. I’m not an expert, but I think in Sweden that. All publicly financed, and there’s just no possibility of of doing something like our PACs do, or the Koch brothers. And secondly, our system wasn’t widely emulated, even by those inspired by our moving to democracy. They almost all have parliamentary systems, which are both. Do those things work together? Is it like a lot of things that it looks better from here than it does from there, or what’s going on?

Francis Fukuyama
Well, no. I think actually Swedish democracy has been working pretty well. No, I think our present problem is the confluence of two separate things. So one is a social phenomenon, which is the polarization of the United States and its political class. So there’s no overlap whatsoever between the Republicans and Democrats today, ideologically. And for most of the 20th century, that was simply not true. And that’s how the New Deal and the Reagan Revolution and all of the major, you know, changes in American public policy took place. They’ve split apart. Second, you’ve had the rise of extremely powerful and well-organized interest groups, and the role, you know, as you mentioned, the role of money. But that again is not necessarily a bad thing, but it intersects with our political system, with our institutions, so I would say that the design of the Constitution by the founding fathers was actually not meant to. It was not majoritarian. It was never majoritarian. What it was was to preserve individual freedom by creating a very complex system of checks and balances, by which minorities could stop majorities from doing bad things and tyrannizing over the rest of the society, so when you put together all of these things-polarization, powerful interest groups, and a political system that’s got a lot of veto points where people can stop stuff-you get a gummed-up political system.

Ken Taylor
You coined a term for our system, right? What do you call vetocracy, right?

Francis Fukuyama
Vetocracy, it’s rule by veto, yeah.

Ken Taylor
there’s so many points of veto, as we said in the opening, and you could go on the Supreme Court, everything. But one of the things, let’s go back to this. The founding fathers thought people think of them as influenced by the social contract tradition and all that, and they there is that. But there’s something else that they seem to buy. I think they seem to buy something like Plato’s critique of democracy, right? Is if you let anything go, if you let every voice be equal, you’ll get chaos, right? And they also seem to they predate Mill, but Mill said something that I think is reflects something about our political egos. He said, “A tyranny of the majority is still a tyranny. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a tyranny of the king or the tyranny of the majority. So our founding fathers built in all these anti-majoritarian things out of fear of tyranny. So we like to think of ourselves as a democracy, but what we really have is, I don’t know what to call it.

Francis Fukuyama
Well, it’s a free-it’s a free political system in the sense that the founding fathers intended. It’s very hard to tyrannize over Americans. I mean, despite what the Republicans say about Obama the tyrant, you know, we’ve never lived in such a free society. But it also means that we can’t make decisions that are collectively good for us, like passing a budget or dealing with you know some of these basic you know long term issues that we face.

Ken Taylor
You say we can’t make decisions that are collectively good for us. Whenever I see a system that’s in some kind of paralysis, and there are all these things that people would agree would be good to have a budget that you know, but it doesn’t happen. I think there must be somebody whose interest the paralysis is serving, whose interest is being served by this paralysis.

Francis Fukuyama
Well, so there’s a very clear case of this. We have a very high corporate tax rate, 35 percent, much higher than most industrialized countries. But very few corporations actually pay that because they’ve all negotiated special tax breaks and subsidies for themselves. The American tax code is a disgrace. You know, it runs to 1000s and 1000s of pages because of all these special privileges. And so the problem is that you can’t get to a collectively rational position, lower the rate, and then get rid of all the subsidies, because every special interest that’s protected is powerful enough to block the collective action. So it’s what an economist would call a collective action problem: that it is better. And everybody, both Democrats and Republicans admit that that kind of reform would be positive, but our system does not permit that to happen.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re talking about democracy in crisis in front of a live audience in Annenberg Auditorium in the Stanford campus, and we’ve got some questions from that audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, sir.

Tom
My name is Tom Aboum from Los Gatos, California. I’d like to go back to the point of democracy in general seems a very generalized term in terms of splitting it between illiberal and liberal democracies, and some illiberal democracies do very well. Maybe Singapore is an example. I like a comment on which one is going to really be successful in the future.

Francis Fukuyama
Well, I don’t think that you can have a real democracy without it being a liberal democracy because. You know, democracy without legal guarantees of individual rights leads to tyranny, and I think you’re seeing that happening right now in Europe. Viktor Orban, the current prime minister of Hungary, last year gave a speech in Romania, in which he said he wanted you know Hungary to be an illiberal democracy, meaning that basically the majority can do whatever it wants, and that’s what he’s-you know-that’s the kind of system he’s been presiding over. That’s what Vladimir Putin has in Russia. So that’s not a good system.

Ken Taylor
I want you to define for you just did in passing for our vast listening audience, though. What this distinction between a liberal and an illiberal democracy-that’s not like liberal and conservative. No, no. What do you mean by that?

Francis Fukuyama
Well, liberal-it’s in the classic sense of preserving individual liberty, meaning you’ve got a system of law that protects individual rights. You know, your right to association, to speech, to property, and the like.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talks, sir.

Reed
Hi, my name is Reed, and I’m from Colorado. My question for you is: In your book, you talk a bit about how the courts play a role in political decay, and I was just wondering if you could touch a bit on that.

Francis Fukuyama
Well, we have a much more interventionist, politically interventionist court system than almost any other democracy. It has to do with the history of civil rights in this country. That because you had a segregationist minority that blocks civil rights legislation. A lot of the advances, like Brown versus Board of Education, had to come from individual citizens suing the government to change the law, and this created a tradition where a lot of enforcement in this country is done by private citizens. And in the social legislation of the 1970s, courts gave standing to private individuals to basically be able to sue the government, and this has led to this very strange situation where any big infrastructure project that we want to carry out now gets delayed by about seven or eight years because lots of private individuals and organizations with only a very tangential connection to the project can sue the government, and so this is a case of, you know, the republic’s not going to fall because of this, but we’re not going to get that that thing on the on the Bay Bridge, you know, in a reasonable amount of time as a result.

Ken Taylor
So let me. So there’s two different things. There’s the structure of our government which has all these veto points, some written into the Constitution, some just have grown up, right? Like the Hastard rule, that’s a veto point. The Supreme, the Constitution doesn’t say anything about how the court is supposed to interpret it, but somehow the Supreme Court has become this very powerful thing, right? Okay, there’s a structure, some of it’s constitutional, some of it’s extra constitutional. But then there is the American people, right? I don’t know how divided the American people are, but I think we’re pretty divided, and and each of these divided elements have their representation with their veto power, right? Especially when you have gerrymandered districts. Could this system work at all? I mean, is I mean, the structure seems bad, but the structure plus the division that gets mirrored in the structure seems like really terrible.

Francis Fukuyama
Yeah, well, that’s right. The that’s what I’m saying is that the system of checks and balances, you know, at a certain point gets so so. There’s no question that you want to abolish basic checks, but we’ve got many more than other democracies do. So, for example, with the Affordable Care Act, Congress passes the law. The Republicans don’t like it. They win the House in the next election. They can’t veto it, and so what do they do? They go to the courts, and there are very few other democracies where that’s possible.

John Perry
So, so let me get your opinion on a somewhat more radical solution. You mentioned you were a classics student, and Athenian democracy, I think, was much different in that a lot of the positions were decided by lot. So that would seem to do away with campaign financing problems. You just and my sense is that if we if we did select our House of Representatives in particular by lot, picking names out of a hat, maybe with some qualification on which names went into the hat, we we’d end up with a more centrist House of Representatives, and we would avoid certain extremes of idiocy, like Representative Gohmert from Texas. I don’t. I mean, the odds against finding someone that stupid by lottery seem to me extraordinary. Only a really bizarre system that looks for somebody far out, I mean, so can you be a democracy and have a lottery system, and would that be a good idea? Or I,

Francis Fukuyama
I don’t think so. Not at the scale of the United States, you know. I mean, it’s a big country, and doing a lottery to, you know, and the other tension in a democracy. You need expertise. You know, most average citizens do not pay attention sufficiently to have an idea how should we control costs in our healthcare system. They don’t, you know, they don’t.

John Perry
Do you think the average congressman knows enough to do that?

Francis Fukuyama
But at least people that you know want to run for Congress, you know, try to educate themselves about that, even if they don’t do that great a job. But I think, you know, most citizens are not going to pay attention, and so there has to be delegation.

John Perry
So, so strike the lottery idea.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, sir.

Nishan
My name is Nishan Dimel. I’m from Verita Research in Sri Lanka. We’ve talked about different problems of democracy. I wonder whether you can comment on what I would call the Western tendency of two-party governments to become post-democratic states. By that I mean that you have lots of elections but very little choice, simply because two parties, when they are strong and contesting each other, tend to converge to the middle. And you know, Ford once said, “You can have your car in any color you like, as long as it’s black. And you can have Republicans or Democrats, but there is a large section of the population who wants something that’s different than either can offer, and we are replicating that kind of post-democratic situation, which then is empirically seen by less people turning up to vote, so less than 60% of people vote in the U.S. and U.K.

Francis Fukuyama
There are several different phenomena. So in Europe, one complaint is that with their parliamentary systems, they vote and it makes no difference. Our system, the two parties, have actually been diverging, and so you have a much sharper choice between right and left than than you did 50 years ago, but I think that there is also a real obstacle to third parties running by our first past the post electoral system. If we had something like the Australian alternative vote, it would be much easier to get a third party up and running in this country.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to philosophy talk. We’re thinking about democracy in crisis with Francis Fukuyama, author of Political Order and Political Decay.

John Perry
What changes can we make to get American democracy back on the road to health? What what changes would you make if you were in control?

Ken Taylor
We’re coming to you from Annenberg Auditorium on the Stanford University campus. We’ll take more questions from our audience when philosophy talk continues.

The Pla’tōnes
Should we vote or should we run?

Ken Taylor
Thanks to our musical guest, the Playtones, for that inspiring, light-hearted ditty. This is Philosophy Talk. I’m John Perry, and I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is political scientist Francis Fukuyama, and we’re thinking about democracy in crisis. And we’ve got some questions from our live audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Hi,

Doni
My name is Doni, and I’m from China. I was just wondering. I would like to propose the possibility that perhaps the speaker is maybe placing too much weight on Institutional structure, in my opinion, the reason why people cannot work together-I’m talking about obviously in a very general sense-has a lot to do with culture, because I feel like in the U.S. the very strong commercializing , commodifying forces that are acting on the individual, because a lot of people are environment structured by a lot of activities of shopping, a lot of activities of you know making your career, accumulating asset, buying a house, and I feel like that sort of mentality makes people think just for themselves. Kind of coincided with the also the rise of neoliberalism around the world since the 80 s. That’s pushing, you know, waves of privatization and all sort of like deregulation. That’s exactly causing the problems. I think all of these are linked together.

Ken Taylor
Okay, so what do you what do you think?

Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think there’s something to that. The in American society, public service has been esteemed by a lot of people, but I think since the 1980s, you know, Ronald Reagan, his first inaugural, he said, “Government is not the solution; government is the problem. And I think ever since that point, there’s been a kind of prejudice against government. And it’s

Ken Taylor
not just, but it’s not just a prejudice against government. I think part of the point of the questioner’s comment, I think, and I think it’s true, that Americans are not don’t see themselves as politically engaged. I mean, there are people in America who are politically engaged. My young son just organized his first protest march, and he formed this Youth Alliance for Justice. That was political activity. That was, but Americans do not think of themselves as a highly politicized, highly politically. I mean, we have elections that are hugely consequential for how things are going to go, and people don’t show up to vote. I mean, they show up to vote in presidential elections because of kind of the cult of personality surrounding the president. But in terms of like making things happen, like an off-year election, Americans just yawn.

Francis Fukuyama
It’s true. After the financial crisis, you would have thought that there’d be a big left-wing populist upsurge because of you know the fact that Wall Street had basically caused the crisis, and what you get is the Tea Party instead. I mean, that was the only. Or

Ken Taylor
think of think of Bush v. Gore. I mean, there are countries in the world that if that had happened, if the popular person with a popular mandate and the court had stopped the voting and turned this over to the person who seemed not to have the pocket. It would have been an uprising, but Americans yawn, right? So there’s something. There’s a level of political disengagement in this country that may have to do with consumerism and our view of what the good life is. I don’t know. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, ma’am.

Unknown Speaker
Hi, my name is Lisa Jarbo. I’m from Ukraine, and I wish to have such discussion in Ukraine now, but it’s very different situation there. So Ukraine tried to apply the principle of democracy for 24 years almost. And in your view, what’s the main reason why it’s failed so miserably?

Francis Fukuyama
I have many Ukrainian friends. I’ve been very engaged in, you know, what’s going on in Ukraine in the past year. The biggest problem in Ukraine is corruption and the failure of democratically elected Ukrainian governments to actually give people what they want in terms of good, honest, clean services, and until they face up to that corruption problem, I don’t think that there’s going to be a healthy democracy in that country. I think that’s really the center of the problem.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, sir.

Mikhail
My name is Mikhail, and I’m from the Soviet Union formerly. And the question which I have is there is this notion that all systems ultimately fail. There was a Russian philosopher Peter Imserovkin who states that. Isn’t the fact that we are discussing the crisis of democracy a precursor of the fact that democracy may fail? And what makes you believe, except empirical facts based on American money and American weapons, the democracy is globalizing.

Francis Fukuyama
Well, first of all, it’s not clear that democracy can’t fix itself. If you look at American history, we’ve been through a number of crises, very much more severe than the one we’re facing now, and the system has pulled itself through, and so I don’t think it’s really safe to vote against American democracy. I don’t think that you know what made people turn out in Tahrir Square or in Euro Maidan, or you know this umbrella revolution in Hong Kong is a result of American weapons and money. I mean, it just isn’t. I think people around the world want to participate because they feel their dignity is at stake in tyrannical governments that don’t give them the opportunity to do that. And I think that’s what mr. Putin can’t understand. He can’t. He thinks that everything is the result of a manipulation by an intelligence service. Whereas I think that actually, you know, people have agency and they want to live under more decent governments, and that’s really what’s been driving what Samuel Huntington called the third wave of democracy.

John Perry
Frank Thomas Jefferson said, I think, that we ought to have a revolution every 25 years or so, and some gun nuts think that that’s a good reason to have guns. But I doubt if that’s what he meant, and I’m sure it’s not what he would mean today. We have the amendment process, and over the years, amendments have often made a big difference. Sometimes after the fact was with the Civil War, but also women voting that was done by amendment. It’s an amazing thing. Now, in the power invested in us as the philosophy talk hosts, we’re going to suspend democracy in America and make you czar for a week, just a week. What fundamental changes would you make? Maybe amendments, maybe something else, but something we could write down and say to the world: If we could do this, democracy in America would would thrive again. What would they be? Give us a short list.

Francis Fukuyama
Well, there’s a number of things. So constitutional amendments are really really hard to do.

Ken Taylor
But you’re the czar, so you get to do whatever you want.

Francis Fukuyama
Well, if I yeah, I mean okay. If I’m the czar, I’d say well we should shift to a parliamentary system.

John Perry
If you’re the czar, you probably get beheaded.

Ken Taylor
So yeah, just say that. If you’re the czar, you shift to a parliamentary system.

Francis Fukuyama
But look, it’s not worth talking about because it’s not going to happen in a gazillion years in this country. Okay, so you might so so you need to think about realistic things. So I would get rid of the filibuster, I would get rid of the senatorial holds on executive branch appointments, I would streamline the budget process. Something like the super committee, so that you don’t have the access of all these lobbyists and interest groups. And this might be controversial, but given that the Supreme Court under Citizens United says we can’t cap the total amount of money, I would force it to be channeled through the political parties. Right now, the Koch brothers are deploying as much money as either the Democratic or the Republican parties, and if that money actually had to go through the party mechanism, I think so.

John Perry
A private person can donate money, but they get they lose control of it. They lose going to be a little less involved. How about yeah? How about gerrymandering?

Francis Fukuyama
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It’s crazy that we let the parties in each state do the redistricting. Okay,

Ken Taylor
I want to take you back to the gentleman from the former Soviet Union’s question, in a way, because I think here’s a you you got this world historical view, so I want to tap into it for a little bit. I think why did democracy seem triumphant? Well, because the Nazis and the communists lost. The Nazis lost the war, thank God, and and it turned out that the Soviet Union was a third world country with a first world world army, but this stupid economy. But but you know we were bumbling and stumbling along. The Europeans had these stupid destructive wars that we got pulled into. The the South lost the Civil War because well they had the better generals, but then the slaves-it’s a whole bunch of accidents. And then one of the things you say in your book is history is full of accidents, fortuitous. I’m not sure that the triumph of America in the 20th century and democracy is due to anything intrinsically superior to those systems. A lot of fortuitous things. I think the verdict is still out of whether the Chinese, who are doing some really amazing things, have a better model, or or or the democracies have a better model. What do you think that? What do you think of that?

Francis Fukuyama
Well, that’s right. You know, a lot of the success is due to accidents, but the question is, can you really see a superior system that you think it would be better to live in. I think the only plausible one out there is is China.

Ken Taylor
Right.

Francis Fukuyama
But you know, I think that they’ve got a long list of problems that will make their system very hard to sustain over the next generation.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, maam

Edith
Hi, my name is Edith from Palo Alto, what is the impact of technology on democracy? One thing I can think of is that with the recent technology and the internet and the instant access that people have to news all of the time, politicians have changed. They’re constantly on a rapid news cycle. How is this affecting democracy?

Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think there’s a limit to transparency that becomes evident when you look at you know what’s happened to the deliberation in Congress. That because of the constant media exposure, nobody can actually say honestly what they think about anything because they’re worried about being quoted out of context and not getting on the internet and so forth. And so the other big effect of technology is it mobilizes people and it raises people’s expectations from government. And this is why I think there’s been a general crisis of authority. I mean nobody wants to listen to anybody in authority. Everybody thinks they know, you know, best, and oftentimes they do, you know, for themselves. But it also makes governing in any kind of traditional sense much, much more difficult. And this is not just the United States. I think this is really everywhere in the world.

Ken Taylor
So, Frank, this has been a really fascinating conversation. I think we’ve just scratched the surface. I love your grand historical, contemporary vision of this stuff, but I have to thank you for joining us.

Francis Fukuyama
Thank you very much.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Francis Fukuyama, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, author of *Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization of Democracy* So, John, are you still feeling gloomy and pessimistic?

John Perry
No, I mean, like Professor Fukuyama said, America’s come back from some pretty bad places, but I do think it’s going to take political action. Somebody’s going to have to get some amendments drafted, and there may be have to be a lot more than elections. There may have to be marches on the street and sit-ins around Congress to get money out of the system in the right way.

Ken Taylor
Well, I I agree, but you know that’s only going to happen if there’s a much more aroused public. That’s one of the things that’s right. Americans are so depoliticized, right? That we don’t think of our we we we love to think we have the best of everything. We don’t think of our system as in crisis. We grumble about this or that party, but we don’t think. There’s something fundamentally wrong here because Americans aren’t capable of thinking that America has a fundamental problem. Well,

John Perry
my diagnosis would be a little bit different. I think the the people whose natural things would be agency for change, those of us who were out on the streets in the ’60s, are are very tired and disillusioned and without hope, because this money thing is is so powerful. But if somebody could give some focus and say this is the action that it would take, and it is possible women did get the vote, I think we might be surprised at what happens.

Ken Taylor
Okay, you you may be right. We have to continue this conversation because it does continue at Philosopher’s Corner at our online community of thinkers, where our motto is, “Cogito ergo blogo. I think, therefore I blog, and you too can become a partner in that community by visiting our website philosophytalk.org.

John Perry
And now a man who solves a crisis fast. It’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Sholes… Those worried about the Koch brothers’ political spending are often met with cries of “Oh yeah, what about George Soros and Michael Bloomberg? Okay, the rich guys with too much influence too. You happy now? The difference is the Kochs have created their own enormous political entity outside the Republican Party. The Koch Donor Network plans to spend $889 million over the next two years. That is a specific and very large number. In January, the Koch brothers hosted a summit of donors and activists in Rancho Mirage, California. Rancho Mirage-that’s probably ironic. Somehow, conservative hopefuls swarmed to the summit like horseflies on a sweaty golfer. Rand Paul was among them, a personal favorite of Charles Koch. Last year, Paul even traveled to Wichita to play golf with him. I read in Politico that Paul’s pack paid $406 as a golf expense to Coke Industries. What Coke couldn’t afford to comp the guy in? I guess that’s why he makes the big bucks. But Rand did not impress the non-Coke donors at Rancho Mirage. He wore blue jeans and was a little too casual for the button-down crowd, so you just don’t know. People get worried about the Kochs, but their shenanigans, if such they are, may not pay off. Now, sure, they can cause people like me to utter strangled, angry curses under my breath, but that’s easy to do. You don’t need to spend money on it. The Kochs agenda is fronted by dozens of groups with names like Heritage Action Alliance for the Future. They’ve been in elections all around the country, trying to stop public transportation, wind farms, zoo expansion, sidewalks-anything that’s not birthed from the free marketplace, which Obama has kept in chains long enough-they and whoever else is finagling these things have gerrymandered their way into having a slew of very red legislators in Washington. But besides the Coke wish list and the other marching orders from the bleaker yet still free marketplace, legislators believe they have a mandate, and maybe they do, but the American people seem more worried about potholes than gay marriage and abortion and the onslaught of Ebola-ridden Mexican ISIS terrorists. The Kochs are also pretty blasé when it comes to the social value stuff: gay marriage, abortion, don’t care. Just get that pipeline going, will you? But we got oil to move, so the Koch brothers have not achieved hog heaven. The red people can’t get along with blue people, but some aren’t as red as other red people want them to be. Those that think that Obama should be impeached at dawn get into fights with those that think that Obama should be impeached twice at dawn. And if you don’t agree, you’re a motley coddler and indifferent to the fate of Israel, inviting the rain of H bombs from a newly empowered Iran. Be that as it may, is money speech, like the Supreme Court said? Well, I guess money talks, but is it free speech? No, it’s money. You spend it. If you give money away, maybe it’s free speech. But who gives money away? You spend it in exchange for a message. If money is talk, then Koch brothers’ money is talk you spend on talking. In the Spinal Tap movie, they had an amp that went up to 11. Of course, that was an illusion, a mirage. The volume didn’t change; only how you measured it. How do you measure the money voice? Is a billion really more than a million? It depends on how you spend it, I suppose. The fear is that the Koch brothers’ dough is the equivalent of a heavy metal band cranking up to 11, screaming, “Are you ready to rock and roll? and then playing rock and roll, whether we’re ready or not. I suspect it’s going to be more like releasing a flock of insistent whisperers into all the silent spaces left in the world. Either way, hey, I’m in, whether I like it or not. Not like I got to vote on it. I gotta go.

John Perry
Philosophy Talk is the presentation of Ben Manila Productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2015.

Ken Taylor
Our executive producer is David Demarest. Special thanks to Eric Westvall, Truman Chen, Erica Tapite, Dan Brandon, and Crystal Nickerson.

John Perry
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Ken Taylor
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John Perry
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Ken Taylor
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John Perry
The conversation continues on our website. That’s philosophytalk.org, where you can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening,

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.