Last Men, we are.

I had the privilege to speak with Professor Fukuyama ahead of the launch of his new book, ‘In the Realm of the Last Man’. It is a reflection on his intellectual evolution, and the failings and flailings of liberal democracy.

The title is a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man concept (and of course this), which argues that for as long as our societies optimise for equality and ease of life, we will produce weak, enfeebled populations (“Last Men”).

Fukuyama says Last Men we are.

Populist movements on both the left and right are the responses to it. Not everyone wants an easy life, and a good chunk of us want to struggle, want to be respected, want greatness. We are unfulfilled, and populism—the struggle for recognition—gives us meaning.

The question is what to do about it. As we cover in the interview, the solution is unlikely to be found in public policy. For Nietzsche, the route to greatness and fulfilment was a personal mission of self-mastery. Fukuyama’s arguments are more social. They revolve around thymos, this idea of relational pride, of the need for social recognition. For Fukuyama, the answer is to focus our desire for recognition into constructive outlets: sport, business, democratic politics.

Where Nietzsche eschewed national projects, for Fukuyama they are crucial: it’s the way you achieve this at scale. He cites Kennedy’s moon landing goal (Nietzsche would disapprove of the nationalism, but strongly support Kennedy’s ‘we do it because it is hard’ framing—pure Will to Power).

Such an approach is markedly different to today’s abstract political projects of growth or devolution. What about building the first fusion power plant? Curing dementia? Eliminating factory farming?

Tom

P.S. we’re running a 30-minute taster session of our ‘How to write so people want to read’ online course on the 17th September. Register for free here.

Policy Unstuck with Francis Fukuyama. Interviewed, edited and titled by Tom Hashemi.

Have we forgotten what matters?

You appreciate a liberal society when you live in an illiberal society. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of refugees that are trying to leave impoverished, dictatorial countries where human rights are routinely abused, and move to Europe or to the United States or other liberal countries. Those refugees understand perfectly well what’s at stake.

We’ve had this 70-year period since the end of the Second World War where we’ve had pretty much continuous peace and prosperity. Ups and downs, but it’s been a pretty good life, and people take that for granted. 

Right now in the United States, we’ve got people on the progressive left that are saying that communism was actually not that bad, that maybe the Soviet Union and Mao’s China weren’t such terrible places. That reflects outright ignorance. Even in Eastern Europe, which was liberated from communism only by the end of the 1980s, you still have a whole generation of young people that never experienced it. And therefore they can pretend to themselves that the EU is the big monster, and not Stalinism.

Populism is less a policy problem, more a listening one

Policy per se is not the solution to populism. Certainly if you restrict access to benefits among certain people, they’re going to feel slighted and disrespected. But a lot of it is really about the way that people either talk or listen. 

One of the things we’ve realised over the past decade is that a lot of educated people aren’t very good at listening. When working-class people were losing jobs that were being outsourced to China, we had all sorts of ways of saying ‘well, we can compensate them by giving them job retraining’ and so forth. But they weren’t paying much attention to the way this was being experienced by the people who weren’t in secure, high-skilled jobs.

Part of the secret is to be able to listen to people that are unlike yourself, and to speak in a way that is understandable to people different from yourself. That whole listening and speaking approach is at least as important as anything you’re going to do in the policy sphere.

People want outcomes, not a rule-compliant class of officials

The vast majority of people would say that bureaucrats are too rule-bound, too picky. You’re waiting in a queue to get a driver’s licence. The place closes at 5:00 and it’s 4:59 and the bureaucrat says, ‘No, sorry, we’re closing at five.’ That lack of flexibility is a universal experience with bureaucracy. The bureaucrat doesn’t take into account the circumstances that the person in front of them is facing. 

You’ve got to explain to people that sometimes it’s a good idea for people in authority to use their judgement. We have to trust them to do their jobs.

In the United States, we have something called the Federal Acquisitions Regulation. If you’re a government officer and you want to buy an office desk for your office, you have to go through a document that’s several hundred pages long. It has all of these detailed rules about who has a right to bid, who can appeal the decision if they don’t like the way it's gone, and so forth. 

That’s not the way to make policy. It was originally put there to clamp down on waste, fraud, and corruption, but in the process they’ve completely lost sight of what the law was supposed to do, which is to facilitate the government buying the things that it needs to operate.

People want outcomes. They want clean water, they want safe air travel, they want protection from disease. They want physical security on the streets. If there’s a focus on actually producing those outcomes rather than following a mass of rules, people will realise that yes, there is a point to having government, and these bureaucrats are serving my interest, as well as some kind of general public interest.

Have we helped cause this problem?

Government’s job is to make rules, but the absolute worst way to go about doing this is for the legislators and the groups backing the legislation to think their job is to come up with a really detailed set of rules about exactly how the government is supposed to implement something. 

You want new rules, you want reform, you want change, but there has to be a certain willingness to delegate authority to the people that are actually in charge of making things happen. Unless the government officials have that freedom, they’re simply not going to get results.

The quiet ‘accumulation of sludge on the statute book’*

This is a general problem with liberal societies. You have to have constraints on the way that the government exercises its enormous power, but there is also this challenge where year after year, decade after decade, you accumulate more and more detailed rules, and you seldom roll any of them back.

The private sector is complaining about this all the time—they don’t like being regulated by government. I’m making a slightly different point, which is that the government itself is over-regulated, and it’s constrained in ways that create a class of public officials who get their promotions by following these detailed rules rather than by actually doing things for citizens.

* from Lord Mark Pack’s interview

Westminster’s dependence on integrity 

Compared to Germany, France, and particularly the United States, the classic British Westminster system has relatively few checks and balances. You don’t have a Supreme Court that can invalidate legislation. You don’t even have a written constitution. You have a weak upper house. You don’t have much devolution of power. But it’s worked over the years.

One of the lessons is that the institutional rules any society develops are ones that evolve out of its own experience. Part of what makes the Westminster system work is that the political culture has a certain moderation.

The Westminster system would not prevent a prime minister from going after and jailing opposition politicians, or people that criticise him in the press. This is what Donald Trump really wants to do in the United States. The reason you haven’t seen that kind of abuse of power in Britain is that the kinds of people that go into politics just have a different culture. It wouldn't occur to them to do the sorts of things that Trump is trying to do.

But if populist politics takes hold in the future and you get a prime minister who’s frustrated that he’s being criticised constantly, you may see the boundaries of acceptable behaviour being challenged. And because there aren’t these formal checks on the power of a prime minister, you’re going to have a real problem.

The fuzzy borders of norms and law

Cultural norms and laws support each other. One of the things we’ve learned in the United States is that everything is normative, in a certain sense. We have something called the Hatch Act, which makes it illegal for a president to do campaign events on government property. Trump has violated that all the time. We have an emoluments clause in the constitution that says that the president can’t accept gifts. And yet he’s accepted this $400 million aeroplane from Qatar.

The trouble is that the body responsible for enforcing the law is the executive branch, run by the president. If he’s the offender, he’s not going to enforce these laws on himself. You begin to realise that actually what we call the rule of law—all these formal restrictions—are only as good as the willingness of powerful people to observe them.

Buy ‘In the Realm of the Last Man’ from Waterstones, Amazon, or your local political bookshop.

Thank you to the 141 of you who have referred colleagues to this newsletter. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.