Francis Fukuyama

Yeah, that's one way of putting it.

In the United States, it gets complicated because you have these libertarians who also think of themselves as classical liberals.

I think that they're a more extreme version because I think that, you know, the true classical liberals, people like John Stuart Mill or Adam Smith,

understood you had to have government.

Government provided certain public goods.

It provided the enforcement of rules and law.

And you simply couldn't do away with government.

Whereas in the U.S., you have this libertarian fringe that thinks that somehow all aspects of government activity are somehow illegitimate, that taxes are illegitimate.

And I think that that's a big problem.

And that really is not what classical liberalism was all about.

Yeah, well, I think it's basically good ideas being carried to extremes.

And you had two cases of that, both on the right and the left.

On the right...

You had what's sometimes called neoliberalism.

I think that this was an extreme sort of worship of market economics where markets could do no wrong or you wanted to deregulate as much as possible.

And you didn't worry about things like growing economic inequality as a result of this free market system.

So that was one of the things that drove liberalism in, I think, a bad direction.

that then spawned a left-wing reaction.

The left-wing problem, I think, is basically identity politics, that classical liberalism is based on a notion that all human beings have an equal dignity and that no particular group of people is superior or has a right to dominate others.

And I think identity politics kind of reversed that and took formerly oppressed minorities or groups that had been marginalized and said, no, they're special or they deserve special recognition and notices.