Francis Fukuyama

And that's where I think they started to deviate from classical liberalism because

they were willing to use state power to enforce some of these group identities and strengthen them rather than treating people as equal citizens.

And I think, you know, the extreme right and the extreme left then fed on each other, that the identity politics created this reaction on the part of former majority communities that said that they were the ones that were being

oppressed using the same language, this identitarian language.

So now you hear that white people are the persecuted minority in the United States, and so they're in a way borrowing that same language of victimization from the left.

No, no, no.

I completely agree with that.

I think that this old ideal from the civil rights era of a colorblind society should still be the objective that we want to move to.

We can recognize de facto that our society isn't colorblind and that there

all these ways of hidden privilege and so forth.

But I don't think that you can have a functioning liberal society based on making these identity categories essential to who you are.

In a liberal society, you judge individuals based on their individual merits, achievements, character, morality, and you don't judge them based on the fact that they are, you know,

female or black or Hispanic or, you know, a member of any particular group.

You want to tolerate and live in a pluralistic society where you're not oppressing any of those groups, but you're also not seeing the society just as a collection of groups.

You're seeing a society as a collection of individuals that may choose to associate with certain groups for common purposes, but their primary identity is something that they themselves create and they themselves

control over.

No, no, I think you're absolutely right about that.

I think that if American Jews see themselves first as Jews and secondly as Americans, there's going to be a negative reaction to that.

The other thing is within Israel itself, you know, it seemed to me that one of the impressive things about the state of Israel, for me as a classical liberal, was the fact that Arabs could be citizens of Israel.

You know, that although Jewish identity was important to...