Why I Can't Stop Thinking About 'The End of History'

29:51One thing you saw right after 9-11 and in that period of run up to war in Iraq, particularly, was a huge number of neoconservatives and other cultural commentators celebrating the return of a thematic, passionate politics, this view that America had become decadent and soft, full of metrosexuals and management consultants. And here, finally, we had a struggle again, a clash of civilizations, a reason we needed this manly Texas rancher as our president. Looking back, some of the rhetoric on this has a real quality of the absurd. But one thing I think you also see is that the Iraq war, the highly aggressive reaction America had for a long time afterwards, it's done very lasting damage to our politics.

30:46I see Trump as a direct descendant of it. Right. And there is this constant belief, I think, on the part of some intellectuals that violent struggle is an ennobling thing for societies. And yet I look at, you know, certainly in more modern times, Vietnam and Iraq, and I see Israel right now. And I think the dangers of having your politics become profoundly oriented around violence, around reprisal, around struggle, around these kinds of more warlike virtues is also very, very present and visible. So I'm curious what lessons you take, not just about the question of in what cases can America export democracy at the point of a gun, but what does it do to a polity when it sometimes gets the wish of people who think that we've grown soft and calculating and all of a sudden we have this return to the virtues or the vices of war?

31:50Yeah, you know, I actually talked about that in the last few chapters of The End of History and the Last Man, that, you know, there are certain thinkers, including Hegel, that kind of felt that every now and then you had to have a war to recharge our batteries, so to speak, and to get us serious about things. The trouble is that technology has moved on, and that's just impossible. I mean, it's not just nuclear weapons. You know, you can't have a little war with nuclear weapons. But conventional weapons have become so destructive that the negative impact of any kind of conflict right now is so potentially devastating that that's simply not an alternative.

32:29And so I think for a successful society that wants to bleed off that megalothumia, you need to find, you know, peaceful outlets for that kind of ambition.

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34:17Brought to you by the Ad Council and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I want to talk about the politicians who follow this, Obama and Trump. And maybe the place to start, because I think this is almost the more interesting question for liberalism, is Barack Obama. I'll begin broad, which is how in the broad story of America do you now see the Obama presidency? Well, I think it was well-intentioned, but in a certain way it wasn't ambitious enough. And I think that's probably what a lot of his progressive critics think, you know, that he said very soothing things about, you know, kind of post-racial America, just his very presence as president was an affirmation of that.

35:05But it didn't really change any of the underlying social and economic inequalities that were driving the racial divide in the United States. And one of, you know, I think another perfectly just criticism was he was too bought into what we now call neoliberalism with the kinds of economic advisors that he surrounded himself with who kind of accepted this new form or the new evolution of capitalism that was producing oligarchs and very large wealth inequalities, which you could have addressed through antitrust, through, you know, different tax policy. But under Obama, you saw this problem that I describe in a couple of my books as vitocracy, that we have a very complex constitutional system built around checks and balances.

35:56The essence of liberalism is the rule of law, that there should be rules that govern and limit executive power. But I think that the American government at that point had become so complex that it became really hard for anybody to do anything, either in a conservative direction, which frustrated Reagan, but also in a progressive direction. You know, issues of climate change really require fairly strong controversial decisions because you have clashing interests and, you know, somebody's got to resolve those. And so I think that the underlying institutional problems were really never addressed.

36:33You know, take the filibuster. It's completely non-constitutional limitation on the power of Congress. And, you know, you could have gotten rid of the filibuster, but even that relatively low hurdle, you know, was not even attempted in that period. The other thing I think that I would criticize Obama for more was that in the absence of the ability of the government to take on frontly many of these challenges because it didn't have the power to do it, you had the flourishing of a certain kind of identity politics in civil society. and that you know was not i don't think that was the core of his presidency but it certainly you know took hold in that period i do think it took hold in that period but i think it took hold for a reason not unrelated to what you're describing which is one of the ways i think about what has gone wrong in liberalism because i think quite a bit has and i think liberalism right now even though i'm a liberal has real exhausted feeling to it is my one line on this is that first liberalism captured the institutions and then the institutions captured liberalism And what I mean by that is that liberals in many cases built America's political institutions.

37:42They certainly as liberals and became like the reigning ideology of the universities, liberals became the people who staffed these institutions. And so then liberals became the people who owned their failures, who governed with the horizons of what these institutions could achieve. And if you are the defenders of the system, that doesn't work. If you are, if your moral ambition is boundaried by what failing institutions can achieve, you're not going to have a very exciting political philosophy or movement. No, you're absolutely, yeah. You're absolutely right about that. I think that at this point, you know, for me, it would be absolutely wrong to think that we need to go back to the pre-2016 world because that world was one in which the government was basically hobbled from doing anything ambitious.

38:38I think, you know, what propelled Trump to power was the belief that it was too constraining. And so he simply wanted to become a dictator, violate, you know, all sorts of rules in order to get things done. but you need a little bit of that in order to do progressive things. You know, it takes 10 years to get the permitting done to do a transmission line, to get power from the middle of the country where alternative energy is produced to the West Coast where it's consumed. And that's the product of, you know, this kind of proceduralism that was ushered in by people basically on the left. So you're right that they created this institutional straitjacket.

39:17And I think one of the big challenges is how to go back to a stronger government that can actually do good things. Well, this proceduralism is, I think, a very biting tension right now. Because on the one hand, much of the critique that liberals, even the left, has of Donald Trump is the evisceration of procedure. Right. He wants to build a ballroom. He just bulldozes his e-swing. And on the other hand, and that's true. I mean, he is eviscerating procedure. He is firing inspectors general. He is doing all kinds of things that properly you are not supposed to be able to do under our system of government.

39:57It is very, very hard, I think, to become very spun up about violations of procedure and not then accidentally wrap yourself as a defender of procedure. And so if procedure is both the problem in the sense that it is being ignored, but also a little bit when you're in power, the problem in the sense that it is being overly followed, that doesn't leave you a very comfortable place to stand. I think if a Democrat is elected in 2028, they're going to have a big conundrum because they're going to want to do things, especially if it's a more progressive left-leaning Democrat. And they're going to find themselves up against these same procedures that have hobbled Obama and Biden.

40:46Biden wanted to have high-speed internet in rural areas, and he was completely unable to produce that in the three years after the passage of that act. So they're going to want more authority and they're going to have to, in a way, look a little bit more like Trump. I think that the trick is going to be to fundamentally stay within the law, but to modify the law in ways that grant, you know, essentially more power to the government to do things. And I think that's going to be a hard thing to sell because the immediate charge is, oh, you're just acting like Donald Trump. but in fact you know he was responding to a real problem this real institutional problem in the way that american government was operating you wrote a book in 2021 that i think introduces an interesting tension into this which is called liberalism and its discontents and that book ends on a call i wouldn't really call it a stirring call i think it's hard to have a stirring call for this, for moderation as the answer for what is ailing liberalism, a sense of temperance.

41:57Here I ask you what you think of the Obama presidency, and what you fundamentally say to me is it wasn't radical enough. I ask you about American institutions and procedures, and you say liberals are going to have to be more like Donald Trump. They got to get rid of the filibuster. I've been arguing for ending the filibuster for a long time. I can tell you with certainty, people do not experience that as moderate. So I'm curious how you think about resolving these? I guess, Ezra, in the end, you're right that there is a contradiction there. You know, the same vices that characterize bad dictatorial governments will also come to characterize good progressive ones.

42:36You know, people have been complaining about the Supreme Court overturning Humphrey's executor. This is this rule that allowed Congress to set terms under which a president could or could not fire an executive branch official in a multi-member commission. Roosevelt wanted to fire this guy, William Humphreys, that had been a commissioner for the FTC because he felt that guy was getting in the way of his New Deal agenda, progressive agenda. So the very same constraint on executive power that we're now criticizing, you know, a conservative Supreme Court for overturning was something that progressives wanted.

43:16I just think that that's kind of built into our politics, that the same set of institutions can either be good or bad, depending on the goal that you set. So you have to, you know, have a good set of ends that you're trying to achieve, but you also need power. Let's talk about the man who stepped into some of the failures here or some of the resentments here, which is Donald Trump. As you mentioned, Trump appears a couple of times in End of History and the Last Man. But when he emerges into politics, he emerges as something other than simply an icon of capitalist success. He emerges as somebody bringing a renewed nationalism, a renewed belief in borders, a belief in maybe more traditional hierarchies in America.

44:07And over time, he emerges in your telling as somebody who is either proposing or modeling a different form of government, a different regime, not just a different leader. You've described him as repatrimonializing the government. What does that mean? So let's begin with another bit of psychology. It's not natural to favor a well-qualified stranger over your relatives or your friends. It's a very natural human desire to want to reward friends and family. So most states in human history were patrimonial, meaning that they basically were run for the benefit of the rulers. It was the ruler's household, the friends and family of the ruler that were given privileges and were able to enrich themselves.

44:53And the reason you went into politics was to enrich yourselves. And I think that every society that has managed to create modern state institutions that are impersonal has had this constant backsliding temptation because the rulers themselves would like their friends and family to be favored. Just one simple historical example. The Ottomans had one of the weirdest ways of getting to a modern state. They literally captured young boys in the Balkans, brought them to Istanbul, and trained them to be administrators and generals. But they couldn't have families because they didn't want nepotism, right?

45:34And they couldn't resist the demand of the Janissaries to have children and have families. So eventually a sultan gave in. And you're back in the whole nepotistic patrimonial world that the Ottomans had briefly managed to get beyond. We're doing that right now. You know, instead of professional diplomats handling our Middle East policy, you get Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, you know, two friends and family of Donald Trump. And you're paying the price for it because a modern state really does need kind of meritocratic, you know, impersonal people running the state apparatus. Are you surprised how easy it was for Trump to begin to build or rebuild that structure in a system that seemed just choked with rules and procedures to keep that from happening?

46:22Yeah, I'm totally astounded that the American people don't seem to really care that much. I mean, maybe in the fullness of time, there'll be some accountability. But yeah, I would not have expected that the degree of corruption that exists in the current administration would have been tolerable to, you know, mainstream Republicans, for example. When Trump sort of roared back in the 2024 election, much more so than in 2016, he ran and assembled a coalition as a candidate of courage and thumos and passions. you know this really took hold after the uh nearly successful assassination attempt with his bloodied fist in the air you saw a sort of rallying around him as a almost mythic man of history figure i think a lot of that has drained out of the system now as he seems a little bit more ridiculous dangerous can't be you know spending his time on the ballroom yeah But is there something to be learned or be seen about what at least some people wanted to see in him?

47:36What they thought he might represent that felt to them like it was missing? Well, I think it's all about power. I think that many of Trump's defenders currently would say that we still, you know, that the Democrats only produced weak leaders and we want a strong leader. They'll excuse the corruption by saying, well, okay, maybe you're getting corruption, but that's the price you have to pay to have somebody that really wanted to close the border and was able to do that. And they'll look past, you know, all of the other institutional depredations that have happened under him because they want that strength.

48:15It's something that I wouldn't have expected in American politics because really our system is really designed to guard against, you know, that kind of leader. There's a famous letter of Alexander Hamilton that anticipates Trump perfectly. He said there will be a point in American politics where some person with great oratorical skills will come and rally people again, you know, in favor of his own personal power. And that, you know, was part of the reason they designed this complex constitutional system. By the way, I'm not completely pessimistic. I think our institutions actually are going to hold at the end of this story.

48:54But, you know, we're being taken for a very dangerous ride in the meantime. You wrote, I forget when they actually came out, but these two books about the origins of modern political states. And the central question in those books was about how do you get to Denmark? How do you get from, you know, more rudimentary forms of human organization to the advanced, efficient, fair, neutral state, sort of both metaphorically and literally represented by Denmark? And I remember reading those books at the time and thinking that that statement made sense. And as I was thinking about them again for this conversation, some part of me when I framed the question, how do you get to Denmark?

49:42It no longer felt like the right question, that Denmark does not feel like the future. I mean, one, Europe itself does not seem all that stable. You just saw the AFD posting a huge result in a regional German election. you have far-right populism rising all across the continent but also the generalized sense that Europe is falling behind that it is itself being somewhat choked by rules and procedures that China is roaring forward if you were writing those books today, if you were thinking about the formations of states and the pathway they're traveling do you still see Denmark as a goal? No, absolutely, I mean the reason I like Denmark was not for the same reason as Bernie Sanders.

50:24It's not because it's got this huge welfare state. It's because it's run competently. And I just don't see any period in human history in which competence in state administration is not a virtue. And it's going to be a virtue if your goal is to restrict immigration. It's interesting, Danish politics has been, you know, more stable than ours, but they've really closed off immigration, despite the fact that there's still, you know, coalition with, you know, with social Democrats in it. And some people, my colleague David Leonhardt, among others, has argued that that's why their politics have been more stable.

51:01Yeah, yeah. They basically merged liberalism with a more closed-border nationalism. You know, but the thing is that they could actually do it competently, and they could actually achieve those goals. So again, I just don't see any circumstance in which having a competent modern public administration isn't going to be an advantage. That's how countries get rich in the first place, and that's how they manage the different crises that hit them at later points, like pandemics and financial crises. If we didn't have a really competent set of financial managers in 2008, I think we would have been in big trouble.

51:36I'm not saying that we don't want competent administration. We do. And I'm not saying that that isn't very hard to achieve. it is. But I want to try to push you towards the question I'm asking here, which is whether or not, again, with your more thematic hat on, I think the conversation around Europe has changed a lot in the past decade or two decades. We've gone from, I remember this spate of books in the early 2000s about whether or not the European Union was the future. And now Europe seems very left behind and a lot less stable politically. And you have this sort of strange competition between an America that is operating in a reckless, chaotic, high-risk way and a China that is showing incredible capacity to build a 21st century manufacturing and innovation juggernaut that is operating under a much more authoritarian form of politics.

52:33It takes risks, but in a very calculated way. And somehow the idea that, you know, what you're trying to do is get to where Europe is. I mean, Europe feels a little bit like it's getting left behind. No, no, look, I am not trying to get to where Europe is. Europe is, you know, if you're talking about over-procedural, excessive proceduralism, that's Europe. Basically, there bureaucrats make so many rules. You have member state level rules, and then you've got the whole Brussels bureaucracy. And, you know, Anybody operating in Europe will tell you that complying with this mountain of rules that they established is why they don't have a big tech industry.

53:14For example, one of the things that Mario Draghi and countless other reformers have recommended is actually get a single market. That was the whole point of the European community. You can't have large-scale companies in Europe because every one of the 27 member states has all these niggling little rules. So they're not there. They're not a model of modern. So it's very hard to sell across the countries. You can't sell across the countries. In the way it's very easy to sell in America. Yeah, and for that reason, they have put limits on their own economic productivity by, you know, by the fact that they don't have competent administration that could actually make a uniform playing field for European companies.

53:52Okay, but I want to stop here because I want you to try to resolve this tension more for me. I think when I say that, I remember Tyler Cowen, the economist, saying something of this nature where he said, look, you meet people who work in the government in Europe. And almost to a person, they are on average, they are competent, they are cultured, they can say more to you about literature and books and art than the person in the same position in America can. And yet the outcomes are not that good, that Europe is struggling. Why? What is it about these competent governments that is not leading to more competent governance.

54:33Well, that indicates they're actually not so competent. I don't think competence is measured by the number of rules that you pile up. At some point, I think competent governments have to cut back on those rules and rely on the common sense and the discretionary judgment of the people running those systems. So I don't think that it's the case that they are actually competent. There's a point at which, you know, you're trapped in an institutional system that sees legitimacy lying in further rulemaking. And, you know, I think legitimacy really comes from outcomes. And they're at a point where they're not getting outcomes because they're choked by, you know, by this compliance, this rule compliance mentality that they've developed.

55:23Thank you.

55:53It's like YouTube got some extra gains. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Hey, what's up, guys? It's Haley Bailey. Okay, I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads, so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi. Because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get ad-free, I get backroom play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. So try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium.

56:25Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. That's a mouthful. This podcast is supported by USA Facts. People disagree about a lot in this country. Taxes, health care, education. But wherever you land politically, I think most of us agree on this. Better information leads to better decisions. That's the mission of USA Facts, to make government data clear and accessible. because public data should be easy to access, trust, and understand so we can use it to make informed decisions. Read and sign our open letter to support public data at USAFacts.org. One thing that I think is shifting the politics of America and Europe simultaneously, China is a little bit of a different case here, is that the platforms on which we politically communicate and the platforms in which we shape what we see politically have changed.

57:21We've moved from people maybe read the newspaper in the morning or they watch some nightly news show to this much more anarchic, algorithmic, social and beyond social media environment. I never think it's an accident that the populist right began to surge across the world at the time that political communication went algorithmic. I'm curious how you see this in terms of some of these theories and particularly the way that social media is a constant measuring of recognition. Are you seeing me? Are you liking me? And the politicians get this constant feedback. It shifts how they act, how they think, how they generate a sense of how they're doing.

58:05Where does this fit in some of your theories of political orders in the human soul? Well, you know, ever since 2016, we've been having this prolonged debate about where all this populism is coming from. And everybody gives this list of seven or eight things, economic inequality, globalization, incompetent leadership. And then they say at the end, and also social media. I actually think that technology exemplified by social media is really much more important than most of the other explanations that you can't explain the timing for the rise of populism. And in particular, you can't explain the particular nature that it has taken without social media.

58:44For example, a lot of what it means to be a conservative these days, a populist conservative, is to believe in conspiracy theories. And it is much easier to promulgate. In fact, there are incentives for promulgating conspiracy theories on a completely unregulated Internet. You know, that the way you get followers if you're an internet influencer is to say more and more outrageous things. Your credibility is not measured by whether you actually have done the fact-checking and have these institutional safeguards for the reliability of your information. It's how many likes you get. And I think it's absolutely been at the core of a lot of the radicalization of the politics of countries that have gone online in that period.

59:32So something that has been kind of lurking in our conversation is China. And you said at the beginning that the end of history was about this question of would we come up with ways of organizing a complex society that were more successful, more desirable than America? I've seen you in more recent comments and interviews begin to grapple with the possibility that China represents a model that actually is working and could appeal on wider scale. I think you said something like we're a third of the way to that actually being the more successful model. So tell me what you think China both represents as a form of political organization, you know, where it differs from liberal democracy, and what you then think that means for it as a possible model of, you know, what other countries and cities are going to try to— Sure.

1:00:27Well, I think a liberal democracy is based on having a competent state that is limited both by a rule of law and by elections. And China has the competent state, very competent, but it doesn't have either a rule of law or elections. and therefore the quality of governance there depends entirely on the quality of rulers. One of the things about Chinese civilization is that, you know, Confucianism embodies bureaucracy as one of its foundational cultural characteristics. Educated people should be the ones that rule and to this present day, that's where Chinese party cadres are recruited from, you know, the best and brightest in society.

1:01:09So they've got this tremendously competent state. The problem, I think, so it's not just recently. I've thought all along that this is the only alternative political and social system that has a chance of being competitive with liberal democracy precisely because they can deal with modern technology. They can be at the forefront of technology and as a result of economic growth. The question is, is this a sustainable model? And I think that there are reasons to still regard that as an open question because, you know, their economy is based on doubling down on this export-driven, you know, model that made them rich in the first place.

1:01:53That's not a sustainable model. They've got big problems in their property market. They're going to have huge problems with unemployment. Youth unemployment there is already at extraordinarily high levels. And so I don't think you can take the sustainability of either their economic or political systems for granted. The reason I started saying these things about China versus the United States is because the American model has deteriorated. I'm not sure you can take the sustainability of our model for granted. No, that's right. No, absolutely right. It seems to me we've got an administration that is doing everything it can think of to weaken the United States vis-a-vis China, attacking the scientific establishment, attacking allies, being completely capricious and arbitrary in economic policy.

1:02:40I mean, this is not something that a competent state does. But maybe to unite two things we were just talking about in the last couple of minutes, when people talk about our model, they tend to mean in their head, whether it's America or Europe, a particular form of governance. But something that you just read a few times there is that that form of governance took hold and flourished in a particular historical context, the post-war context, and a particular technological context, a particular way we communicated. It was a period of newspapers and radio and TV. And I think one of the open questions about us is whether or not these contingencies were fundamental.

1:03:27Whether or not there was something in the way a particular form of government connected to a particular moment in communications technology, you know, a certain level of globalization. And the question that's coming, or maybe is already here, is how all of these models operate in a different, particularly technological era. Right. How they adapt or don't adapt to social and algorithmic media, how they adapt or don't adapt to AI, how they adapt or don't adapt to globalization. But I'm curious how you bring those things into your framework. Oh, no. Look, I've never said that liberal democracy was the best system under all possible technological conditions.

1:04:09I think, in fact, the nature of the technological horizon determines the kind of politics you can have. And I think for that reason, you know, AI is going to be very threatening to our democratic system. I wrote a book in the early 2000s actually about biotechnology where I was arguing that if you could actually, you know, through something like CRISPR-Cas9, if you could modify the human gene line to modify human nature, you would attack some of the basic premises of modern liberalism because you could create different classes of human beings, you know, in a way that didn't exist before. And now you can combine the biotech with the AI and produce these really very science fiction-y but entirely conceivable outcomes that are going to be completely toxic to the maintenance of the kind of egalitarian society that we've seen.

1:05:04We've already seen this concentration, this extraordinary concentration of wealth in the technology sector. And that by itself is also something that is very difficult for a democracy to deal with. So, yeah, I think that it's all contingent on, you know, the nature of technology at any given point in time. One way to look at a political system is that it is a collective technology for absorbing and responding to information. And it works better or worse depending on how well it's able to do that. And I think increasingly we're seeing the way our system is absorbing and responding to information is degrading.

1:05:43So AI is very much a system for absorbing, collecting, aggregating, and then responding or reacting to information. And I've not seen any particularly convincing descriptions of how you might integrate that capacity more fundamentally into a political system. But it's a little bit hard for me to imagine there won't be more profound experimentations around that. That maybe the set of systems we can imagine operating, which were more bounded by the way human intelligence worked and the speed of human beings working with each other, is not the boundary. And the world is going to be opening to stranger things in the next 10 or 20 years than were imagined in our 20th century political science, if not always in our 20th century science fiction.

1:06:36Yeah, well, I think that modern government is going to have to rely on AI simply to process information because there's too much of it out there and it's too hard for human beings to, you know, absorb all of the inputs that they need to. I think the real danger is in agentic AI where human beings delegate certain powers to machines that can then operate autonomously. You know, it's very interesting at the frontier of computer science these days, they're more like zoologists that have just discovered a new species and they're trying to observe how it behaves under different conditions. But they don't really know what's happening on the inside of the machine, even though they're the ones that, you know, built it.

1:07:21And they're trying to make that new creature more powerful as fast as they possibly can. Yeah. They don't know what that will do. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a crazy race that's going on right now. I think that's really the danger is this likelihood that we will over-delegate and then the machine will develop values that may not really align with the ones that the creators hoped it would. I mean, we already had this hugging face incident a couple of weeks ago where the machine did something that was completely supposed to be off limits. And that's just the beginning, I think, of more stuff like that to come.

1:07:56This is a point others have made, but the fear was always that the AIs would take agency from us. What's obviously happening is we are handing that agency over as fast as we possibly can. And I talked to the people at these labs working on self-improvement. They don't even necessarily think self-improvement is a good idea. They just, even if it's not a good idea, if the other labs or the other countries are going to do it, they want to get there first. And I guess this would be, this is a place where I wonder about your perspective that so much of what we can or can't do in terms of regulating AI is dependent on these at least perceived race dynamics between the US and China, between firms and other firms.

1:08:35This doesn't feel to me like a problem without human precedent, but it is a problem coming at a time when the government of the US is pretty erratic and our confidence in our governing capacities is pretty low, where China is trying to catch up with us, where there's a lot of M &E between the two countries. I'm curious how you look at this more international relations-based aspect of it. Well, just on a domestic level, the state capacity problem comes back because you can't regulate this technology if you don't have people in the government that understand it, at least at a level that they can really get a hold of what's going on and put some controls in place.

1:09:16On the international question, obviously, there's a geopolitics of AI that's driving everybody forward, you know, that they're too worried about what China is going to do. I think some of that worry is a little bit misplaced because as far as I see it, the Communist Chinese Party is not a bunch of libertarians that say, oh, great technology, let's just let it rip. You know, we're not going to try to control it. They're going to try to control it. if you create a model that is really good at breaking into the most classified computers your government runs, they're not going to want to see that get out.

1:09:52You know, they're not going to want to have Chinese citizens have that capability. So I'm not sure that there's no basis on which you couldn't get some ground rules laid down despite the competition between the United States and China that put some limits on this. And I think it's going to be absolutely necessary because even a big, powerful country like the United States can't do this simply on its own. One thing I've heard people worry about is whether or not, even if you could imagine a deal, whether or not that kind of deal would be verifiable, trustworthy. Yeah. People will say, I agree that China's not going to want a self-improving model able to break into classified computers running wild.

1:10:33But at the same time, they'll say, but China's probably more likely than we are, given the the way they can wall things off from their media, et cetera, to say, that seems like a quite powerful weapon to have. Let's actually bring the very best scientists into the government. Let's give them the resources they really need. And let's have them create something on our behalf that we can use the way we want to use it. So to the extent this is a powerful weapon, a state that is good at creating things is going to try to create that weapon internally. And so you can't trust the deal. You have to simply act as if the other partner is untrustworthy.

1:11:11Do you buy that? I'm afraid that a lot of that logic is inevitable. Yeah, I do not know whether it's possible to control this technology. Even a powerful state like China is going to have trouble doing that. And when you have a globally competitive world, you know, there may be certain things that you can't really get the capacity to deal with. So, yeah, maybe it's going to be the end of us all. I want to avoid ending there on whether or not the eyes will kill us all. So I'm curious, given, you know, what you've seen in the politics of this era, it does not look like Trumpism is a dominant competitor ideology.

1:11:52I don't think that repatrimonializing the government is proving to be popular, even if it is not maybe as unpopular as one might have imagined. So what do you see as a kind of answer to some of these trends? Well, I think that's pretty simple. In countries where you can still have free and fair elections, you win elections because that's the route to political power. The model for this was really the Hungarian election last April, where Orban had been in power for 16 years, had really turned Hungary into an authoritarian country in the midst of the European Union. But Peter Magyar had the political skill to organize a very broad coalition, and not just squeak out a narrow victory, a massive victory that was a very great repudiation of Orbanism.

1:12:38I think America has a chance of doing something similar, probably not as decisive, but certainly it could send a very powerful message in the midterm elections that are coming up in November. And if the polls are to be believed, you know, it could really take place. What is the goal of liberalism? And here I don't mean classical liberalism in its long history. I mean American liberals, you know, the left of center, not quite socialist part of the Democratic Party. What is its moral goal at this point? In what way does it actually want to change society? I think people look at Trump and they know what he wants to do.

1:13:18I think they look at Bernie Sanders or Zoran Mamdani or AOC and they get a sense of where they feel the problem really is. I'm not sure they exactly could answer that so well for, you know, your generic mainstream liberal Democrat. Well, I don't pretend to speak on behalf of that category of people. I can tell you what my vision of it would be, which really has to do with this whole question that I've been quite preoccupied with, which is state capacity. I would like to see a government that can actually set, you know, generally accepted, not radical goals, universal health care, building high speed rail, doing all of these things, but actually being able to accomplish it in a reasonable amount of time.

1:14:05I got preoccupied with NASA recently because between John F. Kennedy's announcement that they were going to go to the moon in 1961 and actually landing on the moon in 1969, it's only eight years. In the 2000s, George W. Bush announced that they were going to go back to the moon. That's when the whole Artemis program got started. They finally, he said they were going to do it by 2015. Here it is, 2026. They finally got a rocket to go around the moon, but it didn't actually land on the moon. And we'll be lucky to land another human being by 2030. And so something has gone wrong in the ability of the American state to execute the very good intentions that it announces.

1:14:50And I guess maybe this isn't a moral vision, but it's certainly a vision for a different kind of politics. I would like to see an America that can actually announce a goal and actually get it done in a reasonable amount of time at a reasonable cost. Well, this is a very core argument of abundance. So I'm thrilled to hear you say some of this. I think one thing that struck me about the reaction to abundance and its argument for a much stronger state was that many people came back to me and said, well, what is the vision of the good life here? Is it just more stuff? And I would say, no, no, no. We want more homes.

1:15:26We want more clean energy. We want more public infrastructure. We want more medical breakthroughs so we can have cures. right these are all things that have already been identified as goals this is what liberalism is already trying to achieve and i'm saying it should be able to achieve it but after hearing again and again like the need for a vision of the good um the point which is philosophical magazine you know devoted whole issued liberalism and it's you know vision of the good i began to take more seriously that people felt something was absent and lacking you know the the way i take some of the thematic arguments you're making in End of History and the Last Man and apply them to modernity is not just that people want to fight in wars.

1:16:08I don't think most people do want to fight in wars. I don't think most right-wingers want to fight in wars. I think this is cosplay. We do have wars and they're horrible and they are not things that society is excited about having a new draft in order to send its young men and women to fight in, for instance. What I do think, though, is that people want to believe they are engaged in some morally ambitious project to change the world in which they live. That is not all people want from politics. Many people just want low prices. But there is a level of politics that has an intense energy within it.

1:16:44And that any movement that cannot operate on both, right? You can have a politics that is all energy but can't lower prices or achieve anything. Maybe you'd say that's Donald Trump right now. And that doesn't work when you try it. But, you know, politics is driven by the people in it with a kind of energy to change things fundamentally. And so if you don't have some answer for them, some answer of the moral crusade that they are involved in and that kind of beats in your own heart too, I think your politics is not going to be successful, particularly in like the modern attentional environment where energy and enthusiasm and outrage and inspiration are the coin of the realm.

1:17:20I'm not so sure that you can't do that in a liberal society. I mean, if you think about John F. Kennedy himself. Oh, I think you can. I just think you need a liberalism that wants it. Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, it seems to me there's a lot of challenges out there that are achievable within the context of a real liberalism. I mean, for example, current distribution of wealth and power in the United States is something that could be changed. You know, you don't have to have these tech oligarchs running around, you know, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to election campaigns so that they can get outcomes favorable to themselves.

1:17:59Having a state that can actually operate in this very difficult and very threatening technological environment is a plenty ambitious goal. I think it's just a matter of articulating to people why it's necessary and how it's achievable. just in the government being able to master and control AI rather than the technology controlling and mastering the government. I mean, that's a huge challenge. And for that matter, human beings. Yeah, right, right. So then always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? The first two are ones you're doubtless familiar with. One is Jennifer Palka's Recoding America.

1:18:41I think she is the most insightful, in a way, critic of what's wrong with the American bureaucracy, but she does it from a sympathetic standpoint. She understands why bureaucracy and government are necessary and how, you know, it could actually be reformed to do things better. The second one is Mark Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works, where he puts everything in a bigger historical context, a swing between Jeffersonianism, where power is pushed down as far as possible to the people, and a Hamiltonian vision where the government itself is the engine of change. And he argues that we've been in a Jeffersonian period ever since the 1960s and we need to switch to a more Hamiltonian perspective.

1:19:26The final one was written by an old friend of mine, Bob Wright, The God Test. I think it actually, you know, he's been covering artificial intelligence really since the 1980s. He interviewed Jeffrey Hinton way back then. And he's got the best explanation of how LLMs work for a layperson that I know of. It's encased in a ultimately extremely optimistic, sort of almost metaphysical theory about the progress not just that humans have made, but all the way from single cell to multi cell to, you know, different forms of animal life. But it's an argument, you know, for seeing a broader pattern in the human story that artificial intelligence actually plays a positive role in.

1:20:16Francis Fukuyama, thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra.

1:20:34Thank you.