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Francis Fukuyama interview: What Follows the End of History? Identity Politics

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https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-F...-of/244369

EXCERPT: . . . Q. You believe identity politics can be steered toward a broader sense of shared identity. What role can universities play?

Francis Fukuyrama: Universities have lost a sense of their role in training American elites about their own institutions. I’m really struck by this at Stanford. If you read through all the things Stanford thinks it’s doing, it’s global this and global that. We’re preparing students to be global leaders. It’s very hard to find any dedication to a mission of promoting constitutional government, rule of law, democratic equality, in our own country. I’m not saying every student should take an American-government class — that’s not going to work for a lot of reasons. But universities need to better prepare future leaders in our own country.

Q. You have an unusual background for a political scientist. You majored in classics at Cornell, then did graduate work in comparative literature at Yale, where you studied with Paul de Man. Later you spent time in Paris sitting in on classes with Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Any memories from this journey through deconstruction?

A. I decided it was total bullshit. They were espousing a kind of Nietzschean relativism that said there is no truth, there is no argument that’s superior to any other argument. Yet most of them were committed to a basically Marxist agenda. That seemed completely contradictory. If you really are a moral relativist, there is no reason why you shouldn’t affirm National Socialism or the racial superiority of Europeans, because nothing is more true than anything else. I thought it was a bankrupt way of proceeding and decided to shift gears and go into political science.

Q. You pursued your Ph.D. at Harvard, where you got to know Samuel Huntington, who is seen by some as a "prophet of the Trump era" for allegedly anticipating and stoking the rise of white nativism. Were you at all put off by Huntington’s late-in-life book on immigration, Who Are We?

A. I disagreed with his overall view of immigration, which was restrictionist, because I don’t see the empirical evidence that immigration is bad. Overall, I think it’s good. What he has been unjustly accused of is racism. He didn’t say that immigrants are bad because they’re not white Europeans. He said that white Europeans had a specific culture that they brought to North America that was very important for the subsequent functioning of liberal democratic institutions in the United States. That’s a view I agree with.

Q. You went through a public falling-out with your fellow neoconservatives over the Iraq war. What was it like to break ranks?

A. It felt like a liberation. Two things made me no longer a conservative. One was the Iraq war; the other was the financial crisis in 2008. Both came out of conservative ideas that I had supported, and both were complete disasters. That led me to a more fundamental rethinking of a lot of things.

When you’re younger, you may think you’ve got independent ideas, but you do depend on the affirmation of friends and colleagues. Once I made the break, I was liberated because I wasn’t constantly looking over my shoulder wondering: What are the folks at Commentary going to say about this?

MORE: https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-F...-of/244369
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