liberalism and its discontents francis fukuyama on fixing democracy

In recent years, it also has involved stripping power from public offices the minute they are won by Democrats (in North Carolina in 2016, and in Michigan and Wisconsin in 2018).Įven within the party, popular sovereignty has lost ground.

That movement has involved a long-term effort to make it harder for those who might not support the Republican Party to participate in the political system-by imposing barriers to voting, gerrymandering legislative districts, and trying to change the conduct of the census to artificially inflate the power of right-leaning areas of the country at the expense of left-leaning ones (and white majority areas over more diverse ones). The Republican Party’s attempt to overturn an election their candidate lost by more than seven million votes caps a growing movement among a wing of the Republican Party to attack democracy as much as liberalism, if not more so. In the aftermath of January 6, 2021, it is harder to sustain Francis Fukuyama’s argument in “Liberalism and Its Discontents” that, “The ‘democracy’ under attack today is a shorthand for liberal democracy, and what is really under greatest threat is the liberal component of this pair.” What we are witnessing right now is the democracy component under siege.Īnd while we are hard-wired to look for symmetry in the world-or what Fukuyama calls “parallel” threats coming from the Left and the Right-Janushould put those notions of false equivalency to bed. Instead, they attacked the citadel of democracy itself: Congress sitting in session to count and certify the votes of an election to effectuate the peaceful transfer of power.

Despite decades of fury from the American Right that the judiciary’s unelected judges were a form of “tyranny,” the insurrectionists didn’t attack the branch most representative of liberalism’s rule of law.

Liberalism and its discontents francis fukuyama on fixing democracy