He fails to appreciate that Left-modernism has corrupted the ideology
In an insightful piece over at Foreign Affairs entitled ‘Liberalism Needs the Nation’, Francis Fukuyama argues that abstract universalist liberalism is too thin to compete with the Right-wing nationalism of a Le Pen, Trump or Putin, but that an inclusive, state-led form of nationhood can keep the populist wolf from the door. This is a point he made some weeks earlier in an interview with UnHerd, and as a political liberal, I share Fukuyama’s concern at the apparent erosion of procedural liberalism. I agree with him that liberal democracy can generally only operate at the nation-state level.
Yet Fukuyama’s account fails to peer beneath the hood of nationalism to acknowledge the importance of an often assimilative majority ethnicity in underpinning stable national identities. He also overlooks the post-1960s Left-modernist capture of national identity in the West, and its attendant corruption of liberalism.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Unherd
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Eric Kaufmann is professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in UnHerd