Quotes from Francis Fukuyama

In Europe, demands for expanded popular participation came on the heels of war; the rise of the British Labour Party in the 1920s, for example, was in some ways a consequence of the sufferings of the working class in the trenches of World War I. In Latin America, by contrast, elites usually pulled back from interstate conflicts precisely to avoid having to turn to the masses for help.

The common objective of populist politicians in both Europe and the United States is to "take back our country." They argue that traditional understandings of national identity are being diluted and overtaken both by newcomers with different values and cultures and by a progressive left that attacks the very idea of national identity as racist and intolerant. But

In an American context, Lasch argued that narcissism as a social phenomenon would lead not to fascism, but to a broad depoliticization of society, in which struggles for social justice were reduced to personal psychological problems.8 Lasch wrote well before the rise of Donald Trump, a political figure who almost perfectly embodies the narcissism he describes. Narcissism led Trump into politics, but a politics driven less by public purposes than his own inner needs for public affirmation.

Many believed that the Mafia, clientelism, and corruption represented traditional social practices that would gradually erode as the country modernized economically.

The psychological dislocation engendered by the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft laid the basis for an ideology of nationalism based on an intense nostalgia for an imagined past of strong community in which the divisions and confusions of a pluralist modern society did not exist.

The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life. According to Hegel, they are what drives the whole historical process.

There were, however, countervailing forces. The independence of the Italian judiciary had been reinforced by the recruitment of a generation of idealistic lawyers in the wake of the global uprisings of 1968.

Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations.

it diverts attention from older and larger groups whose serious problems have been ignored. A significant part of the white American working class has been dragged into an underclass, comparable to the experience of African-Americans during the 1970s and '80s. Yet one has heard little concern from activists on the left, at least until recently, about the burgeoning opioid crisis, or the fate of children growing up in impoverished single-parent families in the rural United States.

economic grievances become much more acute when they are attached to feelings of indignity and disrespect.

As the political scientist Barry Weingast has noted, a state strong enough to enforce property rights can also take them away.6 On

The Thai and Chinese cases, as well as the nineteenth-century European ones, suggest that the size of the middle class relative to the rest of the society is one important variable in determining how it will behave politically.

Hoje em dia, (…) chegámos a um ponto em que os cidadãos se distraem com as teorias conspirativas mais bizarras sobre o modo como o governo está a ser manipulado por elites obscuras para lhes retirar os seus direitos, e armam-se em antecipação do momento em que terão de se defender do Estado pela força.

We need to promote creedal national identities built around the foundational ideas of modern liberal democracy, and use public policies to deliberately assimilate newcomers to those identities. Liberal democracy has its own culture, which must be held in higher esteem than cultures rejecting democracy's values.

The traditional Christian understanding of the inner self saw it as the site of original sin: we are full of evil desires that lead us to contravene God's law; external social rules, set by the Universal Church, lead us to suppress these desires.

Religion was instead seen as a form of idolatry or false consciousness; recognition was due rather to the expressive inner self that might at times even want to transgress religious rules.

I want that Tesla not because I care so much about global warming, but because it is trendy and expensive, and my neighbor is still driving a BMW.

The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous Ã¢â'¬Â¦ the people in cold countries are, like young men, brave.

Os economistas baseiam toda uma teoria de comportamento social nesta premissa individualista. A teoria económica da ação coletiva defende que os indivíduos se agregam em grupos sobretudo como um meio de maximizar os seus próprios interesses individuais e não por qualquer motivo de sociabilidade natural.

While the United States has benefited from diversity, it cannot build its national identity around diversity as such. Identity has to be related to substantive ideas such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and human equality. Americans respect these ideas; the country is justified in excluding from citizenship those who reject them.

Christian freedom was an inner condition of the spirit, and not an external condition of the body.

What differed were conditions of climate and geography that, operating on the biology of otherwise indistinguishable individuals, produced systematic differences in political behavior. Slavery for him was not natural and needed to be explained in terms of the ability of certain societies to better organize themselves for war and conquest.

Philip Rieff, who argued that the decline of a shared moral horizon defined by religion had left a huge void that was being filled by psychologists preaching a new religion of psychotherapy.

That an ethnically divided posttotalitarian state should not make an easy transition to liberal democracy seems obvious to many people in hindsight.