TFG is once again asking Vladimir Putin for a solid. You’d think the Russian dictator was just another of Donald Trump’s golf buddies. See, Putin is also into real estate. He just acquires his using tanks rather than swindles and laundered money. If it takes slaughtering innocents or poisoning competitors, it’s not personal. Trump admires that in him.
It is useful to remind ourselves what is politically at stake both here and abroad with autocracy on the rise and liberal democracy under threat. Charlie Sykes asked Francis Fukuyama for his thoughts on his Tuesday podcast:
Francis Fukuyama: It’s now 75 years following the last World War, and particularly since 1991, things have been pretty peaceful and stable for many people around the world. And I think that they just begin to take liberalism for granted — It’s kind of the framework.
Sykes: We take it for granted, and we forget why it was so crucial.
Fukuyama: Yeah, and that’s why I felt I should write a book, kind of defending it in itself. But then, also, I think that what Putin has done is in a way to demonstrate for a new generation what some of the dangers of the alternatives to liberalism are — that it does lead to intolerance, exclusion, and then foreign aggression, which then produces war, conflict, unnecessary death, and so forth. And people can see that very vividly.
Fukuyama: So, I hope that one of the consequences of this is at least to remind a whole younger generation that didn’t experience the Cold War, didn’t live in a dictatorship, just remind them that these things still exist. And liberalism is not something that just happens by itself. You have to fight for it, you have to struggle for it, and you have to be vigilant. Maybe that’s the lesson that every generation has to learn on its own.
Let’s hope post-Boomers do, and thoroughly enough to last another 75 years.
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