At a time of polarization and political discord, people came together to discuss not only how to find common ground, but why we must.
Community members from USC and afar gathered at the Annenberg Forum for a conversation with Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist and economist widely considered one of the most influential thinkers in international relations today. The event was hosted by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy and allowed audience members to ask the political scientist questions about democracy and public policy.
Before the start of the event, Annenberg Media had a chance to speak with Dr. Fukuyama, writer of “The End of History” and “The Last Man,” about his upcoming discussion and ask about his guidance on how younger generations can better our future.
According to Fukuyama, one of the most pressing issues that the United States and the greater globe faces is polarization in society. “The polarization in the U.S. is one of the most dangerous things,” Fukuyama said. “And if people don’t know how to talk to each other, you’re never going to overcome that polarization. So I think that’s why it’s important not just to talk to people that agree with you, but to talk to people that you disagree with potentially.”
At the start of the event, Fukuyama was presented the Excellence in Public Diplomacy Award by USC’s Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, Andrew Guzman.
After receiving the award and taking photos with Public Diplomacy faculty, Fukuyama spoke with CPD Interim Director Julie Duhaut-Bedos about how global stability, political, and economic institutions are shaped by identity politics and social trust.
However, it was his ideas on how to fix our collapsing society that had audience members the most engaged. At one pivotal point in the conversation, Fukuyama mentioned how many countries, including Syria, Bosnia and Somalia, have fallen into civil war because they lacked a sense of overarching national identity.
“The problem really arises when the identity becomes regarded as something that is essential to you,” he explained. “The first thing that you want to know about a person is what sect do they come from? What ethnicity are they? What tribe do they belong to? Rather than either understanding them as a human being, who’s similar to any other human being on Earth, has rights, and should be entitled to the protection of those rights.”
Audience member Thomas Erspamer, believed the event was completely worth his 45-minute drive from Orange County. “I found it intellectually engaging, stimulating,” he said. “I liked that it delved into a lot of complex topics that are relevant in today’s world, and I enjoyed it very much. Of course, it would always have been nice to have had more time, given the enormity and complexity of the issues and the chaos that we’re all seeing today.”
The discussion began with Fukuyama likening Trump’s second election to the fall of the Berlin Wall, saying that the wall’s collapse “expressed the view that many people around the world were living in authoritarian countries, hated having to live under dictatorships, and they really wanted freedom. That’s the moment in which communism began to unwind.”
He noted that here in the United States, we have faced our own political watershed.
“I would say that the election of Donald Trump for the second term probably signifies a very different kind of world that we are moving into, where the terms of reference may be as changed as they were in November of 1989.”
Throughout the discussion, Fukuyama highlighted the ways in which liberal democracies around the world were beginning to deteriorate. “You have a lot of elected leaders that really don’t want to operate under [constitutional checks and balances], and so the liberal part of democracy is beginning to erode very substantially, and once the liberal part goes, then the democratic part can be manipulated because now the ruling party can gerrymander, can do all sorts of things to make sure that it never loses another election.”
As Fukayama looked out at the USC students sitting in the audience, he expressed hope that future generations would be the ones to finally bring broken nations back together.