Francis Fukuyama has a Wish, 8/8

He proposes a decisive win by the center-left

Francis Fukuyama thinks that he has a solution for polarization.

Many political reform proposals face a chicken-and-egg problem, however: you can’t enact legislation to reduce polarization until you’ve reduced the level of polarization. The path to a long-term solution is blocked in the short run. The only way to resolve this conundrum is through the democratic process itself: that is, through a decisive electoral victory by one party that seeks to promote serious change, and is able to enact it.

…Could such a realigning election occur in contemporary America? It could if one of the two political parties adopted a truly moderate and centrist posture both in policy and in rhetoric. Of the two parties, it would for better or worse have to be the Democrats.

. . .the most direct path out of polarization is for the Democrats to clearly move to occupy the moderate center of American politics and win elections on that basis. They can do this by passing sensible economic and social policies that demonstrate the possibility of effective government, and by breaking cleanly with the cultural agenda of their own left wing. That is what many of us hoped Joe Biden would do after 2020. Whether he and the current leadership of the Democratic Party are capable of pulling off anything remotely like this is unknown, and time is getting very short.

His view is that the Republicans are hopeless because they support Donald Trump. But that seems like a solvable problem. Perhaps Mr. Trump will not run in 2024. Perhaps he will lose, in either the primaries or the general election, and then no longer be a factor.

In fact, I think it is fair to say that Mr. Trump moved the Republican Party closer to the center. He did so in part by rejecting libertarian intellectual ideas on fiscal policy, immigration, and trade. From my perspective, not ideal, as the kids would say.

Many conservative pundits believe that a Republican Party with Mr. Trump’s position on issues but someone else as the standard-bearer could wallop the Democrats in 2024. But Fukuyama does not think in those terms at all.

I suspect that Fukuyama simply fears and loathes the social class that forms the core of the contemporary Republican Party. Although he thinks that the Woke progressives on the Democratic side are electorally toxic and substantively misguided, I suspect that his class sympathies lie with them. Let me know if you feel that I am being uncharitable toward Fukuyama.

I believe that the Republican Party could turn away from the personality cult of Trump while retaining and building on the support that he generated. Fukuyama believes that the Democratic Party could turn away from the Woke progressive movement. In that regard, each of us may be guilty of wishful thinking.

But I would stop well short of claiming that there would be heaven on earth, or the end of polarization, should a Republican other than Trump lead the party to a decisive victory in 2024. Nor would heaven on earth ensue if Fukuyama’s wish for the Democrats came true.