THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Fukuyama begins with a definition of liberalism borrowed from the English philosopher John Gray that stresses four main features of the doctrine. Liberalism is individualist; it values liberty and autonomy, especially the rights to property and the rights to freedom of speech above all else. It is egalitarian; it ascribes equal human worth to all men and women. It is universalist; it values persons independent of their membership in particular tribes, states, and nations. And it is meliorist; it believes in human progress, but as something to be achieved moderately and not in wholesale revolutionary transformations.

Fukuyama provides a useful walking tour--probably the best part of the book--of the various pathologies of liberal individualism. From the right, during the 1970s a philosophy of freedom and autonomy morphed into a doctrine of "neo-liberalism" or libertarianism that stresses property rights and market liberty above all else. Neo-liberalism was the creation of economists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, which then became something like the official ideology of Ronald Reagan's America and Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain. It was applied with often brutal consequences in the recently liberated countries of the former Soviet empire. The result was to turn liberalism into a version of Gordon Gekko's "greed is good."

From the left, liberal individualism morphed into a form of identity politics. The right to equal recognition and respect owed to each individual became the rights of particular identity groups to special consideration. Since there is no such thing as an individual outside a group, like Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, liberalism must give more attention to the surrounding cultures that shape individual identity. Multiculturalism thus became a formula for dividing Americans by replacing the emphasis on individual rights with group rights, creating a kind of arms race to achieve special victim status.

Both of these, Fukuyama correctly argues, are corruptions of liberalism that need to be resisted. The most powerful contemporary alternative to liberalism is the rise of ethno-nationalism in Russia, China, India, Hungary, and the United States. Nationalism could be a called a form of right-wing identity politics because it takes national membership as a trump card of inclusion and exclusion. Nationalists begin from the commonsense supposition that the national state is the basic unit of political order that must be defended in order to ensure national security and the rule of law. But nationalism today means much more than this. It is not simply a matter of securing borders from "invasion," but of determining who is the real American and who is not. It is a way of dividing citizens into rival and competing camps of ins and outs, who belongs and who is "other." According to the nationalist writer Glenn Ellmers, more than half of actual Americans "are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term."

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