Quora Question for Francis Fukuyama

March 30, 2017 Philip Waring Leave a comment

Is the rise of Muslim immigration to Europe a threat to liberal democracy in the long term?

It’s not a threat intrinsically, because I think there are successful Muslim majority countries in the world.

I don’t think there is any cultural obstacle in that regard but the problem is the reaction of the indigenous/ethnic countries in that migration. This a big tragedy of these populist demagogues that were kept under wraps after September 11th. I think George W. Bush, despite his tremendous policy mistake invading Iraq was very good on this front, he said our war is not with Islamic people, it’s with radical, violent people, these are the people we need to focus on.

This has evolved, ISIS replacing Al Qaeda and it doesn’t look like it’s going to go away, feeding the narrative on the right that it’s not just a bunch of extremists, it is an entire religion and I think there are enough opportunistic politicians who are going to repeat that and that’s the threat. This is what leads to violation of civil rights, injured communities, distrust and hatred in countries where you have larger minorities of Muslims like France and the Netherlands and they’re going to have very polarized politics for some period of time.

Francis Fukuyama,

Author & Professor of Political Science at Stanford

And Fukuyama is not alone. We have any number of good and wise men and women in our Universities. Similarly we have such men and women reporting and writing commentary for the Times, the Journal, the Post and the like. Why is it that the Republican representatives in the Congress, and especially those in the House, not to mention the occupants of the Oval Office seem never to be aware of what the good and wise people among us are writing and saying? This is the great tragedy of our time, in particular of Trump Time, characterized by the shocking ignorance of our leaders.

Just the other day, March 28, the Times, as if in answer to my own thinking as well as that of probably many others, put together this piece:

Right and Left: Partisan Writing You Shouldn’t Miss

By ANNA DUBENKO Times

The Times writers “scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that we might not have seen.”

From the Right there were the National Review: The Weekly Standard: The American Spectator: Red State: and The National Interest:

From the Left were The Intercept: TruthDig: Salon: In These Times:

From the Center —Politico: BuzzFeed: Washingtonian: The Atlantic:

These are just a few of the tens, hundreds of thousands of online sites out there giving us political opinions. My answer of course is to do one’s utmost to remain in the center, with the caveat that I may not have correctly recognized the center, it being something else entirely than what I thought it was. My solution is to read widely in the center, pretty much from the national online, or paper versions of center news outlets, the Times, Post and Journal, as well as Politico, the Washingtonian, BuzzFeed and the Atlantic as mentioned by Anna Dubenko. Reading the first three and less often the others is how I usually will begin my day.

There are, of course, other opinion journals far out on the left or right. And furthermore there are the people, more and more of them, who no longer even read but get their politics from the talk show guys, mostly those on the far right, this often being at the crazy, conspiracy loaded end of the left-right line, there where you will find the likes of crazy Alex Jones and his Infowars.

More and more it’s almost as if the real divisions between us stem not so much from the differences coming from our well reasoned discussions, but from the publications we may read, yes from the Times, but also from the publications posted at the check-out counter of a super marché. In the extreme case of the reader of the Times op eds and the reader of the National Enquirer, there’s no possibility of a reasoned discussion between them.

Then there are, I’m told, publications that try to hold it all together, put it all down, links to all the myriad points of view out there, such as the Drudge Report. But that doesn’t work, because as complete as the single day’s report may be there are always more things left out than put in.

In fact if we would undo the chaos about us there are only well reasoned opinions that will help us in this endeavor, such as that Francis Fukyuyama above. Such opinions are the only key to undoing the chaos of existence. Wasn’t schooling supposed to enable young people to come to well-reasoned opinions? Clearly it hasn’t happened. Clearly it didn’t happen in the recent presidential election.