All human beings are basically morally equal, you know, that they have an underlying dignity,

and that that dignity needs to be respected by governments.

And the way that it is respected is through a rule of law, through constitutional arrangements,

that put limitations on the power of the state to manipulate individuals.

And the state needs to allow them to speak, to think, to act, to associate, to believe,

and ultimately, really, to participate in political life,

because that's the moral core that liberalism is trying to protect.

Hello, and welcome to Wise This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

You know, I think that the Russian invasion of Ukraine for a lot of us, for I'll speak for myself,

felt like a kind of historical rupture, that it was such a seismic act,

and so fully tore up what felt like an old era, that there was a kind of epoch,

basically shaped from late 1980, like an 8990, Fall of Burwon Wall, fall of the Soviet Union,

to the invasion, 30 year period, that was kind of like basically to oversimplify, right?

Post Cold War ideological competition between capitalism and communism as alternate systems.

Globalization, the integration of more and more countries into what we call the global economy,

and I should note for both good and ill, who we can get into that, because it had positive effects and crushingly negative effects,

and arise in the number of nations that were essentially either in reality or at the very least,

aspirationally liberal democracies, and that 30 year period was a strange one in many ways,

and in some ways quite anomalous, and one of the people I think who best foresaw that period and understood it

was a thinker philosopher named Francis Fukuyama. You probably know his name. He's authored many books.

He's a very acclaimed scholar. He wrote this book, actually in 1992, it was published,

but it was based on an essay that had actually been written earlier called The End of History in the Last Man.

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