Introduction

Freedom House’s annual Freedom in the World survey notes that liberalism has rapidly declined each year for the last 16 years. And its precipitous downturn is more evident now than ever amid waning respect for individual rights, increased growth of autocracies and most recently in the seismic Russian invasion of Ukraine. Decades ago, political scientist and professor Francis Fukuyama was one of the preeminent scholars to predict the marked impending fall of liberal societies. He serves as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and is a bestselling author of numerous books, including one published in March 2022 aptly titled, “Liberalism and Its Discontents.” He joins WITHpod to discuss why liberalism doesn’t always live up to its own principles, challenges from the right and the left and why our democracy will be under continued threat without a revitalized approach to its core tenets.