This article is part of Global Perspectives Review Symposium on Democracy.

I very much appreciate the reviews of my book Liberalism and Its Discontents, along with the parallel reviews of Stein Ringen’s How Democracies Live and the Craig Calhoun, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, and Charles Taylor volume Degenerations of Democracy. I want to respond to two of the essays in particular, those of Steven Zipperstein (“Technology and Democracy”) and Jan Zielonka (“Democratic Nostalgia”), which present the most overtly critical perspectives of the collection. These articles overlap in theme and are based on observations about the way that technology has challenged and in many ways undermined liberal democracy.

The Zipperstein article makes a number of cogent and by now familiar arguments about the way that technology has undermined democracy. He points to the concentration of power in the hands of large digital platforms (Google, Meta, and X) and argues that they should be regulated (as opposed to being broken up through antitrust). In addition, he argues that they should be subject to private litigation through repeal of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. He points out that the Federal Communications Commission used to regulate legacy broadcast media through the old Fairness Doctrine, and suggests that we need to reregulate the big platforms through a twenty-first-century version of that doctrine.

With regard to regulation, what is missing from this analysis is any recognition of the current state of politics in the United States and the way that our polarization makes this kind of regulation impossible. The Fairness Doctrine itself was bitterly opposed by Republicans and was ended during the 1980s by a Republican chair of the FCC, in the belief that it was being used one-sidedly against conservative voices. The Democrats thereafter tried to revive it on several occasions, but President Reagan vowed to veto any such effort.

That was in the good old days, before the toxic polarization that characterizes our present politics set in. Who exactly is going to be able to have the political clout to revive this type of regulatory regime, and what standards would it try to enforce in the twenty-first century? Would public health announcements promoting vaccinations have to be balanced by anti-vax claims? Or if the latter were somehow suppressed by a regulator, would that survive First Amendment scrutiny by today’s conservative Supreme Court? The European Union’s Digital Services Act tries to set boundaries on platform behavior, but that is possible only because there is a much higher degree of social consensus in Europe over the boundaries of acceptable political speech than there is in today’s America. Moreover, social media allows much more complex forms of content moderation than legacy media. How would a regulator handle takedowns and shadow banning? Are you really going to contemplate treating the platforms like telephone companies with “must-carry” provisions? Will they be forced to carry the material that is, in Daphne Keller’s words, “lawful but awful” under the First Amendment? And if not, how would you define the content that they must carry?

The private regulation that would occur with the repeal of Section 230 will have potentially terrible consequences. The United States is virtually the only advanced democracy that makes use of private litigation to enforce laws, something known as “private right of action.” As opposed to straightforward state enforcement of its own regulations, private right of action subjects rules to a very unpredictable common law process where boundaries are constantly shifting due to lower court decisions. It is hard to know in advance whether private litigation would expand or contract the content platforms may carry; there have been lawsuits against the platforms (all struck down to date under Section 230) that would either take down content or force a platform to carry certain kinds of speech. The result is likely to be a chaos of contradictory rules that will require endless interpretation by the courts, which are ill prepared to do this. As in the case of a renewed Fairness Doctrine, repeal of Section 230 doesn’t take into account the current polarized state of US politics.

Zipperstein suggests that I have failed to put forward solutions to democracy’s current problems, but my Liberalism book was not the place to do that as it focuses on first principles. In 2020 I led a Stanford “Working Group on Platform Scale,” which put forward what I regard as the only viable solution to the content moderation issue. We suggested a concept we called “middleware,” in which the platforms would be forced to outsource content moderation to what we hoped would become a competitive ecosystem of third-party firms that would tailor content to the specific wishes of users. Since this would not obviously help one side of the current political divide more than the other, this seemed to us the only politically viable way of solving the threat that the large platforms posed to political discourse. It would return power to individual users and create an internet more like the original vision of a decentralized network free from the domination of a handful of large companies and oligarchs.

The Zielonka article attributes to both me and Stein Ringen a certain nostalgia for the way democracy used to be practiced in the twentieth century. Zielonka argues that technology has eroded national boundaries that are traversed by networks of interconnected people who have far more influence on social outcomes than previously. He doesn’t like the way that either of us centers any solutions in nation-states, since the scale of the challenge has grown to so global a dimension. We have failed to reimagine democracy for a digital age, where democratic representation and collective action can transcend legacy geographical boundaries and need to meet networked actors on their own ground.

Versions of this argument have been made now for well over a generation, initially in response to the spread of hyperglobalization and the internet in the 1990s. It is not just digital technology that has escaped the boundaries of the nation-state: terrorism, epidemics, migration, global finance, and a host of other activities now take place at a supranational scale. A truly adequate and reimagined democracy needs to operate both at a global, transnational scale and at a much smaller local one, since these are often now the loci of social action.

However, there is one critical reason why nation-states must remain the centers of democratic choice, a reason that I laid out in chapter 9 of Liberalism and Its Discontents. States remain the sole repositories of legitimate force; only they in the end have the coercive power to enforce rules and regulate activity. There is only one supranational body that makes any claim to real political power, which is the European Union and its executive arm, the European Commission. But while the European Union can make rules covering its whole territory, it has no independent enforcement power and continues to rely on the power of its member states to enforce its rules.

It is simply not the case that nation-states have lost their ability to control the power of big tech companies. China has been perfectly capable of regulating its large internet companies, and indeed in commandeering their technology to enhance the Chinese state’s own surveillance capabilities. The United States could do this as well if it chose to; the problem is rather an embedded antistatism in American political culture and a body of antitrust law and doctrine that has convinced many Americans that regulating technology is not economically desirable.

Zielonka’s critique points to the need for supranational regulation. But this is both normatively questionable and virtually impossible to achieve as a matter of practical politics. It would be very dangerous for existing nations to delegate significant enforcement power to a supranational body. Over the past few centuries, we have built up a series of institutions to constrain power on a national level, like courts and the rule of law, constitutional checks, powerful legislative bodies, and the like. None of us should feel safe creating a global executive that is not constrained by a global legislature and a global court, but building such institutions in a world as diverse as our present one is a fantasy. Such institutions would have to rest on a shared normative consensus about how power is to be accumulated, deployed, and limited, but no such consensus exists now, and none is likely to come into being in the future.

Reenvisioning democracy at a transnational level would require existing nations to cede sovereignty to the supranational body. This is something that, as a matter of practical politics, is simply not going to happen, especially in our current age of rising nationalism. Can anyone imagine either China or the United States ceding significant sovereignty to such an international body?

Nor is the solution to focus on local-level governance. Local government is the best forum to deal with local issues like policing, trash collection, and some forms of infrastructure. But precisely because of globalization, local action is of too small a scale to have a meaningful effect on a host of issues like climate change, international security, financial regulation, public health, terrorism, and the like. The people who would like to retreat into the small worlds of local governance are usually well-educated residents of small communities who would like to cut themselves off from the hinterland of problems surrounding them. That hinterland looks more like the dysfunctional community of Alpine County, California, that Beverly Crawford describes. It is actually not so much a community as a rural area whose problems (e.g., unemployment and drug addiction) cannot really be solved locally. The solutions (if any) would depend on intervention by high-level authorities like the state of California or the federal government.

I have deliberately not tried to respond to the range of helpful comments made on my book in this collection. The issues raised are important, and the answers to many of the questions raised would require much more thought than is possible in a single essay. I very much appreciate the efforts of Global Perspectives to bring this collection together.

The author has no competing interests to declare.

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, director of its Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy, and a faculty member at its Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.