Both words in the phrase "liberal democracy" carry meaning, and both concepts are under attack around the world. "Democracy" means that they people rule, while "liberal" (in this sense) means that the rights of individuals are protected, even if they're not part of the majority. Recent years have seen the rise of an authoritarian/populist political movement in many Western democracies, one that scapegoats minorities in the name of the true "will of the people." Yascha Mounk is someone who has been outspoken from the start about the dangers posed by this movement, and what those of us who support the ideals of liberal democracy can do about it. Among other things, we discuss how likely it is that liberal democracy could ultimately fail even in as stable a country as the United States.
Yascha Mounk received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. He is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard, a Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America, and Executive Director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. His most recent book is The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It.
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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Back in the early 1990s, there was an idea going around called The End of History. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the USSR was dissolving, there was a feeling that history had been very interesting. Thousands of years of conflict and war and trying out different forms of government and society, but that now, as the 20th century came to a close, we had more or less figured it out. The way to live is in a liberal democracy, and liberal democracy was gaining ascendance throughout the world. Even old dictatorships or authoritarian regimes were crumbling under the democratic pressures. As it turns out, the idea of democracy is not necessarily a stable one. You can have a democratic society that gets rid of its democratic institutions for one reason or another, and a couple of centuries, which is the time period over which democracy has been ascendant in the Western world, is a short period historically. Right now we're in a period where the world is changing rapidly in many ways, and you can't just say everything is done, politically, we've figured it out. We're all gonna be liberal democrats going forward.
0:01:16 SC: Indeed, as many of you might have noticed, just over the past couple years, there has been increasing anti-democratic sentiment around the world. It can be very blatant in some places, some countries have elected through democratic means quite explicitly anti-democratic leaders. Here in the United States, there's certainly been controversies and arguments about whether or not our new Trump administration is not getting in line with the norms of liberal democracy. Attacking the media, undercutting our confidence in our electoral processes, and so forth. Around the world strong men and autocratic forces are ascendant, and you can have different opinions about this. You can think that this is a real problem, and if you do think it's a real problem, then I think that it's something that is not just alarmism. I think that if you are of the opinion that this is happening and this is bad, there's more than enough evidence that we should really take this seriously. You might, on the other hand, think that this is just liberals complaining, that they lost the election, they're not used to having a strong leader they have to fight against. And if that's true, okay, but it's up to you to articulate exactly why it's okay to attack the media in certain ways, what should be the norms that are always respected no matter who is the boss, no matter which party is in power. This is not an easy thing to do.
0:02:40 SC: So it's important that we think about these things. And today's guest is Yascha Mounk, who is one of the most interesting and articulate people who is thinking seriously and carefully about these issues right now. Dr. Mounk is a lecturer on government at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America, and he's also the Executive Director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. In his spare time, apparently, he writes a weekly column at Slate Online, and he also hosts a podcast of his own over there called The Good Fight. His most recent book is "The People Versus Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It". I strongly recommend reading this book. It's an eye opener. It can be depressing if you take it seriously, and if you don't take it seriously, if you don't disagree with it, then as I said it's important to explicitly say, in as reasonable, calm, and persuasive a way as you can why we shouldn't be worried about these things. One way or another, this is something we all have to be thinking about. So let's go.
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0:04:01 SC: Yascha Mounk, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.
0:04:04 Yascha Mounk: My pleasure.
0:04:06 SC: So I'll start with a little preamble here because I'll admit on the one hand I'm very excited to have you on the podcast, both 'cause I've loved your work on Twitter and in other places, since I discovered it, and also, because you are a fellow podcaster. You're the first guest I've had who is an expert on being on both sides of this microphone.
0:04:23 YM: And I'm a great professional, and I'm gonna judge you on every transgression.
0:04:28 SC: Well, I know that, yes. That's what I'm looking forward to. I want the report card after it's all said and done. But there's also trepidation because it's politics. And even if it's political science and intellectual scholarship and so forth, there is the nitty-gritty, ugly tribalism of politics, and what I'm trying to get around in this podcast is exactly that. Trying to aim for the underlying ideas, the big picture. So there is a big picture. There's certainly... We all know here in the United States, there's certain political things going on, but it's not just a random particular event. There are some trends underlying what's going on here in the US, and it's going on more broadly, right? The world is seeing, at least it seems from the news, an upsurge in a kind of populist, nativist, nationalist, isolationist, authoritarian moment. So just to start out, why don't we... Let's imagine that over the next hour, we'll be digging into some of the underlying reasons why that's happening. But what's your take right now on sort of the state of the world when it comes to this kind of movement going on?
0:05:37 YM: Well, I'm pretty worried about what's going on in the world. I was just writing an article where I started outlining how different some countries in the world looked three years ago. Three years ago, the Huffington Post had just announced to great hilarity that it would cover the presidential campaign by one Donald J. Trump in the Entertainment section.
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0:06:00 YM: In Britain you had, not somebody I personally would have voted for, but a very reasonable, moderate, center-right Prime Minister in David Cameron. The idea of Brexit was being pursued by the UK Independence Party and a few hard-liners in the Tory Party, but it really seemed very unlikely. There was leadership election of the Labour Party, which seemed to probably go to a relatively sensible person. In Germany, Angela Merkel was at the height of her popularity and there wasn't any far-right populist party in the Parliament. Now today, you are seeing not just authoritarian populists in power in the United States with Donald Trump, in places like the Philippines with Rodrigo Duterte, in Poland and Hungary and Italy and a whole bunch of other places, even in the countries that are supposedly working relatively well. In the countries where the populists have not yet taken over, you have seen these radical transformations of political systems.
0:07:03 YM: So today in Germany, the Alternative for Germany, which is quite extreme, is in the Bundestag, and according to some polls it is now the second biggest party in the country, larger than the Social Democrats. In Great Britain, you now have a leader of the Labour Party who bears more resemblance to Jill Stein than he does to Bernie Sanders. You have a Prime Minister who is embattled from the far right of her own party, may lose her job any moment now. And you've had two years of the establishment trying to figure out what on earth to do about the population's vote to Brexit and not really making any progress in figuring out what the plan for the country is. So just as a snapshot of some of the changes in the world, I would say it doesn't look too good.
0:07:49 SC: And fairly recently, the picture you paint is one of rapid change, which might even be extra worrying, right?
0:07:57 YM: Yeah, absolutely. So, it comes on the heels of a long development, when you look at the rise of populist parties and movements. It started in at least the year 2000, even earlier than that, and has been rising since. So, some 18 years ago, the average vote share of a populist party in continental Europe for example, was about 7%. Now it is more like 27% or 28%, a very rapid increase. We see them now being in power in a whole set of countries. You can drive from north to south of Europe without ever leaving a country ruled by populists. That certainly wasn't possible 10 or 15 years ago and has become particularly fast in the last few years in part because the populists are now at levels of strength where they can suddenly form the government. As a physicist, you think about those kinds of things all the time, I imagine, which is to say you have systems that seem relatively stable and you start seeing a certain kind of change in them, but it doesn't seem to worry and people don't notice it too much because the system on the whole is still stable. And then eventually as it comes close to a certain kind of threshold, you see that a small increase has much bigger systemic effects, and I think that's the kind of moment we're now in with populism.
0:09:12 SC: Yeah, that's exactly right. The idea of a phase transition where things can be more or less, on appearances, fairly stable over long periods of time then suddenly something happens. My wife, Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer, is actually working on a book on this very topic exploring the fact that while things can seem to not be changing to our most direct observations, things can be changing underneath the surface that secretly lead up to these apparently radical quick transformations. And they can be good. Public opinion switched about gay marriage here in the United States very quickly, but secretly, it was changing all along. And it can be for the bad, just as well.
0:09:54 YM: Well, I hope she is gonna add a topic about the cheery topic of populism.
0:10:00 SC: Oh yeah, well that's a good point, because I wanna dig in a little bit deeper here. What is a definition of populism? When I was a kid, and I heard the word, it made no sense to me. Like populism means you're popular and if you're in a democracy, you should be popular to be elected. But of course, it means something a little bit different than that.
0:10:16 YM: Yeah, and I think that is a real problem with that word. On many public appearances where I try to define populism, I try to explain to people what I mean by it, what the proper scientific definition of it is. People then in the question session say, "Well what's wrong with popular-ism?" Not populism but popular-ism. "Shouldn't politicians try to be popular?" And of course they should, it's a normal part of politics, for politicians to say, "Hey, people are unhappy with the current crop of politicians, and I'm gonna point out the ways in which they are imperfect and mistaken, and I'm gonna try and rile up a little bit of emotion against them and say, 'Hey, I'm standing for all of those popular things that they haven't actually thought about.'" So that is perfectly normal.
0:11:06 YM: What's different about populism is the claim that the only real reason why we have problems today is that the existing political elite is corrupt or self-serving, the claim that they alone truly stand for the people. That while they are the voice of the people, everybody who disagrees with them is by nature of that illegitimate. Because if I stand for people and someone disagrees with me, well then they are against the people. And then it often goes together with very large extreme promises. So that once the populists are in power and they can't live up to those promises, as our president sometimes likes to say, "Who knew that things could be so complicated? Who knew that health care could be so complicated?" I think if he was a student in one of your classes, Sean, he might, upon seeing the F on his midterm say, "Who knew that physics could be so complicated?"
0:12:05 SC: Yeah.
0:12:05 YM: But they don't want to actually admit that they told lies and made huge outside promises. They'll say, "Why haven't I been able to deliver for you, because the opposition are traitors and they are undermining me. Because the free press are fake news and they need to be regulated. Because the independent institutions like judges or the FBI are all biased against me and they now need to have their independence taken away." That's why populism is worrying.
0:12:37 SC: Right and so I'm getting the impression that in some sense, populism is defined in opposition to this group of elites, and maybe that's an ill-defined group but it's the populace versus these people who have the power and don't deserve it, and need to be brought under control. Is that fair?
0:12:56 YM: Yeah, that's right. And you know that's... Again, there's an element to that that is normal in democracy. But to say, "Hey, the people in power right now aren't really serving everybody's interests and we need to correct that." But it goes together for populists with a real lack of respect for the most basic rules and norms of political discourse. So the thing that was very shocking in the United States in 2016 that a presidential candidate would leave in doubt whether he will accept the outcome of the election, that he would not just attack his opponent as having the wrong ideas or perhaps even not being as morally upright as he is but is saying "I'm gonna lock her up." Those things are very typical of populists. That unwillingness to accept the kinds of rules we need not because they're important in themselves or because we somehow have a weird attachment to norms, but because in order for democracy to work, I need to not only be able to elect the guy I want today, I also need to be sure that he's gonna respect the rules and the constraints of his power enough so that I have a chance of electing somebody else four years from now. And in many countries, that doesn't happen.
0:14:10 SC: Yeah. I've always thought that the real birth of a democracy is the first time that the party in power faces an election and loses and hands it over, right? And so you can win an election. That's great. But we assume, as part of having norms and so forth, and we'll probably get into that, but we assume that there are rules that everyone agrees to play by. And certainly in addition to attacking the media, attacking the legitimacy of elections is unfortunately common these days.
0:14:43 YM: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. The real test of a democracy is whether politicians are willing to cede power when they lose. And in many cases, we haven't yet seen the test for a populist in part because... And this is another test, they have skewed the playing field so much that the opposition doesn't have a real chance of winning. So what we're seeing increasingly is that you don't have political systems in which somebody says, "Hey, I'm a dictator now, there's never gonna be an election again." Countries like Russia, even countries like Valenzuela, have elections.
0:15:25 SC: Yeah.
0:15:25 YM: But they are elections in which some of the most promising candidates of the opposition aren't allowed to run, in which they might even be put in jail, in which if you go to a protest or a rally for the opposition candidate, you might be beaten up by the police or you might be locked away. All of the main television channels are under control of the regime or of close allies of it. You have changes to the electoral system that are meant to favor the governing party. And you take all of those things together and you basically have managed elections, in which, people can go out to vote but the opposition doesn't have a fair shot of it. And so what we're seeing in places like Hungary is that the countries are rapidly moving towards such a system. And even if, despite all of those obstacles, the opposition should somehow win, I have real questions in my mind about whether a Viktor Orbán, for example, would voluntarily step down from power.
0:16:26 SC: Well, it's always been... In physics terms, as we were talking about before, there's always been an instability in the very idea of democracy. If you're a dictatorship, and you just keep the squeeze of power carefully enough, you can go on forever. In a democracy, there's always the worry that the people will democratically elect anti-democratic rulers, and that's an instability. If everyone chooses to be non-democratic then democracy can't survive. It's sort of the political science equivalent of Karl Popper's question about tolerance, tolerating the intolerant can be a bad thing. So these societies that are democratic, base their success on the idea that people buy in to the idea of being democratic, which is not just voting for the person you want, but giving up power when you don't want it. Are we seeing the people in these countries become less willing to give up power when they lose?
0:17:27 YM: Right, or to... To the people, I think, are more willing and tempted to vote for politicians who give good signs of not respecting the limits on their power, which is one of the reasons why the title of my book is "The People Versus Democracy". It captures that otherwise paradoxical idea that people vote for a candidate who says, "Hey you know what? Just trust me, leave me all the power, things are gonna work out somehow." By the way, that sound you may hear in the background, I believe is Donald Trump flying into London overhead. So, "Leave it to me. I'll fix it. Just give me a little bit more power. Trust me." Right?
0:18:13 SC: Right.
0:18:13 YM: But then, they start to use that power precisely in order to make it impossible to displace a democratically elected president or prime minister by democratic means. By the way, if you want to hear about a scientist's ideas of the flaws of democracy, I have a good story for you.
0:18:34 SC: Oh, yes, please tell me the good science story.
0:18:36 YM: So, I will not remember the details here. And I may butcher and even embellish a little bit in the process. But there was a great story I came across about a year ago of Kurt Godel, the great logician wanting to take a citizenship exam. So he had come to the United States fleeing the Nazis, he was looking to come to Princeton. One of his best buddies was Albert Einstein who was also there at the same time. He was becoming eligible for citizenship, and he had to take the citizenship test. He came to Einstein who had already gone through the process and said, "What should I do to study for this exam?" And Einstein said, "Well, look, they send you a leaflet. Just read through the leaflet, you'll be fine." But Godel was not one to take this kind of thing without the requisite seriousness.
0:19:26 SC: Logicians, they're trouble. Yeah.
0:19:29 YM: Exactly. He started to really study up very deeply on the Constitution and the separation of powers and how it all works. And on the day of the exam, Einstein decided to go to the test with Godel as moral support, for he seems to have been a little bit of a jackass because on the road trip over, he started asking, "Well, are you sure that you really have prepared well enough for this exam?" and so on. So, Godel comes in a little bit of a bag of nerves. And recognizing Einstein, they ushered both of them into an office, and Einstein is allowed to sit there as the test is administered. The official sort of makes a little bit of small talk with Godel and says, "Alright, I see you come from Austria. Horrible what's been happening there." And Godel says, "Yes. It's terrible. What's happening in my country is terrible." And says, "Well, thankfully, now you're in the United States. Something like that could never happen here." And Godel starts saying, "Well, actually, I have been studying the Constitution and there is a deep flaw." And Einstein kicks him under the table and says, "Shut up." And he just answers a couple of questions.
0:20:43 SC: Yeah. Being completely truthful is not always the best strategy in these situations. I wonder if Godel was in fact, just thinking of the fact that you could vote... That the Constitution allows itself to be changed. You can change it to be anything you want. And so, which brings us to another thing in your book.
0:21:00 YM: But... And I would go further than that, which is, it's not just that the Constitution can be changed, which by the way is very difficult in the United States. But it's that ultimately people have to stand up for it. That if you have a president who does not respect the rightful limits of his authority and he controls a political party which also happens to have a majority in Congress, and which also happens to have judges in the Supreme Court whose loyalty to a particular ideological movement goes more deeply than their loyalty to constitutional values and values of their institution then they can, in practice, get away with all kinds of things that might, in theory, not be allowed. And that is ultimately what the danger has always been, that political forces takes over a system and they simply do things that, on a fair reading of a local Constitution, they shouldn't be allowed to do. But because there are the people who are actually in the offices of institutions that are meant to stop them, don't do their job, have a higher loyalty to a party or a man than the Constitution, they get away with doing it themselves. So perhaps that's what Godel was thinking. Sadly the record of the story does not explain what Godel actually thought the flaw was, so we have to guess.
0:22:27 SC: So there could be all sorts of flaws that we don't even see. But, yeah, maybe...
0:22:31 YM: It may be a flaw that the only Godel was brilliant enough to see.
0:22:34 SC: Exactly. [laughter] You're putting your finger on the role of buy-in to the democratic process, to the norms that we have. One of the big things that has been highlighted in the recent years, since Trump has been elected, is the extent to which we do rely on people behaving well. Not simply following the law as it is written, but following the spirit of the law in some sense, as well. So, is this another new thing, or is this just something that they were less artful about taking advantage of before? It seems to me that in the past there was less political polarization, at least here in the US, and there was more belief in the standards of you should do the right thing even if it doesn't benefit your party. I've been recently re-watching the West Wing, and there's an episode where a Republican committee chairman stops one of the people on his committee from questioning a democratic witness because it wasn't on the topic that they were supposed to be investigating even though it would have been devastating to the Democratic Party for them to do that. And we're sitting there thinking, there's just no way that that would happen right now. If you can take the advantage, you would just win. So it does seem like something has really changed.
0:23:50 YM: Well there's lots of things that happen in West Wing that never happen in real life. One of which is that people always have the perfect retort. The world that everybody had two hours to think of a next move. But no, I think there is a real transformation there which is caused by a whole set of things. One of them is rising polarization, the public as a whole in the United States is not necessarily more extreme in their political views or more polarized now than they were 20 or 40 or 60 years ago, although the political parties are. So the most moderate Democrat used to be far more conservative than the most moderate Republican, that is no longer the case. There is a real gulf between them. And we also see, by the way, many people just having less of an understanding of the Constitution. I think for a long time, there was a very deep commitment to the idea of having to transmit political values from one generation to the next, the idea of the founding fathers of how important it is to have a Constitutional culture, and I think because we started to take our democracy for granted, we slightly took civic education for granted, and we know from various studies that people know much, much less now about the most basic aspects of a Constitution, the kinds of things you need to pass a citizenship test, how many Supreme Court Justices are there and so on, than they did a few decades ago.
0:25:17 YM: I also think that there is a strange element of a use for fiction having been exposed. I mean, even two or three years ago when you go back through what some of the most intelligent commentators were writing, and I didn't agree with them at the time, but there were some of the smartest people writing about this, making thoughtful arguments. They said look somebody like Donald Trump, there's a ceiling of how much support somebody can get. Like that can get. People have this deep commitment to the Constitution, to these norms. If somebody says these kinds of outrageous things, or tells these kinds of lies, most people are just gonna be so turned off by them that they're gonna run away from it, and now we're seeing that's not the case. And that encourages more and more people to act in the same way because apparently all of those things that we thought we would be deeply punished for, we're not punished for. It's like you have an electric fence that bars your road to the supermarket and you always sort of walk around it. And one day by mistake, you touch it and you realize, "Well you know what actually I didn't get a shock from it this time, so perhaps I'll try again tomorrow." And once you've done that seven or eight times, there's no longer a cost in your mind to touching the electric fence, because perhaps there was never a cost to it, but now you know.
0:26:37 SC: Yeah, one of the great things in your book is that you closely analyzed the phrase "liberal democracy". I think a lot of people will just sort of blurt that out as if it's one thing, but there are two words there, liberal and democracy. And you point out that they mean different things and they're both under attack in different ways, although ways that might come together in some ways. So why don't you help us understand that?
0:27:02 YM: Sure, the first thing to say is that just as populism isn't popular-ism, which seems obvious but is important, liberal democracy is not the opposite of conservative democracy. It's a philosophical term in the sense in which I use liberal... Barack Obama was as much of a liberal as George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, they all had a basic commitment to those values. So we use this term liberal democracy, and we don't often think about what it means and how it is that those two elements, the liberal element and the democratic element, may actually be in tension with each other. So the way that I understand it, our political system has these two fundamental goals. The first is to allow individual liberty, that's the liberal element. Liberty.
0:27:50 SC: Classical liberalism.
0:27:53 YM: Yeah. Well, classical liberalism has certain connotations about economic policy, for example, which aren't necessarily entailed here, but it is a set of freedoms that individuals enjoy. So that means that I can say what I want, I can worship as I want or not worship, I can be in whatever relationship I want to be or not be in a relationship and nobody gets to tell me that. And in order to sustain that, I need both things like freedom of speech, and we need to have a separation of powers because if the President dislikes what I say, he can't be capable of just throwing me in prison. We need independent institutions to do prosecution. So that offending somebody with political power can't be dangerous to you. So that's the first element, and the second element is relatively straight forward especially once you've separated the liberal element out. It's a democratic element, it's that, well, you actually need to be able to translate popular views into public policies. Democracy is the rule of the demos, rule of the people. So actually, what happens politically needs to be dependent on what we as individuals want rather than being determined by a king or a dictator, or a priest or an imam or a general.
0:29:12 YM: My fear is that these two constitutive elements of our political system are coming apart, more and more. That for a long time we've had political systems that have been reasonably good, with some obvious shortcomings, about respecting and protecting individual rights, but they havn't done a terribly good job of actually being responsive to popular opinion. And now what we're getting is a political system in which yes, at least at first, some popular views are being translated into public policy, but it is at the price of individual rights, of the rights of minorities, and increasingly are the kinds of separation of powers that we need to sustain in order for the system to be stable over time.
0:30:00 SC: Well this brings up... Yeah, so there's two directions to go here. Let's go in both of them, but first, in some sense you're suggesting that there are countries or super country kind of organizations like the European Union that are in fact anti-democratic, that they are doing things behind the scenes, that... Even in the United States where we still have elections. There's so much of everyday governmental activity that is done by executive departments, people who are not elected, but have enormous power over people's lives, and there is a legitimate complaint that people have, that their views are not being put into public policy. There's this whole invisible structure that is making things happen. And so in some sense, that's a fair critique of the current system, is that right?
0:30:56 YM: Yeah, I think I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's anti-democratic, which sort of implies a conspiracy against the people or conspiracy against democracy. I think it's a little less exciting than that. And so I would say undemocratic, which sounds similar, but it is different in an important respect, that it's often a response to quite real requirements. So our economy has become much more complex, the needs of public policy have become more complicated, in part because we need much more international cooperation, because it's harder to govern the economy. And so what we've seen over the last 50 or 60 years, in virtually every country, is the rise of a set of institutions that do constrain popular will in complicated ways. So on the one hand, we just have parliaments, Congress of the United States not being responsive enough to what people want because of a rising role of money in politics, the revolving door between lobbyists and legislators, and all those kinds of things. And on the other hand, we have a bit of a rise of independent agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, or Consumer Protection Bureau. We have a central bank that's both much more powerful, and in certain ways, more independent than it used to be. We have a huge expansion of judicial review and the growing importance and polarization of the Supreme Court. We have international trade treaties, lots of international agencies to deal with all kinds of issues.
0:32:32 YM: And these things aren't a conspiracy against the people, they are often responding to the fact, for example, that it's really hard to figure out how to keep a power plant safe, and that you need lots of experts to make that decision and having Congress vote on it day in and day out probably doesn't make a lot of sense, so why don't we create an agency that can pass a lot of those nuts and bolts regulations and Congress has the authority to abolish that agency, but it's probably not going to. But there's a real logic behind this, but cumulatively, it does raise the danger that people look at what's going on and say, "You know what, for most of this stuff, I'm never consulted. I don't even understand what it really all means. Congress certainly isn't making those decisions. So how is this really a democracy?"
0:33:15 SC: Yeah, I think this is... I think it's dawning on me during this conversation. I think it's a very, very important point, that even putting aside all the questions about nativism and racism and immigration and so forth, there is a thing that is going on that is purely based on the fact that the world is becoming more complicated and more interconnected, technology is advancing. We see this in purely technological realms where there are computer programs that do really, really important functions in the world that nobody understands. No one person knows what's going on inside that computer program. And the same thing is true about government. Nobody understands everything that's going on. And maybe you could imagine a nightmare scenario where two things happened simultaneously. One is that people become frustrated that their needs are not being met, that they're not getting ahead. They see the government as big and invisible, and elitist, and unresponsive, and they vote populists into power as a response to that. And at the same time, all this complication gives more ways for the people who are really up in the game, people who are powerful and wealthy and connected to take advantage of it and to increase their own wealth. So we see this combination of populism and growing inequality. And when you say that out loud, that's a plausible picture of what we're faced with right now.
0:34:37 YM: Yeah, absolutely, and this particular aspect of it I have to say, is the one that I find the most difficult to get my head around, because the other stuff is really worrying and scary, but I know, in theory at least, what to do in response. So the fact that money plays far too big a role in our politics. Look, that's terrible, and given that the Supreme Court is likely to be dominated by people who don't see that as a problem for the foreseeable future, it is in practice hard to know how to fight it, but in theory I sort of know what to do. We need a much more robust campaign finance regulations, make it harder for people to go from Congress to Wall Street and so on and so forth. So I sort of know what the solutions are, even though I struggle to imagine a path by which we would implement. On this other end, it is harder, because I really do think the two values are in conflict with each other here. And one of those values is responding to popular will and having a sense that there's real democratic accountability, and the other is actually achieving the expertise and the coordination we need in order to solve very real problems that people are gonna be pissed off if we don't solve.
0:35:56 YM: So let's take the topic of climate change. In order to deal with climate change adequately we need to have nearly 200 countries around the world coordinating. If United States does a lot of effort to reduce its carbon emissions, but Russia and China don't at all, we're just not gonna be able to deal with the problem. But how on Earth are we going to structure a decision making process in which we coordinate the actions of 200 countries and yet ordinary citizens feel like, "Yeah, you know what? I already had a say in this"? It's going to be incredibly hard.
0:36:32 SC: Yeah, and the time scale for human beings to care about what happens in the world is not much longer than a human generation or a human lifetime, so that's gonna be a very difficult problem in the best of times. But then we also have, in addition to technology and globalization and connectivity and complexity, we also do have the questions of diversity and immigration and so forth, and they're... Clearly these play a role. In the aftermath of Trump's election there was a debate. Is it... Are people voting for him because of economic anxiety or because of racism or nativism? And clearly, they both play some kind of role. But you had a line in your book which I thought was very provocative. You say, "Neither in North America nor in Western Europe has there ever been a truly equal, multi-ethnic democracy. So what we're trying to create right now is a historically unique experiment." Is it plausible, even if slightly depressing, to think that one of the reasons why democracy has been relatively successful over the past couple of centuries is because it's been kind of a very special kind of democracy where there was always one group that was in charge and therefore didn't feel threatened? And the attempt to really be democratic, not only among people, but among different kinds of people in different groups is much less stable and harder to maintain?
0:37:55 YM: That's a fear. I mean, one of the striking things about our political history. Well beyond... Well before the prime of a democratic age, is that those states that were reasonably democratic tended to be more homogeneous. That when you think of examples of a thriving multi-ethnic state or city before, say, 1900, you might think of Vienna in the 19th century or you might think of Istanbul or Baghdad at various points in the Middle Ages, you might think of Rome in the 2nd or 3rd century. But those were usually... One these places either weren't democratic or at least where minorities didn't really have voting rights. And in a way, that's obvious, when you think about it because it's easier for me to tolerate somebody who might have a slightly different culture from me, a different religion, who perhaps has different ethnic origin, if I don't feel like they have a voice over my political fate. "Now I don't have any power, he doesn't have any power, all the decisions are made by the monarch anyway, so alright." Once I look at people who are quite different from me and say, "Oh, these people actually can go and vote and affect what happens to me," it becomes harder.
0:39:19 YM: So that's one historical worry that I have, and when you see how deep resentment is, especially, and there's increasingly been social science on this, of people who used to be dominant and are now threatening the dominance. And in Europe, the idea of what it was to be Italian, or French, or German was always pretty deeply mono-ethnic and mono-cultural, it was somebody who was descended from a particular ethnic stock, and so, suddenly these societies are asked to say, "Oh hey, you know what somebody who comes from other parts of the world, even if they're born here but their parents did, they can be a member of our society, too," and thus feel resistance against that. In the States and in Canada there's always been a multi-ethnic society, but there's been one, as you point out, with a very deep racial and religious hierarchy in which members of a particular group had big advantages over others.
0:40:12 YM: And so, again, the people who are having some of those unearned privileges taken away are going to be quite resentful about that. Now, I don't condone that. I know I don't have a right to those privileges, but I think it's actually important to take a moment to try and understand where that sentiment comes from. And I always picture somebody who's not perhaps especially talented, not especially good-looking, not especially affluent... And in Italy, in 1970, they might have said, "You know what, I may not get the most social respect and all of that but at least I'm Italian rather than Albanian, and at least I'm part of the majority population rather than one of those Moroccan immigrants." Well, now suddenly, the kid of those Albanian immigrants might be making more money than you, he might be your boss, he might be representing you in parliament. And I celebrate that as political progress, but it isn't too surprising that people who have that status advantage taken away from them, who can no longer say, "Hey, thus by virtue of being a member of this group, I have a certain kind of social status that's superior," then they're gonna be resentful for having that taken away from them.
0:41:34 SC: There was a sociologist who did a study that I read back a couple of years ago, I'll have to look her up, I forget her name, but it was one of these things, she was ahead of the curve in terms of asking the question, "What do the Trump voters really want?" And she embedded herself. She was a Berkeley leftist progressive so she went to a...
0:41:55 YM: I think you're thinking of Arlie Hochschild.
0:41:57 SC: Oh, probably. Yes, exactly. And just talked to people and sort of lived their lives and got to know where they were and she came up with this metaphor and she then read the metaphor back to them and they said, "Yes, that's exactly it," and the metaphor was, "You think of yourself as standing in line in the race to life and there's better times ahead and you're walking toward them slowly and you're doing your work and it's effort, but you're making progress and then you see off to the side a whole bunch of new people skipping the line, just being elevated in front of you, not waiting their turn and this feels unfair to you and these are immigrants or minorities or gays or lesbians or whatever, or even women for that matter." And people said yes, that's more or less how they feel even if it's not really an accurate representation. So I want to give value to that feeling, how can we give people back the feeling that they are in charge of their destiny? This must have at least some role to be played by inequality and the fact that more and more wealth is going to the wealthier, but still on a broader scale we need to be able to make people think that this is their country. They can get ahead. It's their country as well as other people's countries and that's a good thing rather than a bad thing. I'm not quite sure how to get there in any simple way.
0:43:20 YM: Yeah, and here again, the striking thing is that we've never quite done that, so we should be prepared for some pain, but what you're describing is exactly right. We need to figure out how we can defend minority groups against frankly required obvious attacks that they're suffering at the moment and more broadly the disadvantages that they have suffered for a longer time and at the same time, we need to make sure that the majority group isn't assured of having special privileges. I don't think we can justly ensure that, but that they feel like they are still going to get to the front of the line at some point as well. That the goals that they have and the inspiration that they have are going to be fulfilled and that they don't see those as being threatened by those broader cultural and demographic changes. And doing both of those things at the same time is incredibly hard, but our ability to win the kind of society we want is dependant on that.
0:44:33 YM: And I wanna add something here which is important, which is that I think sometimes I hear a lot of impatience with that question from people who perhaps are members of minority groups, or just more broadly from the left and I get that because here we are, we're already suffering from historical discrimination. We're being attacked right now and we're supposed to worry about the feelings of those people who have it better than us anyway. I absolutely get that reaction. But I do think that there's a slight contradiction in how we sometimes think about that, which is that I hear the same people say, "We live in a society in which racism and white supremacy and structural injustice goes incredibly deep and the majority group has these incredible reserves of power and influence and so on and at the same time, we should not give an inch to them we should be absolutely uncompromising." And I'm not quite sure how we reconcile those two things, 'cause if you really think that the majority group has such deep power and influence then in order to affect any kind of change you need to make your case to them to some extent, right?
0:45:45 SC: Yeah. You need allies.
0:45:46 YM: Because if it's ... then if you don't have at least some of them onboard, then you're just gonna lose every time and so I think that the most helpful way of doing this is to actually appeal to the better instincts of perhaps not every single member of a majority group, but part of the majority group, and this is by the way what the Civil Rights movement did, it's in many ways what Barack Obama did and it can be effective. And I'm sure it's frustrating. I'm sure it sometimes means that we can't be quite as blunt, at least in certain parts of politics, as we would like to be, not to vent our justified anger quite as freely as we would like, but if you actually care about making this country better and winning those political victories, I feel that it's necessary to some extent.
0:46:37 SC: Yeah, and I feel it's easy for me to give advice to people who are members of historically discriminated against groups since almost none of the groups that I'm in have faced that, but I also think it's important to distinguish between groups and individuals and I think the fact that there is white privilege and male privilege and cisgender privilege, etcetera, I think these are very real things. Those don't mean that even if you're a member of all those groups your life was easy or you haven't struggled and I think that there are real struggles that people go through no matter what groups they're members of. In some sense everyone struggles, but there are some poor people or people who economics and politics have left behind in a very real way and there's nothing wrong with taking their concerns seriously. It's kind of crucially important to the bigger democratic project.
0:47:28 YM: Well, and right, and I think there's a real problem with distribution here, which is to say that obviously on average, members of historically discriminated groups by virtue of being members of historically discriminated groups have faced many more obstacles and many more struggles than members from majority groups and that is a deep injustice that as a society we need to reconcile, but obviously the kinds of people who end up being the spokespeople for that position also aren't the spokespeople by coincidence they're the spokespeople because they have had more success in life and perhaps also had some advantages relative to other members of their own group.
0:48:11 YM: And so you often end up with a dynamic in which people who actually personally have also discriminate... Experienced real discrimination and so on that have gone to some of the best colleges in the country, make six figure salaries and so on, sort of sit there explaining, why it is that most... Perhaps all members of a dominant group have these huge privileges and you end up people... With people who haven't had a great education, who perhaps have had real personal tragedies happening to them, who perhaps have had abusive parents or come from households that are deeply dysfunctional sort of listening to this and say, "Oh you, professor so and so or fellow at so and so instituiton or columnist at so and so newspaper or magazine explain to me why is it that you're so disadvantaged?" And that's a real problem with the dynamic, right? Which doesn't invalidate the fact, but of course there are those underlying structural injustices. But I think it means that we need to be a little sensitive of how to communicate that in a way that people are willing to have an open mind towards.
0:49:24 SC: Yeah, and again, I feel bad asking people who are members of groups who have been discriminated against, to be patient and understanding and empathetic to the people who are members of groups who have been dominating them for hundreds of years. But it's also a good strategy long term. I think there's a place for bomb throwing and raising a ruckus. There's also a place for sitting down and reasoning together and appreciating each other's points of view becoming less and less common.
0:49:53 YM: I just want to empathize two things. A, this is not a moral claim it's a strategic claim. It's just a claim about what to do in order to ensure that people like Donald trump aren't in a position to do tremendous damage and violence to those groups. And B, I think, we would do well not to talk about how much of a ruckus should you raise and how loud should you be about that. I think to me it's about the manner in which we talk about it, not how much we talk about it or how passionately we talk about it. Which is to say that, at a moment in which minorities are under a very real attack there's no limit to how much we should talk about it. I just think that the strategically productive way of talking about it is to actually say this is the kind of society we want and here's why that society is one which would be appealing to all America. And why despite the dark chapters in American history it actually calls on the best traditions in American history and it calls on the ideals of the founding fathers even if the founding fathers themselves were in many ways flawed. And that's something that Martin Luther King to Barack Obama, a lot of people in the history of our country have done incredibly successfully. So that to me appears to be the way to actually make headway.
0:51:19 SC: Yeah and I'm gonna choose to continue to be optimistic on balance about the force of reason and community and appealing to the better angels of our nature. However let me also say that I read your book and it's very depressing. [laughter] There's real prospect of things going badly. I don't want to be an alarmist or I don't want to overreact. It's certainly in my mind very possible that despite everything Donald Trump and the United states and other people in other countries will be moments in history not precursors of an entirely new phase of history. But there's also another possibility that things go just disastrously wrong. If you asked what would it be like for a functioning, healthy democratic liberal democracy like the United States to turn into an authoritarian dictatorship? Maybe the precursors would look more or less like what we're seeing. So how seriously should we be worried about a true collapse of liberal democracy in a country like the United States?
0:52:34 YM: Well I think the... There's a way of interpreting a question purely about probabilities and a way of interpreting it about expected values. Which is to say that, I don't think that the likelihood of liberal democracy collapsing in the United States is over 50%, it's probably quite a bit lower than 50%. But given how disastrous that outcome should be I think we should be very worried about it.
0:53:00 SC: 5%?
0:53:02 YM: I don't know, it's hard to put a percentage around it. But the striking thing is that five or 10 years ago political scientists thought that it was essentially impossible, that the likelihood was zero, that once countries have changed... This is your point from earlier. Have changed governments through free and fair elections at least a couple of times. Once they had a GDP per capita of more than about $14,000 in today's terms, they were safe we didn't have to worry about them. And we've already seen in countries like Hungary where that's not true that you have authoritarian populists take over there and in my mind destroy liberal democracy for sure, probably not even persevere illiberal democracy, but erect a form of competitive totalitarianism. And now we're seeing the president of the United States take the first steps that people like Putin in Russia, like Erdoğan in Turkey, that Hugo Chavez in Venezuela have taken a few years ago. And because we're a richer country, we're a country with a more vibrant civil society, a very deep constitutional tradition, there's every hope that we're gonna be able to stop that. That at step three or step four, Donald Trump is not gonna be able, perhaps not want to, take step five and six and seven as well. But certainly as a scholar of comparative politics, the pattern I'm seeing, the direction we're going in, is very concerning indeed.
0:54:29 SC: Yeah, as a good Bayesian I feel it's my responsibility intellectually, to actually assign probabilities to everything that I think might happen. But I take your point, which is that we've definitely undergone a change from thinking that, that kind of disaster in the United States is simply inconceivable for all practical purposes, to at least thinking that it's conceivable. And if it is rare and it doesn't happen, then there's a silver lining there that we take this more seriously and hopefully we can fix things down the road. The pessimism that I have about that is one of the many ways I was wrong about politics over the last few years was, I dramatically underestimated the extent to which serious grown up members of the Republican Party would resist the worst impulses of a Trump-like administration. And I take it that that's also happening in other countries. You join a group, you do game theory. What is best for my re-election chances? That's just way more important than what's best for the larger country, and that's even more depressing than the fact that one person or another, wins an election to me.
0:55:35 YM: Yeah, so a few thoughts here, the first is that as a political scientist I've always been quite skeptical of some of my colleagues, who took a rational choice approach to much of a political world and in particular to this case, right? Where we said look I mean basically you can just think what maximizes a politician's chance of re-election and then from that very simple assumption you can derive most of their behavior and for that, you know I don't quite buy that. People are more complicated than that. Perhaps I'm a bit more idealistic than that. Well, I have become much more sympathetic to that approach over the last couple of years. I have to tell you.
0:56:10 YM: The other thing is that I used to be the most pessimistic person in the room. I mean, I'm a sort of democracy doom hipster. I worried about democracy before it was cool and I used to be called a "Cassandra" a lot of the time as a result. And I always wanted to say to people, "But Cassandra was right, damn it, read the story." I didn't, it made me sound like much of a crank. But I was a pessimist in debates about what would happen to the Republican Party once Donald Trump won the presidency. I thought... The optimists thought, "You know what? These people have very different beliefs from Donald Trump and they have deep commitment to constitutional values, and so they're just gonna rein him in." I thought, "No that's not true. The base is actually of Trump at this point. You know a couple of them might flip, and over time, Donald Trump is going to succeed in replacing the party with his own base. He's gonna have Trump's candidates running the primary and there'll be a sought of Republican civil war for four, or six, or eight years but eventually it'll turn into a populist party."
0:57:19 YM: Well, it turns out, speaking of having to update your probabilities, that we're both wrong. That what happened is much more extreme than what I predicted, and that's that Republicans just flipped, they said, "You know what Trump is so popular. This is clearly where we're at now. Even though for many years, I talked about values that are very, very different. I'm just gonna go with this now." And so, much more quickly, much more thoroughly than pessimists like me had predicted, Donald Trump has wound up being in control of the Republican Party. And as Bayesians, I think we should therefore also update our probability of similar shifts happening in our institutions. I'm much more worried now than I was six or seven months ago, about the Supreme Court acquiescing with extreme behavior by Donald Trump.
0:58:16 SC: Yeah, and the evidence is there. So we collect more data, we update our priors and that's not the... It's not good news for optimism, but there's still some remaining. Let me just play the devil's advocate here. Part of the pessimism that I have, is that I know some pretty smart people in academia and elsewhere, who are saying, "Sure Donald Trump is not gonna win any IQ tests, but if we look worldwide, if we look not just at Europe but if we look at China, or Russia, isn't it possible that there's a sense in which a strong... Even a strong man government gets more done?" Especially looking at China, there are people who say, "Well sure, it's not a democracy, human rights are not good, but boy, they can really build bridges, really, really well, isn't there a trade off there that we might think about buying into? What do you say to that argument?
0:59:20 YM: Well, a few things. First of all the alternative systems that work very well actually, very limited in number. In China, that's worked reasonably well economically for now. There's a real question about whether it can transition from being a mid-income economy to a high income economy. But it's very difficult to emulate China. I like to quip that China works very well in practice, but it's a mess in theory. It has a very unique history that unless you happen to have a Communist Party kicking around, that's been around for 60 years, and still sort of claims to be Maoist but actually is State Capitalist, it's very difficult to know how you would even go about emulating China. So, let's look at the countries which do actually resemble Donald Trump. Let's look at the countries in which authoritarian populists have taken over. Countries like Venezuela. Countries like Turkey and Russia and Hungary. And they're not doing particularly well economically.
1:00:18 SC: Right.
1:00:18 YM: They're deeply corrupt. Recep Erdoğan just made his son-in-law the new finance minister.
1:00:26 SC: That would never happen here, it's okay.
1:00:27 YM: Unimaginable. Do we even know who Trump's son-in-law is?
1:00:32 SC: Never heard of the guy. Yeah, behind the scenes.
1:00:34 YM: And this is by the way, something when I talk to members of the business community, I have to emphasize to them, I mean, you've already seen companies like AT&T pay, essentially, bribes to Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer. You have seen attacks on American companies for the business decisions they took. Like Harley-Davidson, threatening tax retaliation, and so on. Rule of law is one of the reasons why the American economy has worked incredibly well. You don't want a situation in which your success as a businessman depends on whether or not you are in favor with the regime. And that's not a natural thought. That is how business runs in many countries in the world and those countries tend to have much lower growth rates.
1:01:18 SC: Okay, good, this has been great. To close, I will play the role of the genie coming out of the bottle and I will give you one wish. But I'm only gonna give you a menu. You don't get to make up your wish.
1:01:30 YM: Oh, good. That makes it easier.
1:01:32 SC: Yeah, exactly, it is a multiple choice genie. And so, here are your choices with the goal in mind of some combination of making the country more pluralistic and liberal democracy successful. So one option is you could radically improve our educational system, secondary and primary. You could really inculcate values. You could teach kids that diversity is important and the constitution is important, and rule of law is important, democracy and all that stuff. That's one option. Another is you could really impose policies that would help fight inequality. Redistribute some of the wealth, not by necessarily socializing everything, but just a real tax code that took capital gains and wealth into account and really helped people, maybe a basic income or something like that. That is the second option. And the third option is, we could make sure... I don't know how this would happen... But we could make sure, the media actually told the truth. [laughter] We could have different voices in the media but make sure that there is not any sort of state... Quasi state-sponsored propaganda machine that gave people the news that they thought that they should be hearing. So those are your three choices. Which one of those would you think is the most important?
1:02:48 YM: I'm gonna be very annoying here.
1:02:50 SC: Ah!
1:02:50 YM: And give sort of literalist, natural scientist perhaps, even if I may be so bold, answer. And I think, a lot of the things you're describing are different parts of an equilibrium. And it's very hard to change one of those without changing the other. So I think if you had much more economic equality, you also would have a much better education system.
1:03:11 SC: Right.
1:03:12 YM: And if people were better educated then they would also be less likely to watch Fox News. And so, I think that these things go together or fall together.
1:03:32 SC: Also, there's no such thing as genies. So you could have said that. That would have been an adequate naturally scientific response.
1:03:39 YM: Rah, damn. I missed the easy opportunity, that would have been the easy way out. [laughter]
1:03:43 SC: Alright, Yascha, thanks so much. Even if it's not always making us more optimistic, I think it is important to understand what's going on. That's what really gives me optimism, that there are people like you that are really taking these things seriously. Looking at them as carefully and rationally as we can and trying to find a good way forward.
1:04:00 YM: And if I'm allowed a closing word, there's things that people can do. I mean the people who are listening to this podcast. You can... If you have an answer to Sean's excellent question about whether it's A, B, or C, then go and work at that. If you think it's A, go and work at improving the education system. If it's B, then go and fight for more income equality. If you think its C, then go and found your own media company. Do whatever it takes. But I am worried about the future, but I'm not fatalistic because I do think it's subject to human agency. And unlike the citizens of China and North Korea, and Turkey and Russia, we all still have the liberty to go and fight for our political values. So that's what our job is now.
1:04:47 SC: Good. You correctly perceived the subtext of the question.
1:04:52 YM: Oh, great.
1:04:53 SC: Alright, Yascha Mounk thank you so much for being on the podcast.
1:04:55 YM: Thank you. This was great fun.
1:04:58 SC: Thanks.
[music]
The Trump phenomenon originates, it is widely held, with a groundswell of American opinion that representitive democracy is not authentically representing the American people. Rather, the reins of American so-called liberal democracy are in the hands of intellectualised elitists who represent themselves and their own interests – no doubt sincerely from their points of view. Trump just happened to be the guy there at the time who said the ‘right’ things. It could have been anyone saying the ‘right’ things. Populist opinion is not perforce negative or bad. It quite obviously is someting that needs to be accommodated in America’s democracy before American democracy falls apart and the creepy-crawlies always in the woodwork crawl out to exploit the malaise.
The solution in my view is to get elitism out of the system, at least out of the driving seat. Too much is happening around everyone that has no discernible public mandate. It just happens anyway. People need to see that things happening around them do have a public mandate. They should be able to ask around friends and acquaintances, ‘Did anyone ask you?’, and the answer, at least sometimes, is yes.
Some comments:
1. The discussion, though interesting, is somewhat too abstract, and largely ahistorical. The American democratic practice, including Trumpism, has had marked periods of illiberalism, intolerance of minorities, ethnic cleansing, racism, crooked elections, and punctual failures to abide by constitutional order. In foreign affairs, it’s been generally the practice to coerce near neighbors directly, and less directly more serious peer competitors. But the general historical trend has been that these distortions have been constrained over time. Some practices of the past would not occur today, even with Trump. I could cite examples, but I don’t think it’s necessary. The point is that the institutions are robust, and will not be easily dissuaded from applying any number of sanctions (on Trump or whoever) as needed.
2. The popular democratic will of the “whole” polity expresses itself largely through elections, which take place from time to time. We elect governments. But, as someone aptly put it, governments are really a big insurance company with an army. We the people pay premiums (taxes) for assured services, such as education, health, sanitation, justice and regulation, and other social safety net items — and for defense, of course.
3. But only indirectly do we control (if at all) all the other activities that fall under the rubric of private capitalistic enterprises. And these millions of private enterprises don’t function by “democratic” rules; mostly they function by top-down, hierarchic chains ordered by shareholders and managers. These entities in turn create physical entities and contract workers (us) to deliver a certain product or other. This “capitalism” is highly successful, and I daresay has been the main driver in the success of modern democracies.
4. But capitalism, a system which we all depend on, is intrinsically not democratic. If it has its way, it prefers the corporatist state, a captured entity. So at the very heart of the practice of constitutional government, of equal rights, of equal protection, of bedrock principles of free speech, etc., etc., there lurks this beast that is essentially self-seeking, profit-maximizing, determined to limit its liabilities as much as possible, straining against any constraint on its private mission.
5. So, in general, for capitalists some of the constitutional rules are really good for business, but some of the other rules which complete the circle aren’t so necessary. I think this tension is inevitable within our democratic practices.
Complete hand waving and sloganeering. His ‘solution’ is without meaning.
Very high quality podcast overall, but some constructive feedback for your sound engineer, Sean: this one sounded like your guest was calling in on a cellular connection, and using speakerphone at that. Maybe just a pet peeve of mine, but somehow we put up with lousy sound quality, which really detracts from the content. This was an aberration from your usually good production values, so hopefully a fluke.