Dan Snow's History Hit - What is Going on With Democracy?

Episode Date: July 25, 2021

Democracy is in crisis around the world. Dr Robert Saunders, from Queen Mary University of London, is back on the podcast to discuss why it is under threat. From the changing media landscape, to technological advances and questionable electoral systems, hear why we are facing this global shift and what the future may hold. Are authoritarian regimes dealing with the world’s problems better? How have politicians changed over the years? And how do we refresh our democracies? Robert is currently researching a new history of democracy in Britain.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Democracy, folks, democracy. It's in crisis. Around the world, people are chipping away at what, for generations, we considered to be a consensus on how we ought to govern our society. You could have representative democracies and rules-based democracies in which the people were nominally sovereign and they expressed their will through elected representatives. Electoral systems may differ. Some produce profoundly anti-majoritarian outcomes, but there was a sense in which people voted in Canada, France, UK, US, various places like that, then the composition of the resulting parliament or government would be kind of vaguely democratic and acceptable to the majority of people that cast

their votes. Well, things are changing, folks. You've had me talk a lot on the podcast. We've talked to lots of brilliant scholars like Anne Applebaum on why democracy is under threat. Under threat from the economic challenges we face, the technological transformation we're going through, global warming, China, alternative systems, and just populist strongmen realising it could be to their electoral advantage to undermine democracy. All that means it's time for a pod. Yeah, it's time for history to do our democracy special. What the hell's going on with democracy? And for that, I've got one of the most brilliant minds of people who come on this pod. He's been on several times before. He is Rob Saunders.

He's a reader in modern British history at Queen Mary, University of London. He is brilliant on social media. He brings that 19th century, that 20th century context and history to debates that rage in the present. Pointing out that we've been through things like this before. People have said things like this before. Try and enrich our understanding of what is going on at the moment. He is writing a gigantic new history of democracy in Britain. And he is the man to talk about why democracy is having a tough time. If you want to listen to previous podcasts with Rob Saunders, you'd be very wise. You can

subscribe to History It. It's our new site. We've got a TV channel. There are hundreds of documentaries on there, hundreds of documentaries, more being added all the time. And then we've also got all the back episodes of this podcast on there to be listened to as well with our ads. So please head over to historyhit.tv. Just type in historyhit.tv. You get a month for free if you sign up now. And for less than the price of an expensive cappuccino every month, you get a subscription to History Hit. It's awesome. You're going to love it. month for free if you sign up now and for less than the price of an expensive cappuccino every month you get a subscription to history it's awesome you're gonna love it but in the meantime everybody here is dr rob saunders enjoy robert thank you very much for coming back on the pod it's a pleasure thanks for having me on

we've got 20 minutes or so to answer the biggest question facing up. Well, apart from climate, although it's intimately connected with climate, the biggest question of our time at the moment, what on earth is going on with democracy? Why is it under attack? Sustained assault from every direction imaginable, every single continent. What's going on? And I guess, am I right to say, this is the big question we never thought we were going to ask in our lifetime, is it, Robert? I'm older than you, I'm sure, but in the 1990s, we thought this was a settled issue. I think it's a huge change. If we go back to the 1990s, you'd have the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.

And we all thought that the big constitutional questions were over, that liberal democracy would now extend its empire across the world. And the question was simply what we did with those constitutional powers. But maybe if we put it in a longer historical context, if you would ask the Victorians about democracy, they would have said this is always a short-lived, highly fragile system that has never lasted for more than about 200 years. And where are we in relation to the American Revolution or the Reform Acts in Britain? Maybe we're at the end of its lifespan. Yes, and you've raised another good point, which is, please, everyone, do not pile into our mentions on Twitter to talk about the word democracy. By

democracy here, Robert, we are talking about balanced constitutions that recognise the rule of law, precedent statute law, with democratic elements to subsist in practice in places like Britain and France and the US and India for decades. I think that's a really important point that people often talk as if democracy is dying, but we should remember democracy comes in many different shapes and sizes. And it might be that what's in retreat at the moment is liberal democracy or parliamentary democracy, and that what we're moving at the moment is liberal democracy or parliamentary democracy, and that what we're moving towards instead is a more authoritarian model of democracy or a more executive-led model of democracy. Maybe, and maybe direct democracy. We'll talk

about that when we talk about technology in a second. First of all, let's just get it clear. People might be listening to this podcast thinking, these guys, they're just over-exaggerating, everything is fine. You're much more measured than I am. And I've been really surprised by some of your recent pronouncements on what you see happening in the UK. As a Canadian, I saw the rot set in in Canada with surprising anti-democratic urges, the last Conservative government in Canada. We got Bolsonaro, we got Erdogan, we got BJP in India. We have got Trump and Boris and France. Are we right to be white? Is there a problem, first of all? I think there is. I think we have to try to find some sort of middle ground between apocalypse and complacency. That the idea that democracy is in danger is not a new idea.

You'd find it in the 1970s, you'd find it quite commonly in the 19th century as well. But I think quite a lot of unprecedented things have been happening recently. The idea that a government shuts down parliament to try to exclude it from decision making is really unusual. The idea that you have a mob storming the capital in order to try to overturn a democratic election, this isn't usual. So I don't think that we should immediately lock onto the idea that democracy is about to collapse, but I think we should accept that't think that we should immediately lock on to the idea that democracy is about to collapse but I think we should accept that the freedoms that we enjoy and the democratic systems that we value are not part of the laws of nature that they are human creations and they can rise and they can

fall and that if we take our responsibilities as democratic citizens seriously then we have some responsibility to look out for signs of decay and to try to turn that back. And what other things? You mentioned prorogation here in the UK. We had the prorogation crisis in Canada 10, 15 years ago now. What else has come to symbolise this round of decay here and abroad? Have we all learned that actually a lot of it was just about individuals having respect for things like precedent and former practice? Lots of things that you actually can't codify, you can't insist on people behaving in certain ways, because democracy is about outlook, it's about a way of being, it's about how we think and act. Yes, Gladstone gave a speech in

1886 where he talked about how liberty depended not on statutes, but on the securities that are written on the hearts and minds of men. And we would, of course, want to say men and women. But I think he had a really important point that all the protections in the world, all the constitutional statutes are of value, but you need a political culture that cares about things like truth-telling in politics, that cares about things like corruption and integrity, and that recognises, as I said, some kind of responsibility to maintain the institutions that we all say that we believe in. Let's look at reasons why, at this moment, we think democracy is on the back foot. Liberal represented democracy is having a bad decade. I think you and I both are obsessed by the history

point. Let's come to that at the end. Let's talk initially about some other areas. And one of them that I want to start on is this idea that government has become so complex and our expectations of government have become so ambitious, if you like, that we expect government to protect us from everything, from flooding and COVID and protect us quite immediately. And that liberal democracy written off, as you pointed out once, as sort of old men talking, is not dynamic enough. And in fact, you could argue some people losing faith in democracy because we want fast action about global warming. Is there a scale complexity of government that means that this Victorian ideas, 19th

century idea of rational, slow debate in a parliament is somehow unsuited to delivering what modern citizens want. I think there is a problem. The more complex government becomes, the more areas of the economy and of society that it regulates and the more diverse and pluralistic society becomes. That's very difficult for systems that really evolved in order to constrain governments. The American constitution was designed partly to stop bad kings tyrannising. Parliament built their power partly as a way of making it difficult for monarchs to tax people excessively or to do terrible things through the statute book. So if you want government to be active and you want it

to be quick then these systems aren't particularly well set up to do that. On the other hand though, I think you could say we now have several decades of experience of very rapid, rushed legislation in which we put largely unchecked powers into the hands of a small number of ministers. We might ask whether the fruits of that have been entirely productive either, and that sometimes even in a complex world, moving slowly might be better than kind of veering like a shopping trolley from one side of the aisle to the other. I mean, as ever, you're blowing my mind. It's such a good point. Of course, parliaments, back from Simon de Montfort, but certainly back in the 17th, 18th century, the idea of parliaments was to kind of stop governments. It was stopping executives, let's not have a war, let's not fund

this programme. And actually, as we've come to demand something very different from, well, it's the other problem, Parliament and government have now sort of elided as a single entity, which is a curious one. But we actually want probably more, don't we? We think we want things fixed quicker and schools improve faster. So actually, that early modern model, there is a problem there. Well, parliaments are really annoying institutions. That they are talking shops. That's where the word comes from, from the French word parler. That they are full of people who want to talk.

They institutionalise opposition and resistance. They make it very difficult for governments to function. And there is always, therefore, perhaps especially in democracy, a powerful dynamic that just wants to sweep all of this rubbish out the way and have someone who actually governs quickly and impressively. And so in order to resist that urge, you have to have a memory of what the alternative is. And that the alternative quick government is great if it's doing what you want it to. But what if it isn't? Or what if the strong man in charge of the government is also a bad man

or a corrupt man or someone who wants to wage war on one part of the population? So yes, parliaments are annoying, but that might be because the alternative is worse. And what if, even if that man or woman, the strong man or woman who began as a rational, brilliant, enlightened philosopher king was corrupted and turned mad by simply being vested with that kind of level of executive power, right? That's the problem with the system. Exactly. And we'll come on to history later, but this is where I think historical memory is important. That British and American society in the 19th century were both saturated with the memory of revolutions, in Britain's case, a glorious revolution against a corrupt monarch. So the

memory of tyrants or corrupt monarchs was very, very powerful. And we've really lost that in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. Yes. And Robert, I guess it strikes me that fascism after the First World War, and if you like this kind of aggressive executive we've seen in the last 10 years, it often comes after a kind of crisis, a discontinuity. And I wonder whether, you know, you get that thing after the First World War where I find it's really harrowing. Those veterans who were traumatised. We didn't fight through that war.

So I have to sit on this subcommittee. We need change now. Let's get these homes built. Let's get these roads built. Come on, let's get these trains running on time. We can build a better country. And we kind of deserve it because we've been through the fire. And obviously, for some people, 2008 represented a terrible economic catastrophe. But I wonder whether 2008, Covid, other things mean that there is that sense

afoot now, which is we don't have time for this nonsense. I think fascism and authoritarianism bizarrely often come out of quite noble impulses. If you look at a figure like Oswald Mosley in the 1930s, a lot of his support came out of precisely that sense that you've just described, that a wartime generation had been betrayed, that the better world that people have been promised hadn't been delivered, and all the suffering of the war and all the destruction of the war had simply sunk into a kind of swamp of old men just talking and protecting their own interests. And then, of course, you see in Germany and in Italy and in other fascist regimes what that discontent leads to when unrestricted, and that pulls people perhaps back away from that authoritarian model. But perhaps at the moment, again, we're seeing the frustrations of Parliament.

Why can't it deal with climate change? Why isn't it quicker to deal with economic problems? Why did it allow austerity for so many years? And insofar as there is an authoritarian model out there, it's perhaps China, which might be an attractive model in some respects, which we might say is tackling some of these questions more quickly and more effectively. Yeah, let's come to China now, because actually there are Western environmentalists who have a very, you know, it's fascinating question about China, which is at the same time, deeply disturbing and depressing for lots of reasons, including genocide. But politically, let's park that. But it's depressing just because of the catastrophic environmental

damage been inflicted on that country by their unbelievably rapid industrialization, economic advance. But it's also a place where there is some hope environmentally, because the Chinese government go, we are going to plant 200 billion trees right now. And they don't have to wait and ask permission. Does China appear, particularly the slightly fragile decade that the Western economic models had, the slightly battered sense of our self-confidence of 2008, is having another poll star to look at part of this story as well? I think if you went back to the 19th century... Let's do it. That's where you're happiest. I'm ready. I'm here for it. It's always good to go back to the 19th century.

If you were British, you could look around the world, and it was fairly obvious to you that a parliamentary, at least quasi-democratic system, was the best form of government that had made Britain the richest, the freest, the most powerful nation in the world. And insofar as it had a rival, it was democratic America. So the facts of life, the facts of the universe, seem to support democratic and parliamentary government. That only really starts to change when you get the rise of Germany in the late 19th century, and then when you get the authoritarian regimes of the 1930s. Briefly, again, there is an alternative, but that alternative goes sour and collapses. So we don't have a lot of experience over the last 200 years of living in democracies,

but worrying that non-democratic states might actually be doing things better, that they might be growing their economies faster, that they might be tackling the big problems of the world more quickly than us. And that's a new kind of intellectual problem. Do you have dark nights for Sol Robert when you think, what if there's something in this? What if John Locke, what if everything I believe and I've written about and think about isn't correct? What if the authoritarian model can develop a better standard of living, achieve better outcomes? Well, I think it's the paradox of liberalism. Because it's based on doubt, it's based on the idea that the other side of the argument might be right, then it has to be undergirded by the sense that liberalism might all be a terrible mistake. But broadly, no. I think

authoritarian regimes, of course, will sometimes make better decisions. And when they do, they will be able to enact them more quickly. The question is, are they more likely than democracies to do that over a sustained period of time? And I think that's unlikely. But the case for a democracy is that it can draw in a much wider range of voices and decision making. It's not necessarily going to make the right decision first, but it can correct its mistakes. You can remove a government that's done the wrong thing and replace it with someone else. And that corrective mechanism is perhaps something that an authoritarian regime like China's doesn't have so powerfully embedded in it. I think about democracy as a voter, and I think I don't really have much power over the direction of policy in so many ways. But I do

have that one critical power, and that is I can help get rid of manifestly rubbish governments. And our opinion of governments can change very radically. That figures like Margaret Thatcher can win three landslide elections in a row and then be gone in two weeks. Or figures like Tony Blair, or perhaps at some point Boris Johnson will cease to be Prime Minister. That the fortunes of politics in a democracy are very volatile. And that's good both as a corrective mechanism, but also as a kind of warning sign hanging over people while they are governing. That old phrase, remember that you are mortal. Yes, like the slave with the Roman general at his triumphs. Remember, you too are mortal. Now, so okay, people are eyeing up China,

like that brilliant internet meme that everyone always posts. What about technology? I was thinking the other day after one of my highly enjoyable interactions on social media, polls are fascinating, aren't they? Because we are obsessed with polls, the Clinton administration famously. And so we have this kind of perverted form of direct democracy, where in a curious way, public opinion helps to shape decision making on a day to day basis. And and yet we have none of the advantages of direct democracy which is actually you know proper popular so if we're going to make decisions if everything's going to be based on the polls so we might as well actually vote on our phones you know we might as well cut out the middleman the polling company actually do it properly

and then we would actually take it perhaps more seriously i think when you would give everyone the vote there's a sense in which you might educate yourself for voting you take it seriously you've lost some ownership and pride over your democracy. You start to rise as rights and responsibilities. If this is at the moment, it's kind of really quite passive, but also quite direct democracy. It strikes me as almost the worst of both worlds. Well, when polling emerged in the 1930s, the great hope was that this would be a democratic instrument. It would mean that the relationship between the citizen and the state wouldn't just be something that happened once every four or five years when you put a cross on the ballot paper,

but there would be this constant dialogue going on. There would be a constant feedback loop between the public and those that they've elected to govern them. And I think it does have some value in that respect. But perhaps a problem with it is it's changed what we understand by public opinion. And I think we talked about this in our Twitter exchange, that when the term public opinion first emerged in the late 18th, 19th century, it was assumed to be something that was settled and fixed. So public opinion was not the same as clamour. So clamour might want a war, or it might want some spending increase. But public opinion over a period of six months or a year would decide that this was a bad idea. So it had to be settled,

it had to be informed, it had to know what it was talking about, it had to be a meaningful opinion, not just a kind of knee-jerk response. And I think if you had said to a Victorian that what public opinion means is that you phone up a random group of people and say, so there's this guy you've never heard of called Sajid Javid. Do you think he'd be a good prime minister? And that the result of that poll would tell you that public opinion believed that he should be PM. They'd have thought you were insane. They'd have thought that this is actually vacuuming opinion out of politics and reducing it simply to a series of reflexes and cacophonous responses. Yeah, I also think, like I said, it is nice that governments have got some

interaction with public opinion, quote unquote, between elections. But in that case, let's go the whole hog. Let's be given the opportunity to have a non-binding regular referenda on various things and perhaps before we vote on our phones, have to do a little tiny bit of reading or watch a couple of videos and educate ourselves slightly people would feel like they had a stake in democracy i think you hear that so often don't you around the world people feel disenfranchised there are actually disenfranchised by creaking electoral systems like ours that do practically disenfranchise lots of people or they feel that they're not listened to and yet politicians through, end up listening to the public, quote, quote, the whole goddamn time. They listen to us far too much. They're always

running around the park because they're terrified about polls. Well, I suppose the question might be, what's the alternative to polls? And before you had opinion polls, the main tool that people had for assessing public opinion was by-elections. And imagine if we had no polls this year. We just had the Hartley poll, Chesham and Amersham by-elections. It would be very hard put to say what the political landscape was looking like. But actually by-elections used to be much more frequent. Until the early 20th century, there were roughly 30 by-elections a year. And that meant, first of all, that Parliament was actually constantly being refreshed by contact with public opinion. The membership was changing. And it also meant that quite large majorities could run down over the course of five years. So you could win a healthy majority

in 1880. And by the time you get to 1885, you're struggling to stay in government. And perhaps that would be healthy if we perhaps had more by-elections. Yeah, well, hey, I'm here for that. And in the 1970s and 1990s, they had a material effect on governing majorities as well. To connect it with tech, let's now talk about the media. I found this very interesting quote. A modern dictator with the resources of science at his disposal

can easily lead the public from day to day, destroying the persistency of thought and aim so that memory is blurred by the multiplicity of daily news and judgment baffled by its perversion. Guess who said that? Churchill? That's absolutely right. It's a history of the English-speaking peoples of volume one, The Birth of Britain. I obviously knew you knew that. That feels both very old and very new, but Trump, particularly his use of media, the closed media silos that we live in,

the US, the British tabloid press has long been a very siloed media. Is that something that's important here? The press has always been a double-edged sword for democracy. On the one hand, you can't have democracy without it. It's what drives a lot of the changes of the modern world. The fact that people hundreds of miles away from the capital now can read the next morning, or of course now within minutes, what's happening in their parliament, what people are doing and saying on their behalf. So the press is what makes democracy possible. But in the 1920s, people were very anxious about the press barons or the press lords.

Baldwin compared them to harlots who wanted power without responsibility. Today, the big newspaper barons are actually much weaker than they used to be because newspaper readership is so much smaller than it was. But the new challenge is that we live in this very fragmented world in which we collate new sources that broadly fit our vision of the world. And if you look at the Daily Express or The Guardian on any particular morning, their readers are encountering completely different sets of facts about the universe. And there are real questions, I think, about how you can have a common public debate within a democracy when people are not just seeing the world through different

glasses, but are actually seeing different worlds. You're listening to Down Snow's History, and we're asking what the hell's going on with democracy. Find out after this. There are stories to tell, myths to explore, legends that shaped the medieval world to captivate the imagination. I'm Matt Lewis, and with my co-host, Dr Kat Jarman, I've gone medieval. We're waiting here for you to join us. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and let everyone know that you've gone medieval with History Hit.

Land a Viking longship on island shores. scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. We talk about the post-fact world we're living in now.

This is something I can't decide on. Do you think there was a kind of more accepted body of uncontested facts that the electorate could agree on in, say, the US and the UK in the mid-20th century? Well, you had a smaller number of gatekeepers because there were barriers to entry to the media world. So the owners of the major newspapers could shut out large numbers of voices and opinions from public debate, and that has its positive and its negative sides. But one thing that really struck me when I was researching my book on the 1975 referendum was that the media, they all had their biases during that campaign. Most of them supported remaining in the European community at that point, but that was all very clear on the front cover. But almost all of them reproduced verbatim speeches from both sides of the argument. So you

could buy the Daily Mail and it would print the transcript of a speech by Tony Benn. And in that respect, you had more unmediated access to the opinions of people on the other side of the argument. Nowadays, that's vanishingly rare. Even a paper like the Financial Times very rarely prints at length the remarks of a politician. Everything is now mediated through comment and analysis. And that's perhaps another change in the press that we don't talk about a lot, but has changed the way in which we encounter our politicians. In the US, an astonishingly high number of people who identify as Republican voters believe that the events at the Capitol do not qualify as a threatening, you know,

violent insurrection. It was a protest. It was actually a false flag operation. I mean, it's bizarre. It's different, perhaps, to the 20th century, but not unusual if you're a historian of the 17th century, for example. I mean, fake news is nothing new. Yes, there have always been examples of fake news in Britain. You could talk about things like the Zinoviev letter in the 1920s, which was a faked letter that seemed to suggest that the Labour Party was working for the Soviet International in Moscow. So that's not particularly new. Perhaps one other problem with the press is that if, as I suggested earlier, we're moving towards a more authoritarian idea of democracy, the tabloid media in particular tends instinctively

to gravitate towards that. Because the fundamental difference between a parliamentary democracy and an authoritarian democracy is how you think of the people. So parliament starts from the assumption that if you want to represent the people, you need 650 different people to do it. Because what the people are is a great cacophony of different voices, and what they do is argue. So you bring a mass of people together, put them in a building, and they shout at each other, and that is the people. versions of democracy. See the people in the singular. They talk about the will of the people as a singular entity and its enemies. And the tabloid press stylistically tends to use that tone. The sun demands. The Daily Mail speaks for the people. There is an editorial voice, which is usually we believe or we argue, and it doesn't have that pluralism. So I don't think it's a surprise that it was that kind of newspaper that was carrying headlines like enemies of the people. I agree. It's fascinating that. And now it's what's Boris doing about this? Did you get that

with Lord Salisbury or even these towering figures, Disraeli and Gleison? Or did you just get HMG? Her Majesty's government is thinking about this or that. I mean, it's fascinating to me how many people just come up to me and immediately the personalisation of rule in one person is so fascinating. You do find that in the late 19th century at any rate, particularly as democratisation extends the vote and as the press expands. the vote and as the press expands. So figures like Palmerston and Gladstone and Disraeli became very present public figures. And actually you've got whole merchandising industries that built up around them. So if you were a working man, you could grow the Gladstone pea on your allotment. You could buy a set of Gladstone family dollies for your children. If you were a conservative, actually, you could buy a chamber pot with Gladstone's face on the bottom. This merchandising could be put to very different

purposes. And there was a lot of discomfort about that in politics at the time, about whether this was what democracy did, that perhaps because democracy needs to mobilize very large numbers of people, an easy way to do that is to erect a charismatic figurehead with whom you can associate yourself. This is, again, another wonderful point for you. So this is a central paradox to democracy. As you bring in more low information voters, for example, the paradox is you actually start to plant the seeds of authoritarianism, because to mobilise those voters, to engage them, you create very simple narratives. And of course, the easiest thing to do is around a particular individual. very simple narratives. And of course, the easiest thing to do is around a particular individual.

Something I found quite troubling over the last few years is that if you were told a Victorian that Donald Trump was the President of the United States after 2016, I don't think they'd have been surprised in the slightest. That's what lots of Victorian writers thought democracy would produce. It would produce celebrities with extensive pots of money who would mobilize the public by appealing to their basest and most prejudiced instincts and try to mobilize them against internal enemies. And that was how democracy would work. Now, what they perhaps didn't realize was that there were other forms of democracy you could create that defended against that. And you created the kind of fortifications of a liberal democracy and a parliamentary democracy in order to limit the power of such figures.

But that does mean if we are going to dismantle those defences now, then we might find that democracy starts to take forms that are more like the nightmares of the past than its hopes. More like Alcibiades and Cleon battling it out on the Pnyx in ancient Athens. That's an exciting future. We're both straining at least to talk about history, but before we come on that, what about international example? We're looking for big substructural reasons here for this attack on democracy, but is some of it even more contingent, just copying, pasting what you're seeing? Is there a fashion afoot at the moment? And people are going, well, you got away with that. Let's give that a bit of a go here. How important do you think that is? Yes, I think politicians will always look for

successful examples of the political art elsewhere and try to imitate them. And that might at one point be a figure like Merkel, or it might be a figure like Trump. There's also, I think, a broader issue, which is that in Britain, hardly anybody studies constitutional history at school or at university or constitutional law. These are very niche subjects. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not

only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Whereas very large numbers of people, me included, watch the West Wing or the American version of House of Cards. So actually, we know the American constitution much better than we know our own. So what you see are attempts to make the British constitution work like Washington. So an increasingly presidential attitude towards prime ministers. We talk about designated survivors when a president falls ill. And so

that's another way in which international comparisons come in, because we know the American constitution, we don't really know our own. Well, in the 19th century, as you point out, many people have felt the same about the British constitution, they would have sought to emulate it, literally, in many cases. Right, come on, then we've held back for long enough. Basically, you and I would say this, the listeners might groan, but surely just a huge and incredibly depressing part of this is that liberal democracy looked brilliant when people had direct experience of the absolute dystopian catastrophes that overtook the world when you delivered yourself into the hands of strongmen, which is most recently the most appalling spasm, if you like, in the 1920s and 30s that ended in the most devastating war in the history of the world, genocide, unimaginable levels of forced migration,

barbarity, brutality, and the destruction of peoples and empires. It's really, really, really depressing if all that smugness that we felt in the 90s was based on enough people remembering it or it being recent enough that everyone just thought you know what losing this particular election being on the wrong side this policy decision's bad but it's not as bad as operation barbarossa historical memory i think has a huge effect on politics and that's true even when your political class or perhaps your electorate isn't that historically informed. What you get instead are historical myths. Now the dominant myths of the 19th century were things like the Glorious Revolution, the Civil Wars, tyrants, Charles I. The dominant memories of the 1960s and 70s were Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. So you had inbuilt

into your politics a defence against the strongman. It's interesting perhaps now, the dominant historical memory in British politics is the Second World War and Churchill. But Churchill isn't remembered, I think principally, as someone who defended a parliamentary system against fascism. He's often remembered almost as a kind of democratic dictator. fascism. He's often remembered almost as a kind of democratic dictator. He's someone who embodied the spirit of his age, one person who defied the doomsters and the gloomsters in his cabinet and all the people who wanted to make peace and who wanted to appease because he had some kind of mystical connection with the people. So when Boris Johnson evokes Churchill, it's Churchill the man of destiny, a kind of democratic strongman, not the Churchill

who insisted that Parliament be rebuilt brick by brick after it had been destroyed by bombing. And who took enormous pains and worried hugely about what the House of Commons was thinking. You know, 80 years ago, 1941, people think, well, it was too busy plotting this, that and the other. I mean, he was spending tons of time worrying about Parliament. Yes. And he was part of a generation that spent decades in Parliament. And I think that's another issue with our current politics, that if you have an executive class, if you like, that moves in and out of government and opposition. So Churchill had decades in opposition, he's a wartime Prime Minister, he's leader of the opposition, then he's back in number 10 again.

Then even when you're in government, you think like an opposition. So you think, how might these powers be used against me if I was on the other side of the house? Why might it be dangerous to shut opposition parties out of decision making? Whereas political careers are much shorter now. I think only about four of the current cabinet have ever been in opposition, and very few of them will stay around when their time in office ends. So they don't have that same defence mechanism of if I vacuum powers into the executive, what would I think if it was John McDonnell wielding those powers or someone else that I disagree with? a little bit more hesitant than some perhaps newer firebrands to blow up the filibuster because he's seen decades of perhaps that filibuster i mean protecting although i believe it's anti-democratic protecting points of view so yeah that's interesting point i mean i'm always struck by whenever i make tv shows or do a podcast about second world war the number of even historians go churchill decided that you know we need a different kind of landing craft, you know, really tiny tactical operational decisions. And in some cases, it's true. I mean,

he was a micromanager in many respects, and his intervention around Bletchley Park, I think, was important early on. He met Alan Turing and made sure that they got the resources they needed. But you don't get David Lloyd George. You never, ever read the sentence, David Lloyd George was keenly interested in the development of the tank through 1917-18. Now, I think there is an element that Churchill was a different kind of leader who reached down quite a long way into the war machine. But there's something about the aura that we've imbued him with. Yeah, I agree. It was an era of dictators. And we had one with the kind of pattern of democracy, although telling me he never won an election, did he, as prime minister until much later in his career. But this is where the memory of Churchill has changed. There's a very

good book that you probably know that came out last year by Bill Schwartz and Richard Toy and Steve Fielding called The Churchill Myths. And it's about the way that Churchill is represented in films and in the media and on TV and how that's altered and how the memory of the Second World War has moved away from a people's war, which was in some ways a left-leaning myth, the idea that the people of the country mobilised in all sorts of different ways, won a great victory and their reward for that was the welfare state and the National Health Service, towards Churchill's war in which we instinctively think of that figure slightly stooped, standing with his stick, and that the people only really exist as a power source for Winston, and that the people are

something that he mobilises, for whom he speaks. And so we've individualised the Second World War in a way that was much less common in historical writing, except his own, in the 1950s and 60s. Well, therein lies perhaps part of the story. I'm always curious, when I started out making TV shows, I interviewed lots and lots of veterans, and I would immediately go, oh, it's a treasure. They talked a lot more about the King Emperor, George. For them, there was a figurehead that we had just completely forgotten, that for that generation was hugely important. What's it mean, though, that the kind of messy compromises, we're being simplistic, but if a previous generation was happier to go with a kind of messier compromise, to invest and believe in politics. And there's a great book by my former tutor, Martin Conway, about building democracy in Europe after the war, because they remembered that investing power in strongmen, believing I alone can fix this, might well end up with your strongman invading Poland or reoccupying the

Rhineland. How can we as educators and communicators and teachers of history transmit that post-war belief in democracy to generations that will, fingers crossed, never have experienced that kind of trauma? Well, I think the key way of doing it is obviously people like you with your historical outreach. And this is why history matters, that we have to keep these memories alive. I think it's possible that we will start to see more alarming examples. We might increasingly look at Poland, we might look at Hungary, we might look at what happened at the capital in January, and perhaps that will serve as a kind of reminder. But I think another issue is that Parliament is a

very odd institution nowadays. It used to nest within a much larger array of collective decision making organisations. A far larger number of people were active in their trade union, or in a women's institute, or in non-conformist churches that had collective forms of decision making. Local parliaments used to be a thing that people would practice debating in Stepney or in Lambeth using parliamentary mechanisms and we've lost that kind of associational culture. So it might partly be that we need a kind of cultural change as well if we're to find a way of making parliament look a less unusual institution. Right well that's the last area, isn't it? Which is resistance to reform or reform, which is refreshing, renewing and re-energising our democracies. And not just expecting new

generations or anyone to just maintain their allegiance to these bodies, which in some ways are quite anachronistic and designed for different times and different expectations of government. So as you've said before, in this podcast, we probably need to be, or actually, and David Runciman talks about a lot, we do need to be more adventurous probably, do we? But I guess if we're saying we don't like constitutional innovation when it comes to authoritarianism, we have to be cautious about innovation to try and protect on our side of the ledger, as it were. Well, I think here's something perhaps that we can draw from the 19th century, which is that there were two strands that were in tension in constitutional debates in the 19th

century. One was the idea that a good constitution is always evolving, that because society is changing, a successful constitution has to adapt with it. And there was a great sense that this was why the British constitution worked, because when industrial cities appeared, it brought them into the constitution. When a new middle class appeared, it gave them political power, whereas continental regimes put their fingers in the dikes and resisted until they were blown away. So there was that sense of the need for change, but that ran alongside a sense that constitutions were fragile and that free and stable government was historically very unusual, that this isn't

the normal experience of humanity across time, and that living in a society which is governed by law, in which you have a voice in decision making, is very rare and very precious. And that that means that all of us as citizens, as well as political leaders, have a responsibility while reforming our institutions also to protect the principles on which they're based. That's it. As ever, the 19th century, all the answers are there. I guess on our history point, let's end up.

I've got another quote for you. I was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald the other day, Tender is the Night. And this quote, I knew I was going to talk to you, but I was reading that separately. But this quote astonished me. This is a passage from the book. The Western front business couldn't be done again, not for a long time. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties in the exact relation that existed between the classes.

You had to have a whole soul sentimental equipment, going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, little cafes in Valence, beer gardens in Unter der Leiden, weddings in the Marais, going to the Derby, your grandfather's whiskers. Why? This was a love battle. There was a century of middle-class love spent here all my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love i don't know about you but that just knowing we were about to have this conversation that literally knocked me for six and i thought those images of the derby of your grandfather's whiskers of plenty and peace and generations that have forgotten what it is to be mobilised and go to war and the mistakes that might spring from that sort of comfort was terrifying. Yes and the sense that

politics or collective endeavour of any kind requires an intellectual but also an emotional commitment. It requires a recognition that other people in the country are not your opponents. They're not people who have no relation with you. They are part of you. That when you talk about your democracy, you are talking about we and us. And that, again, I think is a danger of our current politics. Politics is always about disagreement, and it should be. But it's increasingly about enmity and dividing lines and about those who are the people and those who are the enemies of the people. And that if we want a democracy to work and to endure, we have to find

a way to bridge that again and to recreate a sense, not of unity as such, but an ability to disagree fraternally or to disagree collectively and respectfully in a way that maintains a common democratic life. Well, thank you very much, Rob, for coming on the podcast. You know what episode two is going to be, buddy, is the solutions, the solutions. Everyone's done this podcast. No one's done what the hell we're going to do about it all. But actually, no, you came up with some interesting answers. And I think that renewing, refreshing, evolving our democracy is a huge part of that. Thank you very much for coming on. You're writing your gigantic history of democracy in the UK. Every time i see

you i hassle you when's it going to be out oh it's going to take years it's an enormous book okay it's the nam roger history of british sea power three volumes we're still waiting for the third after decades it's that for our generation but get going stop talking to me and get working thank you very much robert. That was wonderful. Thanks for having me on. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done and your support your listening is obviously crucial for that project if you did feel like doing me a favor if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review give a rating obviously a good one ideally then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it we obviously depend on listeners depend on more and

more people finding out about it depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you. you