Dan Snow's History Hit - Why Are We Drawn to Dictators?

Episode Date: May 5, 2024

Is liberal democracy facing an existential crisis? A 2023 poll conducted by the Open Society Barometer found that faith in democracy among young people is waning. But what does this mean? Why might young people become more 'strongman-curious'?To get to the bottom of this, Dan is joined by an all-star cast of experts. We have the renowned journalist Anne Applebaum, author of the upcoming book 'Autocracy, Inc.', Professor of Politics David Runciman, host of the 'Past Present Future' podcast, and Professor Robert Saunders, an expert in political history and the history of ideas. They join us to discuss why democracy is foundering and to remind us why the myth of the strongman is so dangerous.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I think it was probably the chainsaw guy that tipped me over the edge. I was being tested by Bolsonaro in Brazil, trying to cling to power through an election that he obviously lost, or Netanyahu trying to gut the independent judiciary in Israel, or Putin facing a coup from his former chef. But I think it was the chainsaw guy that was the final straw for me. a chef, but I think it was the chainsaw guy that was the final straw for me. Javier Millet, the newly elected Argentinian president waving that chainsaw around as he spouted populist promises to fire civil servants, to gut public spending, to bin the Argentinian currency.

It just seemed to me another crack in the dam. Yet another person in the all too long procession of dictators who seem to be girdling the globe at the moment. He won power in November 2023, and he joins a motley crew of men. I think they are all men who have sought to set themselves up as protectors, as strongmen, as saviours. Liberal democracy, which 20 years ago we were being told, was so certain, so obviously the only way to organise society,

that it was the end point in history, while liberal democracy is now facing an existential crisis. The allure of the dynamic, charismatic, sometimes chainsaw-wielding saviour who alone can solve deep, intractable problems is powerful. Many of us thought we'd killed it off with the Second World War and the events of the 20th century, the grotesque regimes of people like Mobutu in Congo, or the communists in the Soviet Union. But no, there's life in it yet. The strongman is back. In 2023, the Open Society Barometer, which polls more than 30,000 people in 30 countries, deliberately chosen to reflect on a geographic and political diversity, found a crisis of democracy

among young people. More than 45% of people under the age of 35 did not think democracy was preferable to other systems, and around the same number of young people said they were supportive of military rule. A poll from the research company Pew found that nearly 40% of Americans under the age of 30 support non-democratic alternatives to how we currently organise our politics. What is going on with the kids? I have never felt more out of touch. It used to be an essential axiom of our world that dictators were all preening frauds who promised stability and bin collection and safe streets and a nebulous restored national pride. And yet they end up stashing gold bars into the toilets of their private planes.

Their heavies are trying to winkle their feckless sons out of luxury apartments where they're surrounded by mountains of illegal narcotics before they attempt to get spirited offshore to their bolt holes before they're strung up by an enraged populace from lampposts. Well, that used to be the impression we had, but clearly not anymore. The kids are dictator curious, which is odd because it seems very clear from reading of history that far from having the national interest at heart, dictators have their own interests at heart. This, I thought, was settled. It was undisputed.

We need leaders we can fire at the ballot box. But no, the young people need reminding. So this pod is for them. I've got an all-star cast on this podcast. We've got Robert Saunders, a brilliant academic from the School of History at Queen Mary University of London. He's writing a vast history of democracy in Britain.

I've got David Runciman, a towering figure of British cultural and intellectual life. He's Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge and is the host of the very brilliant Past, Present, Future podcast. There's a great series on there about key American elections, which I'm enjoying enormously. Please go and check that out. And we've also got another legend, another towering, this really is the Avengers endgame of podcasts. We've got Anne Applebaum, the historian, the journalist, you all know her. She's a legend. Very, very lucky to have her back on the podcast. Anne is just about to publish her new book, Autocracy Inc. So the timing could not be better. Please go and buy that, everybody. It'll be as brilliant as all her other books. We're going to do something very, very simple here,

folks. We're going to ask why democracy is foundering. And then I'm then going to do something very, very simple here, folks. We're going to ask why democracy is foundering. And then I'm then going to ask them all to remind us why the strongman, the dictator, the wise and impartial leader with his eyes fixed on the long-term good of his people, why that is a myth. It is a myth as distorted as the little old man sitting behind the curtain playing the Wizard of Oz. This is a call to arms, folks. Democracy is in trouble, and these people are going to tell us why and why it matters. Enjoy.

T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Until there is first and blank unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Anne, what do you make of these polls that young people in particular are authoritarian curious at best?

First of all, I guess, do you believe them? And secondly, like, why? We live in a time of really extraordinary, very rapid change. And at a moment when a lot of things are changing, so demographic change, social change, economic change, informational change, the way we get and process political information is completely different now from what it was 10 years ago or even five years ago. And historically, at moments of really dramatic change, you have people longing for stability. People say, there are all these conflicting voices out there.

They're making a lot of noise. I prefer silence. Or I feel the need for unity. You know, there's all this diversity. There's all this argument. There's all this difference. I feel the need for everything to be the same. And this is something that you see in a lot of societies. When you're in a post-war moment or a post-civil war moment or a post-conflict moment,

you often have the rise of dictators to replace whatever complicated argument or dispute was happening before. And I think we're seeing a version of that now, namely that people are confronted with this enormous, particularly the cacophony that we have in the public sphere. The far left, far right extremist voices are much louder than they ever were thanks to social media. And people just want silence instead. And I think that explains why you see it in not just in Britain or America, but really all over the democratic world. David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure as always. David, we talked about this before. What is it in us? Why do we wish to throw ourselves at the feet of a Caesar? There's something wrong with us,

isn't there? It's not all of us and it's not all the time, but it's definitely there. And it's there in the history of democratic politics. There's a constant pull towards something that feels like it would be better because it's more decisive. So the frustration with democracy is timeless. And we all recognise it. It's that democracies are too slow. The double attack on democracy, it's too slow, too cumbersome, too much procedure. It's a red tape politics. It's too easy to get blocked down by veto powers in democratic constitutions and strong men, almost always men in the imagination can cut through that. And then on the other hand, democracy is too quick. That's the other accusation that's made against it. It's sort of chops and changes with the mood,

the wind, they're sticking their fingers up, and 24 hours later, they're doing something else, and the strong men hold firm. It's not true about strong men, either, that they are better able to act decisively, necessarily. Some democratic politicians in history have been the masters of that. Nor is it true that strongmen can think for the long term because they don't have to worry about elections. But this isn't about what strongmen actually are like. It's because democracy is the politics of discontent. It works on discontent. That's its fuel. And one of the frustrations with democratic politics has always been the thought that there must be a way of doing this which is both better able to think long term and more decisive and the illusion is maybe a tougher guy would be better at that i've developed a strange obsession with

reading stefan zweig books recently and he also talks about this sort of impulse, something about sort of throwing off the bourgeois affect it like manners. You can, by rejecting democracy, you can also just give into your kind of base instinct to be rude and violent and nasty to people. And is there something deeper going on there as well? Yes. I mean, I hesitate to do this as sort of pop psychology, although there is quite a lot of serious study of this.

There are people who've studied what they've called the authoritarian personality, both in the leader and also in the followers. And there are lots of weird and unusual findings in political psychology. So for instance, and I'm not saying this is not a comment about Brexit and a desire to be ruled by a strongman, but one of the strongest correlations of likelihood to vote for Brexit, which is about throwing something off. Brexit was, and I think understandably, an expression of a politics of frustration, was support for capital punishment. The strongest correlation, beyond even age and level educations, if you were likely to

say yes, you were in favour of capitalations. If you were likely to say yes, you're in favour of capital punishment, you're also likely to say yes, you're in favour of leaving the European Union. And people have studied these correlations. Correlation is not causation, but try to identify various strains in political psychology that mean these things come together. I'm pretty suspicious of all of that. I think democratic politics and things like how people vote are much, much more subject to immediate stimuli and responses in the environment than they are to something buried in the soul that gets activated by a person who pulls it out. All of us at various points want to throw off affectation. All of us

at various points want to be ruder. All of us at various points get frustrated with the idea that there's a right way and a wrong way of doing things. I don't think you can use that to explain the ups and downs of democratic politics. Before we get on to some of those shorter, well, the other stimuli that you mentioned, do you agree with the premise that moral panic today, that particularly young people are dangerously alienated from democracy? We had a poll in the UK that showed stunning amounts of young people think life would be better without elections and an opposition party. And the question is sometimes phrased, which can get surprisingly high answers. Would you like to have a strong political leader who ignored the rules to get things done? Classic polling question, which invites the answer yes,

if you're feeling at all pissed off with anything. Actually, I'd say three things about that. First, those polls make the headlines when they produce that result. They don't make the headlines when they produce the opposite result. It's not so interesting. Poll shows that most people have confidence in democracy. I think about 18 months ago, there was an academic article published which did a panoptic survey of all of these polls all around the world, of which there have been countless thousands asking people for their relative confidence in democracy. And if you pull them all together, the conclusion was that most people in most places still do want democratic politics and do not want a strong, authoritarian, decisive leader who ignores the rule of law,

breaks the rules, subverts the constitution, however you want to put it. And frankly, if you ask that question, not do you want a strong leader who breaks the rules, but do you want a strong leader who subverts the constitution, you might get a different answer. The conclusion of this survey of surveys was that roughly 35% of people globally want a strong man. And as the authors of this article wrote, that's a lot of people. You know, it is a lot of people. On the other hand, it is nowhere near a majority. If you had a referendum that was 65-35, you wouldn't think, wow, that was close. So these are moral panics, I think. But the other thing I would say is that the focus on young people's alienation from democracy,

to me, is understandable. And I've talked about this and written about this quite a lot. What's different about contemporary democracy than 30 years ago, certainly 60 years ago, definitely 100 years ago, is that the young are a permanent minority. It might sound odd to say that because you start young and you end old, so no one is permanently young. But in any electoral system, the young are consistently now outvoted by the old, partly because there are many more old people, and partly because old people vote more than young people. But one of the reasons that young people don't turn out to vote is they keep losing. If you keep losing, your incentive to turn out to vote is less. If all

the young people voted, all the under 40s voted, and all the over 50s voted, and the people in the middle were one way or the other, the old people would win. And they do keep winning. They do keep winning elections around the world. My favourite electoral statistic is in 2019, when Corbyn led Labour to the worst defeat in its history. If constituencies had the franchise limited to the 18 to 30 year olds, Corbyn would have won the biggest landslide in British electoral history. If the constituencies had limited the franchise to the 60 pluses, the Tories would have won every single seat in the country bar four or five. And who did win? Johnson won a thumping majority with a franchise that runs from 18 through to 108 or whatever the upper end is. The young people lost that election, but the young people wanted Corbyn as their prime minister.

So you would get pretty alienated from democracy if you keep losing. The way to frustrate people with democracy is to create permanent minorities. And for the first time in human history, in most advanced, developed democratic societies, not all by any means, not true, for instance, in India, but places like ours, the young are now the minority. And that would make you pretty frustrated with democratic politics because you do not get what you want. Here's Robert Saunders. Robert, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. There is a poll that says some people under the age of 35 in this country believe that we should get rid of elections and annoying opposition and obstacles in the way of strong leaders doing

powerful and decisive things. First of all, what is your response to that? Do you believe it? Does that corroborate what you've been hearing on the mean streets? And what's your response to it? I think there's always a frustration with democracy, because in many respects, democracy is an intensely frustrating system. And there's a disconnect in some ways between the rhetoric of democracy and its practice. So the rhetoric of democracy is all about the unity of the people and the sense of common purpose. We might think about the crowds in 1989 in East Germany shouting, Wir sind das Volk, we are the people. Or we might think about Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg talking about government of the people, by the people, for the people.

There's that French revolutionary tradition of fraternity, the sense that democracy is a band of brothers. And yet when you actually look at democracy, the practice of it, for very good reasons, is all about division and disagreements. It's about different parties tearing lumps out of each other, doing everything they can to obstruct their agenda. And because of that, even when it's working, it often feels like it's about painfully slow incremental change. So I think democracy itself always has within it a sort of dark angel on its shoulder that wants to just sweep aside the division, that wants to end the party game playing and the special interests, and wants to align behind a strong leader who can embody what it is that the people

want without having all of this tiresome institutionalism and party conflict on the way. So this is something that's built into democracy, I think, as well as something that assails it from outside. But then what is it in our bones, in our DNA, that seems to be drawn to that strong direction, that strong leadership? Because actually in our day-to-day lives, we'd all accept that actually we don't want to be bossed around by a strong leader who says, right, we're all going to go do this and that. That seems like a terrible idea. We all like kind of cracking on with our lives and making our little messy compromises and staking out our little corner of the world to live in and make our own decisions.

Why are we drawn to this highfalutin rhetoric? Why is the strongman attractive to us? Well, I think it's quite deeply written into our culture in lots of ways. We might think about mythic heroes like King Arthur or patriot kings from history like Richard the Lionheart, the idea of the glorious leader who just puts themselves at the service of their people. Or even more recently, I like the Marvel comic universe as much as anybody else. The idea that someone can fly out of the sky and save us from whatever our problems are. It's cleaner, it's exciting, it has a glamour that the business of arguing with each other in a chamber or negotiating in a committee room is just never going to have. And what is it about the present? Do you think social media has

the splintering of traditional news dissemination, social media, has that sort of benefited one side more than the other? Has it made democracy look fussier and more Byzantine whilst making that Marvel Universe hero seem more? Because of course, that's what Instagram does for all of us. We're all suddenly at the centre of our own cult. We all can sort of polish and burnish our own reputations. Has it benefited those around the world who are trying to set themselves up as strongmen? Yes, I think social media has probably had two effects. One is that it's exposed much more painfully our divisions, and to some extent perhaps exaggerates them. The nature of social media is that we're drawn to

extremities and oppositions and things that we find outrageous. So it perhaps makes us think worse of those elements of our democracy with whom we disagree. And secondly, the nature of social media is that it's instant. And so much of the culture of our politics now is immediate. It's about 24-hour rolling news. It's instant commentary on the problem. And yet our democratic decision-making processes are designed to be slow. A bill that goes through Parliament is supposed to go through three separate stages. If it isn't treated as emergency legislation, it's supposed to take months. So democratic decision-making, in some respects, feels very out of kilter with a culture in which we're all supposed to have an instant take on everything and an instant judgment.

So what else do you feel has made this, particularly this younger generation, so strongman curious? Do you think there's, as well as the way that people are receiving information and that kind of culture, is there something in our economics, is there something in our global strategic balance, for example, that has changed today that has, for someone of our generation, the idea that we would ever be attracted to this model of government is just astonishing? I think perhaps it's partly that it's harder to make the case that democracy is a uniquely successful system in the world. You might look economically around the world and think, China is booming. You might think about countries that seem to be making their mark on the world. You might look economically around the world and think China is booming.

You might think about countries that seem to be making their mark on the world. And there's often the sense that democracies of the West are in retreat. But I guess also, democracy always has within it two different ideas of the people. And I think those two ideas are jangling against one another at the moment. So on the one hand, there's a vision of democracy in which we are a unity. The people stand together. The people make decisions together. We pit the people against the enemies of the people. And that's a model that fits very much with the strongman. But there's another model of the people that says we are all different people. That the nature of the democracy of Great Britain is that it's a glorious cacophony of people with different interests, different life experiences, different backgrounds, different political opinions, and different ideals for the future. And parliamentary democracy is

based on the second of those models. The idea of parliamentary democracy is that if you want to represent the people, what you need is a really large room full of different people who all argue with one another continuously. And that that is the kind of model of the people that our liberal institutions embody. And yet the culture of social media again, arguments over things like Brexit have very much amplified the first idea, the idea that there is something called the will of the people, that there is a kind of single intelligence and a single judgment that the people come to, which means you need to sweep aside the arguments because those arguments and institutions are things that obstruct the will of the people and perhaps have one figure who can

carry out the instruction of the demos. You mentioned things can be slow. And I wonder whether for some people who are experiencing the economic hardship in our society at the moment is falling quite unequally. Young people are living at home in extraordinary numbers compared to a generation or two ago. They are very worried, I think, about climate breakdown, the climate crisis.

Do you think there is a sense, and looking back at the past, for example, the argument that Hitler was able to make in Germany or that Putin makes about the 1990s in Russia, and the Romans, of course, and the Greeks would talk about this, sometimes things are so difficult that what we do need is to sort of cut through all this talk and introduce emergency legislation or even kind of dictatorial rule for a set period? Do you understand that attraction? I do, absolutely. And I think perhaps it's particularly understandable that the young are losing faith in democracy. I think if you talk to young people in Britain today, it's often quite difficult to make a case that democracy has delivered for them,

that political parties have not tried particularly hard to appeal to their votes and to appeal to their interests. They've often appeared deeply disrespectful of their values and the things that they believe in. And it would be really hard to make a case that democratic institutions are working for them. And if you take an issue like climate change, which we should all care about, but I think young people care about in particular. If we look at who has a voice in decision-making there, if you're an oil company, there are so many ways in which you can influence our democracy. You can fund an all-party parliamentary group. You can pay for researchers to work in MPs' offices. You can donate extensively to the political parties. You can become part of leaders clubs and you can dine with ministers and other representatives. If you're a young person who just wants to stop

the planet burning, where are those outlets? What is it that you are supposed to do? And I think the fact that we see perhaps a movement towards things like direct action and towards the sort of things that Just Stop Oil do. I think that should worry us intensely, not because it causes a nuisance in museums or because it sometimes obstructs the road, but because it says that idealistic young people don't think that our electoral processes are the route to meaningful change.

They believe they have to step outside of that in order, in a sense, to level the playing field. Here's Anne Applebaum. Is it just me being a history geek here, or is there a sense of amnesia as well about, did our parents' generation grow up with a very clear sense of the perils of authoritarianism because they had seen it acted out? It's certainly true that in the immediate years following the Second World War, people were very conscious not only of the damage that had been done by the Nazis,

conscious not only of the damage that had been done by the Nazis, by the Soviet Communist Party, by the war itself, they were also conscious of what had happened inside their own societies, what was needed in order to prevent this. They remembered how the history had unfolded, but they also understood the need for alliances, the need for unity, the need for Britain and America and Germany and France to work together. And that was because they just experienced the reality of what it felt like when those things were gone. We're now two generations away from the war. Once we lost that memory, we also lost that instinct. And I think that is, you're right, that's part of the problem. We listened to Dan Snow's history hit. We got some towering figures telling us

about why democracy still works. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends,

murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Now let's hear from David Runciman. There is a disenchantment compared to, say, 20 years ago when history had come to an end and we all boasted about how most of the world was living in democracies. What do you think is going on with that? Is it technological change? Is it with that? Is it technological change? Is it wealth inequality?

Is it social media? What's happening? Why are we drifting that way? That's a big question. I think it's a mixture of those things. I do think technology does have something to do with it. I think one of the key features of technology, the digital revolution, which I remember you remember was meant to be basically good for democracy. The original idea in the 90s, early 2000s was because it's a technology that

opens up information, free information, access to information, the ability to understand what governments are doing is thought to be a pro-democracy direction of travel. We, the citizens, pro-democracy direction of travel. We, the citizens, will be better informed, better able to scrutinize our governments, better able to communicate to our governments what we want. That just has turned out not to be true. It's a surveillance technology, so it allows people to watch other people, to see what they're doing, to find out about them. And there's just a basic, other people to see what they're doing, to find out about them. And there's just a basic, I think, asymmetry here, which is, it's hard work. So it is hard work to use this technology to study what people are doing. And the people who are really incentivized to study what people are doing are governments to study us, not us to study governments. You have to be a kind of civic hero to spend your evenings trawling

through the online reports of your local council, which is what this technology would allow you to do. Your local council and many other people pay people to do that about you. Now, if those people who are doing that about you are also actually inclined towards various kinds of authoritarian politics. This technology really helps them. That's the big imbalance here. It is a liberating technology. It liberates us to complain about politics, and it liberates the people in power to observe us. And in that world, I think you get a drift away from democracy, because I think what you get on the one hand is anger and frustration in the citizenry. We have many, many more outlets for telling people what it is that we don't like, which is a democratic impulse. Democracy is about discontent, as I said. It's about being able to

say, I don't like this, I don't like that, I want this, I want that. So there's much more of that, there's more anger, more frustration. But that thing that in the 1990s, this technology was meant to make possible, which is a sort of citizen empowerment, because we can scrutinize the way power is being exercised over us. I think with hindsight, it's obvious that wasn't going to work. Because we don't have the time, we don't have the incentive, we don't have the organization. They do. And China is the classic example of this. The Chinese state, which was going to be brought down by the digital revolution, is the one state that has mastered how to use it to shore up its power. And that is not a democratic

state. Yes, we used to talk about citizen journalists, didn't we? And now that's all we've got because we lost the professional journalists. Yeah. And the trouble with being a citizen journalist is if you're a citizen, it's not your job. So, you know, good luck with that. It's hard work. All of these things are hard work. How much time something takes in politics is usually the key question. And the people who are willing to do it longest will win. And it seems obvious to me that we all know this technology has not made our lives easier. We're not living in a paperless world. We're not living in a world where bureaucracy has gone away. There's more of all of that than ever. There's more form filling. There's more

cluttering up our heads and our information space than ever. Within that space to try and do citizen journalism, activism, scrutinizing incredibly hard. But there are people all around the world who are being paid by including quite nasty governments to do it, and they'll happily do it because they have the incentive. You're also, the discontent point is true. And in fact, we are all being radicalized because if, as we know from the algorithms, if we show an interest in the border crisis or in brexit or in illegal cross border channel crossings suddenly you're in anti-semitism or anti or islamophobia your feed is suddenly absolutely chock full of this you're

being bumper you're living in like a pleasant leafy suburb of whichever city it is and you're being bombarded daily with like ultra violent images of of this thing that you've expressed an interest or a concern about and suddenly you think my god this thing's taking over the world even though if you look out your window it's not there at all so i think yeah as you say it's um it's exaggerated our sense of unease as someone who's interested in climate my feed is now actually full of like catastrophic flooding and wildfires and i'm thinking why the hell aren't politicians sorting this out yeah so it makes you angry right your your response to that is not i'm going to spend my evenings trawling through the data your response

to that is anger yeah absolutely understandably entirely understandably and anger is it's a very powerful political emotion it's always there in one form or another, but it is the fuel of authoritarian politics, no question. Well, because anger being so strong, anger provokes us, because this needs to be sorted out no matter what. Exactly. So it provokes those feelings that that frustration, this is too slow, or it's too superficial, it's too fly by night, or it's not able to act quickly enough. All of those frustrations that we have with democratic politics can be exploited by skillful politicians. And many of these politicians are skillful.

Donald Trump is an extremely skillful politician. He feeds off anger. He feeds off disgust. And this technology, I think, has certainly enhanced that. I think that's more of a problem in a way than the echo chamber problem, the idea that somehow people are having their views reinforced in the same way that if you think about, we all notice that if you search for something, you get endless ads for it. You don't kind of end up wanting that thing more, you often end up wanting it less because you're just so bored with, you know, you looked for whatever it was, a certain kind of jacket, and then you think, okay, I've got one now. I don't think necessarily it's as

straightforward as somehow we're all trapped on a path that leads our views to reinforce themselves. But absolutely, I think there is within this information environment, a greater scope, both for feeling anger and for that anger to be exploited, indeed to be weaponized. And this is the politics of weaponizing anger. Authoritarian politics, that kind of populism, not all populism is like this, but that kind of populism is about directing anger from one group to another. And that certainly is easier than it was. Rob, the frustration for people like me is that what one shouts when you hear that is that what these young people are asking for, in fact, is more democracy, not less.

They're asking for a democratisation of our political process. That's just not one vote every five years. It's equal votes, fair votes, votes that more accurately reflect the view of the people in the country. It's equality of access to our leaders. It's keeping dark money or whatever people call it now out of politics. The frustrations that people feel towards our democracy usually are in the limits to that democracy. I think that's absolutely right. It's really important that we don't just think of democracy as something that we do every four years or so at the ballot box, that democracy is meant to be a way of living. It's an entire political culture. It's about arguments and discussion and debate. It's about the exchange

of information. It's about having control over day-to-day decisions in our lives. And for that reason, of course, democracy can be very messy. And so democracies establish institutions that are intended to kind of organise and discipline those forces. The danger is that they do that to such an extent that they simply lock out for much of the time large parts of the Demos. So if you don't feel that you have a voice in the press, if you don't feel that you have any idea how to influence ministers or even to reach ministers and talk to them, if you've never met your MP or your local councillor, then you don't feel like you're living a democratic life. You feel like, in a sense, you're operating in a simulacrum of democracy, in which power is in fact plutocratic or oligarchic,

and you, once every five years, might get a kind of ceremonial involvement in this. Finish up by telling us why, if people at home, they're feeling strongman curious, they're frustrated, and they do think, well, perhaps a radically new way of doing things is what we need. Tell us why, I guess, theoretically, but perhaps empirically, why does that not work? I can't think of a single example of a society that has handed power over to a strong man and has subsequently thought, oh, that was a really good idea. We're really glad that we did that. They really did govern for us. This is a myth. And it's a myth for two reasons, I think.

Firstly, it tells a lie about the people. It pretends that the people are united, whereas in fact, the people are plural, the people have different ideas and different values, and we need a democracy that brings those voices into debate and discussion and coordination. So it tells a lie about the people. And secondly, it tells a lie about politics. We disagree about politics because politics is complex. It is difficult. The possibilities before us are often quite limited and we're frequently choosing between lesser evils. Strength doesn't help you when the problem is complexity. So the strongman has to pretend that everything is simple. They have to pretend that you can end the Ukraine war in a day, or that you

don't need to worry about the Irish border, or that whatever the problem in front of you is, all you really need is the courage to believe. So strongmen have to lie about politics, and they have to lie about the people. And those two things together are a perfect recipe for really terrible and ultimately despotic government. Give me the Ann Applebaum rallying cry here for liberal democracy. So there is no dictatorship that can persist very long in maintaining the interests of the public and of ordinary people. In other words, dictatorships invariably begin to work on behalf of dictators. Leaders who don't have to take anybody else's wishes into account eventually become corrupt. Eventually,

they begin to steal. Eventually, they need to use violence to repress opposition. There are some soft dictatorships that can persist for a while, but they always decline. Anybody who values their ability to make choices, anybody who values economic opportunity, everybody who wants to live in a society where their views and even just their interests are taken into account has to live in a democracy. There is no other political system that takes account of the wishes of ordinary people except for democracy. What happens though, perhaps young people who are worried about the climate crisis, for example, that they sometimes worry, can democracies do bold, decisive action?

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Democracies have certainly done bold and decisive actions in the past. There's nothing about democracy that prevents it. On the contrary, it was the democracies who allied together to fight

Hitler. It was the democratic systems that built most of what we now think of as the amenities and the possibilities of modern life. It was the democracies that figured out how to fight pollution once pollution was understood to be a problem. Really, it's the democracies that have been the most creative, the most ambitious, and the most forward-looking societies the world has ever seen. If you want a solution to climate change, you're not going to get it from corrupt dictatorships whose interests are simply in maintaining the power of the ruling family or the ruling clique.

You are at the front line of this fight. Do you think it's winnable? Do you feel there's a dangerous tide that is alluring? I think sometimes the authoritarianists, they have the best playlists, they have the best moves because democracies are incremental and committee-led and discursive and want-to-be despots can just jump up in town squares and do dramatic things. Is this winnable? I think we're in a very dangerous moment. We're in a moment when there's quite a lot of self-doubt in democracies.

But I think it's also important to remember that democracies have always been challenged. The founders who wrote the American Constitution wrote it with the idea in their heads that democracy could fail and could be weak, and they tried to put elements into the Constitution to prevent that. And it's really the choices that are made by all of us every day that can, as they have in the past, nevertheless keep our systems going and keep our systems strong. I mean, really, I think it's very important to remember that nothing is inevitable. There is no such thing as an inevitable rise of democracy and there is no inevitable decline. What happens tomorrow depends on choices that are made today.

History doesn't have rules. Things look in retrospect, perhaps like patterns, but we don't see the pattern of the future. And it's very important to keep a better future and a more positive future in our heads. David, let's go on now to the reality of the strongman. We talked about the allure of the strongman. I asked this question on Twitter the twitter the other day like could anyone actually tell me a strongman under which they would like to have lived and one person said lee kuan yew or the singaporean founding father i mean that's that is where the theory falls down right is that actually in practice strongmen don't do what it says on the tin they do not deliver wise long-term thinking above the catacombs of party part-time politics. No, they don't. And if the complaint about democratic politics is it's too short-termist,

actually, in the long run, democracy produces results. There's plenty of evidence of this. And one of the reasons democracy produces results is that democratic politics keeps searching for the solution. The problem with autocratic authoritarian rule is it sometimes hits on the right solution, and then when it does, it can get things done. But it's not adaptable, it's not flexible, and when things go wrong, they stay wrong. They don't get put right by the pressures of a free press, an independent judiciary, an electoral process, all of the things that go with democratic politics, the constant frustration of being a democratic leader, which is you're hemmed in on all sides.

But that makes it much harder to go down the path that leads to ruin. And the trouble with the kind of authoritarian politics we're talking about is that when things go wrong, they stay wrong. And I think the key question to ask if I was doing these polls is to say to people not, are you angry? Are you frustrated? Would you rather have someone who got things done, who broke the rules? But where would you rather be when politics goes bad? Would you rather, when politics goes bad, be ruled by someone who doesn't have to abide by the broader rule of law. And it's hard to imagine any circumstances in which you would rather be in that kind of political system when the chips are down. And the chips are always down at some point.

So yeah, it's not the case. You can't say there's just an overwhelming body of evidence that strongmen never deliver because they sometimes do. Pinochet in Chile was a terrible man who did many, many terrible things. And I would much rather live under a liberal democratic regime than under Pinochet's Chile. But it wasn't simply the case that he was all talk and no action or that he was exposed. He did change the Chilean economy. or that he was exposed. He did change the Chilean economy. He suppressed freedom of speech.

He tortured and murdered people. All of that. I'm not minimizing any of that. But you couldn't say it's just a straightforward record of failure. But you definitely would not want to bet your future on a regime like that that goes down a path and just pursues it to the bitter end. And that's the terror of living under this kind of politics. It will take wrong turns, as well as being repressive and oppressive. It will get things wrong. All politicians get things wrong. And when things go wrong, you're stuck. It's a basic trade-off. And I would much rather

when things go wrong, not be stuck. That's why I would always pick liberal democracy. Yeah. Can we, let's finish up by just expanding that a little bit, both theoretically and empirically. Like what do you say to your students who are authoritarian curious? Like what is the argument well they tend they tend not to admit it for a second it's much easier to answer an anonymous survey and say i would like someone who doesn't abide by the rule of law than to put your hand up in a lecture and say uh yeah my question is why don't we have more people who don't abide by the rule of law and have everyone look at you we have to remember there are reasons that people say don't trust opinion polls.

When they do emerge, what should we be saying to people? How should we be telling them in this world of encroaching strongmen, that liberal democracy, which can look a bit tattered, and we've got, you know, its response to example for the climate crisis has been patchy, it's economically, it hasn't delivered superb results, certainly since 2008. There's an inequality. What is our argument for it? I'd say a couple of things. Democracy had a good second half of the 20th century.

But that's a pretty short period in the long history of modern politics, never mind of human existence, 50 years. And it really is just about 50 years. So there's nothing permanent about this. It may be that it's the outlier and not the rule to live under these kind of regimes. It may be a whole set of conditions have to hold. None of us should assume that this is the default. We weren't by any means at the end of history. And it may be that actually to have a successful liberal democratic regime is an unlikely blessing. And that's not an unhelpful thing to remember. But at the same time, I think we have this wrong risk profile about democracy,

which is we feel if we don't hold on to the thing that we remember worked okay in the second half of the 20th century, if we do remember that, the whole thing will fall apart. We have this image that there's a package, which is called liberal democracy, and it involves political parties, electoral politics, a free press organized around newspapers and television on the whole, that's the sort of imaginary of it. Relatively passive citizens who nonetheless are happy for their representatives to take decisions for them. And that package did work pretty well, but it's a pretty unlikely package to work for long. But that's not democracy. That's just one contingent version of it that flourished in certain parts of the world, particularly

in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, maybe, there are literally hundreds of ways of doing democracy. And there are hundreds of different institutional, constitutional, political, practical versions of it. You could have much more direct democracy. You could have much more citizen engagement. You don't have to focus on elections. You could have completely different kinds of representation. You could have representation by a lot. You could have random parliaments, all of that. And usually the response to that is, yeah, but if we start fiddling around that, it'll fall apart even quicker. It seems to me it will definitely fall apart if we think that in 2050, the version of liberal democracy that worked pretty well in 1950, in the few places where it did work, is still fit for purpose. It so obviously isn't.

And I think particularly our fixation on elections as the be-all and end-all of democratic politics, elections are easily manipulated. Strong men are getting pretty good at running elections. There are lots of elections happening in the world this year, and most of them are going to result in authoritarians winning the election. But also elections are not the whole of democracy. There are so many other things that we could do. Other ways of involving younger people. You know, I think children should be involved. I mean, there's all sorts of things that we could do. Other ways of, given that most citizens don't have the time or the incentive to communicate what it is they actually want, just to communicate their frustration.

So people should be paid to find out what citizens want, give them more opportunities to take part. All of these things that we could do, and we somehow feel, and I hear it all the time, people say, that's fantasy politics, that's pie in the sky stuff. Experimenting with the constitution is dangerous at a time when democracy is under threat. No, not experimenting with the constitution is dangerous at a time when democracy is under threat. How could it possibly be the case that if you're really worried for this form of politics, the correct thing to do is to cling on to what you've got long past the point where it works? That's what I would say.

Election by lot for the second chamber. Let's start there. The thing that I would do is at a general election, I would have a none of the above box. If you take none of the above and none of the above wins, the plurality in your constituency, then everyone who voted none of the above gets put in a big hat and one of them becomes the MP. plurality in your constituency, then everyone who voted none of the above gets put in a big hat,

and one of them becomes the MP. I think that is the best way to shake up democracy. Obviously, no one's ever going to do it. But apart from anything else, it would force people to really think hard about whether they prefer randomness to party politics. And it would also introduce what you want in parliament is actually a mix of professional politicians and members of the public. It sounds crazy. I mean, I say it partly in jest, but to be honest, that idea is no crazier than the way we do it now. And actually, I remember when I was doing GCSE Greek, I remember thinking the one bit of Athenian democracy I thought, that is a bit weird, isn't it? Was the selection by lot, the panics with everyone taking part in the assemblies and the votes, and even the exiling. I go, that's cool. But yeah, selecting executive roles by lot, that's mad.

The nexus of money, technology, and elections now has just radicalized me in the last 30 years. I'm like, no, Dan, 16-year-old Dan, you're completely wrong. That is the only surefire way of ensuring that we keep dark money, corporations, nefarious,iousness out of our politics. You've got to select random people. I agree there needs to be a limit of randomness. And there is a definition of democracy that says democracy, absolute bottom line,

should be the surprising politics. It should throw up surprises. Things should happen that are literally random and shake up the system. And that's one way of doing it. It is quite surprising, democratic politics at the moment. You know, elections are producing pretty surprising results. But I don't think in that sense that I've been talking about here, which is this should be a system of politics where it is not possible for the people in power to be completely certain

what's coming next. Keep them on their toes. Well, it would keep them on their toes. Well, it would keep them on their toes. Well, and it would keep them turning over, which I think is the other key point of politics. Turning over. Some in their graves, but some of them are still alive. Is that churn is probably a good thing.

Churn is good. That's the ultimate, one of the ultimate bulwarks of liberty, right, is just get rid of the old and bring in new, see what happens. Well, that's it, folks. I hope that was a useful podcast at an important time, an important juncture. Thank you so much to David and Robert. I still can't believe I get to bring up people of that calibre,

chat with them on the podcast, and then broadcast it. And I'm very grateful, as ever, for you all listening to it. I hope this one's valuable, really. And I urge you, if it meant something to you, think it's important, please, this might be one to share. If you want to hear more Dan Snow's history, please make sure you follow wherever you get your podcasts.

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