Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 7 | Yascha Mounk on Threats to Liberal Democracy

Episode Date: July 30, 2018

Both words in the phrase "liberal democracy" carry meaning, and both concepts are under attack around the world. "Democracy" means that they people rule, while "liberal" (in this sense) means that the rights of individuals are protected, even if they're not part of the majority. Recent years have seen the rise of an authoritarian/populist political movement in many Western democracies, one that scapegoats minorities in the name of the true "will of the people." Yascha Mounk is someone who has been outspoken from the start about the dangers posed by this movement, and what those of us who support the ideals of liberal democracy can do about it. Among other things, we discuss how likely it is that liberal democracy could ultimately fail even in as stable a country as the United States. Yascha Mounk received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. He is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard, a Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America, and Executive Director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. His most recent book is The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It.

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Visit your nearby Lowe's on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Back in the early 1990s, there was an idea going around called The End of History. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the USSR was dissolving. There was a feeling that history had been very interesting, you know, thousands of years of conflict in war and trying out different forms of government and society, but that now, as the 20th century came to a close, we had more or less. less figured it out. The way to live is in a liberal democracy, and liberal democracy was gaining ascendance throughout the world. Even old dictatorships or authoritarian regimes were crumbling under the democratic pressures. As it turns out, the idea of democracy is not necessarily a stable one. You can have a democratic society that gets rid of its democratic institutions for one reason or another, and a couple of centuries, which is the time period over which democracy has been ascendant in the Western world, is a short period historically. Right now, we're in a period where the world is changing rapidly in many ways, and you can't just say everything is done politically.

We've figured it out. We're all going to be liberal Democrats going forward. Indeed, as many of you might have noticed, just over the past couple years, there has been increasing anti-democratic sentiment, around the world. It can be very blatant in some places. Some countries have elected through democratic means quite explicitly anti-democratic leaders. Here in the United States, there's certainly been controversies and arguments about whether or not our new Trump administration is not getting in line with the norms of liberal democracy, attacking the media, undercutting our confidence in our electoral processes and so forth. Around the world, strong men and autocratic forces are ascendant.

And you can have different opinions about this. You can think that this is a real problem. And if you do think it's a real problem, then I think that it's something that is not just alarmism. I think that if you are of the opinion that this is happening and this is bad, there's more than enough evidence that we should really take this seriously. You might, on the other hand, think that this is just liberals complaining that they lost the election. They're not used to having a strong leader. They have to fight against. And if that's true, okay, but it's up to you to articulate exactly why it's okay to attack the media in certain ways

what should be the norms that are always respected no matter who is the boss, no matter which party is in power. This is not an easy thing to do. So it's important that we think about these things. And today's guest is Yasha Monk, who is one of the most interesting and articulate people who is thinking seriously and carefully about these issues right now. Dr. Monk is a lecturer on government at Harvard University. He's also a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America, and he's also the executive director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

In his spare time, apparently, he writes a weekly column at Slate online, and he also hosts a podcast of his own over there called The Good Fight. His most recent book is The People versus Democracy, Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It. I strongly recommend reading this book. It's an eye-opener. It can be depressing if you take it seriously. And if you don't take it seriously, if you don't disagree with it, then as I said, it's important to explicitly say in as reasonable, calm, and persuasive a way as you can, why we shouldn't be worried about these things. One way or another, this is something we all have to be thinking about. So let's go. What if your skin isn't aging? It's reflecting. According to research, publishing,

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bottle. Clinically shown to improve the look of fine lines, firmness, and overall skin quality for skin that can appear up to twice as useful. Because the benefits of caring for your skin, they're more than skin deep. Visit platedskinscience.com to learn more about our advanced technology. Yesha Monk, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. My pleasure. So I'll start with a little preamble here because I'll admit on the one hand, I'm very excited to have you on the podcast, both because I've loved your work on Twitter and in other places since I discovered it, and also because you're a fellow podcaster.

You're the first guest I've had who is an expert on being on both sides of this microphone. I'm a great professional, and I'm going to judge you on every transgression. Well, I know that, yes. That's what I'm looking forward to. I want the report card after it's all said and done. But there's also trepidation because it's politics. And even if it's political science and intellectual scholarship and so forth, there is the nitty-gritty, ugly tribalism of politics.

And what I'm trying to get around in this podcast is exactly that, trying to aim for the underlying ideas, the big picture. So there is a big picture. There's certainly we all know here in the United States. there's certain political things going on. But it's not just a random particular event. There are some trends underlying what's going on here in the U.S. And it's going on more broadly, right?

The world is seeing, at least it seems, from the news, an upsurge in a kind of populist, nativist, nationalist, isolationist, authoritarian moment. So just to start out, why don't we, let's imagine that over the next hour we'll be digging in to some of the underlying reasons why that's happening. But what's your take right now on sort of the state of the world when it comes to this kind of movement going on? Well, I'm pretty worried about what's going on in the world. I was just writing an article where I started outlining how different some countries in the world look three years ago. You know, three years ago, the Huffington Post had just announced to great hilarity that it would cover

the presidential campaign by one Donald J. Trump in the entertainment section. In Britain, you had, you know, not somebody that person you would have voted for, but a very reasonable moderate center-right by minister and David Cameron. You know, the idea of Brexit was being pursued by the UK Independence Party and a few hardliners in the Tory party, but it really seemed very unlikely. There was a leadership election in the Labour Party, which, you know, seemed to probably go to a relatively sensible person. In Germany, Angela Merkel was at the high. of her popularity, and, you know, there wasn't any far-right populist party in the parliament. Now, you know, today you are seeing not just authoritarian populists in power in the United States with Donald Trump, in places like the Philippines, with Rigotrata, in Poland, Hungary, and Italy,

in a whole bunch of other places, even in the countries that are supposedly working relatively well. In the countries where the populace have not taken over, you have seen these radical transformations over political system. So today in Germany, the alternative for Germany, which is quite extreme, is in the Bundestag. And according to some polls, it is now the second biggest party in the country, larger than the Soviet Democrats. In Great Britain, you now have a leader of the Labour Party who bears more resemblance to Jill Stein than he does to Bernie Sanders.

You have a prime minister who's embattled from the far right of her own party may lose a job any moment now. And you've had two years of the establishment trying to figure out what on earth to do about the population's vote to Brexit and not really making any progress in figuring out what the plan for the country should. So just as a snapshot of some of the changes in the world, I would say, it doesn't look too good. And fairly recently, I mean, the picture you paint is one of rapid. change, which might even be extra worrying, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So it comes on the heels of the long development. When you look at the rise of populist parties and movements, it started in, you know, at least the year 2000, a little even earlier than that and has been rising since. So, you know, some 18 years ago, the average virtue of a populist party in continental Europe, for example, was about 7%. Now it is more like 27 or 28%. It's a very rapid increase.

We see them now being in power in a whole set of countries. You can drive from north to south of Europe without ever leaving a country ruled by populates. That certainly wasn't possible 10 or 15 years ago. And it's become particularly fast in the last few years, in part because the populists are now at levels of strength where they can suddenly form the government. I mean, as a physicist, you think about those kinds of things over time, I imagine, which is to say, You have systems that seem relatively stable, and you start seeing a certain kind of change in them, but it doesn't seem to worry.

People don't notice it too much because the system on the whole is still stable. And then eventually as it comes close to a certain kind of threshold, you see that a small increase has much bigger systemic effects. I think that's the kind of moment we're now in with populism. Yeah, that's exactly right. The idea of a phase transition where things can be more or less on appearances, fairly stable over long, periods of time, then suddenly something happens. My wife, Jennifer Willett, who is a science writer, is actually working on a book on this very topic, exploring the fact that while things can seem to not be changing to our most direct observations, things can be changing underneath the surface

that secretly lead up to these apparently radical quick transformations. And they can be good, you know, public opinions switched about gay marriage here in the United States very quickly, but secretly it was being, it was changing all along, and it can be for the bad just as well. Well, I hope she's going to add a topic about the cheery topic of populism. Oh, yeah. Well, so that's a good point because I want to dig in a little bit deeper here. What is the definition of populism? When I was a kid, and I heard the word, it made no sense to me. Like, populism means you're popular, and if you're in a democracy, you should be popular to be elected. But of course, it means something a little bit different than that.

Yeah, and, you know, I mean, I think that is. a real problem with that word on many public appearances where I try to define populism. I try to explain to people what I mean by it, what the political science definition of it is, people then in the question session say, well, what's wrong with popularism? Not populism, but popularism. You know, shouldn't politicians try to be popular? And of course they should. It's a normal part of politics for politicians to say, hey, you know, people are unhappy

with the current crop of politicians, and I'm going to point out the ways in which they are imperfect and mistaken, and I'm going to try and rile up a little bit of emotion against them and say, hey, I'm standing for all of those popular things that they haven't actually thought about. So that's perfectly normal. What's different about populism is the claim that the only real reason why we have problems today is that the existing political elite has grabbed or self-serving, the claim that they alone truly stand for the people, that while they are the voice of the people, everybody who disagrees

to them is by nature of that illegitimate. Because if I stand for the people and somebody disagrees with me, well, then they are against the people. And then it often goes together with very large extreme promises so that once populace are power and they can't live up to those promises, as our president sometimes likes to say, who knew that things could be so complicated? Who knew that health care could be so complicated? I think if he was a student in one of your classes, Sean, he might, upon seeing the F on his

midterm, say, who knew that physics could be so complicated? Yeah. But they don't want to actually admit that they totalize and made huge outside promises. And so they start to blame. They say, well, why haven't I been able to deliver for you? Because the opposition are traitors and they're undermining me. Because the three press are fake news and they need to be regulated. Because the independent institutions like judges or the FBI are all biased against me

and they now need to have the independence taken away. That's why populism is worried. Right. And so I'm getting the impression that in some sense, populism is defined in opposition to this group of elites. And maybe that's an ill-defined group, but it's the populace versus these people who have the power and don't deserve it and need to be brought under control. Is that fair? Yeah, that's right. And, you know, again, there's an element to that that that is normal in democracy.

But you say, hey, you know, with people in power right now, aren't we deserving of these interests? And we need to correct that. but it goes together for populists with a real lack of respect for the most basic rules and norms of political citizens. So the thing was very shocking in the United States in 2016 that a presidential candidate would leave and doubt whether he will accept the outcome of the election, that he would not just attack his opponent as having the wrong ideas or perhaps even not being as morally upright as he is, Bill is saying, I'm going to lock her up, right? Those things are very typical populace, but unwillingness to accept the kinds of rules we need,

not because they're important in themselves or because we somehow have a weird sort of attachment to norms, but because in order for democracy to work, I need to not only be able to elect the guy I want today. I also need to be sure that he's going to respect the rules and the constraints of his power enough so that I have a chance of election. somebody else for years from now.

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And so you can win an election. That's great. But we assume it's part of, you know, having norms and so forth, and we'll probably get into that. But we assume that there are rules that everyone agrees to play by. And certainly, in addition to attacking the media, attacking the legitimacy of elections is unfortunately common these days. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. You know, the real test of democracy is whether politicians are willing to cede power when they lose. And, you know, in many cases, we haven't yet seen the test for populace in part because, and this is in fact.

and this is another test, they have skewed the playing field so much that the opposition doesn't have a real chance of winning. So what we're seeing increasingly is that you don't have political systems in which, you know, somebody says, hey, I'm dictator now. There's never going to be an election again. Countries like Russia, like Venezuela have elections. But there are elections in which some of the most promising candidates of your opposition aren't allowed to run. in which we might even be put in jail, in which if you go to a protest or a rally for the opposition candidate, you might be beaten up by the police or you might be locked away.

All of the main television channels are under control of the regime or of close allies of it. You have changes to the electoral system that are meant to favor the governing party, and you take all of those things together, and you basically have managed elections. in which people can go out to vote that the opposition doesn't have a fair shot at victory. And so what we're seeing in places like Hungary

is that the countries are rapidly moving towards such a system. And even if, despite all of those obstacles, the opposition should somehow win, I have real questions in my mind about whether a victor or one, for example, would voluntarily step down from power. Well, it's always been, in physics terms, as we were talking about before,

there's always been an instability in the very idea of democracy. If you're a dictatorship and, you know, you just keep the squeeze of power carefully enough, you can go on forever. In a democracy, there's always the worry that the people will democratically elect anti-democratic rulers. And that's an instability. If everyone chooses to be non-democratic, then democracy can't survive. It's sort of the political science equivalent of Karl Popper's question. about tolerance. Tolerating the intolerant can be a bad thing. So these societies that are democratic base their success on the idea that people buy into the idea of being democratic, which is not just voting for the person you want, but giving up power when you don't want it.

Are we seeing the people in these countries become less willing to give up power when they lose? Right, or to the people, I think, are more willing and tempted to vote for politicians who give good signs of not respecting the limits on their power, which is one of the reasons why the title of my book is the people versus democracy, right? It captures that otherwise paradoxical idea, that people vote for a candidate who says, hey, you know what, just trust me, leave me all the power, things are going to work out somehow. By the way, that sounds you may here in the background, I believe, is Donald Trump flying into London overhead. So, you know, leave it to me, I'll fix it, just give me a little bit more power. Trust me, right?

But then they start to use that power precisely in order to make it impossible to displace a democratically elected president or prime minister by. democratic means. By the way, if you want to hear about the scientists' ideas of the flows of democracy, I have a good story for you. Oh, yes, please. Tell me the good science story. So I will not remember the details here, and I may butcher and even embellish a little bit in the process, but there's a great story I came across about a year ago of Kurt Gödel, the great logician, wanting to take a citizenship So he had come to the United States, fleeing the Nazis. He was 15thons at Winston, one of his best buddies with Albert Einstein, who was also there at the same time.

And, you know, he was becoming eligible for citizenship. And he had to take citizenship test. And he came to Einstein, who had already gone through a process and said, what should I do to study for this exam? And Einstein said, well, look, they send you a leaflet, just read for a leaflet, he'll be fine. But Durdle was not one to take this kind of thing. without the requisite seriousness. Legicians. There was a trouble, yeah.

Exactly. So he started to, you know, really study up very deeply on the Constitution and the separation of powers and how it all works. And on the day of the exam, Einstein decided to go to the test with GERL as moral support. For he seems to have been a little bit of a jackass because on the road trip over, he started to ask, Well, are you sure that you really have prepared well enough for his exam and so on?

The GERL comes in a little bit of a back of nerves and recognizing Einstein, they asked both of them into an office and Einstein is allowed to sit there as a process is administered and, you know, the official sort of makes a little bit of small talk of Girdle and says, all right, you know, oh, I see you come from Austria, you know, horrible what's been happening there. It says, yes, terrible.

It's happening in my country. that also. Thankfully, now you're in the United States, something like that could never have me here. And Gerdl's not saying, they'll actually, I have been studying the Constitution, and there's a deep floor. And Einstein kicks him under the table,

to shut up, and he just answers a couple of questions. It being completely truthful is not always the best strategy in these situations. I wonder if Gertel was, in fact, just thinking of the fact that you could vote, the Constitution allows itself to be changed. You can change it to be anything you want. Which brings us to another thing in your book. I would go further than that,

which is it's not just that the Constitution can be changed, which, by the way, is very difficult in the United States. But it's that ultimately people have to stand up with it. But if you have a president who does not respect the rightful limits on his authority, and he controls a political party, which also happens to have a majority in Congress, and which also happens to have judges in the Supreme Court whose loyalty to a particular ideological movement goes more deeply than their

loyalty to constitutional values and values of their institution. Then they can in practice get away of all kinds of things that might in theory not be allowed. And that is ultimately what dangers always be, that political forces take over a system. And they simply do things that on a fair reading of a local constitution, they shouldn't be allowed to do. But because there are the people who are actually in the offices of institutions that are meant to stop them, don't do their job, have a higher loyalty to a party or a man than the constitution, they get a way of doing it themselves. So perhaps this was Girdle was thinking. Sadly, the record of the story does not explain what Girdle actually fought the floor was.

So there could be all sorts of flaws that we don't even see. But yeah. It may be a flaw that only Girdle was brilliant enough to see. You're putting your finger on, you know, the role of buy-in to the democratic process, to the norms that we have. I mean, one of the big things that has been highlighted in the recent years since Trump has been elected is the extent to which we do rely on people behaving well, not simply following the law as it is written, but following the spirit of the law in some sense as well. And so is this another new thing or is this just something that they were less artful about taking advantage of before? It seems to me that in the past, there was less political polarization, at least here in the U.S., than there was more belief in the standards of you should do the right thing, even if it doesn't benefit your party.

I've been recently rewatching the West Wing, and there's an episode where a Republican committee chairman stops one of the people on his committee from questioning a Democratic witness because it wasn't on the topic that they were supposed to be investigating, even though it would have been devastating to the Democratic Party. for them to do that. And we're sitting there thinking, there's just no way that that would happen right now. If you can take the advantage, you would just win. So it does seem like something has really changed. Well, there's lots of things that happen in the West Wing that never happened in real life, one of which is that people always have the perfect retort. You know, it's the world that everybody had two hours to think of their next move. But no, I think there is a real transformation there, which is caused by a whole set of things. One of them is rising. polarization. The public as a whole in the United States is not necessarily more extreme

the political views were more polarized now than they were 20 or 40 or 60 years ago. But the political parties are. So the most moderate Democrat used to be far more conservative than the most moderate Republican. That is not longer the case. There is a real gulf between them. And we also see, by the way, many people just having less of an understanding of the Constitution. I think for a long time, there was a very deep commitment to the idea of having to transmit political values from one generation to the next. The idea of the founding fathers of how important it is to have that constitutional culture, and I think because we start to take our democracy for granted, we slightly took civic education for granted. And we know from various studies with

people know much, much less now about just the basic aspects of a constitution, the kinds of things you need to pass citizenship test, how many Supreme Court justices are there and so on, when they did a few decades ago. I also think that there is a strange element of a useful fiction having been exposed. I mean, even two or three years ago, when you go back through what some of the most intelligent commentators were writing, and I didn't agree with them at the time, but there were, you know, some of the smartest people writing about this, making thoughtful arguments, They said, look, somebody like Donald Trump, there's not a ceiling of how much support somebody can get, like that can get.

You know, people have this deep commitment to the Constitution, to these norms. If somebody says these kinds of outrageous things or tells these kinds of lies, most people are just going to be so turned off by them that they're going to run away from it. And now we're seeing that's not the case. And that encourages more and more people to act in the same way. Because apparently all of those things that we thought we would be deeply punished for, We're not punished for, right? It's like, you know, you have an electric fence that bars your road to, you know, the supermarket and you always sort of walk around it. And one day, you know, by mistake, you touch it and you realize, well, you know what, actually, I didn't get a shock from it this time.

So perhaps I'll try again tomorrow. And once you've done that seven or eight times, you know, there's no longer a cost in your mind to touching the electric fence. Because perhaps there was never a cost to it. But now we know. Yeah. One of the great things in your book is that you closely analyze the phrase liberal democracy. I think a lot of people will just sort of blurt that out as if it's one thing, but there are two words. They're liberal and democracy.

And you point out that they mean different things and they're both under attack in different ways, although ways that might come together in some way. So why don't you help us understand that? Sure. I mean, the first thing to say is that justice populism isn't popularism, which seems, obvious, but is important. Liberal democracy is not the opposite of conservative democracy, right? It's a philosophical term in the sense in which I use liberal, you know, Barack Obama was as much of a liberal as, you know, as George R. Bush or Ron Reagan or Bill Clinton,

they all had a basic commitment to those values. So we use this term liberal democracy and we don't often think about what it means and how it is that there's two elements, the liberal element and a democratic element may actually be in tension with each other. So the way that I understand it, our political system has these two fundamental goals. The first is to allow individual liberty. That's the liberal element, liberty, right? Classical liberalism. Yeah, well, classical liberalism has certain connotations about economic policy, for example,

which aren't necessarily entailed. But it is a set of freedoms that individuals enjoy. So that means that I can say what I want, I can worship as I want or not worship, I can be in whatever relationship I want to be, not be in a relationship. And nobody gets to tell me that. And in order to sustain that, I need both things like freedom of speech and we need to have a separation of powers. because if the president dislikes what I say, he can't be capable of just throwing me in prison. We need independent institutions to do prosecution,

so that offending somebody of political power can't be dangerous to. So that's the first element. And the second element is very straightforward, especially once you've separated the liberal element out, it's a democratic element. It's that, well, you actually need to be able to translate popular views into public policies. Democracy is the rule of the demos,

rule over people. So actually what happens politically needs to be dependent on what we as individuals want rather than being determined by a king or a dictator or a priest or an imam or a jungle. My fear is that these two

constitutive elements of our political system are coming apart more and more. But for a long time we've had political systems but I've been reasonably good with some obvious shortcomings. about respecting and protecting individual rights, but they haven't done a terribly good job of actually being responsive to the popular opinion.

And now what we're getting is a political system in which, yes, at least at first, some popular views are being translated into public policy, but it is at the price of individual rights, of the rights of minorities, and increasingly of the kinds of separation of powers where we need to sustain in order for the system to be stable over time. Well, this brings up, yeah, so there's two directions to go here.

Let's go in both of them. But first, in some sense, you're suggesting that there are countries or super country kind of organizations like the European Union that are, in fact, anti-democratic, that they are doing things behind the scenes that it's even in the United States where we still have elections, there's so much of everyday governmental activity that is done by, you know, executive departments, people who are not elected, but have an enormous power over people's lives. And there is sort of a legitimate complaint that people have that their views are not being put into public policy. There's this whole invisible structure that is making things happen.

And so in some sense, that's a fair critique. of the current system. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, I think I wouldn't go so fast to say that it's anti-democratic, which sort of implies a conspiracy against the people or conspiracy against democracy. I think it's a little less exciting than that, and so I would say undemocratic, which sounds similar. But it is different and important respect, because it's often a response to quite real requirements. So our economy has become much more complex. The needs of public policy have become more complicated, in part because we need much more international cooperation, because it's harder to govern the economy.

And so what we've seen over the last 50 or 60 years in virtually every country is the rise of a set of institutions that do constrain popular will in complicated ways. So on the one hand, we just have parliaments, Congress in the United States not being responsive enough to what people want because of a rising role of money in politics and revolving door between lobbies and legislators and all those kinds of things. And on the other hand, we have, you know, the rise of independent agencies like the environmental protection agency or consumer protection bureau. We have a central bank that's both much more powerful and in certain ways more independent than you see. We have a huge expansion of judicial review and the growing importance and politicization of the Supreme Court. We have international trade treaties, lots of international agencies to deal with all kinds of issues. And, you know, these things aren't a conspiracy against the people. They are often, you know, responding to the fact, for example, that it's really hard to figure out how to keep a power plant safe and that you need lots of experts to make that decision.

And having Congress voted a day in day out probably doesn't make a lot of sense. So why don't we create an independent agency that can pass a lot of those nuts and bold regulations? Congress has the authority to abolish that agency, but it's probably not going. But there's a real logic behind this. But cumulatively, it does raise the danger that people look at what's going on and say, you know what? For most of this stuff, I'm never consulted. I don't even understand what it really all means.

Congress certainly isn't making those decisions. So how is this really a democracy? Yeah, I think, I mean, this is, I think it's dawning on me during this conversation. I think this is a very, very important point that even putting aside all the questions about nativism and racism and immigration and so forth, there is a thing that is going on that is purely based on the fact that the world is becoming more complicated, more interconnected, technology is advancing. You know, we see this in purely technological realms where there are computer programs that

do really, really important functions in the world. nobody understands, right? No one person knows what's going on inside that computer program. And the same thing is true about government. Nobody understands everything that's going on. And maybe you could imagine a nightmare scenario where two things happen simultaneously. One is that people become frustrated, that their needs are not being met, that they're not getting ahead. They see the government is sort of big and invisible and elitist and unresponsive, and they vote populists into power as a response to that. And at the same time, all this complication gives more ways for the people who are really up in the game, people who are powerful and wealthy and connected, to take advantage of

it and to increase their own wealth. So we see this combination of populism and growing inequality. When you say that out loud, that's a plausible picture of what we're faced with right now. Yeah, absolutely. And this particular aspect of it, I have to say, is the one that I find it most difficult to get my head around. Because the other stuff is really worrying and scary, but I sort of know, in theory, at least, what to do in response, right? So, you know, the fact that money plays far too big a role in our politics, look, that's

terrible. And given that the Supreme Court is likely to be dominated by people who don't see that as a problem for foreseeable future, It is in practice hard to know how to fight it. But in theory, I sort of know what to do, right? We need much more robust campaign finance regulations. We make it harder for people, you know, to go from Congress to Wall Street and so on and so forth. So I sort of know what the solutions are, even though I struggle to imagine a path by which we would implement.

On this other end, it is harder because I really do think the two values are in conflict with each other here. And one of those values is responding to popular will and having a sense that there's real democratic accountability. And the other is actually achieving the expertise in the coordination we need in order to solve very real problems

that people are going to be pissed off if we don't solve. So let's take the topic of climate change. You know, in order to deal with climate change adequately, we need to have, you know, nearly 200 countries around the world coordinated. If the United States does a lot of effort to reduce its carbon emissions, that Russia and China don't at all, which is not going to be able to deal with a problem. But how on earth are we going to structure a decision-making process in which we coordinate the actions

of 200 countries and yet ordinary citizens feel like, yeah, you know what? I already had a say in this. That's going to be incredibly hard. Yeah, and the timescale for human beings to care about what happens in the world is not much longer than a human generation or a human lifetime. So that's, that's going to be a very difficult problem in the best of times. But then we also have, in addition to technology and globalization and connectivity and complexity, we also do have the questions of diversity and immigration and so forth. And clearly these play a role, you know, in the aftermath of Trump's election, there was a debate. Is it, are people voting for him because of economic anxiety or because of racism or nativism, and clearly they both play some kind of

role. But you had a line in your book, which I thought was very provocative. You say, neither in North America nor in Western Europe has there ever been a truly equal multi-ethnic democracy. So what we're trying to create right now is a historically unique experiment. Is it plausible, even if slightly depressing, to think that one of the reasons why democracy has been relatively successful over the past couple centuries is because it's been kind of a very special kind of democracy where there was always one group that was in charge and therefore didn't feel threatened and the attempt to really be democratic not only among people but among different kinds of people and different groups is much less stable and harder to maintain.

That's a fear. I mean, one of the striking things about political history, you know, well before the the prime of a democratic age is that those states that were reasonably democratic tended to be more homogeneous. That when you think of, you know, the examples of a friday, multi-ethnic state or city before, say, you know, you might think of Vienna in the 19th century, you might think of Istanbul or Baghdad at various points in the Middle Ages. you might think of Rome in the second or third century.

But both were usually when these places either went democratic or at least where minorities didn't really have voting rights. And in a way, it's obvious when you think about it, because it's easier for me to tolerate somebody who might have a slightly different culture from me, a different religion, who perhaps has a different ethnic origin, if I don't feel like they have a voice over my political fate. No, I don't have any power.

He doesn't have any power. All the decisions are made by the monarch anyway. So, all right. Right. Once I look at people who are quite different from me and say, oh, these people actually can go and vote and affect what happens to me, it becomes harder. So that's one historical worry that I have. And then you see how deep resentment is especially in this increasing good social science. on this, of people who used to be dominant and are now threatened in the dominance.

And you know, in Europe, the idea of what it was to be Italian or French or German was always pretty deeply mono-ethnic, monocultural. It was somebody who's descended from a particular ethnic stock. And so suddenly these societies are asked to say, oh, hey, you know what? Somebody who comes from other parts of the world, even if they're born here, but they're parents that they can be a member of our society too, and there's real resistance against that. And the states in Canada,

there's always been a multi-ethnic society, but there's been one, as you point out, with a very deep racial and religious hierarchy in which members of a particular group had big advantages over others. And so again, you know, the people who are having some of those un-earned privileges taking away are going to be quite,

resentful about that. Now, I don't condone that. I don't have a right to those privileges, but I think it's actually important to take a moment to try and understand sort of where the sentiment comes from. And I always picture sort of, you know, somebody who's not, perhaps especially talented, not especially good looking, not especially affluent. And, you know, in Italy, in 1970, they might have said, you know what, I get the most social respect and all of that. but at least I'm Italian rather than Albanian. And at least I'm part of a majority population rather than one of those Moroccan immigrants.

Well, now suddenly, you know, the kid of those Albanian immigrants might be making more money than you. You might be your boss. He might be representing you in parliament. And I celebrate that as political progress. But it isn't too surprising that people who have that status advantage to take away from them. You can no longer say, hey,

just by virtue of being a member of this group, I have a certain kind of social status but superior, that they're going to be resentful for having that taken away from them. There was a sociologist who did a study that I read back a couple of years ago, but I'll have to look her up. I forget her name. But, you know, it was one of these things. She was ahead of the curve in terms of asking the question, what do the Trump voters really want? And she embedded herself. She was a Berkeley leftist progressive.

I think of Ali Hochschild. Oh, probably. Yes, exactly. And just talk to people and sort of lived their lives and got to know where they were. And she came up with this metaphor and she then read the metaphor back to them. And they said, yes, that's exactly it. And the metaphor was, you know, you think of yourself as, you know, standing in line in the race to life. You know, and there's better times ahead.

And you're walking toward them slowly. You're doing your work and it's effort, but you're making progress. And then you see off to the side, you know, a whole bunch of new people skipping the line, just being, you know, elevated in front of you, not waiting their turn. And this feels unfair to you. And these are, you know, immigrants or minorities or gays or lesbians or whatever, or even women for that matter. And people said, yes, that's more or less how they feel, even if it's not really an accurate representation. So, I mean, I want to, you know, give value to that feeling. Like how can we give people back the feeling that they are in charge of their destiny?

This must have at least some role to be played by inequality and the fact that, you know, more and more wealth is going to the wealthier. But still, on a broader scale, we need to be able to make people think that this is their country. They can get ahead. It's their country as well as other people's countries. And that's a good thing rather than a bad thing. I'm not quite sure how to get there in any simple way. Yeah, and here again, I mean, you know, the striking thing is that we've never quite done that.

So we should be prepared for some pain. But what you're describing is exactly right. We need to figure out how we can defend minority groups against, frankly, the quite obvious attacks with the suffering at the moment. And more broadly, the disadvantages that they have suffered for a longer time. And at the same time, we need to make sure that the majority group isn't assured of having special privileges. I don't think we can justly assure that. But that they feel like, you know, they are still going to get to the front of the line at some point as well.

That the goals would they have and the aspirations of having to have are going to be fulfilled. And we don't see those as being threatened by those broader accounts. and demographic changes. And doing both of those things at the same time is incredibly hard. But our ability to win the kind of society we want is dependent on that. And I want to add something here which is important, which is that I think sometimes I hear a lot of impatience with that question from people who perhaps are members of minority groups,

or just more broadly from the left. And I get that, right? because, you know, here we are, we're already suffering from historical discrimination. We're being attacked right now, and we're supposed to worry about the feelings of those people who have it better than us anyway. I mean, I absolutely get that reaction. But I do think there's a slight contradiction in how we sometimes think about that, which is that I hear the same people say, you know, we live in a society in which racism and white supremacy and structural injustice goes incredibly deep. and the majority group has these incredible reserves of power and influence and so on. And at the same time, we should not give an inch to them.

We should be absolutely uncompromising. And I'm not quite sure how we reconcile those two things. Because if you really think the majority group has such deep power and influence, then in order to affect any kind of change, you need to make your case to them to some extent. Right? Yeah, you need allies. So how then if you don't have any sum of them on board, then you're just going to lose every time. Right.

And so I think that the most helpful way of doing this is to actually appeal to the better instincts of perhaps not every single member of a majority group, but the bulk of the majority group. And this is, by the way, what a civil rights movement did. It's in many ways what Barack Obama did. And it can be effective. And I'm sure it's frustrating. I'm sure it sometimes means that we can't be quite as blunt, at least in certain parts of politics as we would like to be, not given to our justified anger, you know, quite as freely as we would like. But if you actually care about making this country better and winning those political victories, I fear that it's necessary to some extent. Yeah, and I feel, you know, it's easy for me to give advice to people who are members of historically discriminated against groups,

almost none of the groups that I'm in have faced that. But I also think it's important to distinguish between groups and individuals, right? And I think the fact that there is white privilege and male privilege and cisgender privilege, et cetera, I think these are very real things. Those don't mean that even if you're a member of all those groups, your life was easy or you haven't struggled. I think that there are real struggles that people go through no matter what groups they're members of. in some sense, everyone struggles, but there are some, you know, poor people or people who economics and politics have left behind in a very real way. And there's nothing wrong with

taking their concerns seriously. It's kind of crucially important to the bigger Democratic project. Well, and right, and I think there's a real problem of distribution here, right, which is to say that obviously, you know, on average members of historical discriminated groups, by virtue of being members of historic discriminatory groups, have faced many more obstacles and many more struggles than members of majority groups. And that is a deep injustice, that as a society we need to reconcile. But obviously, the kinds of people who end up being the spokespeople for that position also aren't the spokespeople by coincidence, there's a so-wix people because they have had

most success in life and perhaps also had some advantages of relevant. to other members of their own group. And so you often end up with a dynamic in which people who actually personally have also experienced real discrimination and so on that have gone to some of the best colleges in the country, make six-figure salaries and so on, sort of, you know, sit there explaining

why it is that most, perhaps all members of a dominant group have his huge privileges and you end up people, you know, with people who haven't had a great, education who perhaps have had real personal tragedies happening to them, who perhaps have had abusive parents or come from households but are deeply dysfunctional, sort of listening to this and say, oh, you, you know, professor so-and-so or fellow at so-and-so institution or, you know, columnist and so-and-so newspaper and magazine, and I explain to me why it is that you're,

you know, so disadvantaged. And that's a real problem with dynamic, right? which doesn't invalidate the fact, but of course, there are those underlying structural injustices. But I think it means we need to be a little sensitive of how to communicate that in a way that people are willing to have an open mind to. Yeah, and again, I feel bad asking people who are members of groups who have been discriminated against to be patient and understanding and empathetic to the people who are members of groups who have been dominating them for hundreds of years. but it's also a good strategy long term. I think there's a place for bomb throwing and raising a ruckus. There's also a place for sitting down and reasoning together and appreciating each other's points of view,

becoming less and less common. And by way, I just want to emphasize two things. A, this is not a moral claim, it's a strategic claim, right? It's just a claim about what to do in order to ensure that people like Donald Trump aren't in a position to do tremendous damage and violence to those groups. And B, I think, you know, we would do well not to talk about, you know,

how much of a rocker should you raise and how large should you be about that. I think to me it's about the manner in which we talk about it, not how much we talk about it or how passionately we talk about it, which is to say that at a moment in which minorities aren't a very real attack, there's no limit to how much we should talk about it. I just think that the strategically productive way of talking about it is to actually say this is the kind of society we want.

And here's where that society is one that should be appealing to all American. And why despite the dark chapters in American history, it actually calls on the best traditions in American history. And it calls on the ideals of the founding fathers, even if the founding fathers themselves were in many ways flawed. And that's something that from Martin Luther, king to Barack Obama, a lot of people in the history of our country have done incredibly successfully. So that to me, you know, appears to be the way to actually make headway.

Yeah, and I'm going to choose to continue to be optimistic on balance about the force of reason and community and appealing to the better angels of our nature. However, let me also say that I read your book and it's very depressing. There's real prospects of things going badly. I don't want to be alarmist or I don't want to overreact. It's certainly in my mind very possible that despite everything, Donald Trump in the United States and other people in other countries will be moments in history, not precursors of an entirely new phase of history. But there's also another possibility that things go just disastrously wrong. You know, if you asked what would it like, what would it be like for a functioning healthy, democratic, liberal democracy like the United States

to turn into an authoritarian dictatorship? Maybe the precursors would look more or less like what we're seeing. So how seriously should we be worried about a true collapse of liberal democracy in a country like the United States? Well, I think, you know, there's a way of interpreting a question purely about probabilities and a way of interpreting it about, you know, expected values, which is to say that, you know, I don't think that the likelihood of liberal democracy collapsing in the United States is over 50% is probably quite a bit lower than 50%. But given how disasters that outcome should be, I think we should be very worried about it.

5%? I don't know. It's hard to put a percentage around it. But, you know, the striking thing is that five or ten years ago, political scientists thought that it was essentially impossible, that the likelihood is zero, that once countries had changed, this is your point from earlier,

had changed governments for free and fair elections, at least a couple of times. Once they had a GDP per capita of more than, you know, about $14,000 in today's terms, they were safe. We really didn't have to worry about them. And we've already seen in countries like Hungary that that's untrue, that you have authoritarian populists take over there and, in my mind, destroy liberal democracy for sure, probably not even preserve illiberal democracy, but erect a form of competitive authoritarianism. And now we're seeing the President of the United States take the first steps that people like Putin and Russia, like Adewan and Turkey, that...

Chavez and Venezuela have taken a few years ago. And because we are a richer country, we're a country of a more vibrant civil society, a very deep constitutional tradition, there's every hope that we're going to be able to stop that. That at step three or step four, Donald Trump is not going to be able or perhaps not want to take step five and six and seven as well.

But certainly as a scholar of comparative politics, the pattern I'm seeing, the direction we're going in, is very concerning indeed. Yeah, as a good Bayesian, I feel it's my responsibility intellectually to actually assign probabilities to everything that I think might happen. But I take your point, which is that we've definitely undergone a change from thinking that that kind of disaster in the United States is simply inconceivable for all practical purposes to at least thinking that it's conceivable. And if it is rare and it doesn't happen, then, you know, there's a silver lining there that we take this more seriously and hopefully we can fix things down the road. the pessimism that I have about that is, you know, one of the many ways I was wrong about politics over the last few years was I dramatically underestimated the extent to which serious grown-up members of the Republican Party would resist the worst impulses of a Trump-like administration. And I take it that that's also happening in other countries.

There are, you know, you join a group, you do game theory. What is best for my reelection chances? That's just way more important than what's best for the larger country. And that's even more depressing than the fact that one person or another wins an election to me. Yeah, so a few thoughts here. The first is that, you know, as a political scientist, I've always been quite skeptical of some of my colleagues who took a rational choice approach to much of a political world. And in particular, to this case, right, where we said, look, I mean, basically you can just think, what maximizes a politician's chance of reelection? and then from that very simple assumption,

you can derive most of their behavior. I thought, ah, you know, I don't quite buy that. People are more complicated and bad, have something more idealistic than that. Well, I've become much more sympathetic to that approach over the last couple of years. I have to tell you. The other thing is that, you know,

I used to be the most pessimistic person in the room. I mean, I'm a sort of democracy dream hipster, right? I worried about democracy before it was cool, and they used to be called a Cassandra a lot of a time as a result. And I always wanted to say two people, But Cassandra was right, damn it, read the story. I didn't. It made me sound like too much of a crank.

But, you know, I was the pessimist in debates about what would happen to the Republican Party once Donald Trump won the presidency. You know, I thought, you know, the optimists thought, you know what, these people have very different beliefs from Donald Trump. And they have deep commitment to constitutional values. and so they're just going to rein him in. I thought, no, that's not true. The base is actually of Trump at this point. And, you know, a couple of them might flip. And over time, Donald Trump is going to succeed in replacing the party with his own base.

He's going to have Trump as candidates running the primary, and there'll be a sort of Republican civil war for four or six or eight years, but eventually it'll turn into a populist party. Well, it turns out, speaking of having to update the probability, They were both wrong. But what happened is much more extreme than what I predicted. And that's that Republicans just flipped. They said, you know what?

Trump is so popular. This is clearly where we're at now. Even though for many years I talked about values that are very, very different, I'm just going to go with this now. And so much more quickly, much more thoroughly than pessimists like me had predicted Donald Trump has wound up being in control of a Republican Party. And as Bayesian, I think, we should therefore also update our probability of similar shifts happening in other institutions.

I'm much more worried now when I was six or seven months ago about the Supreme Court acquiescing with extreme behavior by Donald Trump. Yeah, and the evidence is there, right? So we collect more data, we update our priors, and that's not the, it's not. not good news for optimism, but there's still some remaining. Let me just play the devil's advocate here. Part of the pessimism that I have is that I know some pretty smart people in academia and elsewhere who are saying, you know, like, sure, Donald Trump is not, you know, going to win any IQ tests, but if we look worldwide, if we look not just at Europe, but if you look

China or Russia, isn't it possible that there's a sense in which a strong, even a strong man government gets more done? I mean, especially looking at China, there are people who say, you know, well, sure, it's not a democracy, human rights are not good, but boy, they can really build bridges really, really well. Isn't there a tradeoff there that we might think about buying into? What do you say to that argument? Well, a few things. I mean, first of all, view of return systems that work very well, actually, very limited in number. And China does work reasonably well economically for now. There's a real question about whether it can transition from being a mid-income economy to a high-income economy.

But it's very difficult to emulate China. I like to quip that, you know, China works very well in practice, but it's a mess in theory. You know, it has a very unique history. But unless you happen to have the Communist Party kicking around, that's been around for 60 years and still sort of claims to be Maoists, but actually a state capitalist, it's very difficult to know how you would even go about emulating China. So let's look at the countries which do actually resemble Donald Trump. Let's look at the countries in which of our foreign populace have taken over.

Countries like Venezuela, countries like Turkey and Russia and Hungary, and they're not doing particularly well economic. They're deeply corrupt. Recep Erdogan just made his son-in-law the new finance minister. That would never happen here. That's okay. Unimaginable. Do we even know who Trump's son-in-law is? Never heard of the guy, yeah, behind the scenes.

And this is, by the way, something when I talk to members of a business community, we try to emphasize to them. I mean, you've already seen companies like AT&T, basically bribes to Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer. you have seen attacks on American companies for the business decisions they took, like Harley Davidson, threatening tax retaliation and so on. Rule of law is one of the reasons why the American economy has worked incredibly well. You don't want a situation in which your success as a businessman depends on whether or not you're in favor with the regime.

And that's not enough to short thought. That is how business runs in many countries in the world. and those countries tend to have much lower growth rates. Okay, good. This has been great. To close, I will play the role of the genie coming out of the bottle, and I would give you one wish, but I'm only going to give you a menu. You don't get to make up your wish.

Oh, good. It makes it easier. Yeah, exactly. It's a multiple choice, genie. And so here are your choices with the goal in mind of some combination of making the country more pluralistic and liberal democracy success. So one option is you could radically improve our educational system, secondary and primary. You could really inculcate values.

You could teach kids that diversity is important and the constitution is important. Rule of law is important, democracy and all that stuff. That's one option. Another is you could really impose policies that would help fight inequality, you know, redistribute some of the wealth, not by, you know, necessarily socializing everything, but just a real tax code that took capital gains and wealth into account and really helped people, maybe a basic income or something like that. That is the second option. And the third option is we could make sure, I don't know how this would happen, but we could make sure the media actually

told the truth. We could have, you know, different voices in the media, but make sure that there was not any sort of quasi-state sponsored propaganda machine that gave people the news that they thought that they should be hearing. So those of your, three choices, which one of those would you think is the most important? I'm going to be very annoying here and give a sort of literalist, natural scientists, perhaps even if I may be so bold answer. I mean, I think a lot of the things you're describing are different parts of equilibrium. And it's very hard to change one of those who are changing the other. So I think if you had much more economic equality, you also would have a much better

education system. Right. And if people are better educated, then they would also, you know, be less likely to watch Fox News. And so, you know, I think that these things go together or fall together. Also, there's no such thing as genies. So you could have said that. That would have been inadequate, naturally scientific. Yeah, damn. I missed an easy opportunity.

That would have been an easy way out. All right, Yasha, thanks so much. even if it's not always making us more optimistic, I think it is important to understand what's going on. That's what really gives me optimism, that there are people like you that are really taking these things seriously, looking at them as carefully and rationally as we can and trying to find a good way forward.

And there are, if I'm allowed a closing word, there's things that people can do. I mean, the people who are listening to this podcast, you can, you know, if you have an answer to Sean Zxton question about, you know, whether it's A, B, or C, then go and work at that. If you think it's A, go and work at improving the education system. If it's B, then go and fight for more income equal.

If you think it's C, then go and found your own media company or do whatever it takes. But, you know, I am worried about the future, but I'm not fatalistic because I do think it's subject to human agency. And I like the citizens of China and North Korea and Turkey and Russia, we also have a liberty to go and for our political values. So that's what our job is now. Good. You correctly perceive the subtext of the question. Great. All right. Yasha Monk, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you. This is great fun. Thanks.