TED Radio Hour - What Topples Democracies

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Around the world, democratic ideals are being tested in surprising ways. As the curtains rise on a big election year, TED speakers explore what can keep people united and what drives them apart. Guests include journalist and Broadway producer Jose Antonio Vargas, civil war expert Barbara Walter, and political scientist Yascha Mounk. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/tedSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Manusse Zamoroti. We start today on Broadway, where I recently went with an old friend to see a musical called Here Lies Love. It already feels like a party just stood in the lobby. Would you agree? Yes, absolutely. 100%.

The show tells the story of the rise and fall of Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt dictator who was married to a former beauty queen, Amelda Marcos, who later became famous for her extensive designer shoe collection. Do you think that we're going to watch a show about the demise of democracy? Because that's what it is. Is that what we're going to see? I had no idea. Marcos was democratically elected, but over the course of 20 years,

he had thousands killed to maintain his grip on power. Weirdly, the story is told through disco, written by David Byrne and Fat Boy Slim. And much of the audience don't have seats. So we were on the dance floor, boogieing away with the dictators. Which felt really fun. But at times also very wrong. It is uncomfortable. This is producer Jose Antonio Vargas.

He says Ferdinand and Amelda's ability to seduce theater goers night after night. That's the point. The music is so good, right? And it's a metaphor. You know, we all get lost. They're like, okay, there's Imelda. You know, she's charming. But then they can't help it, right?

The Marcos's were eventually ousted in 1986 by massive peaceful protests called the People Power Revolution. It's Jose's favorite act of the show. And all you hear is the human voice. the guitar, and he says that democracy belongs to the people. And that's the moment when I'm like, okay, the people power revolution of the Philippines in the mid-80s. I was there. My auntie Ida brought me. I was five. That was a peaceful four-day revolution. And given everything that's happening right now in the world and in our own country, I think that concept of democracy belonging to the people, and what are we going to do with it? Our democracy will only

stay alive if we actually fight for it. The history of the Philippines, a democracy sliding into a dictatorship, and the country's struggle to wrestle it back. It echoes what's happening in many countries, from Poland to Turkey, and now, maybe even in the U.S., as our multicultural democracy is tested. So before the curtains rise on a big election year, today on the show, what topples democracy? Ideas and stories about what keeps people united and what drives them apart. Which brings us back to Jose Antonio Vargas. A recent text from a friend reminded him of the personal significance of putting Here Lies Love on Broadway.

And she texted me and she said, Jose, you can't go to the Philippines, so now you help bring the Philippines here. And I remember I looked at the text, and I actually, I have to tell you, I was in the subway, I actually started staring up because she's right. I didn't think of it that way. That's what I was trying to do, helping to do. You know, I haven't been able to go back home for 30 years. 31 years next summer. Before telling the saga of the Marcos's, Jose experienced his own saga growing up. When he was 12 years old, he was living with his mother in the Philippines, and then,

left to join his grandparents in California. There was always this expectation that America was inevitable. And so growing up, I knew that my grandparents were here, and it was only a matter of time that I was going to come. They hoped, as most immigrants do, that he would get a better education, a better life. And Jose did. Until age 16, when, like many American teens, he went to get his driver's permit and got a shock instead. Yeah.

And then I went to the booth. And this woman with curly hair, glasses, I said, I was here for the permit. I gave her my green card. I gave her my Mountain View High School ID. And she flipped my green card around twice. And she told me that it was fake. And then she said, don't come back here again. What went through your mind?

Well, the first thing was she's lying. I was thinking to myself, she's just confused. You know, like, I didn't believe her. And my grandfather was a security guard. So he worked the graveyard shift. So he was always home during the day. So I biked a home. And I got to the house.

And I told her what the woman had said. And I assume my grandfather was going to say, oh, she's lying. That's not right. But then my grandfather says, what are you doing showing that, the green card, to people? You're not supposed to be here. Jose's grandparents were naturalized citizens. But Jose didn't know that he was undocumented in the U.S. illegally. And then I think that's when my journalism career started in a way.

Because I was like, wait, what? Yeah, because you must have had a lot of questions. If that's fake, then what else is fake? I mean, that's why I never thought about me not being here in any other way than legal. because my grandparents, they were both here with papers. So if they had papers, why didn't I? And what did they tell you? You know, that's when kind of the unraveling started.

So then I, from the way my grandfather explained it, they couldn't petition me here because grandparents can't petition grandkids. And then that's when I remembered when I left the Philippines. I was introduced to this guy that was my uncle, and that was the first time I had met him. But again, I'm Filipino. know, everybody's an uncle. So I just assumed that he was really my uncle, right?

And then that's how I found out he was the smuggler that was paid money to smuggle me here. And then the plan was I was supposed to go through high school at least. And then after high school, I would work under the table, which is what a lot of undocumented people do at the flea market where my grandfather's brother was a janitor. So that was, again, his plan. right and then this idea of like you know marry a woman who's a U.S. citizen and then that's when I was like but I'm not attracted to women like I'm gay you know which is not the kind of thing that you want to tell your grandfather who's you know very much a Catholic so in many ways coming out as gay when I was finding out that I was undocumented was my way of claiming I'm not going to

surrender to your narrative to what you want me to do so at six 16, Jose decides to find ways to fit in so no one will ever doubt his nationality again. The first thing was like, I can't, I have to make sure that people know that I'm supposed to be here. The first thing was the way I spoke and thank God for PBS and hip hop and R&B. Like, that's how I learned it. Right? I figured if I can sound like Charlie Rose and Dr. Dre, I'll be okay. So that was the first thing.

And then the second thing was really. kind of getting lost in America. You know, and I was really lucky that I was in high school when the New York Times website went online for free. And thank God I could read all these articles. And mind you, I wasn't like a straight A student. I think I was like barely a 3.0 student. But I did everything. I edited the school paper.

I was in the speech and debate club. I was I was in theater. I was in choir. I did everything. A couple teachers noticed Jose's enthusiasm. And they wanted to make sure that he got a chance to go to college. All I could tell them was that I don't, you know, clearly I can't apply for financial aid and I can't afford college.

So how am I going to get to college? And it just so happened that there was a venture capitalist whose kids attended the school district and he wanted to start a scholarship fund. And Rich Fisher, the superintendent, convinced him, yeah, if you're going to start this, like, can we just make sure that it doesn't have immigration status as a requirement? So you were lucky. adults who didn't give a crap about what your status was. No, because I did.

It was always foremost in my mind, but they didn't. Jose went to college. He became a journalist. He got a job at the San Francisco Chronicle. Then the Washington Post, where he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. He paid taxes using a doctored social security card. All the while, fearful,

that someone would find out his secret. I lied on an employment form saying that I'm a U.S. citizen. To get those jobs, to get to the San Francisco Chronicle, to get to the Washington Post, I lied. I checked the box. I checked U.S. citizen. Keeping up the charade was exhausting. Finally, at the age of 30, it became too much. You know, like I, the lying is I'm done. lying. Like, I'm here.

In 2011, Jose decided to write an article that he thought might be his last. The first person's story appeared in the New York Times magazine with the headline, My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant. His face in black and white filled the cover.

I knew that making myself the story was a big choice. There was no coming back from that. Right? And then the thing that I had to really grapple with was understanding the legal ramifications of putting in paper, in black ink, in the New York Times that I had broken the immigration law and that I claimed U.S. citizenship that I didn't have.

And I didn't know until I spoke to a bunch of immigration lawyers that actually claiming false citizenship, claiming that you're an American citizen if you're not, is the highest offense you could make. Right. And the moment you do that, you can't apply for an EB extraordinary ability. visa, right? The EB visa is for people who can show that they can contribute special things to the United States so that they can get citizenship.

But you had committed a crime, which meant you couldn't even try to get the one kind of visa that you probably would have qualified for. Most things you actually put off the table, right? So I had to understand that. And to be honest, 12 years into this work now, someone is going to ask me, hey, why can't you just go fix this thing? Can you just ask President Biden for a pardon? Somebody actually asked me that. You know, like you're producing a Broadway show. Like, you know, you're doing all of these things. Like, can't they just make an exception?

No. That's not the point here. The point is to say there are 11 million of us, and mind you, I think there's more than 11 million. And we are in legal immigration purgatory. In a minute, more from Jose Antonio Vargas. and his hopes for other undocumented immigrants. On the show today, what topples democracies? I'm Manus Zummerodi, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. Hey, it's Manus.

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And what matters is that you are a part of the community of listeners who make this work possible. We can't do it without you, and your support, make sure everyone can listen. You can give today at donate.npr.org slash ted radio hour or explore NPR Plus at plus.nepr.com. And thanks again. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti. And we were just talking to journalist and Broadway producer Jose Antonio Vargas. about his 2011 public announcement

that he was living in the U.S. illegally, that he was undocumented. You lie, you pass, you hide. So that he could draw more attention to the legal immigration purgatory that many undocumented people here in the U.S. are in, Jose made a documentary about his experience. So I'm launching a whole campaign about what it needs to be an American and the fact that I am an American. He started a media company called Defyfile.

Fine American, gave his first TED Talk, and wrote a book called Dear America. There are tens of thousands of students across America who were here without papers. And I would hate to think that they're sitting in their classrooms listening to us talk about them and internalizing the word illegal. He changed his entire focus from reporting on Americans to reporting on people who consider themselves American. They pay taxes, contribute to society, but are told that they need to. to leave or hide. Actions are illegal. Never people.

But when Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and anti-immigration sentiment was on the rise, Jose started questioning his decision to stay in a country with laws that essentially told him he didn't belong. I started getting messages from all the undocumented people, right? Like who have decided to leave, actually. So I was thinking, go back to the Philippines

where I have to go back to because that's what I'm a citizen of. And then I was thinking either, you know, the U.K. or Canada, if they'd have me. And then the whole world would be available, right? Just not America. So that was my plan. Then something delightful happened that made him feel wanted here in a way he never expected. Yeah, so the school district that I attended as a sixth grader decided to rename an elementary school. And then, to my surprise, the trustees voted.

and it's Jose Antonio Vargas Elementary School. Wow. My first question was, wait a second, can they legally do that? Can you legally name a school after someone who's here illegally? Like, is that allowed? And so then I was thinking to myself, what do I say to these kids?

When they asked her parents, who is this guy? Oh, he left. It got too hard? I know that sounds crazy. But school, for me, like, I don't know where I'd be if I wasn't a graduate of Crittenden Middle School, Mountview High School, in San Francisco State University, all public schools. I don't know where I would be.

So explain the significance of that, because on the one hand, just as you're feeling like you're unwanted in the U.S., you find out that you are recognized and had a big influence on the place where you grew up in California. So how has your thinking evolved? And how have you seen the country's attitudes towards immigrants? evolve. Yeah. There was a moment, actually, when I came out as undocumented 12 years ago, that there was a whole movement called undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic.

Young people coming out as undocumented. Now, because of how anti-immigrant, the rhetoric, especially during the Trump era, a lot of young people are going back to the closet about this. And a young woman reached out to me recently, and she was asking me, why keep going? And the thing that I had to tell her to think about is, look, if freedom can't come from the government, then freedom has to come from people that actually are going to make you feel free. There may be teachers, they may be coworkers, they may be whatever, who are the ones saying, you know what, you belong here.

Go find those people. You know, mind you, when my principal and my superintendent, my mentor, my journalism mentor, I don't think they ever used the word allies, but that's what they were. Right. I would argue that they were practicing citizenship. In many ways, they defined American and didn't see any reason why it wasn't one. Because whether or not America considers me an American, like, this is my country. And I have to be a part of it.

And I am a part of it. That's Jose Antonio Vargas. He's a journalist and Broadway producer. You can see both of his TED Talks at TED.com. On the show today, how nations thrive, endure, or just fall apart. Iraq had a civil war. Northern Ireland had a civil war with Great Britain for many years. Central America had a whole series of civil wars in the 70s and 80s. The ones that are experiencing civil war today are Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Libya,

Mali, Myanmar, Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria is still going on. This is Barbara Walter. I am a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. And as you may have guessed, Barbara is an expert in civil wars. The most prevalent form of violence in the world is civil war. And not only that, but civil wars have been increasing pretty much consistently since 1946. And we are now at a point in history where there are more civil wars going on today than at any previous time. Barbara had been studying this for decades when in 2017 she was invited to join an

unusual CIA task force. The goal? Find a way to predict which countries are about to go to civil war. Conflict experts like Barbara made up half the task force, data analysts, made up the other half. The data analysts asked the experts to give them all the factors that they thought could potentially matter in this path towards war. And we gave them 38 different factors. And some of those factors seemed quite obvious, whether a country was poor, or whether the government heavily discriminated against one particular group, whether there was a lot

of income inequality, things like that. And the data analysts went away and they came back. with a model and they said it turns out that only two factors were highly predictive. The two factors actually surprised Barbara. They were not the two factors that the experts thought would be important. The first was something that political scientists called anocracy. An anocracy is kind of like a partial democracy, neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. So think about Hungary today.

Hungary holds elections. Hungarians gladly go to the polls. They like to vote. But basically, the outcome of that election is preordained because Victor Obon has essentially made it extremely difficult for any opposition party to campaign. So he controls the media. He jails opponents so that they can't campaign. So it's a partial democracy. The second factor was whether political parties were mostly grouped around race, ethnicity, or religion. So instead of setting up political parties based on whether you're a conservative or a liberal, communist or a capitalist, you set up your political parties based on whether you're Muslim or Christian, black or white, Catholic or Protestant. When you have these two factors, the task force considered it at high rate, risk of political instability and violence, and it put it on a watch list. It was actually called the watch list, and we sent that watch list to the White House. As she identified these traits in countries around the world, Barbara realized one country was missing from the conversation.

So here I was sitting in a hotel conference room in suburban Virginia four times a year with a room full of really smart people, and we talked about countries in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, but we never, ever talked about the United States. Barbara Walter continues from the TED stage. That's because the CIA is legally not allowed to monitor the United States or its citizens, and that's exactly the way it should be. But I was a private citizen, and I had this information, and I could see that, both of these factors were emerging in my own country,

and they were emerging at a surprisingly fast rate. The U.S. democracy has been downgraded three times since 2016. 2016, it was downgraded because international election monitors had considered the 2016 election free, but not entirely fair. America's own intelligence agencies had found that the Russians had, in fact, meddled in that election. It was downgraded again in 2019 when the White House refused to comply with requests by Congress for information. And it was downgraded a final time at the end of 2020 when President Trump refused to accept his loss in the 2020 election and actively attempted to

overturn the results. Between December of 2020 and early 2021, the United States was officially classified as an anocracy. If the task force had been allowed to monitor and study the United States, it likely would have considered it at high risk of political instability and political violence in December of 2020, just a few weeks before the January 6th insurrection, and it likely would have put the United States on the watch list. So January 6 happens and, you know, I'm, and most people I know are completely and utterly shocked, but were you? No, not at all.

If you're studying sort of the signs and risks of civil war, these tend to grow slowly over time, which means that you're seeing these underlying changes before anybody else's. And I'd given a number of talks prior to January 6th. And people thought I was hyperbolic. People thought this was ridiculous. People thought I didn't know what I was talking about. We couldn't seem to get through to the American public. That cancer was growing. That unless we paid attention, it was going to get bigger and bigger to eventually take us down.

So why is this happening now? It's happening now because of demographic change. The United States is in the middle. of a major transition from a country whose population is majority white to a country whose population will be majority non-white. The United States will be the first country to go through this, but others are going to follow. The people who tend to start civil wars

are the groups that had once been politically dominant, but are in decline. If you think back to the former Yugoslavia, Serbs had enjoyed most of the positions in government and the military throughout the Cold War for decades, but they were the ones who stood to lose the most as Yugoslavia democratized. The Serbs started that war. Iraq's Sunnis enjoyed most of the key positions in the military and in government under Saddam Hussein. But when the United States toppled Saddam Hussein,

Saddam Hussein, they also threw the Sunnis out of their positions. It was the Sunnis who started that war. In the United States, the rise of militias has been driven primarily by white men who see America's identity changing in ways that directly threatens their status. They were the ones who marched on the Capitol on January 6th. Six. I mean, so where are we now, then, Barbara? Are we just waiting for the other shoe to drop?

We're in a really precarious position for a number of reasons. And, you know, I think in the United States, if we did have a civil war, it's not going to look like the 1860s version of a civil war. It's going to be more decentralized. It's going to be violence targeted at civilians, at opposition leaders. How it usually starts is every group has more moderate members and more extreme members. The extremists in any group are usually marginalized and ignored. And that's because they're usually a tiny minority. And what happens in situations like this, where things are already tense,

where truth is increasingly hard to discern, this is how you often see the very first stages, of real sustained violence. So how do we fix things? Because this country has had a civil war, and we did come back from that. Is it possible to mend these extremely frayed relationships? I think probably the single easiest thing that we could do to shore up our democracy is to regulate social media.

Our information environment is increasingly toxic. It increasingly pushes out the most extreme material. increasing distrust in democracy, perpetrating misinformation and disinformation in ways that have had really negative societal effects. I also think that help is going to have to come from the bottom up and from us as citizens. We have to participate more in our democracy. We have to get involved. We have to vote more. If you look at Tennessee, for example, most people think of Tennessee as a deep, deep red state. But if you look at, for example, primaries in Tennessee, only about 20% of eligible voters in Tennessee vote in any given primary. Tennessee is not unusual. 80% of eligible

voters are standing on the sidelines. And now imagine state by state if all of those people actually vote. The outcome of those elections will be very, very different. Full, healthy democracies do not experience civil war, period. I want to ask you, you have done so much research on this, including visiting countries that were starting to democratize when the other shoe did drop and the country fell into a civil war, including Bosnia. You interviewed a woman named Berena Kovac from Sarajevo,

who had a chilling story. Gosh, I get teary every time I think about it. So Barina Kovac was a woman who lived in Sarajevo in the 1990s with her husband. They were a young couple. They were both professionals. I had a series of interviews with her and I said, Barina, tell me about the months and weeks leading up to the outbreak of war. Tell me when you knew something was happening.

And she said, we had no idea. We were a young couple. We were going to work. We were having weekend getaways. We didn't think that anything bad could happen here. And then she started to see her friends changing. And suddenly at a wedding where they were all together, one of her friends told them to stop singing Muslim songs.

And she's just like, nobody ever thought of them as Muslim songs. They were just, you know, wedding songs that we would sing in these events. And she's like, why are you guys? feel something shifting. And she said then one night, it was in 1992, she was at home with her newborn son, and suddenly the lights went off. And she said, and then you started to hear machine gun fire. And that's how the siege of Sarajevo started.

Everybody I've talked to who's lived through a civil war has said the same thing. I didn't see it coming. I didn't see it coming. And that's because they didn't understand what the big signs were. And I think that's what really I'm trying to do here is just to help people see the early signs, see the early steps that countries take as they go down this terrible path. And to tell them that if you know the early signs, there's time to turn it around. But you have to be willing. You have to be willing to get involved and basically demand change because otherwise you will lose your democracy.

And the only way to get it back after you lose it is going to be to fight for it. Barbara Walter is a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. She's the author of How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, what topples democracies? I'm Manus Zumerodi, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zomerode.

And on the show today, what topples democracies? And for our final guest, something a little different. A conversation we recorded live at TED's first democracy event held in New York City this month. I was joined on stage by political scientist Yasha Monk to talk about the wave of authoritarian leadership around the world and how the ideals of democracy that many of us have taken for granted are changing in surprising ways. So just a little bit about Yasha, he was born in Germany to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Poland. He's a professor at Johns Hopkins. He became a U.S. citizen in 2017 and has written five books. about the state of democracy. Here we are on the TED stage. You were one of the first to start

alerting us that liberal democracies had big problems when you wrote in July 2016, the citizens of wealthy established democracies are less satisfied with their governments than they have been at any time since opinion polling began. With that as the backdrop, I actually want to start some more positive. Let's start with Poland. Democratic opposition party won recent elections there. It's being called a win for liberal democracies everywhere. Remind us about what happened and how you see it. Yeah, Poland is a wonderful microcosm of the threat to democracy in this moment and the fact that we shouldn't need to despair. You know, when I was in graduate school, my professors taught me it's very hard to sustain democracies. But once

countries have had a number of changes of government for free and fair elections, once we reach a certain level of wealth, you basically can take the future of democracy for granted. And Poland was one of those places. But then what we saw is something that wasn't supposed to happen. These political candidates and parties come into government that are very extreme, that don't respect the basic rules of a democratic game, but try to concentrate power in their own hands. We call them populists, populists like Donald Trump in the United States,

like Haye Bolsonaro and Brazil, like Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, and like the ruling Law and Justice Party in Poland, that won in 2015 and was in charge for a very long time, and it looked as though they had managed to concentrate power in their own hands. They had turned the state broadcaster into a propaganda outlet. They had replaced many of the justices on the country's courts. But what we've also seen is that democratic oppositions can be resilient, even in the face of these challenges,

even as the ability to organize as an opposition, becomes more and more constrained. And about a month ago in Poland, that democratic opposition managed to remove the government by democratic means. They managed against the odds, against all of those challenges to win a contested democratic election,

and it now looks as for Poland is back on the path towards a more stable democratic system. And so, yes, you can return to democracy, but it won't necessarily be a smooth path. Well, so the problem is that once you have people in the democratic system who really don't play by the democratic rules, it sets up all of those follow-on dilemmas. So one of the things that the incoming government will now have to decide to do

is what you do once the state broadcaster is full of loyalists, outgoing government, who really just spread the most extreme form of propaganda, well, I guess you want to fire all of them. But if you fire all of them, then you're just another step in the repoliticization of the state broadcaster. That's not going to be the way to actually turn it into a neutral and trusted source. What do you do when a lot of the justices on the courts have been appointed in an illegitimate manner? But if you then go and fire all of the justices, you're simply cementing a new norm, but each time that somebody wins an election,

you're going to come in and sweep out the old people and politicize the system, and that's not the way to build stable institutions. So I think we've been thinking far too much in the last 10 years, either full democracy or you're veering towards full dictatorship. I think the actual situation we're going to be facing is decades of struggle over those things,

in which we might make a little bit of progress in one moment, in which more democratic forces might win an election and trying to re-establish some of those basic democratic rules and in which the populists win sometimes and start to undermine those rules. And we're never going to have a perfect democracy. Most countries will never turn into straight-up dictatorships will be somewhere in that messy middle.

And so I think what we're facing is a very long and protracted and complicated fight. So all the countries that you mentioned, the threats to their democracies were different. But for our purposes, you often use the term liberal democracy. Can we just define that, how you see it? Yeah, so as a political scientist, I think of our political system as having two fundamental values. So I tend to use the term liberal democracy,

which is that one value of our democracy is derived from the literal meaning of a term. Democracy is the rule of the people. It's the idea that we collectively rule ourselves rather than having a king or a military general or a priest or a rabbi or an imam or somebody else telling us what to do. But that's not the only thing, because we also think that even the majority should not be able to tell us exactly how to live. But even if the majority says, we don't like what you say, they shouldn't be allowed to shut us up. Even if the majority says, we don't like the way you worship, they shouldn't be allowed to force us to worship in the way that they worship.

And so this is the second element, the liberal element, the republican element, the element that maintains our individual freedom. And the danger with many of these authoritarian politicians, many of what you might call these populists, is that they don't want to accept that. But they say, I and I alone truly represent the people. And if you disagree with me, then you're illegitimate. When there's something wrong with you. And so that becomes a threat to the pluralism we need in our political system to sustain individual liberty. Okay, so these two core components, you've got the individual rights and the popular will. When do you start to see those fracture?

Well, so I think there's two ways that that can happen. One is that sometimes established political parties and movements stop being good at listening to what people actually want. they often come from a similar kind of social milieu, they have their own kind of ideas and values, they're often more affluence, they might have their own kinds of material interests as well, and so often they stop being very good at translating the popular will into public policy. But that then invites a counter-reaction. That invites politicians who come in and say, you shouldn't trust those elites, you shouldn't trust the people in charge, they're completely corrupt and self-interested, they don't want to listen to you, they look down on you.

And so what we need is somebody who truly speaks for the people. And that's me. I truly am the voice of the people. And all you need to do is to allow me to go in government to push aside all these stupid norms and procedures that constrain what the people actually want. And that way we're going to make progress. And that is the thing that all of these politicians that otherwise look very dissimilar to each other have in common. Why, as political scientists, do we talk about authoritarian populists like Donald Trump,

in Hugo Chavez, in Venezuela, and Redoan in Turkey, and Viktor Orban in Hungary, in Narendra Modi, in India. These politicians come from very different parts of the world. They come from different parts of political spectrum. Some of them are left wing, many of them are right wing. They have different religions.

They hate different kinds of people. They all hate somebody. They hate different kinds of people. What they have in common is this claim that they truly represent the voice of a country and that anybody who disagrees with them is not just a political opponent but an enemy, somebody who's illegitimate because they disagree with them. Okay, we're entering 2024, which is a mega election year.

My understanding is two billion voters are expected to go to the polls in 50 plus countries. Broadly speaking, is this next year a tipping point or a key moment for democracy that you're watching? Yes, there will be a number of very important elections, and one of the most important ones will be in the United States. But we got quite lucky in the first term of Donald Trump, because he did not have a deep bench of loyalists who were competent and who actually wanted to effectuate his program because there was real constraints on him from within his own political party.

All of that is going to be different the next time around. He now is coming in with a much more decided point, plan to push back against any of the limits on his power. He's in a much angrier mood. He has many more loyalists who've actually spent four years gaining experience about how to wrangle a federal bureaucracy and how to exercise believers of power. And it looks like we're going to be in much more existential international crises as well. That alone makes 2024 a decisive year for democracy in the United States and by implication around the world. So you just We just talked about how Donald Trump has changed in the past four years, but what about the

electorate? One thing you wrote was that knowing what ethnic group of voter hails from tells you less about who they are going to vote for today than it did in 2016. Talk about what's changed for voters. Yeah, I've been worried about the crisis of democracy since before it was cool, but at some point when people still, in very significant numbers, seem to plan to vote for him, we need to look in the mirror a little bit. It's not that Americans love Donald Trump so much, according to most polls, they actually don't. It's that they also kind of hate the people on the other side. And so I think those of us who are really worried about Trump should think a little bit about

why we can't convince people of the danger he poses. And I think one of the key things that many Americans have gotten wrong, especially political consultants and politicians and so on, is this idea of a rising demographic majority for Democrats or for the left. White voters tend to prefer Republicans and non-white voters tend to prefer the Democratic Party. And so as the share of non-white voters increases, there's going to be this natural majority for Democrats. In 2016, knowing what race somebody belongs to in the United States gave you a lot of information about who they were going to vote for. By 2020, that was already the case to a much lesser degree.

And when we're looking at the polls now, that trend seems to have accelerated more. So, for example, among Hispanic voters, Donald Trump is now within single digits of Joe Biden. There's a very, very close election coming up, even if you just look at Hispanic voters. And it turns out that many Latino voters also have concerns about immigration. It turns out that many African-American voters, many Muslim voters, have concerns about what children are taught in schools when it comes to sexual education and gender questions and so on. The other way to explain this is to look at the Democratic Party.

And the Democratic Party has effectively become the political party of educated elites, of people who have college degrees. It speaks like somebody who's just graduated from, from one of the universities at which I teach. Most people don't talk like that. Most voters continue not to have a college degree. And so if you turn yourself into the party of a highly educated, you lose elections.

Well, we're all sitting here together, talk in the same way. As a member of the press, I've certainly heard just in the last few days, loud and clear, Margaret Sullivan wrote an op-ed calling the press out for writing in very sampley. sanitized language about autocratic plans that the would-be-again president is making if he were to take office. That was in fact very sanitized language that I just used to describe that. And it makes me wonder, what the heck we should do? America is a affluent country with a very lively civil society

organizations, with a very independent-minded media, with a deeply regional system of governance, with many checks on political power, would the second Trump turn be an acute danger to American democracy? Yes, absolutely. I think January 6, 2021 demonstrates that very clearly. Would that mean that the moment he's elected, we should give up on American democracy?

No, of course not. You know, this idea in American politics of what some people call the beer test. In the 2004 presidential election campaign, there was a poll which showed that many more Americans would like to have a beer with George W. Bush than with John Kerry. And so when the media didn't understand why George Dobie Bush won re-election, people said, well, perhaps it's because people wanted to have a beer with George W. Bush.

I don't think that makes sense, because most voters know that they're never going to have a beer with a president. Why should they care? But I think there's an inverse beer test that makes a lot more sense. I think a lot of voters ask themselves, if this political candidate showed up in my home today, and I didn't have time to clean up, right? I was going to talk to them the way I talked to my friends or to my neighbors. Are they going to like me? Are they going to respect me?

Or are they going to look down on me? I mean, that's the test that pro-democratic forces fail far too often. I do want to just finish by asking you, you wrote that this really struck me what you wrote. You said there's nothing natural about the idea of a nation. And, you know, I think this is what we're born into, and sometimes we forget just how strange and radical and even experimental it is. We all have subnational identities, right? We have allegiances to the cultural origin of our parents, allegiances to the religion we might practice, religions to our ethnic groups. And all of that is fine.

But in order to sustain that incredible scheme of social. cooperation, we also have to lean into some of the identities that we share. We also have to recognize that above and beyond those things, we have things in common as residents of the same city or as citizens of the same country or the same nation. As a German Jew, it is true that patriotism does not come naturally to me, right? But I have over time come to embrace the idea of patriotism. Not in its ethnic variant. But in the civic sense, part of a healthy patriotism is an appreciation and a love for the culture of your country. It is a love of the sights and sounds and smells and cities and landscapes and people that animate the country today.

And that lived, forward-looking culture of a country like the United States bears the influence and the hallmarks of people from. very different backgrounds, very different origins, very different cultural and religious groups. And I think having a healthy love for that is one of the things that can connect us to each other and allow us to have forbearance for each other, to tolerate each other when we get on each other's nerves, and hopefully to stand arm in arm to build a better future. That was Yasha Monk. He's a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. His latest book is The Identity Trap, a story of ideas and power in our time. Thank you so much for listening to our show about democracy.

This episode was produced by Andrea Gutierrez, Fiona Gehrin, Rachel Faulkner White, Chloe Weiner, and Harshanahada. It was edited by Sanaas Meskampur, James Delahousie, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Katie Montalione and Matthew Cloutier. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Josh Newell, Robert Rodriguez, and Gilly Moon. Our theme music was written by Ramteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Ballerzzo. I'm Manusse Zameroody, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.