The Munk Debates Podcast - Jan-Werner Mueller Dialogue

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

The January 6 commission is a reminder that a peaceful transfer of power is not guaranteed and that democracy is in trouble. But do many understand what democracy really is? In his book Democracy Rules, German historian and political scientist argues three things are crucial for its survival: political parties over populism, a free media and a healthy level of uncertainty.    QUOTES:   “I think what's paradoxical about the situation in the U.S., but to some degree it's also true of other democracies, is that high degrees of polarization actually coexist with very weak and hollowed out political parties.”   “Democracy allows us to deal with conflict, ideally also in a productive way. And uncertainty is important because if uncertainty disappears from a public system, you can be pretty sure that you are well on the way to an autocratic system.” The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.     Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/   To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].     To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/   Senior Producer: Kelly Linehan Editor: Adam Karch  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Hello, Monk debate listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Well, this week we are continuing our regular series of monk dialogues. These are extended conversations with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers on the big issues and ideas transforming our world. This week, a conversation on the fate and future of our democracy.

The capital, preach of the capital to the upper level. When armed rioters stormed the U.S. capital, the U.S. capital. Capitol buildings on January 6, 2021, the world watched on in stunned silence. Something like this had not happened in American democracy in over a century or more. It just never occurred to me that a mob would get into the Capitol building. They wanted to stop this election. If we were in the way, they were going to kill us to do it. I didn't think I was going to go home that day.

Communications in line with combat. We have multiple capital injuries. The violent protests seem to resemble. more of a coup d'etat than anything approaching a peaceful transfer of power between then outgoing President Trump and the Biden administration. Pence, I hope you're going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. While we are now learning what happened behind closed doors on January 6, 2021, including in President Trump's Oval Office, thanks to the U.S. Congressional hearings that are ongoing, we've also had an important and valuable lesson about our democracy itself. It doesn't just happen. Our guest on this week's Monk Dialogue says that there's a

recipe for success when it comes to modern democracy that involves stressing the importance of political parties and pluralism over populism and simple authoritarian solutions to the challenges we face. It involves strengthening our media and its institutions through reform, and maybe most important of all, a growing attitude or tolerance on the part of all of us that our democracies do involve uncertainty, and they involve conflict between different interests, policies, and ideas. We dig into all this on today's monk dialogue with German historian, political scientist, and author of the new bestseller, Democracy Rules, Jan Werner Mueller. Professor Mueller, welcome to the Monk Dialogues.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Well, a very timely book that you've just published. We've just summarized it for our listeners. A terrific opportunity here to kind of go deep into the state. The future, maybe the fate of democracy in these opening decades. of the 21st century. I want to begin, Jan, with, I think, the original insight that resides at the core of this book and that challenges some of our current conventional thinking. And it's your contention that conflict and uncertainty are essential to democracy. They are a kind of engine

of its dynamism, both now and in the past. So I wonder if you could just unpack that idea for us because it runs counter, I think, to a lot of our current anxieties about the state of democracy, which for some seems far too conflictual, far too disruptive in ways maybe that we haven't experienced in decades past. I realize that after years of pandemic, where we've all had enough of uncertainty, it's kind of a hard sell. Same is true for conflict when, you know, after years of polarization or more or less violent confrontations on, you know, even streets and squares, obviously in the U.S., but also, you know, recently in Canada, it's not an obvious thing to say that there could be something important about uncertainty and conflict when it comes to

democracy. The idea about uncertainty is not that it's a value in and of itself. So it's not like, you know, really foundational democratic commitments like liberty and equality, but the point is simply that in a democracy, outcomes should ideally be unpredictable and uncertain. Whereas in autocracies, to put it bluntly but not incorrectly, the outcomes are usually pretty clear. Actually, what is uncertain in autocracies or in vulgar systems that are on the way to becoming autocracies are the procedures. As you know, in Russia, the election system has changed all the time, same as true in countries like Hungary, where basically rulers manipulate the procedures, which in that sense are always uncertain, but the outcomes of the elections are not uncertain.

And ideally, in a democracy, it's exactly the other way around. The procedures should be fairly certain. It's not to say that we could never talk about, you know, changing those as well, but, you know, in any given election, that should be clear how, you know, basically the election rules are working, what you have to do, et cetera. But the outcomes should be uncertain. And in a more general sense, uncertainty could point us to what ideally, though of course not always in practice, would be the sort of dynamic and creative dimension of democracy. Which leads me briefly to the second point about conflict. Obviously, on one level, we do need to have some sense of all being agreed on the desirability of democracy.

So on that level, yes, there ought to be some kind of, some kind of basic consensus. But beyond that, conflict is completely normal in a democracy. Contrary to those who, you know, sort of treat us to, if I may put it that way, endless communitarian kits where, you know, especially in the U.S., people constantly say, oh, if we could all overcome our divisions and, you know, all be on the same page about, you know, policy questions. No, democracy is about different ideas, different interests, even different identities. The problem is not conflict as such. The problem is not being able to deal with conflict in a way that ultimately might even be productive in a democracy and lead to further cohesion.

What does that mean? Well, conflict can certainly not be productive in the democracy. if you don't recognize other citizens or for that matter other political parties as legitimate. We've seen that in many, many democracies, unfortunately in recent years, where one basically denies the standing of those who, at least in theory, should be partners in conflict. And this is the moment where any journalist listening might be break into hearty laughter. And at least in theory, we ought to have some kind of common ground in terms. terms of facts. True, you know, very often fact and opinion are difficult to distinguish. I don't

need to give you lectures about this. But if, let's say, you from the get go tell me that there's no point in talking about climate, because the whole thing is a Chinese invention to destroy Western manufacturing, it's very unlikely that, you know, any kind of conflict we could have around questions of climate could possibly be productive. So that's roughly what I mean by trying to make the the case for uncertainty and conflict. Again, these are not values in and of themselves. It's not like uncertainty is valuable by itself. It's not that conflict is valuable by itself. But ultimately, democracy allows us to deal with conflict, ideally also in a productive way. And uncertainty is important because if uncertainty disappears from a political system, you can be pretty sure that you're

well on the way to an autocratic system. Fascinating stuff. A lot of focus attention right now on these January 6 hearings in the U.S. Congress regarding President Trump and his administration's attempts to overturn the previous U.S. presidential election results. What is your take on that? Because I think the perception right now, the public, is that, you know, again, intense conflict, polarization, were the precursors to this seemingly very close and dangerous kind of rupture of a lot of really basic institutional and procedural traditions that previously had underpin the peaceful transition of power in the United States. I think what's paradoxical about the situation in the U.S., but to some degree it's also true of other democracy. is that, as you say, high degrees of polarization actually coexist with very weak and hollowed-out polka parties.

And one might actually have something to do with the other. I'm not the first person to observe that in many ways Trump transformed the Republican Party into a kind of personality cult, such that, you know, the position of being a good Republican and at the same time being critic of Trump has become very difficult. Some might say untenable in the case of, you know, let's say Liz Cheney, for instance, basically resulting in being expelled from the party altogether. And as old-fashioned as that can sound, I think one of the larger lessons is that ideally Polka parties while obviously being committed to the same basic principles.

I mean, that's after all why people join Polka parties, you know, because they have certain partisan, partisan views, they should nevertheless also have a certain degree of internal pluralism or even, you might say, internal democracy. Because if that disappears, if a position of, you know, what in the Westminster system would be known as legitimate opposition or what you might also call critical loyalty, where, you know, you're still committed to the same principles,

but you might have reasons to dislike one particular person or dislike their particular account of how these principles should transit into policy, if that disappears, you no longer have any restraint on a leader like Trump. And you are well on the way to January 6th because there was no possibility inside the Republican Party to basically counter him effectively. And it's also telling that, as you remember in 2020, at the convention, the party wouldn't even bother anymore to issue a new platform. They basically said, you know, here's what we said in 2016, and we simply add that whatever Trump wants, we will want.

And that's also a terrible position for a political party to be in, because any halfway non-polical party can afford to lose an election. I mean, they don't like it, obviously, but they can afford to lose an election because they have a long-term time horizon. They can say, okay, we lose this time, but we're going to try again to convince citizens that our principles are the right ones, our programs are attractive, and four years, five years, whatever. down the road, you know, we might win. If it's all about a person or to put it even more pointedly, if it is about one man well into the 70s, that means a different kind of time horizon. And that makes it much more difficult to lose an election. And again, there's not going to be anything like a structured internal opposition, any sort of internal mechanism for basically bringing different leaders to the fore. So I think there's a kind of larger lesson in

January 6th, which points to the importance of basically an institution, which ever since the 19th century was considered to be pretty much indispensable for the proper working of representative democracy, namely polka parties. And as I said, that can sound like a very old-fashioned conventional view. You know, we have many other interesting and exciting associations, especially for younger people on offer today. I'm not trying to malign them. I'm simply making the point that even today, if you don't have... have well-functioning political parties, that in all likelihood is going to have negative consequences for a democratic political system as a whole. Let's go a little bit deeper and just talk about

some of your views about what's in a sense happening to our democracy itself, because I get a sense here that we're talking in a sense about the effects of polarization, of anxiety and uncertainty coursing through the body politic are themselves symptomatic of some deeper ails that affect our democracy itself. And you have this, I think, interesting idea about what you call a double succession, retreat from democracy of both the wealthy and the poor. I'd love to hear more from you on that idea and why you think it could be part of the underlying explanation. for some of the instability that we're seeing in our democracies right now? So the double secession refers to the idea that at the bottom, to put it very bluntly,

more and more people are checking out of politics altogether. So contrary to a narrative according to which basically the working class has discovered right-wing populism or right-wing authoritarianism and turned away from social democratic parties, Contrary to that narrative, what really matters is that more and more people simply don't participate at all. And that can give rise to a vicious kind of circle because parties don't care about people who don't vote at all. There's nothing in them, so to speak, for them. So we've seen in a whole range of countries, ever more people basically finding that they simply don't bother to vote because none of the programs, none of the parties have anything, have anything on offer for them.

at the very top, again, to put it very crudely, but not inaccurately, we have more and more actors who certainly participate in politics, but who at the same time are taking themselves out of what you might describe as anything like a real social contract, where, you know, any sort of sense that we're all in this together somehow disappears, because to put it again very crudely, but not inaccurately, people have a lot of their money elsewhere. They have their second home in New Zealand. They have all kinds of insurance policies. They don't share a sort of common lived experience anymore,

so they don't have a sense of certain shared problems within their own democracy. And in some cases, not in all cases, we have a phenomenon that one may indeed call something like oligarchic tendencies. Oligarchy in the precise sense of people basically deploying their wealth to manipulate political processes to their own advantage. I mean, we, of course, tend to think, okay, oligarchs, you know, that's something that happens in Russia. But we have plenty of actors also in well-established democracies who, you know, acquire media

companies who try to influence the bulk of the process through campaign finance and so on, that basically tries to ensure outcomes which are favorable to preserving and increasing their wealth. And that's also one way of basically seceding from democracy as some kind of share project, as something that requires some sense of partnership, which again is not to say that we always have to agree or that there couldn't be any conflicts. That's completely normal as well. But there does need to be some kind of underlying sense that on one level, as much as we might disagree, we're still sort of in this together. And both at the bottom and at the top, so to speak, of societies today, that sense might be disappearing. And that's bad news for democracies.

Let's talk a little bit about Europe. You're coming to us from Hamburg, Germany. We've seen in a few big, important European countries, most notably France and Italy, the kind of destruction of mainline political parties. and the rise of what you've characterized in your book as a kind of techno-populous parties. You might disagree with me, but maybe there's a spectrum here we can think about. Macron famously created his own party, obliterated the traditional political brands that had previously existed in France for a generation or more in Italy, now undergoing new political convulsions.

you have the five-star movement more explicitly, you know, explicitly populist, let's say than the Macron government, certainly. But again, a focus on a presentation of a political ideal that you feel is missing a kind of a key piece, a key ingredient of the democratic cocktail that allows our society. to work. Let's talk about that a little more. Unlike some of my colleagues in Polic Science, I don't think that the sort of disappearance of older parties and the creation of new ones, i.e. a certain instability in party systems, is necessarily a reason to get to war. It you might say on one basic level, as societies change, parties should change should change too. That can certainly make life more complicated if you have, you know, 17 parties in a parliament, as is now the case in some European countries.

Yes, it makes it much more difficult to form coalitions. It might be more difficult to establish a certain accountability in terms of who really makes which decision. I see these problems. But the fact that there's change going back again to the point we talked about earlier in terms of uncertainty also being basically a pointer towards the dynamic and ideally creative dimension of democracy, that's not necessarily a reason to get worried. The reason to get worried has more to do with the self-presentation of some of these new parties.

And here, what can look like polar opposites can strangely have something problematic in common. So to pick out some of the examples you just mentioned, so on the one hand, we have sometimes self-declared populist parties, which, in my view, basically have leaders declare that only they represent what they often refer to as the real people or the silent majority, with the implication that all other contenders for power are fundamentally illegitimate, are corrupt, work against the people, and so on, and less obviously, also the implication that any citizen who doesn't really support these populist parties might not be properly part of, you know, the so-called real people. So a really sort of anti-pluralist exclusionary gesture to begin with. But other parties, and Macron, who of course was often hailed

as the great savior from populism is a good example. In a sense, also represent what you might call an anti-pluralist attitude. Of course, a technocrat like McCall doesn't say that only he represents the real people. But especially in the early days, he would basically suggest that there was only one really reasonable solution to every policy challenge. Ideology was, you know, something from the past, you know, which is why. I could also reach out to former socialists and former conservatives or in the current French parliament's Republicans and basically say, look, forget these unreasonable ideological differences,

come and join the uniquely reasonable center. And as different as these two views seem to be, they actually do have one thing in common. Because on the one end, you have actors who say there's only one. you know, real people, only we populist leaders know the uniquely authentic popular will, and only we will implement it because we are the only ones who are not corrupt. That's the one view. And the other view basically says there is only one rational solution to each policy problem. Only we know what it is.

If you disagree, you basically reveal yourself to be irrational, whereas the person who disagrees of the populace reveals themselves to be, you know, in the worst case, traitor to the people. But in a strange way, they both share this kind of anti-pluralist attitude. They both tend to not recognize other parties and other contenders for power as legitimate. And to top it all off, you might say that if you basically only have actors like this on the scene, even though they would always say we're totally different from the other side, in a strange way, they reinforce each other. because, you know, technocrats will often say, look, you know, you give, you know, people a chance to vote. They're going to bring crazy demagogues to power. So we have to kind of, you know, retrench even further.

And ideally, you know, taking away even more decision-making power from citizens. That is, you know, a great occasion for populace to say, you know, what do you mean, democracy without the people, democracy without choices? We are the only representatives of the people and so on. So it becomes a kind of vicious circle where these two extremes, which nevertheless had something in common, tend to reinforce each other. And we saw this very clearly during the years of the Euro crisis, which in fact might not be entirely, might not be entirely in the past, given how things are going now. But we also see it in a number of other contexts. You know, we sort of saw echoes of this in the confrontation between Trump where, you know, Clinton would often simply resort to the view that it was so obvious that, you know, Trump's ideas were crazy, that anybody who followed him was irrational. And Trump, of course, saying Clinton was corrupt, didn't really represent the people.

He was the only authentic representative of the people. And anything that we would recognize as normal party political competition around ideas with content. vendors recognizing each other as legitimate, that sort of thing tends to disappear once politics is reduced to this kind of rapidly. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts.

You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching. around the world, and you get a specially curated Friday weekly Monk members-only podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www.w.munkdebates.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. Let's start moving to discuss some of your solutions. solutions, ways potentially that we could kind of strengthen our democracy, maintain this robustness,

this dynamism, but possibly channel it, as you say, towards more pluralistic ends. And to get to those solutions, let me ask you about a problem, which is, which I've thought about for a while. And it's one that's evident here in Canada, but as you would know, it's evident many democracies, which is that the more traditional, explicitly pluralist political. parties have proportionally very small memberships in relation to the population as a whole. And I think if you go back over the last decade or more, those memberships are declining. So the very representative character of these parties, even though they're expoused values

and kind of engagement with democracy is definitely more towards the pluralistic end of the spectrum, which we'd like to see emphasized, they seem to be withering, don't they, Jean? They seem to be somehow kind of dying on the vine of democracy. Is there anything we can do about that? Well, let me give you a very clear answer. Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it's true that in many democracies, party membership on the whole, is declining, but no in the sense that there are also some pretty striking counter-examples.

We can debate the meaning of some of these examples. So the fact that, for instance, in France, a Melanchot party, France en masse, at a point it's certainly claimed up to 500,000 members, or think about, you know, Corbyn and Labour in the UK, I think it's not meaningless. Even though in some cases you might question, you know, what the notion of membership means under conditions like this when it's sort of more or less like Facebook, you just click on, you know, one button and boom, you're a member or you count as an adenron. home. Nevertheless, I think the more general lesson is that it would be wrong to slip into some kind of cultural pessimism that says, oh, people are just, you know, fed up with politics or nobody wants to get engaged anymore. I think panfew people are still willing to get engaged in parties, as to two examples I just mentioned might show. They're also willing to engage in many other kinds of associations and exercise their fundamental democratic rights in demonstrations.

which, you know, contrary to the conventional wisdom, that the internet was going to displace somehow demonstrations on the street. You know, in many ways the opposite has happened. We've seen a much more interesting dynamic or sort of back and forth between physical action on the streets and action on the web. So I think we should not sort of jump to the conclusion that, oh, everybody's enchanted and nobody's ready to get engaged. Yes, we probably will not be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

If your only idea of a good political party is some idealized version of a 19th century, more or less social democratic mass party, yeah, we might not see that again in our lifetimes in quite the same way. But new parties keep appearing. People, including young people, keep joining them. And I think the real issues are not so much in terms of having better PR or sort of appealing to people more, but making sure. that the parties you actually do have, indeed, are seen as representative. Again, it goes back to the point we talked about earlier, that if you have the feeling that, look, there's just nothing on offer for me as a citizen,

that is clearly a problem, but also less obviously that these parties are properly regulated. And yes, we cannot, you know, conjure up magically intra-party pluralism and democracy. but we can do something about it. So the fact that, for instance, in the Netherlands, you can literally have a one-person party, namely the right-wing populist party of Gerd-Wilders. Actually, let me correct myself.

It's not a one-person party. It's a party that has two members, namely Gert-Wilders, you know, the man, and then a foundation of which, in turn, you will have guessed, Gretwilders happens to be the only member. That would not be possible in other democracies. This total absence of internal democracy, proper pluralism reflected inside a polka party,

the kind of thing that I was trying to say earlier really sort of can have long-term negative consequences for a democratic political system as a whole. That kind of thing, one can certainly basically mandate and regulate such that poker parties have a more robust, properly democratic internal life with positive knock-on effects for democracy. as a whole. Fascinating stuff. Just to get your quick reaction, something, one idea that has been considered here in Canada, it's obviously an element of debate over the regulation of our parties is the idea that parties should not be allowed to promulgate falsehoods and that our elections agency between elections and during campaigns should police parties,

and their speech. What do you think about a measure like that? Too far? Is it too much of an impingement on free speech rights? Or are these the types of more aggressive reforms we should be thinking about to try to address some of these key problems that reside as you've diagnosed at this kind of nodal point, this intersection of parties, media, the dialogue of democracy? So politics, including democratic politics, is not a realm for truth. I know this can sound very controversial, but it goes back to an important insight by Hana Iran who basically said, look, you know, politics is a realm of pluralism and in particular plurality of opinions.

If, you know, if we all knew the one truth, the truth in politics would actually turn out to be despotic. again, it goes like a little bit to this kind of technocratic imaginary that says, you know, there is a uniquely rational solution to every single problem. So on some level, actually, you know, democratic debate is a waste of time because, you know, why would we need that? If we could always already say, here's, you know, the one rational answer or here's the one correct, correct truth.

Our and, however, also said, well, opinions have to be constrained by facts. And in that sense, I think, yes, one can certainly make the case for. some arbiter who might intervene in debates, as of course is very often already the case, with fact checkers in political debates, who then simply go on record as saying, but look, the assertion just made is factually incorrect. You can still have, you know, a million different views on, you know, how we should address, let's say, the climate issue in light of different value commitments. I mean, facts do not mandate any particular political outcome in and of themselves. The problem, however, with this, and we've seen this, of course, most egregiously in the US,

is that, to put it bluntly, authoritarian populists are not stupid, and they know how to discredit institutions like this in advance. I mean, they've been waging war on, you know, established news media organizations for many years by now and basically have recoded the issues along the lines of, you know, as you know better than I do, I'm sure, of saying, look, you know, these people are only saying that because they happen to be the elite. They distrust you as the people. They hate you as the people. So whatever is then sort of issued as a factual correction is discredited in advance. I mean, Trump, you may remember, I was very explicit about this in this interview with Leslie Stahl, where he basically

said, look, I'm doing this to discredit whatever you guys are going to end up saying in advance. And in that sense, the strategy of declaring, quote, unquote, the media, the opposition remains available. Doesn't mean that it will always succeed. But whoever has sort of ideas about, oh, we should have, you know, an institution that issues statements about facts, needs to also say something about how to counter that strategy. Otherwise, it's not going to get better. Great segue, just to wrap up this conversation by talking about your views on the media, because you feel that this is a kind of, you know, a third leg of the stool. We have, you know, public attitudes. We have political parties and the various institutional structures and machinery of elections and democracy. And then the third leg that you feel needs some renewed attention is the media. And again, I'm sure you would acknowledge this is a, a broad insight now. There's a sense that our media is in crisis and that it is having direct and real and urgent impacts on our democracy. So let's talk about your solutions.

How do we maintain free and open and vibrant debate within the media, a pluralism of ideas and views, while at the same time trying to correct for a greater emphasis on facts, on truth-telling, and providing citizens with practical information they need to make informed choices about the society they want to live in. So again, at the risk of seeming in Kirby pedantic, let me just preface the answer by saying that, of course, different countries traditionally have very different media systems. So there's no universal, quote-unquote, solution in some democracies, public subsidies for journalism make a lot of sense in other countries that wouldn't make sense. So I think one always has to look very carefully of how particular media system has evolved, whether you have, for instance, you know, robust public television to start with in case you have it.

You should certainly keep it, make it even more robust if you can. but in other countries, the U.S., again, being the most obvious example, clearly the approaches have to be somewhat, have to be somewhat different. So kind of long story short, my approach would be twofold. First of all, there's an important question about financing. That applies actually to political parties as well, that if at all possible, I think one should put the financing of, you know, what is sometimes called intermediary powers.

So most prominently polka parties and to professional, national news organizations back into the hands of citizens themselves. This is not as utopian as it might sound because there have been experiments, for instance, with giving citizens vouchers that they can then spend on, you know, different forms of local journalism or for the matter on contributing to different political parties. And that would at least move us some way in the direction of not having both political parties and potentially media organizations. as the tools of, again, to put a very bluntly, oligarchic interest,

but something that relates much more directly to citizen choices on the ground. It's not a panacea. Many people will probably give their vouchers to Fox News anyway, but it's at least somewhat changing the overall parameters of how these institutions are financed.

Secondly, going back to another earlier point, regulation always does matter. The British philosopher, Nora O'Neill, Once pointed out that professional news organizations should not just be accessible, so it should be possible to be well informed, you know, if you look for good information, but that these organizations should also be accessible, which is to say they've got to be reasonably transparent about questions of ownership, about particular interest that they pursue. Given how many, again, France is actually a good example of this, given how many television stations on newspapers now happen. to be owned by people who have, you know, a whole range of other economic interests in ways that is not always clear to those who, you know, watch a particular television channel or buy a political newspaper to basically mandate much stronger transparency to mandate much stronger legal

tools to ensure media pluralism and counter concentrations of power. All that, you know, again, is not a panacea, but it would move us considerably closer to a situation. where the currency that, of course, has become incredibly rare in democracies, namely trust in professional news organizations might be increased, and might also then make media organizations themselves more careful in terms of how they act, how they treat their audiences, and so on. So a comment on a question one. I think it's a great idea to think about a voucher model to support media.

We have an experiment underway in Canada right now, which is different, which is in a sense the government providing a certain, I guess, form of registration or qualification on the part of a media organization, which then allows it to access government subsidies directly and or charitable donations. And the government, unfortunately, is now put into the role of being the arbiter of what is journalism and what is media. And I think that's a very uncomfortable place, both for our governments, but in some ways for our democracy. And I guess the question would be social media, Jan. You know, we've had NYU professor Jonathan Haidt on this, on the monk dialogues, to talk about,

you know, his views that something changed in 2014 when Facebook introduced the news feed. the power of these algorithms, the extent to which they are designed to make you stay on the site to click on content. And this has created a feedback loop of polarization, of extremism. What's your view on that? Do you share that concern? And if so, is there a different solution or approach to somehow better reconciling all the positives of social media with the prerequisites of vibrant, critical, informed, hopefully truth-based democratic dialogue? I think it's telling in this respect how we've sort of moved from one extreme to the other. I mean, some of us are old enough to remember at a time when social media were hailed as a

liberation technology, when people said Twitter and Facebook are going to lead to democratic revolutions everywhere. Now we've moved to the other extreme, you know, some of our colleagues saying things like Facebook equals fascism, but both forms of technological determinism are, of course, wrong. And again, at the risk of seeming overly pedantic, which is got to be precise in terms of what we're talking about. So the internet is not social media, and social media is not Facebook. Facebook has a very particular business model, as many people have pointed out, that, yes, in a sense amounts to, you know, what some have also rightly called incitement capitalism or, you know, optimizing for outrage.

And, yeah, that's highly problematic, but that's not social media as such. That's not platforms as such and so on. I think we also also recognize empirically that unlike five or six years ago, we know a little bit more about, you know, what's actually happening online and some of these very, very easy explanations for, you know, Trump, Brexit, etc., that we had not too long ago. turn out to be, you know, very plausible, but actually ultimately, empirically wrong. So the notion that, oh, online, we're all in filter bubbles, echo chambers, and so on,

from what I understand from some of my colleagues who, you know, really work on this properly, is just not correct. And in fact, we had a sort of strangely kind of echo chamber about echo chambers, where we would always sort of tell the story to each other, and everybody would nod and say, yeah, that's the problem. But in many ways, there are reasons to believe that our online life is actually considerably more diverse. in our offline life. Now, that in and of itself is not meaningful in terms of, oh, and that's going to save democracy

or make us all get along. Of course, of course, it doesn't mean that at all. But I think we should be much more precise about where exactly these problems might be. We might be much more precise about the particular challenge platforms as a sort of somewhat larger category than social media might pose. And that, if anything, might be the area where, you know, we've done considerably helpful kinds of thinking, but maybe not enough. What do I mean? I mean that, well, platforms are basically not about owning the means of production. They're about owning the means of access.

They're really not about, you might say, property. They're about, you know, controlling sort of who's going to see what or do what. If that's true, then, you know, one obvious approach should be to say, well, we got to sort of strengthen individuals in terms of of their rights of access. We also have to strengthen their ability to assess these platforms. Goes back to the older point about transparency and actually understanding what I'm seeing and why I'm seeing it. And most of all, one would have thought that, as many people have said, that the incredible

concentration of platform power is simply unacceptable in a democracy, irrespective, actually, of the business model, irrespective of whether a particular company, has a commitment to not doing any evil, the simple amount and concentration of power should not be available in any democracy. So more individual rights, more transparency, more pluralism. I think these are all pretty straightforward approaches and remedies one could think of. The warrior would have, quite frankly, is that this is probably pretty much what any old style, so-called classical liberal in the 19th century would have said already as well. They also would have said individual rights are a good thing,

competition is a good thing, transparency is a good thing. That doesn't make these things wrong as remedies. But of course, the question one would still have at the back of one's mind is whether this is really enough to deal with the challenge of platform power. And I'm not sure it is. So that's why I'm saying maybe we need to think harder, need to try even more to understand what might be peculiar and in a sense genuinely new about these

institutions. But while we're doing that thinking, we can already or try to already implement some of these, some of these measures I just mentioned. Excellent. Let's wrap up just by bringing this kind of back to basics, which for me is the question, John, what is your advice to, you know, the average citizen out there? I mean, what can they do? What are the types of either attitudes or behaviors that they need to emulate or expouse? I mean, at the end of the day, the solutions to the challenges that our democracy face are going to come about, obviously, through participation, how we participate, how we engage. do you have any kind of practical advice that could push us all collectively in the right direction?

Well, I'm somewhat reluctant, I have to say, to lecture millions of people along the lines of only do this and then it'll all be, it'll all be well. I would just, with my limited capacities as a political theorist, remind people that, look, we're all in a democracy committed to some basic principles of liberty and equality. And that means not that we all have to agree, democracy does partly exist to allow us to deal with disagreement, with conflict in a particular way. But it also means that ideally in a democracy, we can all look each other in the eye. There are no sort of, there's no inherent sense that, you know, some are superior, some are

inferior. And that, you know, with a certain degree of mutual respect, a sense that, you know, we can fight really hard conflicts. It's not in and of itself a problem. but without denying the standing of other people as, you know, proper members of the polity, without, you know, basically being being carried away by misinformation, disinformation, because it happens to fit one's ideological preconceptions. As long as these sorts of parameters are observed and people also mutually and collectively reaffirm them,

I think that might on the level of attitudes sort of move us a long way in the right kind of direction. Well, Professor Mueller, thank you so much for this conversation. Congratulations again on the publication of democracy rules. We'll contain in the show notes of this program links to the book and some of the positive reviews and coverage. So again, thank you for your contribution to this monk dialogue. And let's have a conversation again. Well, in the interest of transparency, you can also, you also most welcome to link to the negative reviews, you know. To make sure that people get the full picture. Exactly. Well, I'm not seeing too many of those. So you'll send me links. We'll, as you say, provide the basis for a pluralistic interpretation of the book's contributions to our understanding of democracy. Anyway, thank you again, Jan. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you.

Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, Jan Warner-Muller, he gave us a lot to think about. I really encourage you to check out his new book, Democracy Rules. We'll have a link to a couple of reviews, as just discussed, and where you can purchase the book online. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send me an email to podcast at monkdebates.com.

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