TRIGGERnometry - Matt Goodwin on National Populism, Immigration, Brexit & the Future of Politics

Episode Date: October 22, 2018

Matt Goodwin, Professor of Political Science at the University of Kent (@GoodwinMJ) discusses national populism, immigration, populism, Brexit, Donald Trump, academic corruption, bias in academia, liberalism, the liberal consensus, the European Union, the future of politics and a lot more with the guys at TRIGGERnometry. Buy Matt's latest book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/National-Populism-Against-Liberal-Democracy/dp/0241312000/ Find us on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin. And this is the show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts. Our fantastic expert guest this week is Matt Goodwin, who's a professor of political science at the University of Kent and a senior fellow Chatham House. Matt, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you. And listen, the question,

We always ask is who are you, what's your background, how are you where you are, what's your interest in some of the things that we're going to be talking about? Yeah, well I'm an academic. I've been in political science, the study of politics for 15 years, something like that. I got interested in populism, I think, really during the early 2000s, late 1990s, early 2000s. I was doing my undergraduate dissertation on what was going on in Austria at the time. time and Austria was one of the first democracies in Europe to have a national populist party

really join a national government in a way that got global attention. There'd been some stuff in Italy prior. And I found myself in Austria running around sort of talking to all of these national populists, asking them what they were trying to do and so on. And from there on, it kind of became this real interest in trying to understand, you know, really why people were voting for those movements, where they were coming from and how they were trying to change their countries. And then over the years, I started doing some pretty interesting research projects. My PhD, I was interviewing the harder end of that scene, talking to a lot of folks on the extreme right wing about why they became active,

why they joined these parties and movements that were even further to the right, the national populace. And then, yeah, went to the actual populace. academic route, got a job at Manchester and then Nottingham and then ended up where I am now at Kent and doing some work with think tanks along the way. And you're about to release a book literally in a couple of days about national populism. We'll get into that. And it's fascinating. Thank you for sending us a copy. We've had a chance to look through some of it. First of all, define national populism for it because I think some people don't really understand what we're talking about.

People see Brexit and Trump and these movements in Europe happening, but they don't have quite a solid idea of what it is that we're talking about. So who are these people? What's their agenda? Yeah, so there's a bit of a debate about how to define all of these movements, but basically I refer to national populists as being really movements that want to prioritize

the nation and the common plain people against political, media, social elites that have often held the people in contempt or certainly even, collected them on a number of key issues. And national populism is quite different from left-wing populism. Left-wing populists prioritize class allegiance. National populists prioritize the nation and a particular conception of the nation.

And not all of the things that tend to get lumped into that category are necessarily national populist. Brexit had elements of national populism, but it wasn't exclusively a national populist in the same way that Donald Trump had elements of national populist. national populism, but he was also too, a Republican candidate at a presidential election. But in Europe, it's a bit more different. We have movements that are firmly outside of the mainstream that are, I would argue, unequivocally national populists. And they all build on a very long tradition in democracy that goes back as long as we've had democracy, that as long as we've

been participating in elections, voting for parties, we've had national populace. So it's been with us for a very long time. National populism has obviously, we've seen a rise. How much of that has got to do with the economic crash in 2008? Well, this is a million dollar question, right? So if you're on the left, you basically argue, and I'm not making judgments. I don't know.

Don't know where your politics are. Got an idea. But if you lean leftwards, you tend to say, all of this is about economic scarcity, right? It's the old Marxist line that effectively anybody who votes for nationalist movements or movements that express unease about mass immigration, that they are driven by their worries over basically income, wages, and scarce economic goods.

And that usually an extension of that argument is that the people are being manipulated by ruthless elites in society, whether it's the media, whether it's these conspiratorial right-wingers trying to divide and rule. The evidence, I would argue, and certainly we are, argue in the book is pretty overwhelming in pointing in a different direction, which is that if you think, for example, about some of the most successful national populists that we've had in the Western world coming in places like Switzerland, in Austria, the Netherlands, they broke through amid very low unemployment rates, some of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe, very strong,

growing economies. Look at law and justice in Poland, really came into power on the back of a rapid economic expansion. Take Britain, Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party first really broke through in 2004 after 48 consecutive periods of growth. And then when we drill down to the individual level and we look at who's actually supporting these movements and I'm sure we'll come back to it, they tend to be working full-time. They tend to often be on not amazing wages, but standard average wages. And so the unemployed, the kind of real losers of globalisation in a sort of visceral sense, they are not generally providing the bulk of support to national populism. I mean, it's worth remembering even in the 1930s, many people on the left like that

comparison at the moment. A lot of the unemployed and those who are out of work are actually voting for the communists, not for the national socialists. And national socialism, national populism are two very different movements. But the idea that the left pushes, that this is all about economic scarcity, I'm afraid is not. actually very convincing when you look at the evidence. One of the interesting points in the book is that one of the interesting fact you cite in the book is that Donald Trump voters on had the average highest income of the three available candidates.

If you take Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, his voters actually had a higher average income than any of the other two. And I wanted to come back to the fact that you've been talking about this for a long time, actually. You've been predicting this, unlike most people who predicted Brexit and Trump very confidently after it happened, right? You actually predicted it many years before. You've been talking about this since like 2010, at least,

from what I've seen and interviewed with economists, for example, where you were talking actually about Anders Breivik, I think, in the context of this. And that is not a time in which we were having these conversations at all. So can you take us back through that period, if it's not the economic crash that Francis asked you about, what has happened over the last 10 to 15 years that has caused this movement to emerge in this way? Yeah, well, one of my pet frustrations about the public debate, is that we focus on the short-term factors, right?

And we're obsessed about what happens during campaigns. I mean, I just finished reading Hillary Clinton's book, What Happened? And I realized she still doesn't know what happened, largely because she's obsessed with what happened during that campaign period. Now, I would say, actually, if you don't, if you look not at the last 10 to 15 years, but actually at the last 30 to 40 years,

you can really see a number of deep currents begin to come forward, and start to reshape democracies in the West quietly, but in a powerful way from below, creating the conditions that have allowed national populism today to get to the levels of support that we're seeing. And this is partly about a backlash to the rise of what you might call the new left in the 60s and the 70s, which pushed a very liberal agenda, the expansion of rights for minorities, the support, if not celebration of mass immigration, the shift towards supranational institutions like the European Union.

And in the 80s and the 90s, in particularly in countries like France and Austria, you began to see the beginnings of a backlash to that new liberal consensus. Jean-Marie Le Pen, for example, who used to run on the slogan, Le Pen, the People, or the Austrian Freedom Party in York Heide, an earlier generation of populists

that we now tend to forget, because we like to think everything is unique to our era, York Heider used to say, I say what the people think, right? And it was that notion that he's tapping into a concern, particularly among an alliance of social conservatives that were often quite affluent, and blue-collar workers, who together felt very uncomfortable with both the scale and the pace of change that was happening within the broader nation. and that was partly about immigration. It was also about in some countries, increasingly,

a political establishment that seemed to be holding the people in contempt, certainly neglecting them. And also increasingly in more recent years, the specific issue of Islam in Europe and the refugee crisis that followed. So by the time you get to really the 90s of 2000s, and you start going through things like 9-11, long before the financial crisis, you're beginning to see these movements

actually reaching very high levels of support in some countries joining national governments, often doing well and very prosperous, affluent areas, and really winning over low-skilled service workers, the self-employed blue-collar workers. So we talk a lot about the collapse of social democracy today. Actually, you can really trace that to the early to mid-2000s. And now the crisis kicked in, and no one's saying the crisis isn't important because it is. It wasn't the underlying driver, but it did exacerbate a number of these emerging value conflicts in the West between kind of culturally liberal middle class professionals and those social conservatives and workers. And you begin to see this kind of gradual polarization within a lot of Western democracies.

And I think what mattered in a big way was the national populists themselves also changed. They became more articulate, they became more sophisticated, they started to tone down white supremacism. They started to basically get a bit more in line with where public opinion really was on these issues. People like Gert Wilders started to say, well, let's be pro-LGB, but also let's be anti-Islam at the same time. So you started to see these kind of curious innovations that we didn't really have before. And of course that then really brought together, you know, the public demand for a sort of a challenge to that liberal consensus with the sort of party supply, with these parties just being a bit more competent, a bit more articulate at how they're bringing these groups into the political system.

And today, where we are, I think the interesting macro question, at least, is when you look at what's happening in the West, does this signal that we are at the end of a period of great change and volatility, or does it instead signal that we are at the beginning of a new period of great change, fragmentation, and polarization? My view is that if you look at all the evidence, we are very much at the beginning. of a new period of great change and volatility. And these movements will ride that wave. So, you know, with populism, right?

Now, I've got a lot of friends. You may have a PhD, you may be a professor. I've got a mates who've read a couple of Guardian articles. And they've told me that populism is racism. Is this right? So, no, that's not right. Surprise! So there are racist voters who are drawn to national populism, right?

There's nobody is denying that. But I think the debate, particularly on the left, dare I say, the Guardian. I have many of the same friends, by the way. Within academia especially, you know, there is a default, there's a view that, you know, populism equals fascism, populism equals racism. And some of my colleagues, I think, have given up on the search for truth and have become social justice activists who are more interested in pushing a political agenda than they are in actually interrogating the evidence. If you look at the evidence, there is a minority of national populist voters who certainly subscribe to avertly racist, xenophobic views that argue,

you can only really be British if you were born in the country and if your father and mother and grandparents were born in the country. And they hold that very narrow ethnic conception. but there are a lot more voters than those within the national populist electorate that distance themselves from those very narrow kind of race-based conceptions that say actually when I think about who's in the nation, I would like people to speak the language. I'd like them to share some of the customs and traditions. I'd like them to integrate into the national community.

and I feel, for example, completely comfortable with minority rights, with LGBT communities, but I have some specific concerns over the extent to which the pace of this change is actually being able to be managed and these new communities are being integrated into the national community. And that isn't about race at all. And these movements as well, I think, have not just out of strategy. I do think part of it is a sincere generational change within the national populist movements themselves. They are very different from what we saw in the 60s, 70s and the 80s. The likes of Golden Dawn in Greece, which is basically a neo-Nazi party, is very much an outlier.

Now, I did a lot of work, for example, on the UK Independence Party looking at kind of that movement and how it was organising. And lots of UK Independence Party leaders and activists were completely comfortable with non-white Britons, black minority ethnic Britons. Many of them were in the party. They were active. But they did have specific concerns over that issue

of the pace and the scale of demographic change and wanting to slow that down. And I think the problem for the left is it's drawn a straight line between populism and fascism or populism and racism, and it's fueled as a consequence of that, the sense among voters and actually the left really isn't interested in having a conversation about these legitimate grievances over communities being changed, sense of community decline, community loss, concerns over who's in the social contract, who's not actually interested in joining that social

contract. And as a consequence, I don't think it's a coincidence that national populism has risen at the same time as social democracy has collapsed because I think the way in which the left has responded to this is really exacerbated its decline. Are you telling me that calling someone a racist doesn't help the situation? Well, we have a lot of evidence suggesting that it makes things are worse, right? And we've got a lot of evidence now coming out on the kind of political correctness agenda, social norms that if you're brandishing somebody in that way, then actually what you're doing is you're encouraging that backlash and you're basically creating the conditions under which people are more likely to abandon the mainstream and go over to national populism.

And these parties are doing a reasonable job of exploiting that unfortunate strategy on the left. You know, we have to try and get past this moment in the West where we associate any airing of grievances over migration as racism because if we don't get over it, we're going to end up with incredibly polarized societies and the kind of polarization that we can begin to see now in the US, for example, in the US when 90% of people say support interracial marriage, but now we're seeing over 50% of some, in some groups,

saying I'd be uncomfortable if my son or daughter married somebody, from the other political tribe, you're beginning to see the building blocks of a polarization that actually I find incredibly worrying. And in Europe, you can begin to see the same. And this is partly why I'm increasingly perhaps provocative and controversial within academia is that there are still many who refuse to accept that what we're seeing through the prism of national populism is an expression of grievances that are partly legitimate. and we need to respond to those.

It's perfectly legitimate to talk about prioritising citizens over non-citizens. It's perfectly legitimate to talk about integration, what isn't working, and it's perfectly legitimate to say we'd quite like to reform the migration system in order to be more responsive to what ordinary people want. Those are perfectly legitimate grievances. Unfortunately, the left in general is terrible at actually. having that conversation. And why do you think that is? I think it's a combination of factors. I think partly it's about it's a genuine, I think the left was essentially hijacked in the 60s and 70s by a

philosophical movement that really had no real interest in engaging with anything that wasn't part of its broader agenda, that it was a movement that I think was very much around the prioritisation of minority rights and identity politics that we are all familiar with, and I don't need to rehash what that is and how it came here, but very much prioritised that at the expense of sustaining and replenishing its relationship with traditional boaters on the left. and I think that that was a big strategic mistake and we're still living through the consequences of that. But it's also exacerbated by social networks.

So many people on the left kind of constantly within their own bubbles, within their own orbits, that they don't have many networks, they don't have many links outside of those, and that fuels this disconnection. I mean, I'm from a, you know, I grew up in a working class community, you know, single-parent household, most of my mates are in construction,

or non-academic, non-elite, if you like, industries. And I think increasingly we're seeing this sort of coming apart, the tearing apart of that centre ground. And it's going to have, I think, incredibly negative effects. And so my line on this in terms of where we're going over the future is that as we polarise, And as we've seen through the Brexit debate, there are lots of people on the left

that simply, you know, who've been used to feeling like winners and now feel like losers, but consequently have no interest in actually even having a conversation with the other side. And that's going to make this a lot worse. Well, that's what we tried to do on the show is have these conversations with people...

Piss people off. Yeah, well, that's definitely part of it, but that's why we've got you here. Yeah. But generally, we tried to have these honest conversations because that's the only way this is ever going to change. I mean, that's my... biggest frustration with what's happening around these issues is that we're no

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and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. Go to avocado green mattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. But I want to take you back to a chapter in the book, which I think is kind of a key piece of it, which is the bit where you talk about myths. And one of the myths that you talk about

is the idea that the support for national populism comes from angry white men, basically France is 10 years from now. A lovely slice of gammon. Yeah. So you talk about that, and there's a whole bunch of other myths that you talk about. And I think just reading it, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's just what we're seeing out there in the world right now.

So tell us about that. What are the myths about the typical populism supporter? Yeah, so these are what I call comfort blankets, right? A lot of folks who have been outflanked by this political change have thrown comfort blankets over themselves to try and explain it away. And one of those is that this is all about angry, old white guys who are basically going to dance. in five years and they're going to be replaced by, you know, my students, you know, young, liberal, tolerant Corbynistas who are going to take us into this, you know, the sunny uplands of cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and never-ending diversity.

My God, that sounds horrible. This is what I call the economist argument. I mean, the economist loves it. They wheel it out on a weekly basis. And my friends on the liberal left really love it because the implication of that argument is You don't actually need to engage with the grievances. You don't need to actually take this stuff too seriously because it's a waiting game. Just hold on, put the seatbelts on, let's just hang on.

Okay, right now they're all dead. Okay, now we can see. And you saw that in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, an economist friend of mine even calculated that if Remainers could hold on to 2022, then that is the moment at which Remainers will have a clear majority because enough levers will have died, and therefore you don't basically need to engage with the grievances and other, you know, the columnists and national newspapers

have also pushed this argument. It's the laziest argument that's going around, and it's also bloody insulting, to be honest. But the... It's also a factual, because as people get older, they change their political... Well, so here's where you can basically easily destroy that argument. One is, if you just look at who's voting for national populace across Europe, it's often the under 40s, Marine Le Pen,

closed the gender gap last year for the first time in her party's movement. She was as successful among young women as young men. They go women are racist too. Austria, the under 40s, were very supportive of the Freedom Party. 41% of white millennials backed Donald Trump. Half of 35 to 45-year-olds in the UK endorsed leaving. The Sweden Democrats, strongest among the 30 to 54-year-olds, the alternative for Germany, strongest among the 30-to-50-year-olds.

I mean, the argument basically is being stretched to its absolute extreme by lots of what I'll call hyper-liberals because, you know, it's a sexy argument, right? They like it. It kind of conforms to their value set. But generational change takes a long, long, long time. And secondly, the jury on life cycle effects is out, right? So I've got a colleague at Oxford James Tilly who's shown that as all of us age will become 0.38% more communication. conservative as one year replaces the next, right? 0.38%, which doesn't sound like a lot.

But if you consider that over the course of a lifetime, that basically explains the generational differences in labor and conservative support among the different age groups. And, you know, we do it. And the second thing to keep in mind, by the way, related to that, is I don't really see much evidence in the survey data on the new sort of Igen generation, the millennial generation. These actually are passionate, tolerant liberals who are going to defend freedom of speech

and have these really big debates and proactively really hold up the marketplace of ideas and ensure that the beating heart of liberalism continues. If anything, I actually, I'm a bit anxious in that I see evidence to the contrary, that if you look at the debates over campus environments in the US, if you look at some of the evidence in Europe. Yes, they tend to be socially liberal, but not always as open to the exchange of views, the exchange of opinions and debate

as perhaps we would like them to be. You put that very mildly, Matt. I mean, if you look at the concept... Try to be diplomatic. Yeah, well, screw that, man, not on this show. Right. But, I mean, you look at the concept of free speech in things like academia

and things like the comedy industry, which we know very well, it's essentially become a right-wing issue. Well, there are lots of people who, when you point this out, will say, oh, the problem on universities is being stoked up by people who are causing problems, right? And then you see actual real-world events going on around where you think, well, actually, I'm not sure this is being blown up. And if you look, for example, at the recent story of my university, which has just decided that, or at least the union has decided that people dressing up as cowboys

is a sort of, you know, cultural appropriation and could seem to be offensive. And unfortunately for me, actually, the guy who pushed that argument was also called Matt Goodwin. So I suddenly found I woke up one morning. My email was stacked full of emails saying, what on earth are you doing? I said, well, actually, quite the contrary. I think people should dress up in whatever they want to dress up in and be offensive. Not in my name. Yeah, yeah, indeed.

But the argument is very real. And the evidence is certainly there. And it's good to see the US now having a much more vigorous debate about that and where we're headed. But the angry old white man narrative, also ignores the fact that we have generations, particularly in Europe, new generations, that are going to feel left behind in their own way, that if you're grappling with youth unemployment rates of 10% or 15% in southern Europe, if you are struggling to get a hundred grand deposit for our house in London,

if you are keenly aware, as my students are, that they've got a pretty crap deal compared to their baby boomer parents or grandparents, then I would argue the conditions, the underlying conditions that partly fuel national populism, that sense of relative loss, relative deprivation, and also some concerns over the speed at which societies are being transformed. I think these movements are going to continue to have a lot of gas in the tank. In Austria, for example, they campaign for votes in nightclubs. I mean, something, it would be like the equivalent of Nigel Farage going to the Ministry of Sound or something.

It would just be very bizarre. But the youth, in Hungary and Central and Eastern Europe too, by the way, the youth votes very important to these parties. Now, you were pointing out about the different types of people who voted for populism. We didn't really touch it. Apparently quite a lot of ethnic minorities. For instance, my mother is a Latin American woman, and she loves Trump, and she voted Brexit. Well, when Vince Cable came out and said, you know,

the vote for Brexit was a kind of a backlash among old white people that want to return to the days of empire. It was a very ill-judged intervention. It was also completely disconnected from the evidence, right? One in three black or minority ethnic voters in Britain endorsed, leaving the European Union. And my frustration, I suppose, with the media is we've had a lot of voxpops with the white working class from Stoke and Burnley and Clacton.

All great towns. All great towns. But we haven't seen many similar. box pops in Birmingham, Slough, Luton, with minority communities that also voted leave. In the same way, we haven't heard much about the one in three Hispanic, Latino voters in the US that endorsed Trump, Cuban Americans in Florida, Jewish activists in Europe that have got involved with national populism because they, I think, have made a strategic trade-off in a way in viewing these movements as being more serious about countering sort of the

perceived threat from Islam than the mainstream parties. And so I think that we're going to hopefully get into a debate that acknowledges that these electorates that are supporting these movements are more diverse than many commentators and thinkers would have us believe. And when you look at why minorities voted to leave the European Union, a strong sense that goes back to the point about young people, that they were being left by behind or excluded at the expense of others, that EU nationals were being given preference to the UK at the expense of their relatives, friends and networks from South Asia, for

example. Also a strong sense of social conservatism that they, like other social conservatives, value stability, group conformity within a sort of quite diverse conception of the nation, and aren't really down with this never-ending social change argument that liberals really love. I mean, the analogy I use, you know, the Tony Blair argument was, you know, you're on a train and it's going 300 miles an hour. The train is called globalization. You can't get off. And it's inevitable.

You just have to stay on. And that was effectively Blair's argument in his 2005 conference speech. A lot of these voters, I think, now are saying, actually, well, we can get off the train. We can try and slow down the pace of change. And there's this concept that I think national populism offers, which is this idea that, There is an alternative state, right? You don't have to just be down with this never-ending constant churn. You can try and shift things in a different direction,

and the world might not collapse. Now, that comes with a lot of negatives, too. Those movements can be xenophobic. They can ferment grievances and polarisation. But even minority voters, I think, are partly receptive to that argument of saying, well, if you're in the US, for example, you might feel that, well, now you are established within that national, community you might not necessarily therefore be down with endless change endless

flux just because you happen to be from from the same background as as new migrants and new arrivals so that may increase the jury's out one of the things I find interesting about the political situation at the moment is that we might have it sounds like we come from Syria backgrounds in terms of so I come from an upper working class area and When I grew up, there was the NF. And everybody knew they were right-wing, they were racist, they were pretty unabashed about.

Where did you grow up? In a place called Morden in South London. Right. And it was very obvious what they were. There was the NF pub and all the rest of it. Now you look at a lot of these groups, and you go, I don't know whether you're right-wing or not, like the Football Lads Alliance, who went on a march.

And then there was a case where the team that I support West Ham had a coach go along and openly support them. And there's a discussion now whether he should lose. is his job or not? Are the football lads Alliance a right wing? Is Tommy Robinson right wing? Well, definitely right wing. Is he far right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Is he far right?

And all these different things. I mean, where do you stand on this with these types of groups? Are they far right? Are they racist? Or is there something more going on there? Yeah, well, with those particular groups and also groups like Pegida in Germany, it's quite they're quite amorphous.

They don't really have fixed borders and they operate outside of electoral politics, which makes it quite difficult to understand really what they're about. But they are certainly right-wing in that they are prioritising the nation. They're certainly not interested in class allegiance, but they are prioritising issues of migration and identity and culture, which puts them firmly on the right. Are they extreme right-wing, or are they radical right?

And traditionally, the distinction between the two is, If you're advocating the overthrow of democracy, if you're anti-democratic, if you are like historic fascism and you're a revolutionary, you just believe democracy should be overthrown, then you are on the extreme right wing. If, alternatively, you're saying, I accept democracy, I think democracy as a system of government is probably what we should have, but I'd quite like to give more power and influence to ordinary people who have been shut out of key decisions, for example, they haven't been talked to about these issues of Islamic terrorism or grooming

or female genital mutilation, these issues on which Tommy Robinson and others campaign, then I would say they are radical right, not extreme right-wing. When they trip into violence and when they trip into openly undermining the democratic state, then they trip into that extreme right-wing category. The term far right, I just think, is meaningless because it doesn't really tell us anything. If you're on the far right, well, is that Greece's golden dawn? Is it the UK Independence Party?

And if you lump them all under far right, it doesn't really give us that nice dividing line that we need. I've done a lot of work with police and security services over the years. And I think that's where we need to be very careful in how we categorize these movements. National Action, for example, which was an extra parliamentary extreme right-wing group that was advocating terrorism and was banned by the UK state,

you know, was banned on that basis, that it sort of overthrow the democratic system and commit violence, if not murder. But there are groups within the radical right orbit, football lads alliance, I would say, that are not overtly advocating terrorist activities that are not saying, let's go rid of democracy, but they do feel they tap into that national populist point,

which is that they've been neglected in terms of their views about key issues, whether that's relating to the role of Islam, its capacity to integrate, whether it's about the grooming scandal. Because this is an awkward point, right? But many of the people on the radical right who were talking about child sexual exploitation

in the early 2000s have partly been legitimised by the subsequent events that have occurred. The Times have brought attention to this, great journalists like Andrew Norfolk and others who have really kind of pushed, been forerunners on that, but groups on the radical right, the BMP, the English Defence League, were talking about those issues in the early 2000s. And I wonder kind of out loud how British

politics might have been different. Had we, collectively as a society, be more responsive to those issues early on? I mean, working class anger, disillusionment, you know, was evident in the late 90s, early 2000s. If you've been looking at turnout in some communities like in South London or the Midlands, North East, North West, you would have seen, particularly after Blair's second landslide in 2001, turnout levels among working class voters just start to decline steadily. And by the time you get to 2010, many of those voters are basically not voting. Some of them came back into the system for the UK Independence Party. Some of them then went back into apathy in 2015.

But at the 2016 election, a lot of them came out to vote leave. because they felt that outside of first pass the post, that was an opportunity to get those values, to get those views, to get that seat at the table, and they came out and boated. Turnout, let's not forget, was higher in working-class districts, but it was lower than average in some of the hipster London districts of Camden and Shoreditch and Hackney.

And I think partly, and what data can't tell us, but what my suspicion is, was that that's partly about this sense that, listen, I want to be listened to. I've got concerns. I want to put them on the agenda, and Football Labs Alliance and those groups, which are on that borderline, I think the risk is if you don't open up this conversation and you have it nationally, those are the groups that are closer to that border that will end up having that conversation,

and they would just control that space. And they are significant, right? Those movements are significant. And as the Germans are discovering, when you don't get control of that conversation, you quickly lay the conditions for a very significant backlash, which partly found its expression through Pegida, but also through the alternative for Germany. And it sounds like what you're saying really, if I'm reading between the lines,

is these movements have been necessary because the elites haven't been listening. The media, the MPs, the parliament, the government, hasn't been listening to the concerns of ordinary people. Things like you talk about the grooming games, there's a significant amount of evidence now, the reason they were able to thrive in these areas is because of political correctness. It's because the police, the councils, the social services didn't want to raise the issue

that there was an ethnic component to this problem. And so do you think that the rise of national populism has been a necessary wake-up call for the rest of society? So I think this is really where the debate is, and the key part of the debate, is very much around, do you view populism as an inherently evil force, which many on the left do, and therefore they're not interested in engaging and thinking about it seriously? Or do you instead view it partly as a corrective, as a movement that ebbs and flows throughout the history of democracy,

but it really comes to the forefront when certain groups feel that they're not being listened to and certain issues are not being addressed that concern a large number of people. So populism, for some writers and thinkers, is a really a snapback in the system. The system has gone too far away from groups or issues and it's forced to come back into those areas in order to deal with it.

So that's why it's a controversial point, but in a way, that's why some people argue that national populism has a silver lining in that it brings these things, issues back, it also brings groups back into the political system. I mean, if you look at the alternative for Germany, you know, the German party system is rapidly imploding, right, in front of our eyes. We're seeing mad shifts in Germany, essentially. I mean, the SPD is, the one's dominant center-left SPD is collapsing. The AFD is now in 15 of 16 state parliaments,

will probably be in all of them by the end of October 2018, and is also having quite clear impact on the policy agenda. The number one source of votes for the AFD, non-voters, people who didn't vote at the previous election. The Brexit referendum, I was involved with an exit poll on the day of the referendum, about 2 million voters turned out who hadn't voted at the previous election. About 30% of them then didn't vote at the 2017 election. So they are bringing these non-voters back in. That, to me, is something that should be welcomed, right? That we want the marketplace of ideas to be as strong as possible.

Now, you might not like what national populism is saying about these issues. You might not like how it frames these issues, and sometimes it does frame them in a xenophobic way. But the underlying grievances are legitimate ones, and that's certainly the argument in the book, that if you just think about where the West is heading over the next few decades, a lot of the trends that are already in place, we can't do anything to stop it now, right? A lot of the trends that are in place that are fueling these movements.

They are going to accelerate at speeds that are going to cause a significant sense of alarm among a large number of voters. I would rather have those voters in the democratic marketplace of ideas than outside of that and pursuing things like the Football Labs Alliance or the Defence Leagues or Pegida. or Pegida. And that means, I think, for my friends on the Liberal Left, when they're at the table, right, and they've asked you a question, you have to give a reply. You can't ignore it anymore. You can't duck it, for the simple reason being that your own vote shares are rapidly dwindling.

Do you think that there's any way that this can be addressed credibly without reducing immigration? So I think immigration is front and center to the phenomenon. And I think that inevitably, particularly Western Europe in the US, will have to reform immigration in a much more substantive way, that we will have to slow down migration, and we will have to work at the same time a lot harder at how we integrate minorities into the broader national community. And you can see the beginnings of this already. So if you look at Scandinavia, it's actually many parties on the left that are now endorsing more assertive policies to try and bring people together in a meaningful way. Denmark, for example, has just pledged to end all parallel societies by 2030.

And it's doing some pretty radical stuff that will make a lot of people feel uncomfortable, right? Reducing welfare for people that choose to live in segregated neighborhoods, knocking down apartment blocks that have become too segregated, giving people who commit crimes in those neighbourhoods harsher crimes than they would if they lived in other areas, effectively forcing kids under five to go into mixed schooling, so they develop those bridges, those links with other groups, with kids from other backgrounds. And that stuff will make a lot of people feel uncomfortable, but I think that's the beginning of the broader direction of travel. Europe in general will have to strengthen external security and borders considerably,

simply because of the political pressures that are going to bear down on liberal Europe, especially from Central and Eastern Europe. And it may be over time that actually internal borders will have to be a lot stronger than they are at the moment. I mean, over the last few years we've really seen Schengen not die, but certainly be weakened. Significantly, we've had temporary border checks and so on. And I think simply because of the mood in the continent, the sort of mood music, that we know that these issues are now at the front and center of people's minds.

We know that they're going to, I would argue, they're going to stay at the front and center of people's minds because what they're going to see over the coming years is going to be quite troubling, particularly not for the winners, if you like, not for the highly educated middle-class professionals that are basically at ease with a lot of these changes, but other sections of society are going to want to push back very strongly. And when you look at people like Macron, they're the outlier, they're not the norm. The norm now are conservative parties, right-wing parties, and the evidence backs me up on this. Europe is moving very quickly to the right in policy terms.

So a lot of my liberal left academic colleagues are very excited about the Greens in Bavaria at the moment. I would say show me one study that shows the Greens having anything like the policy influence that conservatives and national populists are having. When you've got left-wing parties advocating more restrictive migration measures, even Corbyn has come out and said, well, let's respect the reference. random result and let's reform freedom of movement. And I think that that's the beginning of a much broader shift. It could also be that he loves Brexit.

Yeah, but exactly. But the point is, Labour on that policy issue are much more, I think, to the right, if you like, than Blair would ever have been, or Chukra Amuna, whatever have been. And that's the broader travel. Now, the Democrats in the US are an exception, but I think the Democrats are going to have a very difficult few years. I called Trump quite early. It was quite obvious that I think Trump was going to do surprisingly well and everything since the political shocks of 2016 has told us that many on the liberal left are completely and utterly lost. They don't have a meaningful reply to these moments.

Well, this is exactly my concern because what I see since 2016 is the very people who should have taken that as an opportunity to listen and to go, well, first of all, how did you do this, right? You know, listen to Steve Bannon about how he thinks he achieved what he achieved getting Trump elected. But also, listen to the concerns of the people who did that. Like, you know, I was against Brexit, and it was a massive wake-up call for me when Brexit and Trump happened. And it's led to this process of us doing the show because I wanted to understand people from different sides and their opinions. But it seems to me like the Democrats in America, the far left here in the UK, they're doing the opposite. They're doubling down on exactly the things that helped to...

lead to Brexit and help to get Trump elected. Well, I mean, I completely agree, except I wasn't surprised by Brexit. You're a lot smarter than I have. No, no, but I thought Brexit was odd-on. I always thought the fundamentals favor Brexit. You know, it's just that everyone got lost and they wanted. Group think, triumph.

People saw what they wanted to see, basically, and they completely lost sight of what was going on around them. And when you have a referendum like that against the backdrop of the refugee crisis, terrorist attacks in Paris, the Bata clan, the suicide bombings in Brussels, 20 years, at which the surveys had shown us consistently, more or less, that more than half of Britain's population

either wanted to leave the EU or wanted to dramatically reduce the EU's powers. The fundamentals were there. What the vote leave campaign did as an aside, which was ruthlessly effective, was the slogan, take back control, which was emotionally resonant, but also gave people a personal sense of agency that they could take back control.

Now, irrespective of whether you believe it, whether you don't, and so on, just from a campaign point of view, it was ruthless. Now, what I see in the US today is the emergence of a new strategy that I think might be as effective and Donald Trump last week said,

the Democrats have moved so far left, they're going to turn us into Venezuela. And in a way, it's Trump being Trump, right? But on another level, I think that is a message that will resonate among a mainstream American audience that is looking at Elizabeth Warren

falling over herself to show that she's connected to Native Indians. or, you know. Over 1,024. Never ending search for identity, politics, quest for recognition, everybody's a victim.

Nobody can be brought together. I think American voters have had enough of that. And I think the backlash to it may be stronger than we currently anticipate. We can see what will happen at the midterms. And in Europe, I think at least it's more interesting to see people on the left, the new rise-up movement in Germany, which is trying to say, okay, in order to win back

AFD voters, we can't argue that this is all about economic scarcity, because clearly it isn't, you know, but maybe we need to actually revisit what we're saying about the social and economic model. So they've now started saying, well, why don't we have a pause on mass, low-skill migration, and why don't we try and think about how we can boost productivity, wages and innovation without this never-ending search for endless low-skill workers because maybe that isn't producing a social settlement that is making everybody feel happy,

that people do also care about community, nation, you know, belonging and so on. And I think that's why in a way that parts of the left in Europe might be ahead of the curve. The Democrats are completely and utterly lost. I mean, framing themselves as the resistance, talking about the democracy being high,

hijacked. They're using militaristic language in order to frame the response to Trump. And that's a very, very dangerous game to play. You know, Trump outplayed the Democrats, leave outplayed, remain, and I would argue national populism is outplaying social democracy. So there needs to be a much more serious period of self-reflection about what's gone wrong. And my last criticism is that these parts, parties, movements, groups, think tanks on the left, only really invite thinkers and speakers to their events who confirm what they already think. If you look at all the keynote talks, the guest speakers, you name it, it's people who already,

you know, they're preaching to the converted. They're not even putting themselves in a difficult place. They're not even putting themselves in uncomfortable territory. Whereas national populism, I think, has actually gone on a far more, I mean it's troubling in a way, but it's gone on a far more rigorous intellectual journey over the last 30 years than many people on the left have. If you go back to the 80s and the 90s, the new right in France, in Italy, these thinkers were basically trying to explore how the national populace could take the ideas of people like Gramski and left-wing thinkers and apply them from their own ideological standpoint. There's not much innovation going on at the moment on the left.

All the interesting ideas that are going on in the West in general are on the right. And I don't say that as somebody that identifies openly being on the right. I just say that as somebody who is looking at the intellectual debate, or the momentum is with people who are pushing back against identity politics. It's pushing, people who are pushing it back against the liberal consensus in a way and saying, well, what's next? Because clearly this social settlement, this status quo is unsustainable. So maybe, hopefully, we will be.

get that renaissance on the liberal left that will come into the marketplace of ideas and bring something new. Because at the moment, there's not a lot that's new. I'm actually quite enthused by what you're saying. I mean, take the Democrats aside, and they have gone absolutely apeshire. They've just gone crazy. I see Maisie Hirono telling men to sit down and shut up, and I think that's not a message that's going to resonate with the wider public, it just isn't. But if you set that aside and the Democrats in America are going crazy, and you look at the rest of it, isn't this the brilliant, democracy at work where, you know, something didn't work for 20 or 30 years, and now we have a

movement that's through the democratic system without large-scale violence or any of that, is getting the voice of the people back into the mainstream of the conversation. And as you make the point in the book, even if these parties aren't necessarily getting elected, they're changing the conversation that we're having and they're bringing it to the right or further to the right of the far left that it's been on for so long. Well, there's certainly a view that I would share. But of course, the dominant view is that that would be, that's an apologist line on what's happening in the West, that actually what we're seeing is the collapse of democracy around us. If you go to Waterstones and you just look at the latest wave of books that have come out post-Trump, post-Brexit,

it's how democracies die, you know, the end of the world. You know, it's all this alarmist stuff about, you know, young people giving up on democracy. It's all nonsense. I mean, if you look at the most reliable gold standard research surveys that we have, support for democracy is incredibly strong and entrenched. 85, 90% of people saying, I want to live in a democracy, I value representative democracy, I don't really want to go into an authoritarian regime. But we have a lot of writers now, particularly coming from the left,

who really like to push this alarmism, this idea that the world is collapsing around us, I think partly because they don't really know what else to say. I think their world is collapsing around that. Because their world is collapsing. They don't really know what to say. They don't really know how to respond to it. And as a consequence, it's easier to kind of preach to the audience, preach to the Guardian Easter's, I guess, and say, well, actually, you know, the world is going to hell in a handcart. And it's quite sad to watch, to be honest, because if you look at the British debate, I mean, the one or two journalists who are pointing out that actually it's not all.

all bad, that we're getting some conversations going that should be happening. If you think about people like John Harris at The Guardian, everyone says, oh, isn't he cool by going up to Blackpool and pointing out that they might have a point by voting for Brexit. I mean, there should be 20 of those journalists in the British debate, you know, but instead we've got this very insular, inward-looking discussion that isn't really getting us anywhere near understanding why people are feeling so lost and forgotten. One in two, columnists even today went through Oxbridge. I mean, it's not surprising they didn't see the tide of working class anger coming to 2016, right? I mean, it's just, and ever since then,

I mean, look what we've had since then. It's just like, well, maybe an anti-Brexit centrist party is the answer. I mean, who can, who seriously can look back on the last two years and think the answer to this, the reply to this, is more economic and social liberalism? Like, who, I don't understand how you could even reach that conclusion, right? There's no interesting, interesting intellectual experimentation. There's no new project. The third way in the 90s was kind of a neat response, partly by some on the left.

It went way too far and it wasn't perhaps as economically interventionist as it should have been. But for that particular time, it was quite an interesting response by someone on the left. Now there is no similar response. There's sort of nothing. It's just a kind of vacuous space. And then we wonder why these alternative movements

that are meeting the left are on the left, on economics now, right? So when Le Pen says, I'm anxious about savage globalization, a lot of people on the left in France are going, yeah, yeah, I'm row too. You know, Amazon is taking the piss, IKEA are taking a bit. Maybe we should prioritize domestic workers.

But they're also outflanking the left on the cultural axis too, because the formula today is very much economic security and cultural security. And if you can unlock both, then the audience is very big. Fantastic stuff. Yeah. Well, we're coming to the end of our interview

and the question that we always like to ask at the end is what is the one thing that no one is talking about that we ought to be talking about? The future, I think where are we going? And I think it's going to be a lot more challenging than we even realize at the moment that the levels of volatility that we've seen. If you buy my argument, and I don't mind if you don't,

But if you buy my argument that the bonds between voters and the main parties have now broken down to such an extent that we're only going to see a lot more volatility going forward, and that the issue agenda in the West with these big complex identity issues on which the left doesn't really have much of a response, is going to also favour the right and national populism. And we'll see more polarisation as some middle class professionals break off to the Greens and the radical left. I think the pace of political change over the coming years is going to surprise a lot of people. I think we need to start talking a lot more about how to prepare for that, how to respond to that, how to ensure that we have the marketplace of ideas and support it as well as we can. We have the institutions that do a good job of doing that.

Perhaps we need to think about electoral reform. Perhaps we need to think about getting rid of the House of Lords and stuff like that, having citizens' assemblies. How can we get ready for this period? because we're going to see a level of churn and change in the West over the next 30, 50 years that I don't even think we are close to comprehending at the moment. We had someone on the show a couple of weeks ago

talking about citizens' assemblies. Not quite the future, no, no, no, I'm not dismissing your point. It's a very good point. And do you think we're going to see increasing fragmentation of political parties? Do you think, you know, the three of us have lived essentially under two-party system for all our lives? Do you think that we're coming to the end of that as a result of some of these things? Or when you talk about fragmentation, are you talking about kind of more mental fragmentation as opposed to out there?

No, no, I'm talking about real fragmentation. I mean, when I mean volatility, I mean you guys switching your votes from one election to the next. And one election, you'll Lib Dem, then you're Conservative, then your Labor, then you're UKIP, then you're whoever, right? And you're constantly changing. There's no tribal allegiances. A little bit like in Central and Eastern Europe where you have really quick changing. party systems. And I think what we're going to see is a lot more of that, a lot more party systems where the two big main parties come down, smaller parties do better. We're already seeing

it in Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal. I think we'll see a lot more of that, polarization. Maybe over the long term you get the emergence of two new blocks, but they're more radically distinct, more ideologically incoherent, more irreconcilable, more polarized. And that will, that create new problems. But even in the UK, the 2015 and the 2017 elections were the most volatile that we've had in the post-war period. Now, yeah, we had 80% of the vote going Corbyn or May, but underneath that you had Lib Dems going Labor, UKIP going Conservative going Labor, some Lib Dems going green, some green going labour, you name it, we had a lot more churn. So there is certainly space in the British system for a different type of party. It's not an

anti-Brexit centrist party. It's one that is actually accepting of Brexit, wants to have slightly lower immigration, but is also a bit more economically interventionist. But it's incredibly hard to break through under the current dynamics that we have. And now without European Parliament elections, it's even harder because you don't get that injection of PR politics once every five years. But we will across the West see a lot of churn and change. And it might be that look at five star in Italy, you could start a party tomorrow. Phenometry party and within 10 years you could... Just go around defending people.

You could win an election. Or you could be Emmanuel Macron and you could say, I'm stepping out of the party system and you could become president within 18 months. Or you could be Matteo Salvini in Italy and you could be the only political party now that's growing. What started as a pretty small northern separatist movement is now eating its way south through Italy, eating up the rights vote, now beginning to attract five-star vote. voters. So we're seeing changes that are truly historic and we're living in them, which is exciting, but also quite challenging. Isn't that the Chinese curse, I think, may you live in interesting times?

I think that's what we're doing now, right? I think I've got a fridge magnet. Well, that's where all the wisdom is nowadays. Anyway, as you can see, the future is bright, the future is trigonometry. In that vein, subscribe to our channel, as always, follow us at TriggerPod. Follow Matt, you're on Twitter, and very active user on Twitter, by the way. You're pretty prolific on there. I like it. It's the marketplace of ideas. Absolutely. And you are there at... Goodwin, MJ. And tell us, your book is called... National Populism, the Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, which is out on October 25th with Penguin.

Perfect, which is a couple of days after this interview comes out. Get the book, I've read big chunks of it. It's very, very interesting and well written. You'll enjoy it. And there's always tune in next week for another fantastic episode. Thanks for much, Matt, for coming on. Thanks for having me. Wonderful stuff. Don't forget to subscribe. Click the little bell icon and that will tell you when our videos are released and also as well If you're listening to us on audio, you really like it if you can leave us a review would be infinitely grateful See you next week guys. Thank you very much