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0:32

my god, Ross, when was your birthday? Yesterday.

0:35

Oh, happy birthday! Happy birthday. Thank you.

0:37

Thank you. Sagittarius. Yeah. How old are

0:39

you, Ross? I am, you know, my

0:42

soul is eternal, but I'm 44. I

0:45

think I've reached the age that I always was.

0:47

I think I'm gonna just stay here. There you

0:49

go. I think this is my true age. I

0:53

believe that. You're an old soul. From

0:57

New York Times Opinion, I'm Michelle Cottle. I'm Ross Douthat.

1:00

I'm Carlos Lozada. And I'm Lydia Paul

1:02

Greene. And this is Matter of Opinion.

1:13

All right, today I really want us to talk about

1:15

strongmen. Not so much of the

1:17

physical variety, but of the political

1:19

kind. Because of late, I've been thinking

1:21

about this a lot as the Republican president

1:24

presidential primary heats up. And

1:27

we're looking at Donald Trump trying

1:29

to make his return

1:31

with an increasingly

1:33

disturbing dark authoritarian

1:36

rhetoric. But we

1:38

also have, looking at this

1:40

globally, Argentina's new president,

1:43

the far-right libertarian Javier Mille,

1:45

Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

1:48

And both have been compared

1:50

to Trump. So what I

1:52

want to talk about is, for those of you who

1:54

think about this more globally, why

1:56

are we seeing this trend toward these

1:59

kinds of leaders? What's changed

2:01

and then later on we can get into what's gonna

2:04

happen next or what we see down the pike?

2:06

Especially if Trump is

2:09

reelected in 2024, but first

2:11

let's clarify who we even talking about Who

2:13

do you think of when you hear the term

2:16

strongman? Well, well, I mean

2:18

we need to go ahead. No go

2:20

Carlos No, well, I think we need

2:22

to define more precisely what we mean

2:24

by a strong man Like is it

2:26

an attitude? Is it a set

2:28

of policy? Positions is

2:31

it just a style of politics?

2:34

Trump is not to be so

2:36

obvious right and so and so parochial but like,

2:38

you know He's sort of the the caricature of

2:40

the strongman leader and the kind of us

2:43

versus them Rhetoric

2:45

the them being immigrants or the them

2:47

being political elites Malay

2:50

who you mentioned from Argentina, you know,

2:52

he's kind of a rabble-rouser Right-winger

2:55

his us versus them rhetoric is

2:58

less about Immigrants and it is

3:00

about like the federal government, you know of Argentina,

3:03

which he wants to slice in half You

3:05

know What makes someone a quote unquote strongman

3:07

is something that I'm interested in because we

3:09

sort of throw the term around a lot

3:12

as if We all agreed on what it

3:14

was. I think there's a distinction here

3:16

between style

3:18

and substance where what

3:20

you have Globally

3:22

are sort of rebellions

3:26

against existing governments

3:28

existing constellations of elites

3:31

That seem to take similar stylistic forms

3:33

even when the substance is quite different

3:35

So as you guys have just been

3:37

saying Malay is a

3:39

kind of hyper libertarian, you

3:41

know Grown in a laboratory

3:43

by reason magazine and the

3:46

Lou Ludwig von Mises foundation

3:49

In Alabama in ala right in order to You

3:52

know libertarianize Argentina, which itself has

3:54

been governed by a kind of

3:57

Populist Peronist formation for a long

3:59

time community time. So

4:01

that's quite different from Trump

4:04

running as an economic populist

4:07

against the neoliberal elites,

4:10

and also quite different from Gert Wilders

4:12

running as mostly just

4:14

a, immigration is out of control,

4:16

we need to do something about it candidate in

4:19

the Netherlands. But you

4:21

would not be mistaken to notice

4:23

that all of them have

4:26

very weird hair. Right? Like step one.

4:28

That is the real definition of a

4:30

strong man. And all of them are

4:32

playing in different ways with a kind

4:35

of politics of sort of disruption, showmanship,

4:38

absurdity, that is,

4:41

I don't think the term authoritarian is

4:43

right. I think some of them have

4:45

authoritarian impulses and some don't and some

4:47

it remains to be seen. I think

4:50

it's fair to say Trump has authoritarian

4:52

impulses that Millet may not

4:54

have. But all of them are rabble

4:56

rousers with a kind of like, we

4:58

are against the system. And we

5:01

are manifesting this in a particularly

5:03

male style. There is, I think,

5:05

a way in which a kind of like, male

5:09

braggadocio, this

5:11

sort of like, performative masculine

5:13

rebellion against liberal polytesse shows

5:17

up again and again from Silvio

5:19

Berlusconi to Trump, even Boris Johnson

5:21

has some of this. I don't

5:23

think it's a coincidence that you

5:25

get these misbehaving men with wild

5:27

hair as particular avatars of populist

5:30

rebellion. Well, and they're not

5:32

all men, right? I mean, we have

5:34

leaders like Giorgio Maloney in Italy, Marine

5:36

Le Pen in France. I

5:38

think that what a lot of these leaders

5:41

are promising is a kind of past oriented

5:43

politics. It's both a sort of

5:45

cult of personality that like I alone can

5:47

solve this problem. And also that I

5:49

am going to take us back to

5:51

when things were good. You know, obviously,

5:53

I alone is a Trump line and

5:55

Make America Great Again is a Trump

5:57

line and that notion of There

6:00

was this glorious past in which more people

6:02

had jobs, more people spoke the same language

6:04

as you, more people looked like you. The

6:07

economy was growing. That I

6:09

think is to me what's at the core of

6:12

this appeal is the sense of deep disappointment with

6:14

modern life and where we are right now and

6:17

a sense that something's got to be done about it. I

6:19

mean, it's, you know, they're mad as hell and they're not going to take

6:22

it anymore and willing to throw the

6:24

dice on people like Millet who is

6:26

like, hey, let's dollarize the economy and,

6:28

oh, by the way, I have cloned

6:30

my dogs, which is, yeah, great. You

6:33

know, when I think of strong men, I

6:35

think more in terms of authoritarian impulses. You

6:37

know, they're willing to use the tools of

6:39

government to consolidate and expend

6:42

their power. I tend to

6:44

think more along the lines of Viktor Orban,

6:46

the ultra right-wing prime minister of Hungary or

6:49

Donald Trump that I do just kind of

6:51

the performative machismo. I mean, otherwise, then we

6:53

get down into Robert F. Kennedy taking off

6:55

his shirt to do push-ups on social media.

6:58

But I think Kennedy fits

7:00

this part of his success

7:02

is that he fits into this category too.

7:05

And it's also just disruption for disruption's sake

7:08

and a way to kind of get attention and to,

7:11

you know, to kind of hack the current

7:13

kind of media landscape, I think, is having

7:15

crazy hair. I mean, Millet was like, I

7:17

won't apologize for having a penis. Like I

7:20

won't apologize for being a man. And

7:22

it's interesting, right, because I feel like in this

7:24

country, the demographics of that politics is very

7:26

different. But in Argentina, I think

7:28

there's been a huge groundswell of support for

7:30

Millet among young people. I

7:33

mean, I don't know about disruption for

7:35

disruption's sake. The style alone

7:37

is not the appeal. Like

7:40

there have to be a set of conditions that

7:43

enable this kind of politics to

7:46

not just exist, but to

7:48

thrive. So you can look at

7:50

outcomes and you can look at ideas.

7:53

The outcomes in

7:55

recent years have not been great, right? Like

7:57

look at Russia, where Putin does combine the...

8:00

like stylistic, take my shirt

8:02

off, ride horses and

8:04

fight judo style with the policy

8:06

substance. Look

8:09

at Russia, declining life expectancy and growing

8:11

poverty during the post-Soviet experiment

8:14

made people think

8:16

back to an era where someone

8:18

strong was in charge. The financial

8:20

crisis in not just the United States, but

8:22

in Europe starting in 2008, broke the

8:26

assumption that standard liberal democratic

8:29

practices would make things

8:31

work. You end

8:33

up tying those struggles to the

8:35

kind of style of politics and the substance of

8:38

politics of the quote unquote strong man, which

8:40

is often fears

8:43

of national decline, fears

8:45

of immigrants. There

8:48

has to be a substantive impulse

8:51

to why this exists. It is not

8:53

purely that like we just sort of

8:55

like are starting to like dig the

8:57

hair. And coming back to the United

8:59

States, you definitely see this with

9:01

Trump. I mean, a lot of surveys

9:04

and research has been done showing

9:06

that there are a not

9:08

insignificant number of Americans who

9:11

increasingly say things like the

9:13

country's in so much trouble, we're going to

9:16

need a leader who is willing

9:18

to bend the rules in order to save

9:20

us. Or at some point, the

9:22

country is going to need people to take matters

9:25

into their own hands. There

9:27

is a sense of apocalyptic change

9:29

that underlies a lot of what

9:31

you see with the

9:33

willingness to tolerate anti-democratic

9:36

impulses in American leaders.

9:38

But wait, what is the anti... I

9:41

think we're playing around with a lot of different

9:43

terms here, right? I don't

9:45

think that most of these

9:47

figures embody anti-democratic

9:50

impulses. I'm just talking about

9:52

what we're seeing in American

9:55

voters and Trump. Okay, well then even in

9:57

the United States, the whole

9:59

success... of Trump's sort

10:01

of basically his plan

10:03

to sort of hold on to

10:05

power within the Republican Party after

10:08

losing reelection in 2020 was based

10:10

on the idea that he could

10:12

convince his supporters that he actually

10:14

won the election. There was no

10:17

possible way that Joe Biden could have gotten

10:19

so many more votes than Hillary Clinton, therefore

10:21

the election was stolen and so on. Now

10:23

that is, it is

10:25

an anti-democratic impulse in some way,

10:27

but the people

10:29

who hold it don't think that they're

10:31

overthrowing democracy. They think they're saving. Well,

10:34

sure. I understand that. That's quite different

10:36

from... But what I'm talking about are

10:38

all these surveys where people are more

10:41

comfortable with a strong leader who is

10:43

willing to do things, even if they're

10:45

in treatment, like go after the press, introduce

10:48

the Justice Department to go after

10:50

the elite who are undermining him.

10:53

Buy into that whole deep state stuff. You're

10:56

talking about a guy who did, whether

10:58

or not it worked, encourage

11:00

folks to take matters into their own

11:02

hands when we're talking about overthrowing

11:04

an election. Yeah, and he's made a lot

11:06

of promises of things that he's going to

11:08

do if he's elected next year and

11:10

so on and so forth. We

11:12

talked about the sort of conditions that created this moment,

11:14

and I don't know if you guys listened to it

11:16

or have seen the book that's now come out about

11:19

it, but Rachel Maddow did this

11:21

podcast last year called Ultra, and it was all about kind

11:23

of the 1930s and the rise

11:26

of antisemitism and fascism

11:28

and lawmakers who were

11:30

making speeches that were written by Nazi

11:32

propagandists and then mailing them out to

11:34

their constituents on the taxpayer's dime.

11:38

It's sort of this forgotten episode, but what

11:40

really strikes me about it is the

11:42

sort of organic conditions, the global economic

11:44

and political conditions that led to that

11:47

moment within the United States were like

11:49

the same sorts of conditions that led

11:51

to Italy becoming a fascist country or

11:53

to Germany becoming a fascist country. None

11:56

of those conditions like the Great Depression, the

11:58

sort of ecological conditions. crisis in the United

12:00

States. None of those are happening now,

12:02

right? Like, we've had some tough times, like

12:05

we've been through a global pandemic, we've

12:07

been through some hard things, but none

12:09

of them, I think, come even close

12:11

to mirroring what the state of the

12:14

world was in, like, you know, the

12:16

late 1920s and then the 1930s when

12:18

there was this flowering of affection for

12:20

fascism. Which makes it unsurprising that there

12:22

is no evidence that you're seeing a

12:25

comparable flowering of affection for fascist dictatorship

12:27

today, right? And part of the bullshit

12:29

of what Maddow does is

12:31

to pretend that America

12:33

is actually on the brink of being

12:35

tipped into over into something that resembles

12:38

a Nazi dictatorship, which is not in

12:40

fact the case. And the

12:42

reality of all of these figures is

12:45

that they are further in

12:48

not every case, but in many cases further

12:50

to the right than right wing

12:52

politicians were 15 or 20 years ago. This

12:54

is not true on economic policy, but it's

12:56

true, let's say, on issues

12:58

related to immigration especially. And I

13:00

agree on issues related to, like,

13:03

what a powerful president can

13:05

and should do, issues related to

13:07

sort of norms of government. But

13:09

that's just really different than Benito

13:11

Mussolini and Adolf Hitler being literal

13:13

dictators of their country. Georgia Maloney

13:15

took- We've shifted the semantics here.

13:17

We're not talking about fascism. We're

13:19

talking about what we're seeing.

13:22

There's a lot of- Well, we were just

13:24

talking- Hold on, let's put Carlos, Carlos, Carlos,

13:26

okay, you got it. No, no, no. I

13:28

was just saying that there's a lot of

13:30

room between Mussolini, a fascist dictatorship- And a

13:32

thriving liberal democracy to sort of say that,

13:34

like, because we're not a fascist dictatorship to

13:36

say that somehow we're not eroding- I don't

13:38

think we're a thriving liberal democracy. But Ross,

13:40

like, I want to go back to something,

13:42

Ross. You seem to minimize

13:45

the sort of anti-democratic inroads of a

13:47

figure like Donald Trump when you were

13:49

like, well, I guess, like, convincing a

13:51

bunch of people that he actually won

13:53

the election and that, you know, it

13:55

was all rigged was you said- Yes,

13:58

it's anti-democratic in- some way. It's

14:01

undermining the absolute rock bottom minimal

14:04

definition of democracy, right? Which is

14:06

that it is a system that

14:08

selects leaders through fair and competitive

14:11

elections. And so that

14:13

is a frontal

14:15

assault on

14:17

liberal democracy. I don't agree. If

14:19

you are saying that

14:24

only that elections are only

14:26

fair and proper when

14:28

you win, you have

14:30

given up on democracy.

14:33

So it's not just like some

14:35

weird affectation. And in

14:37

fact, there's nothing else that really animates

14:39

his coming campaign. Nothing

14:42

else beyond like litigating those battles.

14:44

Well, what do you mean by litigating

14:47

those battles involves Trump making a platform?

14:50

What you know, like it's about 2020. Right. It's about

14:53

Donald Trump arguing to the public

14:55

that he actually won the 2020 election,

14:57

which is nonsense. But is well,

14:59

of course, but is but is nonsense

15:02

within a context where he's saying to

15:04

his supporters, I won

15:06

the most votes and the Democrats stole

15:08

it from me, which I'm saying is

15:10

different from say, the views of large

15:13

numbers of people on the German right

15:15

in 1930, not the Nazis,

15:17

but the people who helped the Nazis

15:19

take power. The view of those people

15:21

was that democracy was bad and should

15:24

be replaced. And they said

15:26

so explicitly. That is not the argument.

15:29

And there is a continuum here,

15:31

right? Where if the claim you're

15:33

making is that, you know, someone's

15:35

election is not legitimate, is a

15:37

frontal assault on American democracy, then

15:39

I'm sorry. But by your definition,

15:41

Rachel Maddow's entire Russiagate conspiracy hysteria

15:43

represented a frontal assault on American

15:45

democracy because its entire argument was

15:47

not the front runner of a

15:49

major party to be president. She's

15:51

the front runner of MSNBC. Donald

15:53

Trump is a more serious problem

15:56

for American democracy than Rachel Maddow.

15:58

I completely agree. But if

16:00

the argument is, is Donald Trump a

16:03

figure who is part of a

16:05

turn away from democracy in American

16:07

life, I don't think that's quite

16:10

the right way to understand that.

16:12

But democracy's turn by

16:15

electing people, right? You vote

16:17

in people who then take away

16:19

your democracy. Like this is the thing that happens

16:21

over and over and over again. You

16:23

know, Viktor Orban is an elected

16:25

leader. Vladimir Putin, for that matter,

16:27

is an elected leader, right? But slowly,

16:30

over time, the people who are allowed

16:32

to compete in elections against you become

16:35

fewer and fewer. You find ways using

16:37

lawfare to limit who your opponents can

16:39

be. I mean, we just saw this

16:41

in Turkey, right? There was an election

16:43

there where the most plausible candidate was

16:45

barred from running, essentially, because they had

16:47

a trumped up, you know, political charge.

16:50

Yes, it would be terrible if one

16:52

political party wanted to bar the most

16:54

plausible candidate of the other political party

16:56

from running for president. That would really

16:58

be a big threat to democracy, wouldn't

17:00

it? Using the procedure of impeachment, which

17:02

is in the Constitution, as the way

17:04

in which we deal with these elections?

17:06

That's not what I'm referencing. How about

17:08

using the procedure of a very recondite

17:10

interpretation of post-civil war constitutional amendments

17:12

to argue that Donald Trump is- I mean,

17:15

there's nobody buying that argument, Ross. So I

17:17

think part of the problem here, Ross, is

17:19

that you are, the way you are presenting

17:22

it, it is just as though you are

17:24

suggesting that Donald Trump took to the airwaves

17:27

to convince people with his

17:29

rhetoric or his logic or

17:31

whatever that he had actually won that election.

17:33

That is not the extent of it. He

17:35

didn't just say it. He used the tools

17:38

of government. He was trying to replace people

17:40

in the Justice Department. What Trump did was

17:42

really bad. I agree. It was

17:44

really bad. It's not just

17:46

rhetoric. He used the tools of

17:48

government, which is classic, classic

17:51

abuse of power to

17:54

try and put forward an alternative

17:56

reality. What I'm saying is that

17:58

the argument that Trump put

18:00

forward was an argument to

18:02

persuade his supporters that

18:04

they were defending the sanctity of American

18:07

democracy. And that was bad and

18:09

wicked and had terrible results.

18:12

I think you raised a really good

18:14

point, Ross, when you say that the

18:16

people who stormed the Capitol on January

18:18

6th think that they're saving

18:21

democracy. They don't think that they're to

18:23

undermine it. And that's

18:26

the way it is in the United

18:28

States always. People

18:31

whose actions one can look at and

18:33

think are undermining

18:35

the system almost always

18:37

couch those actions in

18:40

a perhaps sincere belief that they are in

18:42

fact rescuing it. People who want

18:44

to secede from the Union say that they're

18:46

doing so to uphold

18:49

its greatest principles. It's

18:51

a fundamental battle of America.

18:54

And you have different sides who look at that

18:56

battle and think that the other side is destroying

18:58

the nation they're striving to preserve. Everyone

19:00

thinks they're saving it. Everyone always thinks

19:02

they're saving it. Now in the case that you

19:04

just described, they thought they were saving it because

19:06

they had been lied to. But of course,

19:08

of course they thought they were saving it. This

19:11

seems like a good point to take a break.

19:13

And when we come back, we're going to talk

19:15

about where all this could be headed, especially

19:18

if we're looking at another

19:21

Trump presidency in 2024. Being

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successful takes sacrifice. You'll

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surfing all morning, work through lunch

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that you picked fresh from the garden,

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we're back. So we were

20:51

talking about Trump and the justifications people might

20:53

use for what most of us

20:55

see is his anti-democratic behavior. But

20:58

I think there's a larger question here

21:00

about the fate of liberal democracy, especially

21:02

if we're looking at another Trump presidency.

21:05

Are we seeing a global embrace of a different

21:07

kind of politics? And if so, what does that

21:09

mean for the US? Ross,

21:11

you have thoughts. If

21:14

you look at what is happening in

21:16

Europe right now, what

21:18

you're already seeing is a kind

21:22

of normalization of

21:25

populist critiques of the

21:27

liberal consensus as

21:30

the new normal form of opposition politics,

21:32

which in most places

21:34

will cease to be interpreted as

21:37

a kind of existential threat to

21:39

democracy itself and will be understood

21:41

more as politics as

21:43

usual. For instance, you've

21:45

just seen in Poland an

21:48

election that turned the populist party

21:50

out of power and returned

21:52

the kind of center to power. What

21:54

you see in Italy with Maloney has been a candidate

21:58

with roots in Italy. fascist

22:00

movements, becoming prime minister,

22:03

and ending up sort of operating

22:05

within the normal paradigm of

22:08

European politics, to the point where people

22:10

on the far right feel somewhat betrayed

22:13

by Maloney. What you might see in

22:15

France is Marine Le Pen actually becoming

22:17

president and not being able to rule

22:19

France as a far right dictator and

22:22

operating within the normal confines of French

22:24

politics. Gert Wilders is not going to

22:26

become dictator of the Netherlands.

22:28

He may not even be able to

22:30

form a government. If he does, he

22:32

will be operating within a coalition and

22:34

so on. That is, I think, the

22:36

likely future of Europe. We will see

22:39

less talk about populism overthrowing

22:41

liberal democracy and more

22:43

talk about democracy divided

22:45

between, let's say, liberals

22:47

and populists. The United States, I think,

22:49

is a different case because, in spite

22:51

of all of my argument that

22:53

Trump is not actually

22:55

destroying democracy, I do

22:58

think that he is a man

23:00

with an appetite for constitutional crisis.

23:02

The American system, because of the

23:04

outsized powers of the presidency, lends

23:07

itself to risks of constitutional crisis.

23:10

I think it's reasonable for liberals to

23:12

be more anxious about a Trump presidency

23:14

or for non-liberals to be more anxious

23:16

about a second Trump presidency than Europeans

23:19

should be about Marine Le Pen, Maloney,

23:21

Wilders, whoever else. I'm

23:24

interested in how

23:26

the consensus came to be that liberal and

23:28

democracy are conjoined words that go together like

23:30

peas and carrots. You can have illiberal democracies,

23:32

and we've had them in the past and

23:34

we'll have them in the future. I don't

23:37

know, how did we get to a place

23:39

where we thought that it was inevitable that

23:41

liberalism and democracy would go together? I'm talking

23:43

about liberalism in more of the classic

23:45

sense, that there's a

23:47

certain rationality to human behavior and to

23:49

markets. Perhaps it's because, and not to

23:51

answer my own question, that has

23:54

produced a large technocratic state that

23:56

has not necessarily delivered for people

23:58

in the way that was... promised

24:00

and foreseen. But I'm curious, like,

24:02

Carlos, why do you think liberalism and

24:04

democracy have become unyoked? I

24:07

mean, I think that part of it is that

24:09

it seemed like the only game in town for

24:11

a while. And therefore it seems inevitable when it's

24:13

all you have. It seems like it's all

24:15

there should be. As we discussed

24:17

earlier, there's a minimal definition of

24:20

democracy, which is assistance,

24:22

like leaders through fair and competitive elections that

24:24

are voted on by a majority of the

24:26

people who will be governed by those

24:28

leaders. Liberal democracy, of

24:30

course, far transcends voting. It's

24:32

protection of basic liberties, of,

24:35

you know, freedom of the press, of religion,

24:37

robust adherence to the rule of law, independent

24:39

judiciary, a strong civil society, you

24:41

know, all these things that we say

24:44

we like. The problem with liberal

24:46

democracy is that it's a procedural

24:48

system that is judged not by

24:50

its processes, but by its outcomes.

24:52

A democratic government doesn't have to

24:55

be virtuous or successful or

24:57

non corrupt to still count as

24:59

a democracy. But when democracy fails

25:02

to deliver, say, sustained

25:05

economic growth or social stability, people

25:07

may sour on like the party in

25:09

power, which is a

25:11

non systemic issue, or they may

25:13

start to sour on the

25:16

system itself. If

25:18

we think about the risks to liberal democracy,

25:20

that's where it is. And that's

25:22

what Vladimir Putin has been pushing the idea

25:25

of. It's past its prime, it's over, you

25:27

know, he's gleeful about any signs or

25:29

any opportunity to just trash the whole system.

25:32

But the issue, I think, that's specific

25:34

to European and American politics in the

25:36

last 25 years is that

25:38

liberalism as a system takes

25:41

certain issues off the table. It says,

25:43

look, no matter what public opinion says,

25:46

you cannot persecute people

25:48

for being Baptists. You know,

25:50

you cannot discriminate between races,

25:52

you cannot, whatever the

25:55

specifics are, there's a certain set of

25:57

basic rights that liberalism protects in places

25:59

outside the political system to some

26:01

degree. And what's happened, especially

26:03

I think since the

26:06

end of the Cold War, political liberals

26:08

have wanted to place more

26:10

issues somewhat outside

26:13

normal democratic contestation. And in Europe,

26:15

that's particularly meant immigration. There's been

26:17

this sense that like in some

26:20

form, migration is a human right.

26:23

And there's sort of a practical argument,

26:25

immigration is necessary in societies with declining

26:28

birth rates for economic dynamism. And European

26:30

elites from the perspective of a lot

26:32

of their own voters have sort of

26:35

conspired to make it impossible to criticize

26:38

immigration. And the

26:40

populist parties have emerged as

26:42

critics of immigration whose

26:45

illiberalism is just sort of defined

26:47

as like, oh, well, you know, they're illiberal

26:49

because they're against immigration. But that's, there was

26:52

never a, you know, a sort of formal

26:54

agreement that open

26:56

immigration was somehow actually fundamental to

26:59

liberalism. It was just sort of

27:01

became assumed by elites. So

27:04

earlier I was saying that the reason folks

27:06

are souring a liberal democracy is in part

27:09

because it's not delivering on outcomes, whether it's

27:11

economic growth or stability. But

27:13

it's also, I mean, you can also think

27:15

that liberalism bought its own hype and that

27:18

it lapsed into sort of extreme versions of

27:20

itself. So like on the right,

27:22

that was the worship of free

27:25

markets. And the free movement

27:27

of people's globalization, that was

27:29

sort of liberalism to a

27:31

certain extreme. On the left,

27:33

it might be, you could say it's

27:36

the worshiping of group identities and denigrating

27:38

individualism emphasizing the solidarity

27:40

aspects. And so liberalism

27:43

ceases to be attractive to kind of

27:45

a broad middle. I don't know how

27:47

to rally the middle. I mean,

27:49

it's interesting, right? Because I think that

27:51

like our political systems are not designed

27:54

to necessarily produce like moderate choices. I

27:56

don't know if any of you have been following

27:59

the upcoming lecture. in Portugal. Which-

28:02

Every day, Lydia. Every day. Every day.

28:05

There was a really great article in HuffPost that was sort of

28:07

a deep look at the Chaga party, which is

28:09

Chaga, I guess, is Portuguese for enough. And

28:12

they're in the wake of a big corruption

28:14

scandal involving, and this is just so on the

28:16

nose, it's like something out of House of Cards.

28:19

There was a scandal involving

28:21

backroom dealing over green energy

28:24

deals. So with the

28:26

socialist government- That is sexy. ...

28:28

is corrupt, no matter what. So

28:31

in marches, this guy named André

28:33

Ventura, who is, of course, a

28:35

former sports commentator and media star

28:38

like Trump. And

28:40

there's a lot of talk about political

28:42

correctness. And in this case, it's actually,

28:44

I think it involved the Roma people.

28:47

What you're seeing is, and I don't think

28:49

I necessarily am ready to call this authoritarian

28:52

now, but the rise of a

28:54

kind of alternative to the center

28:56

right and center left consensus. And

28:58

people might say that they want moderation, but

29:01

I think that there is something sort

29:03

of fundamentally underlying it, which is like

29:05

a mistrust, and this came up in

29:07

the case of Argentina, that the

29:09

Costa, right? Like the political caste on

29:12

either side is capable of

29:14

delivering the type of like pathbreaking

29:16

change that is needed. So that's

29:19

where I think like moderation sort of

29:21

fails, is that there's just a lack of trust

29:23

in the establishment parties that represent the

29:26

ideological points of view that might address

29:28

one side or the other of these

29:30

problems, which I think creates then another

29:32

lane for somebody like this André Ventura

29:34

and his Chaga Party to march

29:36

right in and let's see how they do in the

29:38

election in March. That lack of

29:41

trust is completely warranted because- No, totally.

29:43

I don't know. I sort of believe

29:45

that everyone is a latent authoritarian, right? Certainly

29:48

Roth and I are typical Latin American

29:50

perspective there. Because

29:53

democracy is this very, very

29:56

fragile bargain, and it's

29:58

not always based on a consensus over

30:00

shared values, but a recognition by the

30:02

various sides that like they can't achieve

30:04

dominance. Democracy is not what partisans want.

30:06

It's what they settle for. See,

30:09

this is actually a question I have for

30:11

all of you, which is one of the

30:13

things that makes me quite nervous in the

30:16

US in particular. There seems to have been

30:18

a real devaluing of the whole idea of

30:20

pluralism, of the idea that different groups should

30:22

be expected to live together and abide by

30:25

certain agreements. There's

30:27

just this move that the other

30:29

teams values or believes, and certainly

30:32

their candidates and political wins are

30:34

illegitimate, and that seems to

30:36

me a bad road to go down, and I

30:38

don't know how you come back for that. If

30:40

you can't embrace this kind

30:43

of pluralism, where does this take you

30:45

other than just bifurcated extremes? And

30:47

part of that is there is a media digital

30:49

age component to this. Absolutely. One

30:51

of the arguments in the spoke by Martin

30:54

Gurrey, the revolt of the public, is that

30:57

the internet especially, and sort of

30:59

its media culture in general, creates

31:02

a constant cycle of discrediting

31:04

of elites. Nobody can believe

31:06

in elites anymore because we

31:08

know too much about them at all

31:10

times. And society needs a little

31:13

bit of room for elite hypocrisy

31:15

and self-dealing in order to function,

31:17

and that's been taken away. But then the other thing

31:19

the internet does is collapse the

31:22

distance. So a formative

31:24

political memory for a lot of

31:26

religious conservatives was right around

31:28

the time that same-sex marriage was

31:31

being sort of instantiated by the

31:33

Supreme Court and so on. There

31:36

was this moment where there was

31:38

a pizzeria in Indiana called

31:40

Memories Pizza, or something like

31:43

that. Some media people went

31:45

to it and said, would you guys

31:47

cater a same-sex wedding? And

31:50

someone at the pizzeria said, no, I'm

31:53

against same-sex marriage. I guess I wouldn't.

31:55

Something like that. And this became a

31:57

national story that somewhere in Indiana, There

32:00

was a pizzeria that no straight couple,

32:03

let alone a gay couple, would ever

32:05

ask to cater their wedding, but they

32:07

were against same-sex marriage, and that was

32:09

sort of like a major focal point

32:11

for a couple of weeks. And this

32:13

happens all the time on the right

32:15

and the left now. Nothing can happen

32:17

in like a left-wing city council meeting

32:20

or a right-wing homeschooling collective or whatever

32:22

that can't become a national story. And

32:24

I think it's really hard to have pluralism under

32:27

those conditions, where there is no sort

32:29

of local and regional anymore. There's only

32:31

the national. So Ross, you're saying we've

32:34

always been this way, but now we

32:36

all know it. Well, to your point

32:38

about people being natural authoritarians, to some

32:40

degree, people, yeah, people are always, you

32:43

know, intolerant of the

32:46

outgroup. And the

32:48

internet gives you in your

32:50

phone or on your screen constant

32:53

contact with the absolute worst thing

32:55

that the outgroup is doing today.

32:58

And that's, yeah, that seems like a problem for

33:00

democracy. Well, I think there's

33:02

another aspect to this. Human

33:05

nature is that like we tend

33:07

to either like idealize or demonize over

33:09

time, right? And so we're very good

33:12

at sort of idealizing the past or

33:14

seeing the past as being incredibly bad.

33:17

And we're also always looking to the future

33:19

as either sort of the promised land or

33:21

the road to hell, that things

33:23

are going to get so much worse. So

33:26

there is something in this kind of like human

33:28

tendency to always be

33:30

caught in this netherworld between memory

33:32

and fantasy. And none

33:34

of those things help us deal with the present. We're

33:37

over learning the histories of the past, or

33:40

we're over idealizing or over terrified of what's

33:42

going to happen in the future. And

33:44

I think insufficiently attentive to like what's happening right

33:46

now in the present in this kind of

33:48

abstract way. But the reality of how

33:50

we actually live our lives is like, we

33:52

have to deal with the present. We don't

33:54

have any choice, right? So I think that

33:56

in some ways that combination of the internet

33:58

and our weird. shared relationship with

34:01

temporality creates this like particularly

34:03

toxic moment right now. Between

34:06

memory and fantasy is like

34:08

a great short story collection title

34:10

or something. The

34:12

discarded alternate title

34:14

from Vladimir Nabokov's

34:16

memoirs. All right,

34:18

let's leave it there and when we come back, we'll hear

34:21

from you. Here's

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35:16

we're back. So we have something else up

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our sleeve this week in lieu of a hot cold. We

35:21

recently asked our younger listeners to send

35:23

in their political awakenings. So

35:25

let's take a listen now. Can't wait.

35:29

My name is Ethan from Pittsburgh. I

35:31

just about managed to figure out how to use the

35:33

phone so thanks for that reminder. Hey,

35:36

my name is Katie and I'm from

35:38

Little Rock, Arkansas. I am in fact

35:41

under 30. I'm from Tennessee. I'm

35:43

from Mississippi. Back from Idaho, California. She falls

35:45

up the quota. I am

35:47

originally from the DRC. Wow. Warwick,

35:51

Rhode Island. I am 22 years old.

35:53

Hello. My name is Alberto

35:55

Lopez. I'm from Chadsworth, Georgia and I

35:58

am around 21 years old. I'm

36:00

running out of time because I'm currently in

36:02

the call to class. Hi,

36:04

my name is Matt and I am

36:06

from Brooklyn, I'm 27. And

36:10

the one moment in politics that I

36:12

remember as a young child at 7

36:14

was talking to my grandpa about the

36:16

invasion of Iraq. And

36:19

then, of course, in 2004, speaking with my

36:21

mom and asking her who she was voting

36:23

for. And she told me she was voting

36:25

for George W. Bush because he had to

36:28

finish the war that he had started. Hey,

36:31

matter of opinion, this is Sydney

36:34

Wilson. I am 24 years old

36:36

from Charlotte, North Carolina and was

36:38

calling in about my first political

36:40

awakening moment. I was eight years

36:42

old in third grade, sitting

36:44

in circle around the class and we were talking

36:47

about the election. And it was in that moment

36:49

when I realized that my parents were the only

36:51

ones in the classroom who had voted for president

36:53

Barack Obama. It was

36:55

something I was proud of, but also embarrassed

36:57

by because South Carolina

37:00

where I grew up, that was definitely reason

37:02

to be outcasted. And it was from that moment

37:04

on when I started to believe in the little

37:06

guy, which is a little bit more. Nice.

37:10

Hi, my name is Ava. I'm from New

37:12

York. I'm 17 years old and I'm calling

37:14

to tell you about my first political experience.

37:18

It was 2012, the second election

37:20

of Obama, and I was in a restaurant

37:22

with my parents and we were watching some

37:24

clips of the debate. It

37:26

was, you know, a pretty nasty exchange of words.

37:28

And I remember asking my mom, can the president

37:30

of the United States speak like that?

37:32

And she ended up laughing. And

37:35

I think I remember this so clearly because I

37:37

was so mad that Obama, the president who I

37:39

was supposed to look up to, was speaking so

37:41

rudely. Little did I

37:43

know, you know, who would win in 2016. Yeah.

37:47

Oh my God. Life

37:49

is full of little disappointments. Hey

37:52

there, my name's Owen and I

37:54

am only 18 years old, just

37:56

turned 18 around three weeks ago and I'm

37:58

from a suburb in Portland. The

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