Good morning, everybody.
I'm Ed Steinfeld.
I'm the director of
the Watson Institute.
Before we do anything else,
I want to congratulate you
all, those of you who
are back as alums,
those of you who have family
members who are receiving
diplomas this weekend,
and those of you
who are receiving
diplomas this weekend.
It's such a privilege
for me and for all of us
at the Watson Institute
to be able to share
this weekend with you.
The Watson Institute was
founded 25 years ago in 1991.
And I imagine, if an event
like this was done in 1991,
we would probably be celebrating
the triumph, or at least
the validation, of liberal
values, of the values that
undergird, at least
for many of us,
modern democracy
and particularly
the modern democracies of
advanced industrial nations.
And by those values,
I mean values
of tolerance, and pluralism,
and rights, and a limited state.
And maybe we would have
taken a triumphalist view
at the time or maybe
even a skeptical view,
but I think we would
have had to acknowledge
in 1991 and in the
immediate years following
that democracy seemed
to be spreading
across the world in
places where many of us
never would have
imagined it possible,
whether in Poland, or Hungary,
or Turkey, or Indonesia.
You name the place.
And today, 25 years
later, I think many of us
feel that something
has happened.
In each of the
countries I just named,
whether it's Turkey, or
Indonesia, or Poland,
or Hungary, many of these
underlying values of democracy,
underlying values of
enlightenment and liberalism,
are coming into question.
And it's not just in Hungary,
and Poland, and Turkey,
but also in countries like
Denmark, or France, or Germany,
or the United States,
as many of us feel.
The purpose of
this panel today is
to think about that phenomenon
in a couple of respects.
I welcome my colleagues to
say that I am full of beans,
so to speak, and that this
phenomena is really not
sweeping the world,
or I hope they'll
help us to understand what
really is the challenge
to liberal values today.
Why is it that so
many people across so
many different democracies--
from the United States
to the world's largest
democracy, India-- why
is it that so many people are
challenging not just maybe
the inability of a country
to realize the liberal values
upon which it's based,
but rather they're
challenging the ability
of liberal values
to solve basic problems of
livelihood, of security,
and of justice.
I can't think of three
better colleagues
today to enlighten us and
illuminate us, illuminate
these topics for us, than the
colleagues that are here today.
Let me introduce
them very briefly,
and then I will turn
the floor over to them.
Margaret Weir is professor
of political science
and international
and public affairs
here at the Watson Institute.
Margaret, as many of you
know, is a political scientist
and sociologist
with great expertise
on American political
development,
comparative politics,
comparative social welfare,
and a variety of
other topics that
are dead center relevant to the
issues we're discussing today.
Next to Margaret is
Professor Ashutosh
Varshney, who's the
Sol Goldman professor
of international studies
and social sciences.
Ashu also directs the
Brown India Initiative here
at the Watson Institute.
The Indian Initiative
has just matured
and is combining with
the South Asia program
to found a new center
within Watson, the Center
for Contemporary South Asia.
And next to Ashu is
Professor Mark Blyth,
professor of political
science and political economy.
And Mark's expertise
is on European affairs,
financial affairs.
And Mark, as many of you know,
has done extraordinary work,
most recently on
issues of austerity.
What I'd like to
do at this point
is turn the floor over to each
of my colleagues in succession.
We'll start with Margaret,
and then Ashu, and then Mark.
And then we'll open it up
to questions for all of you.
Thank you.
Margaret.
[APPLAUSE]
We do have PowerPoint.
Here we go.
It's on the desktop files.
You just need to click the file.
Good.
Morning
Good morning.
So Ed gave us a hard task,
a big question, short time,
early in the morning.
So I'm going to do my best here.
And I thought about
his question as,
is American democracy
on the defensive?
Is there a turn to
illiberalism when
it comes to civil rights and
civil liberties in the US?
And when you think about this in
the American context, in a way,
we are the democracy with
the most stable institutions
over a long period of
time, Britain and the US.
And I was just thinking
as I was walking
over here, the Upton Sinclair
It Can't Happen Here,
that old novel.
And it leads us to think that
our fundamental institutions,
they can't really be
in any real jeopardy.
And political science research,
in a way, backs this up.
Political science research
shows that rich democracies
since 1950, looking over
all rich democracies,
have not back slid
to authoritarianism.
So we have some
indicators that we're OK.
But the United States
is a stable democracy
in which illiberalism
has historically
played a fundamental role
in the form of slavery,
legalized racial
segregation, denial
of the vote in the South,
nativism, anti-immigrant
sentiment.
So we're a strange democracy.
Now some people say
we really didn't
become a full democracy until
1965 with the Voting Rights
Act.
So the question for
today is, are we
facing a renewed period of
significant illiberalism
in the United States?
And is even our stable
democracy in jeopardy?
So these are big
questions, and I
thought I would present a few
pieces of evidence that provide
some things to think over.
So what I first want
to do is give you
some evidence from what's
called the World Values Survey.
This is a survey that's done
in countries across the country
and asks a variety of questions.
And so these are the answers
to the questions about,
on a scale of 1 to
10, how essential
is it to live in a democracy.
And what it does is it
shows it by birth cohort.
What you can see
is that people who
were born in interwar period--
people born in the '30s, '40s--
it is the highest value
for them, up to 70%
in the United States,
above, and rises
after the experience
of fascism and Nazism
in other countries in Europe.
But that starting in the 1950s,
as you get birth cohorts born
in these other
eras, those saying
that democracy is the highest
value begins to decline.
This is rather sobering.
There's other evidence too.
And I thought, since it's
early in the morning,
this is from a TV
show that I've managed
to watch about three
episodes of before I
couldn't watch anymore.
[LAUGH]
That in the United States,
41% of the people born
in the interwar and the initial
post-war decades-- 41%, so
near half-- say it's absolutely
essential for a democracy
to protect civil rights
and civil liberties.
When you get to millennials,
that falls to 32%.
So on this issue of
supporting civil rights
and civil liberties,
there's also
something of a
declining support.
Another thing that people
have become interested in
is whether we have rising
support for authoritarianism.
And that's the
answer to a question.
This is, again, from
the World Values Survey.
A good way to run the country
is with a strong leader,
not parliament and elections.
And this is responses just
for the United States.
And this is over time,
not by birth cohorts,
but you can see that support
for this pretty authoritarian
question, strong leader, and
not parliament and elections,
grows.
It is still 35% at its height.
It is not half of
the United States,
but it is something
that is growing.
This question about
authoritarianism
has come up with
regard to Trump.
And if you go
online, you'll find
lots and lots of
articles about this,
and people trying
to assess this.
And interest in political
science and authoritarianism
began after World War
II, trying to understand
the authoritarian personality--
Nazi Germany, fascism.
And it has revived in
recent years in part
because political scientists
have become better
at measuring the authoritarian
personality through looking
at things like
parenting practices.
They have proxies for it.
And so what this
debate is arguing
is that Trump is
much more strong
among people who score high on
these authoritarian measures.
So this is a very hot topic.
And so I want to-- don't worry.
I'm not going to go
on the whole time.
I want to stop
and then just ask,
what do all these things
in public opinion mean?
Does it mean that
suddenly, Americans
have become more authoritarian?
Is there some latent part of our
personality that's coming out?
And I want to suggest that
just looking at public opinion
doesn't give us enough,
that we need to look also
at political
institutions, how they're
operating, how they're doing.
And here, I would highlight
a few things-- government
inaction, money in politics,
and government responsiveness.
And let me just briefly say a
little bit about each of these.
And we have ample evidence
that there's problems
in each of these dimensions.
And so one way that political
scientists-- there's
debate about it--
but there's one
way that political scientists
try to measure government
action, and they do it through
the numbers of laws passed.
And it is clear that we, for
the last 10 years, and it's
gotten progressively worse,
have a stalemate in Congress.
The Congress isn't doing
much, and in fact, sometimes,
when it doesn't
do things, it does
things like jeopardize
our debt ratings,
et cetera, our ability
to borrow money.
So congressional stalemate
leads to this sense
that politics, politicians,
can't do anything.
But one thing they can do
is they can raise money.
So the idea that
our politics is just
saturated with
money, that there's
insiders who get more than other
people do, and Congress doesn't
even do anything, has led
to a disgust with politics.
And you see that everywhere.
It's very widespread.
It's very hard for
political scientists.
And then finally to
look at the policy
influence of different groups.
This is an old question in
American political science--
who influences policy?
And so there's been
lots of different ways
to try to measure it.
And this comes from
an article that
was published two years ago
in one of our main journals.
And what these
researchers did was
that they took public opinion
and the positions of interest
groups, and they correlated
them with policies
that actually got passed.
Big, big data set.
And what they found is
that average citizens--
this is on a scale from 0 to
1-- that average citizens have
very little influence over
policy, that what passes
doesn't reflect their views.
And this is both liberal
and conservative.
It's not like the
people are more liberal.
It goes both ways.
Economic elites are
the ones-- and that's
measured in the top 10%
of the income scale--
get the most responsiveness
and business interest groups,
with mass-based interest
groups like the AARP
being a little bit higher
than the mass public.
So this has led, I think these
kind of senses of government
failing, being attentive
to rich people,
has led to our
unusual election year
with two "outsider" candidates,
Bernie Sanders on the one side
and Trump on the other side.
But I do want to say
that Trump in particular
is without parallel in modern--
[LAUGH]
I guess you might
agree with that.
Modern American politics.
People have tried to think
about, what is he like?
Andrew Jackson,
who may be losing
his place on the $20 bill, is
perhaps the closest analogy.
But his hair, all that is funny,
but he really poses the specter
that we could have a
democratic election that
is leading to a dangerous
rise in illiberal rhetoric
and can lead to government
practices which will themselves
undermine the idea
that democracy
is a culture of civic
engagement and a culture
of collective problem solving.
So to return to
the first question,
I think we have to take this
threat to democracy seriously.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thank you, Margaret.
Ashu Varshney.
Where are we on the--
Sorry, that was mine.
This is not me.
End of slides.
Skip.
Skip?
Yeah, good.
Thank you all for coming.
We know more about
American democracy
than Indian democracy, so
I'll lay out the map for you
much more than Margaret had
to do for American democracy.
But let me start with the basic
theme of my presentation, which
is that India's democracy
can best be described
as a paradox whose two
elements, for the purposes
of our discussion today, are
continuing electoral vibrancy
but mounting liberal deficits.
And the points that
Margaret made about income
being the best predictor
of democratic survival
or democratic resilience
is summed up here.
This idea is not new,
but it is most carefully
examined by Adam Przeworski,
a political scientist at NYU,
and his colleagues.
And their data set covered
141 countries since 1950.
And they found that
income was the best
predictor of democracy.
It correctly predicted
the type of regime
in 77.5% percent of the cases,
and only in 22.5%, it did not.
And no other predict--
note, religion
is one of these--
no other predictor--
religion, colonial
legacy, ethnic diversity,
and national political
environment--
is as good on the whole.
And given this larger
picture, worldwide picture,
about democratic
resilience, India
clearly becomes an
exception, because it's still
a lower-middle income country.
It is not a rich country.
And so on page 87,
Adam Przeworski et al.
say "The odds against democracy
in India were extremely high."
So with this
background, let's look
at the data on
electoral vibrancy
before we come to liberal
deficits and their increasingly
worrying quality.
Since 1952, India has had 16
national elections, 357 state
elections.
And since 1952, it has also had
elections for the third tier,
local level.
3 million local legislators
are elected every five years,
and a third have
to be women by law.
In 1952, which was the
first parliamentary election
in India, 81 million
votes were cast.
In 2014, two years ago, 555
million votes were cast.
Turnouts have routinely
gone into the 60s now.
Moreover, until 1989, following
mainstream democratic theory,
the richer and more
educated Indians
used to vote much more than the
poorer and the less educated.
Since 1989, India has
defied democratic theories--
this is called SES principle--
the poor and the less educated
have voted as much as or
more than the more educated
and the wealthier.
The biggest single weakness
of India's electoral record
is election finance.
It's murky.
Much of it is illegal.
But it's also clear that while
businesses finance elections
in India, they're unable to
determine election outcomes.
Often, the poorer parties
win state elections and even
national elections sometimes.
So that's the
electoral vibrancy.
It's theoretically surprising.
As I said, one more
point, it needs
to be noted that contemporary
democratic theory believes
that democracies
can be established
at low levels of income.
That's not the
surprise about India.
But they do not survive
at low levels of income.
That's the surprising part.
So the distinction drawn between
establishment and resilience
is what's relevant to us.
So India has become
the longest surviving
low-income universal franchise
democracy in history,
from 1952 through
now, with 18 months
of national democratic
suspension between '75 and '77,
that's the exception.
And there are regional
democratic suspensions
in areas of insurgency, but
those areas of insurgency
have never affected more than
5% of the country's population
directly.
So this, according
to whether it's
Robert Dahl, one of our
foremost democratic theorists,
or Adam Przeworski, this
is a very substantial
electoral result,
a democratic result
on a purely electoral level.
Now the liberal deficits.
When political scientists,
especially political theorists,
talk about standard
liberal freedoms,
they talk about
freedom of expression,
freedom of religious practice,
and freedom of association.
Sometimes, a great
deal more, but at least
these three freedoms are
called liberal freedoms,
and they're extremely
important for democracy
between elections.
And India's record
on these freedoms
is not as strong as
its electoral record.
These freedoms are not
absent, but they are not
robustly anchored, so
threats repeatedly appear.
It's not true of only the last
two years-- threats repeatedly
appear-- but it is especially
true of the last two years,
and it's worsening,
and I'll explain why.
Now India is at its freest
at the time of elections.
Short of inciting violence,
virtually any argument
can be made in
election campaigns.
But once an elected
government takes over,
it often places restrictions
on basic liberal liberties.
Intellectuals, writers,
artists, students,
and non-governmental
organizations
can face harassment
on grounds that they
hurt the sentiments
of certain groups
or undermine national interest.
In a multireligious
society which
has had a deeply hierarchical
system for centuries,
some group or the other can
always claim to be hurt.
And when the claim of injury,
group injury, is made,
Indian policy does not
defend the intellectual,
does not defend the writer,
does not defend the artist,
does not defend the student,
does not defend the NGO.
It bans the book.
It bans the speaker.
The ban on Rushdie's
Satanic Verses
was placed first in India.
The departure of MF
Husain, a leading painter,
a famous painter of
India, took place
because a Hindu right objected
to his paintings of Hindu
goddesses.
And Satanic Verses was banned
because Muslim right objected
to Salman Rushdie's
depiction of the prophet.
And this happened during
the Congress regime.
BJP was not involved.
Mr. Modi's party was not
involved in these decisions.
But these problems
become especially
serious when Hindu
nationalists come
to power, as is true today.
Why?
A, because minorities
get added to the list
of targets automatically, not
simply writers or artists.
A Hindu-centric view of
the nation leads to that.
India, for Hindu nationalists,
is a Hindu nation.
India's constitution
does not say that.
India's constitution
says Indian nation
belongs to all religious
and linguistic communities.
So that leads to non-Hindu
minorities, 20% of India,
becoming special and automatic
targets of Hindu nationalists
when they come to power.
Second, they also favor a
more muscular nationalism,
or what Michael Sandel the
other day at Harvard called,
describing Mr. Modi, a bearer
of hard-edged nationalism,
hard-edged nationalism,
which threatens
to exclude dissenters,
even legitimate dissenters.
And here are some examples of
that, some iconic examples.
Very soon after Mr. Modi
came to power, his group--
not exactly his party,
but the mother group
is called the RSS-- the
mother group started,
which led to the birth
of BJP, the mother group
started a campaign called Ghar
Wapsi, reconversion of Muslims
and Christians back to Hinduism.
Most Muslims and
Christians in India
were converted centuries
ago, and they were originally
Hindus, as the argument goes.
And this campaign was launched
to forcibly convert them back.
Luckily, it was dropped.
But after it was dropped, we
had the infamous Dadri lynching.
What was this lynching about?
A Muslim man, 58-year-old, was
suspected to have eaten beef
or have beef in his fridge.
As a result of which, a mob,
a Hindu nationalist mob,
went to his house,
lynched him to death,
and lynched one of his
sons also, who escaped,
luckily, escaped death.
That was also dropped
after a lot of criticism.
Then a third
campaign began, which
has been called the Bharat
Mata campaign, Mother India
campaign, which insists
that you, when demanded,
should sing a victory
anthem for Mother India.
And if you do not sing a
victory anthem for Mother India,
a mob can be unleashed on you.
And there are legislators
from assemblies
who've been tossed
out, not simply
average citizens,
legislators from assemblies
who refused to say "Bharat
Mata ki jai," "victory
to Mother India."
Tossed out of the assembly.
Now India's courts,
of course-- now
the Bharat Mata campaign
is still underway
and probably will lead to a
lot of vigilante violence.
All of this leads to a
lot of vigilante violence.
Groups are privileged to
go and attack dissenters.
And the government
does not stop that.
The government does not stop it.
Another example.
When the student
leader of India's,
perhaps, leading university,
Jawaharlal Nehru, the JNU,
was present in a meeting
which was discussing
the fate of Kashmir in
India, and some people
ended up saying India
should break up in pieces.
He did not say that,
but some people
did say that in the meeting.
He was charged with sedition
and brought into legal--
the sedition case is still on.
Not only that, when he was
brought into Patiala court,
about 200 lawyers
attacked him physically.
Lawyers are supposed to
assume that he is not guilty
until proven guilty.
But 100 odd lawyers physically
attacked him for disloyalty
to the nation.
And it was difficult
to save him, actually,
in the court of law where
the trial was about to begin.
Now the role of courts, of
course, is extremely important.
They are the final institutional
repository, if you will,
for protecting basic
civil freedoms in India.
But the battle between the
executive and the courts
is always in the short
to medium run, weighed
in favor of the executive.
It takes time, in a court of
law, to come to a judgment.
It takes time to even file suit.
And not all of these
people who are attacked
have either the resources or the
courage, when faced with a mob,
to go to the court
and seek redress.
So the court versus
executive problem in India
is a serious one.
The courts do protect, in
the end, the civil freedoms,
but it takes very
long, it's expensive,
and most people simply give up.
Now why India's
liberal record is not
as good as India's electoral
record, it'll take us very far,
I'm happy to discuss.
But perhaps in my last minute,
I could say something about why,
in the last two,
three years, apart
from the rise of Hindu
nationalism, which is against,
in many cases, minority
rights, et cetera, why
you have this new
phase of mounting
anxiety about liberal freedoms.
First of all, a
lot of Indians do
believe-- I can't give you as
precise a data set as Margaret
produced, but we're
doing the survey,
and we should be able to give
you very good data very soon.
First of all, a lot of Indians
believe that India's parliament
has become entirely
unproductive,
and a charismatic
leader is needed
to solve the institutional
stalemate, who doesn't have
much regard for institutions.
He is to be welcomed, given the
institutional stalemate that
has appeared in
the last few years.
Second, a lot of Indians
believe or increasingly
believe that too much democracy
ends up protecting minorities
and hurts the
majority community.
Hurts the majority community.
And finally, a lot
of Indians believe
that too much
democracy, especially
non-electoral democracy
protecting civil freedoms,
civil rights, ends up
undermining national security.
So often, an argument
is heard about how
commitment to civil rights
and individual rights
ends up undermining
India's national profile,
or national security,
or national strength.
I don't have more
time to go into all
of these points,
some more points,
but these three, in my
view, are the reasons
for the surprising popularity
of Mr. Modi as prime minister,
despite the fact that some
people have been lynched
for eating beef,
despite the fact
that a man who's not
yet pronounced guilty
has been attacked in a
court of law by lawyers,
and has been charged for
sedition despite not having
uttered anything that could
be construed as anti-national,
and a very credible
threat was made
for forcible conversions of
25,000 Muslims and Christians
on 25th December of 2014, a
threat, luckily, not delivered,
because that would have
been quite dangerous.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ashu.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much.
Mark Blyth.
Yes.
OK.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Now to make you
even more depressed,
in a more global
context, let's try
and be even more depressed
in a more global context,
let's question the question,
because that's always fun.
So it's the populists who
are threatening democracy.
This is what Margaret said.
Now I agree with
that, but I also
think this might
not be the best way
of looking at what's going on.
That is not what I said.
I'm interpolating as to
what you said at the end--
that populists have
a consequence, which
will be to undermine.
I didn't say the
word "populist."
Well, I'm saying "populist."
[LAUGH]
And the slide
changer won't work.
Never mind, let's
turn to it this way.
There we go, OK.
Some evidence for
this proposition.
You got Trump, yes.
You've also got Sanders, right.
You got Corbyn in Britain,
taking over the Labor part.
You have Syriza on the left in
Greece, of course, famously.
And Podemos in Spain.
Le Front Nationale,
of course, in France.
Even in Germany,
super stable Germany,
we have Alternative
fur Deutschland.
We have Sinn Fein in Ireland.
All of these parties
fragmenting the party system,
eating away at the middle.
Over the past six major
European elections,
the combined vote
share of the center
left and the center right,
the traditional bulwarks
of democracy, has
fallen below 50%.
And the US has Trump
going up in the polls.
If a picture paints
a thousand words,
this is the one you
need to look at.
This is from a friend of
mine, Branko Milanovic,
who writes wonderful books
on global inequality.
I do recommend him to you.
So if you have a look at the
bottom here, what you've got
is the global
income distribution.
So if you're in the
5th to 15th percentile,
over the past-- 1998 to
2008, your real income's
gone up a lot.
If you're in Sudan
or Cote d'Ivoire,
you've actually seen
really large income gains.
And if you go all the
way up to where China is,
kicking around at around
35th percentile to about
45th percentile.
Yeah, and that's a big story.
400 million people out of
poverty over that period.
Incredible, right?
But when you get
to the 55th, that's
where the American
middle classes start.
The poorest person
in the United States
is on the 50th percentile of
the global income distribution.
So have a look at 55
to 65 to 75 to 82.
That's the American,
and generally
speaking, Western
European middle classes,
and they have taken
an absolute pummeling
in terms of their income
over the past 30 years.
Now have a look at
their tail as it goes up
from the 85th percentile
to the 90th percentile
to the 99th percentile.
They did really
well, didn't they?
What happened to US
middle class jobs?
Well, that's manufacturing
on the top line,
and that's productivity
on the other.
So there's a story
here that says, well,
if you're becoming
more productive,
you substitute
capital for labor.
You don't need those people
to work those awful jobs.
I don't know why we
keep celebrating them.
They should be doing
something else.
And that's the story
we told ourselves
all the way through
the 1990s and indeed
over the last 20 or 30 years.
And there's definitely
something to this
because it was all
globalization's fault, right?
It would have happened
anyway, right?
But the funny thing
is, globalization,
we think it's the same as Tom
Friedman, technical change,
it just happened.
Well, let's think about NAFTA--
seven years of negotiations
by hundreds of lawyers,
lobbyists, and politicians,
393 pages long.
Yeah, that just happened.
Totally, that just
happened, absolutely.
The WTO-- 60 agreements
over 10 years,
550 pages of legal agreements
binding what citizens,
corporations, and firms can
and cannot do in the global
economy.
EMU-- European Monetary
Union, fantastic, dozens
of treaties and agreements
between 1992 and 2016,
none of them voted on directly
by Europeans themselves,
and any time they
had a referendum
to disagree with anything
that Brussels wanted,
they had another
referendum until they
got the answer right.
And in the euro
crisis, let's remember
that two democratically elected
governments were deposed
by the Europeans-- from
Brussels, and Berlin,
and from the European
Central Bank--
and technocrats were
put in their place.
These were constitutional
coup d'etats in democracies
in the heart of Europe.
And while we had the Scottish
independence referendum,
the entire British establishment
lined up and linked arms
to say, please don't do this.
It will be terrible.
And the Scotts said,
oh, all right then.
We won't this time.
But now it looks like
the Brits are out.
And did the Brits really
care about Europe?
Or are they basically fed
up of basically having
their elites mansplain to
them what they should want,
what they think is good?
Because it's been good for
them, but as I showed you
on that slide earlier,
it hasn't been good
for the majority of
people in these countries.
So why should they believe a
single word people like me say?
Let's have a look at this one.
This is Thomas Piketty's data.
This is, of course, the
growth in the income
of the top 1% of the United
States, and then in Europe
in this slide.
And there's a slide that
looks really similar.
It's funny that, isn't it?
What's this one?
This is hourly compensation.
As you can see,
beginning in 1973,
it basically went
completely flat.
Real income gains
don't happen anymore,
but productivity goes up.
Now if you do an
economics class,
they always tell you
marginal productivity theory
of wages-- you
get paid according
to how productive you are.
Which explains why bankers get
paid so much because they're
obviously 120,000 times
more productive than anybody
else in the world.
I mean, that obviously
makes sense, right?
But there's a
relationship here that's
obvious, because
basically, when you
have more and more
productivity, and compensation
for the vast majority
remains constant,
where's all the money going?
Maybe people are beginning
to figure this out.
What do you think?
So is democracy under threat?
Let's remember
Hayek on this topic,
my favorite quote from Hayek.
"We have no intention,
however, of making
a fetish of democracy.
Democracy is
essentially a means,
a device for safeguarding
internal peace
and individual freedom."
So we have to decide
what democracy is.
Is democracy just
a means to an end?
Is it a process?
And I like that definition
because it's very clean,
it's very simple.
Because what it says is
if you lose this time,
you get to come
back and try again.
There's no winner takes all.
There's no Game of
Thrones win it or you die.
That's the nice thing
about democracy.
It's a process.
You can lose the argument.
You can lose the election.
You can come back the next time.
But ultimately, if you take
a hierarchian liberal--
and I mean that in terms of
the classical liberal set
of principles--
democracy is not an end.
Because those ends can be, as
John Stuart Mill said, vulgar,
base.
They can be ruled by passion
rather than interest.
And in fact, if you leave,
according to John Stuart
Mill, the vast majority
to make decisions,
there will be a huge
regression to the mean in taste
and in vulgarity.
And we will end
up electing clods,
and we will vote ourselves
each other's property,
and society will break down.
So liberalism is a
supporter of democracy,
but as process, not as outcome.
Now there's a guy
called Karl Polanyi.
Karl Polanyi was a
Hungarian refugee writing
at the same time as Hayek.
And he wrote a book in
1944 at the same time
he wrote his most famous
book, The Road to Serfdom,
called The Great Transformation.
And in The Great
Transformation, he said,
whenever we try to
make markets, we
forget that they don't
come out of the ground,
and they're not given by God.
It's just like globalization.
The entire architecture
of globalization
depends upon legal treaties.
When we talk about financial
markets and people trading
derivatives, we forget
these are legal contracts.
These are things made
by men and women.
Now what Polanyi pointed out
was when you liberalize--
to use our contemporary
language-- when you privatize,
integrate, when you create
global supply chains,
when you outsource, when
you do all these things,
the people who get hurt by
this do not get automatically
compensated.
And when they figure
out that they're never
going to be compensated,
they invent a democracy.
And then they come
after the people
who have done this to them
through the ballot box.
There's no guarantee that
you get a nice outcome.
There's no guarantee
that you end up
with a nice New Deal order with
a little bit of redistribution.
Let's remember that Adolf
Hitler was voted into power.
And at the 1934 election, the
Nazis got 43.1% of the vote.
This is something that
Margaret had already mentioned.
This is Marty Gilen's Flat
Line of Policy Responsiveness.
What you've got over here is the
probability of policy change.
And the green line, the
first line, is low income.
So basically, if you're
under $50,000 a year,
there's 0.3 chance that
anybody in Congress
will take up what you want
and do anything about it.
But then look what happens when
you scale it up to high income.
Now here's the fascinating
story about his book--
it's really worth reading--
from a couple of years ago.
Inequality and Democracy, is it?
Is that what's called?
Affluence and Influence.
Affluence and Influence,
that's what it's called.
And the wonderful
thing about the book
is he points out
that the government
in contemporary American
history which, in a sense,
paid the most attention
to affluent preferences
and the least attention to
average people's preferences
was Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Isn't that strange, right?
Now here's another
interesting one.
Guess which president
was the best
at listening to low
income preferences
and going against high
income preferences?
George W. Bush.
Yes, isn't that
extremely odd, right?
Now throw that back into
that world with that slide
that I showed you,
where you basically see
the middle income of the
middle classes collapsing,
and then think about
why you get Trump.
There's no mystery.
Think about why you
get Jeremy Corbyn.
Think about why you get this.
You remember these two guys?
Alexis Tsipras,
Yanis Varoufakis.
They were Syriza.
They were the guys that
were elected in Greece.
They said, no more austerity.
We're had enough.
And fair enough.
Basically, it had eaten away
30% of the country's economy.
It was a disaster.
It's the worst episode
of policy making
you can possibly imagine.
And we're going to have more
of it, so just keep going.
Now they were elected because
every single electoral district
in Greece said, no,
we're not doing this.
They got 61% of the vote
in a referendum that says,
we're not signing
up to a new bailout.
It's killing us.
Does anybody know who
the guy on the right is?
Dijsselbloem.
Dijsselbloem, exactly.
Can you tell me who he is, sir?
He was head of finance
ministers of the EU.
Yes.
So he ran something
called the Eurogroup.
The Eurogroup has no
constitutional basis
in law in Europe.
It is essentially an ad hoc
meeting of finance ministers.
And the first time those two
guys met, he said to this one,
if you don't do
exactly what we want,
we're going to starve
your banks of liquidity
and shut down your country.
Three months later,
that's what happened.
If that's the case,
is it the populists
that are threatening democracy?
Or is it the technocrats that
are strangling it, and causing
a reaction which brings
you Trump and brings you
all of the other nice
things that come with it?
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I hope this gives you a
sense of why I love my job,
being surrounded by
scholars like this.
We have a little bit of time for
questions, so let's open it up.
Yes.
So you've each done a really
good job of telling us
what the problem is.
You've each done a very
good job of telling us
what the problem is in the US,
and in Europe, and in India.
How do we get people to not vote
against their best interests?
And if that's not the
solution, what is?
Who wants to go first?
[LAUGH]
Margaret goes first.
So let me think about this.
I think the first thing is
that people need to vote.
Because one aspect of
this non-responsiveness,
et cetera, is declining
participation.
So that would be one thing.
And of course, it's
a political strategy
to expand and contract the
electorate in the United States
to try to achieve whatever
your political goals are.
So we are having
contention about that now.
I think the biggest thing is
that, really, leaders in--
and I would say this
about both parties,
although I think Trump
is a distinctive problem.
I do agree with Mark.
And the reason that I
challenged him on that populist
is that people on both sides
of the political spectrum
are feeling the
effects of trade.
And it was an elite consensus
that trade was a good thing,
and in the long term,
everybody would do well.
People don't live
in the long term.
They live in the short term.
And so I think attentiveness
to the economic problems
that face, especially,
certain declining
parts of this country.
There was some evidence that
showed that Trump voters were
strongest in places
like around here,
the New Bedford area,
et cetera, places
that have had a lot of
economic problems due to trade.
So I think that the answer
is more government attention
to economic vitality in parts
of the country that have really
lost that economic vitality,
as well as more engagement.
I'll just say, one thing that
struck me in those numbers
that I saw was how younger
people are feeling like they're
not so engaged with democracy.
Bringing young people in and
making sure they have a stake,
I think, is the other thing
that I think is critical.
I don't think those who are
supporting Modi think that they
voted against their interest.
I don't think so.
And they may throw him out three
years from now, we don't know.
But it would certainly
help if we could find a way
to make parliament work
better so that this desire
for a charismatic leader doesn't
become so intense, strong,
and pronounced.
And some of us are
certainly trying
to find an intellectually
creative way of coming up
with proposals to make
parliament work better.
It will be a struggle, but a
lot of thought is going into it.
Second, I don't know about
the other charismatic leaders
that we're discussing here.
I don't know whether this
would apply to Trump,
but Modi, in particular, cares
about international opinion.
He wants to be seen
in the highest forums
and in the most
celebrated corridors.
He wants to be
seen hugging Obama.
And Mr. Obama, by writing
an article in Time magazine,
celebrating his rise
from being a tea seller's
son to prime minister
of India-- Mr. Obama
has written a 600-word essay
on Modi in Time magazine.
Now I can't persuade Mr.
Obama to start criticizing
Modi for these failings.
But if international
opinion started
focusing on these failings
rather than India's role
vis-a-vis China, then I
think you can once again
see some changes.
But there, you have a judgment
about democratic vitality
clashing with the judgment
about security imperatives.
And look at what's happening
to Turkey, for example.
The European leaders
are not criticizing
Erdogan for attacking
civil rights,
for attacking the press.
But they want his cooperation
because of the refugee crisis.
This is how they've defined it.
So you have these conflicting
multiple objectives.
And in the end, of
course-- this is
something I couldn't
talk about-- one
great promise of Mr. Modi
is economic strengthening
of India.
A Chinese style growth rate as
opposed to Indian style growth
rate, which was always
second for the last 20 years,
quite high, but second to China.
If he can't deliver
on that, those
who voted for him, not on
ideological grounds, on grounds
that he represents them,
represents their interests,
represents their aspirations,
will also not vote for him.
But there's no easy
solution to this
because these are all
institutional questions,
and institutional questions
evade easy solutions.
Let's do another question.
All right.
Brian.
Thank you, and thank you for the
panel's contribution to this.
This is on everyone's mind,
so it's an appropriate time
to do this.
I love the Hayek
quote, but I've heard
of another one, which is that
democracy is a journey and not
a destination, which is the
same basic point that it's
a process.
And democracy is not an ideology
either, despite the fact
that it's been often
described that way,
it can encompass
many ideologies.
And it seems to me that
as you look at the process
and what it produces
in terms of policy,
you look at three aspects
of policy-- social policy,
economic policy, and foreign
policy-- for any country.
And where we have, I think,
been failing in this country
is that we've made
political issues out
of social policy, the latest
one being the bathroom issues.
And that's very troublesome
because once you
mix religious values with
policy questions, it seems to me
you're basically creating
problems for the democracy.
I'd like to just ask one
other question with respect
to the development perspective.
I happened to have something
to do with a donor agency
at one point in my career--
For the audience, Brian
Atwood is a senior fellow here
at Watson.
And many things in his
distinguished career,
among many things,
Brian had led USAID.
When you look at democracy
from the perspective
of a development professional,
you're looking at two aspects.
One is participation.
It's very difficult to
achieve development results
if people aren't participating
actively in the society.
This goes to the book that
Acemoglu and Robinson wrote,
Why Nations Fail, when
governments become
extractive as
opposed to involving
the people in these decisions.
And the second issue
is accountability.
And it seems to me if
we lose both the ability
to see people participating
in their society
and the accountability of
government, we've lost a lot.
I'm not sure that the United
States is yet in that position.
We'll have to wait for the
next election to see that.
But many developing
countries, including India,
are very much involved in that.
And I think India's
success in development
has been the result
of its democracy.
But maybe the
panelists would comment
on some of these observations.
Thank you.
Mark.
It's a bit off my reservation.
And my general
comment on this is
that if you look at the very
positive aspects of the past 30
years rather than the
negative aspects, if you
put this in a wider
frame and think
of it as a story of global
development, then essentially,
after World War II, the
rich countries of the world
were obscenely rich in
comparison to everyone else.
And what's happened
through trade
and through other processes
is a leveling out.
So if you want
China to be China,
if you want then China
to turn from exports
into a huge consumption economy,
which would actually power
growth throughout the
whole global economy,
then they have to get richer.
And a corollary of
that is that the wage
premium that you have in the
West is going to go down.
That's just going to happen.
Now when you turn around and
say that-- I'm sitting here.
I'm a Brown professor.
I can't be fired unless
I do something egregious.
And I've got tenure,
there you go.
And I sit on a very
nice income, and I
live in the nicest
country in the world,
and I'm a citizen, and all that.
I'm telling other
people that your wage
premium needs to go down, and
we call it global development.
And I wonder why they want
to kick me in the head.
[LAUGH]
And that's when the politics
comes into this, and quite
rightly so.
Because who the hell am I to
say that that has to happen?
And what politics
and what democracy
is all about, to use
another famous quote,
is the art of the possible.
And the art of the possible is
to take the impossible today
and make it possible tomorrow.
Now what terrifies me about
Trump is he gets that.
That's nonsense.
You can't do that.
I know, but by pushing it
this far, I can get there.
You can't even get there.
So I don't think he's actually
going to do a Joe Stalin
and try and actually physically
deport 11 million people, which
is the last person who tried to
do something as insane as that.
But I think he's going to make
life very, very uncomfortable
for millions of Americans.
And he'll get away
with that because he
understands that
democracy and politics is
the art of the possible.
And if people like me sit around
saying, well, it's development.
Yeah, I'm afraid you guys in the
Rust Belt have to take a hit.
Maybe you can get
a job at Walmart.
They're going to vote for him.
Simple as that.
Yes, in the back.
This is fabulous.
And the question I have for
all of you-- it was fabulous.
And the question I have
is, it seems to me,
hearing you all, that we've all
become liberal couch potatoes.
We're sitting there,
and we somehow
expect ideas of liberalism,
and democracy, and development
to carry us forward,
and it's not.
And it's not just because
of the poorly educated
who are supporting
Trump, but it's also
because, increasingly,
the educated
who seem to be supporting
Trump, or supporting
characters in Austria, in
Germany, and certainly India,
and so on.
So what role does
education have in this?
Do we think about
reframing education?
Or should we?
How do we handle this?
And what role do we have to get
people to think differently?
I'm going to ask for very
quick answers from the panel
so we can get some
more questions in.
Margaret.
I'll belt. Yes, this
is part of our job.
This is the job description.
We bring students here,
and we try and turn them
into good citizens, to do
good in the world, that's
their thing.
And you've got to think about
the micro incentives on this.
So in 2006, 40% of MIT
grads, who were primarily
engineering and
related disciplines,
went straight into finance.
Why?
Because that's
where the money is.
Now they're not engineering
our way out of global warming.
They're engineering
more and more complex
derivatives, which is zero
sum ways of arbitraging money
they don't have.
So that's not
socially productive,
but it's personally
incredibly remunerative.
Now we can educate
people all you want.
We can turn out
really smart people.
But if the incentive
structure of the world
is such that the top
talent is just going to go,
well, I could do
that for $30,000,
or I could make $3
million, they're gone.
So we need to have something
more than education--
a project to believe in,
perhaps, sort of terrifyingly,
a threat that we need to
face up to, which I think
is climate change, which
we really don't focus on
to the extent that we need to.
But something needs to change
more than just our ability
on a micro level to
produce good citizens.
That sense of [INAUDIBLE].
I think we also
need to recognize
the very complex relationships
between development
accountability in education.
My own area of
expertise is in China.
And while I'm no great fan
of the Chinese government,
I will say that many
middle class Chinese feel
at least the central government
in China is highly accountable
and performs well, put
their faith in that,
and may feel that that
government is somehow
delivering liberal
values, therefore,
they don't really need
democracy for the time being.
And while I'm not particularly
an advocate for that position,
that is the position of
many highly educated people
who are living an experience
of a pretty good life or one
much better than they had
lived just years earlier.
Yes.
It seemed to me,
and I ask the panel
if they would agree that the
threat to liberal democracy
comes from both sides, as
much from Mr. Obama, who
says he has a pen and a phone,
as it does from Mr. Trump.
But I would also like to
extrapolate that a little bit
and talk very quickly
about the concern
that we are ruled by passion
rather than interest,
and what role social
media will play in that
in the forthcoming election.
Takers on social media?
Yeah, on the
Trump-Obama question,
I've heard people saying
Trump is like Obama,
and that comes from thinking of
Obama as someone doing things
through the executive order.
And I have to say that
I think the issue is
a division within
the Republican Party,
and that part of
the Republican Party
doesn't want to compromise.
It has particular beliefs and
doesn't want to compromise.
And you saw this conflict
between John Boehner on the one
hand and the Tea Party
group-- I'm forgetting
their name-- in Congress.
And that has made it
hard for compromise
to happen in Congress.
And I have to say,
Obama was going
to compromise in
2011 on things that I
felt were really bad ideas--
Boehner and Obama had
this compromise
that they were going
to do around Social Security.
But I think it's the failure to
compromise that has led Obama
to do the executive order.
And I would say there is
a difference between Obama
and Trump in the
demonizing of outsiders
and the demonizing of people
that are different that I think
is really significant
for American democracy.
Just quickly on the
social media thing,
I think this is
incredibly important.
What technology
enables you to do--
and all the psychological
work on this shows
this clearly now-- is to be
far more mean to someone online
than you would ever
be face-to-face.
And if the background
noise is one just
of unremitting hostility, cyber
bullying, and all the rest
of that stuff,
which is incredibly
damaging, particularly to young
people, you're creating damage.
You're creating long-term
psychological trauma
in populations.
I think we need to take
this very, very seriously.
Now of course,
freedom of speech.
What do you do with that?
Do you ban Twitter?
Well, there'll immediately
be something else
that will take it.
And also, these tools
are double-edged.
Twitter is fantastic.
You can get news out.
You can organize.
It's a wonderful tool.
But it's also very,
very dangerous
in terms of what it does,
I think, particularly
to young people's psyches.
So again, no easy
answer to this one.
But the long-term consequences
for politics, I think,
are absolutely profound.
And we're just beginning
to grapple with them.
Mr. Modi is the most
efficient user of social media
that Indian politics has seen.
He does not want to talk to
traditional press directly.
And he broadcasts his messages
through his Twitter account.
He has, I think at
this point, we're not
talking about 2 million
followers, talking about 30,
40 million followers.
So there's a direct
communication
about what he's doing, where
he's going, what he's thinking.
And I think we are not
yet clear about what
the implications of social media
are for democratic processes.
I think this will be a very
important subject to study.
I'll also say,
although it's not well
portrayed in the American media,
the social media landscape
in China is incredibly vibrant.
But I think what it does is
it encourages people to behave
as individual operators,
even news generators,
but they don't organize across.
They're so busy producing
information individually.
Now of course, there are huge
barriers to organizing across,
but in some ways, at least
in some circumstances,
a rich social
media life could be
an important underpinning
of authoritarianism
as much as democracy.
We have time for
one last question.
Yes.
I wonder if the
panel could respond
to the seeming rise of
illiberalism on campuses
and how that is contributing
to a lot of the conversation
outside of campuses,
the lack of willingness
to allow dissenting
voices on campus.
I'm sure you're all nodding.
I'm interested in your
opinion about that
and how that then translates
into the broader population.
And who wants to step
into that minefield?
[LAUGH]
Ashu.
No.
No.
Margaret is new to Brown, so
she has a fresh perspective.
This is what guys do.
Guilty.
I think it's a huge problem.
And I think it has something to
do with the removal of campuses
from the real world.
And more engagement with the
real world and more diverse
kinds of people allows people
to see different perspectives.
So this is true, I
came from UC Berkeley,
big, diverse public university.
I'm not saying UC
Berkeley hasn't
had its moments of
political correctness,
but to me, it looks a little bit
like a tempest in the teapot,
like a little enclosed world.
And I don't doubt that people's
concerns and things they feel
are real, but for
me, it's always then,
how do you open out?
How do you engage more
broadly in the community?
And what do you learn from that?
Rather than something
that's inward looking.
That's my perspective on it.
I would just add, of
course, these issues
are very sensitive on
campuses, including at Brown.
But I think there
is a big upside.
Just speaking for
myself, I grew up
as a privileged
citizen in the US.
And I learned a
particular narrative
of what my country's history is.
Maybe that narrative
is correct, maybe not.
But I think the
recent discussions
about incarceration,
about policing
in minority communities, that's
forced me to rethink what
that narrative is and the
validity of that narrative
that I learned.
And while it doesn't encourage
me to abandon liberal values,
traditional liberal
values, it does,
I think, force a number of
us to ask, to what extent
our country--
whichever country we
happen to cover--
to what extent are
our countries really
meeting the values that we
claim to be meeting?
And if the discourse
on campus forces
that kind of
reconsideration, fine.
That's appropriate.
That's what an intellectual
life should be,
and that's what a civically
engaged life should be.
On that note, I want
to thank you all,
and thank our wonderful panel.
[APPLAUSE]
Please join us.
We have a brunch outside
following this event.
Thank you all.
