[MUSIC PLAYING]
YASCHA MOUNK: Thanks for
this very kind introduction.
And I love being at
Google, because it's
the one place in the world where
I feel hopelessly overdressed.
[LAUGHTER]
At the beginning of his
beautiful commencement speech
at Kenyon College,
David Foster Wallace
tells of a story you may have
heard of two old fish that
are swimming along
peacefully, and they
run into a younger fish.
And they say, oh,
how's the water today?
And the younger fish
says, what water?
What are you talking about?
They have never thought about
what water is, because it's
always been around them.
So they haven't
noticed how important
it is to them for
their livelihood--
for actually being able
to live and breathe.
I think, in a strange way,
we are at a similar place
with our political system.
We've taken it for
granted for a long time.
When I grew up, I
thought that there
was really important
political battles
to be fought, that it mattered
a lot what kind of health care
policy we might end up having,
how we would treat people who
are gay, and all those
kinds of questions
which were live issues
when I was growing up.
But I also assumed that there
was a whole set of even more
important issues that we really
didn't have to worry about.
That obviously, 20
or 30 years from now,
we would still be
living in a democracy,
that we would have free
and fair elections,
that people wouldn't be
prosecuted or not prosecuted
depending on what
kind of relationship
they have with the president
of the United States
or the prime minister
of whichever country
I was living in.
And I fear that these
things are now under threat,
that what we're
living through right
now politically is
not just a moment
of high political
tension, not just
a moment of big drama
with headlines every day
playing out one unlikely
saga after another.
This, I think, is only the
epiphenomenon-- only one
of the symptoms of a much deeper
malaise of liberal democracy,
of our political system.
For decades,
political scientists
believed that poor democracies
could sometimes fail.
They knew that rich,
authoritarian countries
could actually continue
to be quite stable.
But they also had this
really optimistic belief
that countries that
are already rich,
that are already
democratic would continue
to be so for a long time.
The richest democracy
to have ever failed
was Argentina in the late
1970s, and that country
had a GDP per capita of about
$14,000 in today's terms.
And so the conclusion
was that once you're
in that kind of
area, once you've
had a couple of
changeovers of government
with free and fair elections,
once you had a GDP per capita
of about $14,000, you really
didn't have to worry anymore.
Democracy had
become consolidated.
It had become the
only game in town,
and it would stay
there forevermore.
What it was supposed to
look like when you're
the only game in town is
that most of your citizens
actually give great
importance to democracy,
that they reject authoritarian
alternatives to democracy,
and most importantly,
that all of the parties
and political
candidates in the system
actually accept the most
basic rules and norms
of a political system.
So before Donald Trump was
elected, with a colleague,
[INAUDIBLE],, I started
to look at that question.
I started to look at, is
it actually still true
that most people give this
deep importance to democracy?
Do they still reject
authoritarian alternatives,
and most importantly, aren't
there more and more politicians
who seem to challenge that?
And what we found
was pretty worrying.
So in the United States,
among older Americans
born in the 1930s
and 1940s, over 2/3
say it's absolutely important
to live in a democracy.
Among people born since
1980, less than one third do.
20 years ago, one
in 16 Americans
said that army rule is a
good system of government.
Now it's one in six.
And among young and
affluent Americans,
it's actually gone up from
6% 20 years ago to 35%
now, nearly a six-fold increase
over those couple of decades.
And it's not just in the United
States that this is happening.
In new survey data
from last year,
we saw that the number of
Germans and French people
and Brits who say that a
strong leader who doesn't have
to bother with parliament
or elections is a good thing
has gone up a lot.
In Germany, it was
16% 20 years ago.
Now it's 33%.
In France, the United
Kingdom, it was 25%.
Now it's 50%-- one
in two people--
who long for a strong leader
who doesn't have to bother with
parliament and elections.
Now, as you know,
how people answer
survey questions can be a
little difficult to interpret.
So it would be
tempting to say, well,
who knows what exactly
they mean when they answer
those kinds of questions?
Do they really want army rule?
I mean, probably they don't.
But we're also seeing
actual voting behavior
changing more and more.
You're seeing the rise of
authoritarian populists,
not just in the United States
but in many democracies
around the world.
We saw a few weeks ago
an election in Italy
where nearly 2/3
of the electorate
voted for very radical
populist parties.
You saw the rise of populist
leaders in Central Europe,
in Poland and Hungary, where
democracy is now actually
under threat.
And you see it even
in countries that
were once supposed to be safe.
Once question I'm
often asked when
I go around the country
talking about this stuff is,
well, aren't there
some countries
where this isn't happening?
What about Sweden?
What about Canada?
Well, in Sweden, the
Sweden Democrats--
the party that comes out
of the neo-Nazi movement--
is now polling above 20%.
In Canada, Doug
Ford, the brother
of Rob Ford, whom you may
remember from such hits
as being mayor of Toronto and
being caught on video smoking
crack with drug dealers--
his brother, who is a populist
in the broadly Trumpian vein,
may be about to become
the premier of Ontario,
the most important
province in the country.
So there's no places
that are safe from this.
So what I want to do today
is to say a little bit
about what populism is
and why it's dangerous,
to think about some of the
causes of why this is happening
in so many countries
all at once,
and to start talking a little
bit about some of the things
that we might actually
be able to do to confront
all of these problems.
So what is populism?
Why should we be concerned
about these kinds
of political figures?
It would be tempting to say that
these populists have nothing
in common with each other.
Donald Trump doesn't appear
to be overly fond of Muslims,
I think it's fair to say.
Recep Erdogan, who's, I
think, rightly often called
an authoritarian populist-- the
prime minister and president,
now, of Turkey--
doesn't appear to be overly fond
of anybody who isn't a Muslim.
There are some
populists who advocate
for very right-wing
economic policies,
either in their rhetoric or at
least in their actual actions.
And there's others, like the
late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela,
who advocate for very
left-wing economic policies.
So why does it make sense
to call all of these people
by the same name?
Well, I think the
answer to that has
to do with a shared political
language and a shared
moral imagination.
All politicians say
there's something
wrong with the current
political class.
All politicians say,
it's really important
that I get elected rather
than that guy over there.
It's really important that
my policies are better.
They speak better to my voters.
That's a normal
part of politics.
But traditional
politicians also say
that the people
on the other side
are adversaries
rather than enemies.
That though they are much
better than the opposition,
if the opposition wins
the election, that's fine.
They, too, are loyal citizens.
The country is not going to be
destroyed if the other people
take a turn at governing.
Well, populists are
different in that.
Populists say, the
only reason why
we have any real
political problems
is that the political leader's
corrupt and self-serving.
And so actually, all
commonsense, ordinary, good
folk know what to
do politically.
Common sense is enough to
deal with all of our problems.
And I, the populist,
have a unique ability
to speak for people's ideas, for
people's desires, for what they
really want.
As Donald Trump said at
the Republican National
Convention in Cleveland in
2016, "I am your voice."
Now, once they actually
get into government,
it turns out that all of
the big promises they made
are difficult to keep.
And so populists end
up saying things like,
who knew that things
could be so complicated?
[LAUGHTER]
Who knew that health care
could be so complicated?
Who knew that negotiating
with Kim Jong-un
might turn out to
be complicated?
But of course,
they don't actually
want to say, hey, I was wrong.
Politics is complicated.
It's difficult to solve all
of the problems we have.
And so they need
to start blaming.
And blame they do.
They blame media for being
purveyors of fake news.
They blame the
political opposition
for being traitors,
illegitimate.
And they blame
independent institutions,
whether it's judges in courts
or independent institutions
like the FBI and the
Department of Justice,
as enemies of the people.
And we see exactly
where that leads
in countries where
authoritarian populists actually
manage to put through their
program in a disciplined way.
Take the case of
Hungary, a country which
political scientists, five years
ago, considered a consolidated,
a safe democracy.
Scholars of Central
Europe praised Hungary,
along with Poland--
which is now going
through similar troubles--
the most successful case of
transition from communism
to democracy.
Well, once Viktor Orbán took
control as prime minister
there, he reformed the judiciary
in order to be able to nominate
his own judges and assign
cases to particular judges.
He turned the state media
into a Shia propaganda outlet
and forced the sale of the most
important private media outlets
to his friends and
political associates.
He flooded the electoral
commission with his loyalists.
And as a result, we now have
an election coming up just
a couple weeks from now in
Hungary in which it's very
difficult for anybody to
criticize Viktor Orbán
in the public media in which
the electoral system has been
gerrymandered in
unconstitutional ways without
judges being able to
stop it from happening.
And in which, perhaps
most shockingly,
the electoral commission
has investigated all
of the opposition parties,
fining them huge sums of money
so that they essentially
can't campaign,
while the party of
Viktor Orbán, Fidesz,
miraculously was
never investigated,
and therefore never fined.
So we have elections
coming up in Hungary
which are neither free nor fair,
in the heart of the European
Union.
Now, I think it's important
to actually understand
what kind of political system
has been erected in Hungary.
How to understand what's
actually going on there.
In my terms, we live
in a liberal democracy.
Now, liberal, in this
sense, has nothing
to do with liberal
and conservative.
It has nothing to do with Barack
Obama versus George W. Bush.
Liberal in the
sense that I use it
simply means a commitment
to individual rights,
to minority rights,
to the rule of law,
to the separation of powers.
And once we define
liberalism that way,
we can use a very
straightforward definition
of democracy, which is actually
translating popular views
into public policies--
the rule of the demos,
the rule of the people.
So the political system needs
to be responsive to what
people actually want.
I think the way to
understand populists often
is as a form of illiberal
democracy, of democracy
without rights--
at least initially.
Take the case of
a Swiss referendum
a little less than a decade ago
on the building of minarets.
A majority of Swiss people
in direct referendum
voted that Muslims
in the country
should no longer be able
to build towers which
are traditionally
used for the call
to prayer as part of the
mosques in the country.
So as a result, the Swiss
Constitution now reads,
and I quote, "There's freedom
of religion in Switzerland.
The building of
minarets is forbidden."
Which doesn't make much sense.
Now, that was criticized
in the Swiss media
and abroad as undemocratic.
And I think that's a
confusion of terms.
What it was was illiberal.
It violated, in ways
that I found intolerable,
the rights of a
religious minority--
the biggest religious minority,
in fact-- in Switzerland.
But to call it undemocratic
is a little odd,
because a majority of the people
did, in fact, vote for it.
So the way I think to understand
what Viktor Orbán has done
in Hungary and the way to
understand parts of what Donald
Trump is trying to do
in the United States is
it's instituting a form of
democracy without rights,
a form of illiberal
democracy in this country.
And the danger of it is
that once you've gotten rid
of the separation of
powers, once you've
gotten rid of the rule of
law, then eventually it
becomes very difficult to get
rid of a democratically-elected
president or prime minister
by democratic means.
So it's illiberal
democracy, but it's
an unstable political
regime form.
Now, the big question is,
why is this happening?
Why do we see the
wave of this kind
of politics rising in
so many different places
at the same time?
Now, if you'll indulge me,
I'll answer this question
by talking about yet another
animal-- not just fish,
but in this case, a chicken.
And this is the kind of
chicken that we'd all
like to eat for dinner--
which is to say, those of you
in the audience who are not
vegetarian or vegan, at least.
But it's a good chicken,
because it's local.
It's organic.
It lives on a farm very happily.
It gets to run around.
But the other
animals on the farm
warn it and say,
hey, be careful.
The farmer only seems nice.
One day, he's going
to come and kill you.
And the chicken says, what
are you talking about?
All my life, the
farmer has fed me
and muttered some
encouraging words.
Why would he suddenly
act so differently?
Well, Bertrand Russell-- who
I'm stealing this story from--
in his nice, wry, British wit,
says, but eventually the farmer
does come to wring the
chicken's neck, showing
that more sophisticated views as
to the uniformity of causation
would have been to
the chicken's benefit.
[LAUGHTER]
What does he mean by that?
Well, what he means
by that is that there
are scope conditions
to how things
happen in the world, right?
As long as the chicken was too
thin to be taken to the market,
the farmer had an incentive
to keep feeding it.
Once it was fat enough
to fetch a decent price,
he had an incentive to kill it.
I think in order
to understand why
it is that democracy was
so stable for many decades
and now appears less
and less stable,
we have to ask the
chicken question.
Which is to say
that we have to ask,
what scope conditions were
in place for the past 50,
60 years that are no
longer in place now?
What's changed?
And I think that when you
look beyond the United States,
there's at least
three reasons for that
that are at play in
many of these countries
at the same time.
The first is the stagnation
of living standards
for ordinary people.
So from 1945 to 1960,
the living standard
of the average American doubled.
From 1960 to 1985,
it doubled again.
Since 1985, it's
essentially been flat.
It's essentially been stagnant.
That really changes how
people think about politics.
They used to say, you know what?
I don't love those
politicians in DC.
I don't completely trust them.
I don't completely
see myself in them.
But you know what?
I'm twice as rich
as my parents were.
My kids are going to
be twice as rich as me.
Let's give them the
benefit of a doubt.
They seem to be delivering.
Now, I think a lot of people
are saying, you know what?
I've worked really
hard all my life,
and I don't have all
that much to show for it.
My kids are probably going
to be worse off than me.
So let's throw some shit against
the wall and see what sticks.
How bad could things get?
Now, there's been a lot
of intelligent commentary
in the last year or two that
said that the rise of populism
has nothing to do
with the economy.
And the main argument for that
has been that it's not actually
true, in the United States,
that poorer people voted more
for Donald Trump
and richer people
voted more for Hillary Clinton.
That's correct, but there's
very clear geographic patterns
to support for populists, which
you see not only in the United
States, but also in countries
like France or Germany
or Italy, and in countries like
Poland and Hungary and India
as well.
One of those is
that populists do
much better in parts
of the country that
are less economically
affluent, much better in parts
of a country where there's been
less recent investment, even
much better in
parts of a country
where the share of jobs
that might be automated
in the coming decades is high.
So they are people who
might still be doing OK
but who have good reason to
fear that the future is not
going to be especially
kind to them economically.
People who perhaps
still have a decent job
and are paying off
a mortgage, but they
are seeing that their
neighbor is having trouble
keeping up with his mortgage,
and one neighborhood over, it's
already starting to turn.
Now, the other argument against
the economic cause of populism
is that it also seems
to have something
to do with identity and
something to do with race.
And I agree with that.
But I think it's a mistake to
think that most interesting
things in the world
are mono-causal--
that there's only one cause.
Most of the time,
things go together.
If your partner leaves you
because you've cheated on them
and you're an alcoholic and
you're rude to their friends,
you don't ask which of the
three things is it that did it.
It's clearly a little
bit of all three.
I think the same
way with the rise
of populism, this whole debate
of, is it cultural identity,
is not very fruitful.
It is both of those
things, because they
reinforce each other.
One way of thinking
about this is that when
people are doing
pretty well and they
see somebody who they think of
as a member of an outgroup--
of different along some
salient characteristic--
they might say, hey,
I'm doing great.
This person over there
is doing great, too.
Good for them.
If they feel like,
I'm not really
getting what's owed to me.
I'm stuck.
I'm not doing particularly
well, and that guy over there
is doing well?
Well, what's that all about?
They become much
angrier about that.
And that's particularly
salient because we're
going through a very big and
actually historically unique
transition in virtually
all liberal democracies
around the world.
So in continental
Europe where I grew up--
I was born in Germany and lived
in various parts of Europe--
most democracies were founded
on a mono-ethnic, mono-cultural
conception of a nation.
There'd always, obviously, been
a lot of migration in Europe,
and national identity
is a complicated thing
that's partially
historically constructed.
But when you asked
a German, when
you asked a Swede, when you
asked an Italian in 1960,
who is a true Swede?
Who is a true Italian?
They would have had
a very simple answer.
They would have said,
well, people who ethnically
descend from the same group.
And obviously, somebody who's
brown or black or somebody
who's Muslim or Jewish or Hindu
is not Italian, not Swedish.
That's clear.
Now, thankfully that has
changed over the last decades
as we've had a lot
of new immigration
into European countries.
The legal understanding of who
really belongs has changed.
Citizenship law has liberalized.
A lot of people have
embraced the idea
that yes, of course somebody can
be a true German irrespective
of the fact that their
parents or their grandparents
came to this country from Turkey
or from Syria or from somewhere
else.
But there's also a mass
rebellion against that.
People who keep insisting
on that older conception
of national identity.
And though we don't
have to condone that--
I personally don't
condone that--
I think it's actually
helpful to pause for a minute
to see why that's
understandable.
It shouldn't surprise us
that this is happening.
And one of the
reasons for that is
that if you're not the
richest guy in the country,
you're not the most
educated guy in the country,
you perhaps don't command
the most social respect,
it's very tempting to
say, well, at least I'm
better than that guy over there.
And for a long time, that's
what society told you, right?
Well, that guy over
there might not
be a politician, that guy over
there might not be your boss.
They may be getting as much or
more social respect than you.
And that means that you're
losing the one thing that you
can proudly point to
and say, hey, this
is giving me something.
So it shouldn't
surprise us that there's
a mass rebellion against that.
Now, the case in
the United States
is both similar and different.
It's different in
the obvious way
that the United
States has always
been a multi-ethnic society.
It's similar in the
equally obvious way
that the United
States has always
had a very strict racial
and ethnic hierarchy which
gave huge advantages to one
ethnic and religious groups
over others.
Now, for the past
20, 40, 60 years,
we've actually made a lot of
progress on that dimension.
It's easy to forget that when
you just look at the headlines.
But I think there's practically
no doubt that for members
of virtually any minority
group, it's better
to live in the United
States today than, perhaps
not two years ago, but certainly
20 or 40 or 60 years ago.
And that's something
to actually celebrate.
But again, it's equally
obvious that there is now
a very strong
rebellion against that,
and that that rebellion
happens particularly
in parts of the country not that
have traditionally been diverse
and that perhaps are more used
to dealing with people who
are not like the majority group,
but in parts of a country that
used to be very
homogeneous and are rapidly
becoming less homogeneous.
Over 2/3 of American
counties were
over 90% white 25 years ago,
and are now less than 90% white.
And that's an interesting
point of transition,
because it's about the moment
where you go from rarely having
to deal with anybody who, quote
unquote, is "not like you"
to having to do so
on a daily basis.
Now, if the economic
causes of all of this
leads to a baseline lack
of trust in government
and a baseline
anger about what's
going to happen to
you in the future,
and if a lot of that
anger takes a form
of cultural and
ethnic resentment--
which is a jealousy at
people being accorded
equal status when
you used to have
a whole bunch of privileges--
then the third
ingredient you need
to make this cocktail
really lethal
is the rise of the internet
and of social media, which
explodes a lot of this
underlying frustration.
When you go back 25
years, you, in some way,
had a world of
communication that
was quite similar to
300 or 400 years ago.
That sounds like a
ridiculous claim,
so let me walk you through
it, what I mean by that.
Well, 25 years ago, you had CNN.
You could broadcast news
events live with sound
from all across the world.
That's always
something you couldn't
have done 300 years ago.
But you had a
situation which I would
call one-to-many communication.
So to have a real voice in
our society 20 years ago,
you had to own a television
station, a radio station,
a publishing house, a
newspaper, or be somebody
whom the owners of
those institutions
wanted to give a platform to.
What's happened
since then is, first
of all, the democratization
of one-to-many communication.
As you have the rise of
websites and the internet,
anybody can make a site
called [? joeblocks.com, ?]
and billions of people
with internet access
can go, free of charge,
and see that website.
That is an incredible
structural transformation.
But it's still somewhat
limited, because people
need to have the idea of
going to [? joeblocks.com. ?]
And though they might
find you on Google
and so on, that
number of people is
going to be relatively limited.
Well, in the next step, we went
from democratized one-to-many
communication to a form of
many-to-many communication,
which is social media.
So now you might only have
100 followers on Twitter,
but if you're on a
United Airlines flight
and you're re-accommodated and
somebody takes a video of that
and you share it with your
100 followers and 10% of them
retweet it and 10%
of them retweet it,
very quickly, millions of
people can see this video clip.
What this does is to
reduce the importance
of societal gatekeepers--
the people who used to
have the power because they
had political power and capital.
Now, in some countries,
that's a very good thing.
In dictatorships, it
makes it much easier
for the democratic opposition
to organize, to spread news
about government suppression,
to let people know
that the dictator is corrupt.
Even in democratic
societies, it can
empower a lot of
marginalized voices
that weren't listened to
in the same way earlier.
Just think, as a
recent example, of some
of the students at
Parkland High in Florida
who would never have
had the importance
in our national discourse
and the platform
they now have if it
weren't for Facebook
and social media and Twitter.
At the same time, it
obviously also makes
it easier for people who
want to spread hateful views,
for people who have
racist views, for people
who want to spread fake news,
for people who just want
to organize at the extremes
of the political spectrum
to be much more effective.
So social media favors
the forces of instability
and of change over those of
stability and continuity.
And at a moment
when there's already
a lot of political
disenchantment and distrust
of the system and
there's already
a difficult moment of
transition on the way
to an equal multi-ethnic society
from which a lot of people
have something to lose, that
becomes a very dangerous
addition to the mix.
So what do we do
about all of that?
How do we respond to
these three developments?
Well, I think that we need
to actually counteract
some of the structural
drivers of populism.
And that means dealing with
each of these underlying causes.
The first thing
is to show people
that politics can
actually deliver on them,
and that they can have a
better economic future.
That things are
not already great,
that things are not going
to be worse in the future,
that they're actually
going to be better.
The people who advocated--
the Brexiteers who advocated
for the United Kingdom to
leave the European Union--
had a slogan that actually
was quite brilliant.
It said, take back control.
Now, there was an element of
anti-immigrant dog whistle
to that, but there's also
an appeal to very legitimate
aspirations that people have.
Citizens want to feel
that they have control
of their own lives,
and that the nation has
control of its fate in
the age of globalization.
I think there's a lot
more that politicians--
without going to the
ideological extremes,
and certainly without
going towards populism--
can do to deliver
on that promise.
There's no reason why it should
be so easy for rich individuals
to hide their money
in tax havens.
We can make much stricter
rules around that.
We can invest much more money
into investigating them.
We can raise
punishment for people
who do hide their money
in that kind of way,
creating a real
disincentive to doing that.
There's no reason
why corporations
should pay more or
less tax depending
on whether their
nominal headquarters is
in Delaware or Massachusetts
or in Ireland or Luxembourg.
So there can be
changes around that.
We can do a lot more in order
to raise productivity, which
is one of the great
drivers of inequality
and economic stagnation-- the
lack of growing productivity.
And that requires us to invest
a lot more money in education,
to use technology much
more smartly in education,
and to make sure that
we actually invest
in ongoing adult education, not
just at the point when somebody
might lose their job, but at
the point when they're in a job.
They should have the resources
to keep up with technology,
to keep up with the
cutting-edge skills they need
in their particular fields.
And finally, we also
need to make sure
that people don't have to spend
such a vast share of what they
earn on life's necessities.
When you just look at the
post-tax income of people,
it has actually gone up.
But the post-tax
disposable income
has barely gone up, or in many
parts of the country gone down.
And one of the reasons for that
is the vast amounts of money
they have to spend to send
their kids to school or college,
go to the doctor,
and buy a house.
And there are things we can
do to solve that, including
trying to actually vastly
increase the supply of doctors
in the country, the supply
of housing in the country.
The second question
is around how
we can facilitate
this transition
to a multi-ethnic society.
Now, having grown up Jewish
in Germany, my temptation--
and it's a temptation that a lot
of people on the left have had
for a long time--
has always been to say, let's
leave collective identity
behind altogether.
Why do we need this weird
thing called the nation?
Let's leave that in the 20th
century, which it so cruelly
shaped.
A more recent
response to the rise,
particularly of
exclusive nationalism
and what I would call the
white nationalism of parts
of the White House, is
to say, let's celebrate
different collective groups.
Let's celebrate every ethnic,
religious, and sexual group,
but not the nation--
all of the groups at
a sub-national level.
Now, I've come to think
that both of these responses
are, in important
ways, mistaken.
That actually, yes,
you need to fight
against the jingoistic
aspects of nationalism.
And yet, of course,
without any compromise,
you have to defend groups
that are under attack
from the policies of the
current administration
and other governments
around the world.
But at the same
time, you actually
should emphasize what
unites us as Americans
across racial and ethnic
and religious divides.
That actually,
nationalism traditionally
has been a way of
increasing solidarity
beyond your immediate
family group,
your immediate ethnic group,
your immediate neighborhood
or town.
So that even as we sit in
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
we can look at a hurricane
in Houston, Texas,
or for that matter in
Puerto Rico, and say,
those are our compatriots.
We should help them.
The crucial thing, of
course, is to fight
for a notion of this nationalism
or this patriotism that
is inclusive.
I've come to think
of nationalism
as a half wild beast.
That if you leave it alone,
the worst kinds of people
are going to come in and
stoke it and bait it until it
becomes really dangerous.
And the response, I think,
is to try and domesticate it
as best we can, being aware that
it can always turn dangerous,
but that we need to
claim its meaning
and make it work for us.
I don't always agree with
Emmanuel Macron, the president
of France, but I think he
had a really beautiful speech
in the city of Marseille
during his election campaign.
Where he said, when I
look into this room,
I see people from
the Ivory Coast
and from Mali and from Algeria
and from Italy and from Poland,
but what do I see?
I see the people of Marseille.
What do I see?
I see the people of France.
Look here, ladies and gentlemen
from the Front National, this
is what it means to
be proud to be French.
That, to me, encapsulates
what I'm talking about nicely.
Now, third and
finally, and then I
promise that I'm
about to shut up,
how do we respond to the
role of social media?
Well, I don't think
the right response
is to censor what can
be said on social media.
I don't think that
works technically.
I think people would
go to other platforms.
I certainly don't think
that the government
should have that role.
I certainly do
think that we should
push Facebook and Twitter
to enforce the community
guidelines more strongly and
the privacy guidelines more
strongly.
But I don't think that
the government should
be overly-involved in regulating
free speech on the internet,
because I believe in
the First Amendment.
So if we can't
effectively control
the supply of hate
speech, what we can do
is to control the demand for it.
And one of the
ways of doing that
is to actually become
more proud defenders
of our political system.
Look, from Plato to
Aristotle and from Rousseau
to the founding
fathers, every set
of historical thinkers
about self-government
has emphasized the
importance of transmitting
our political values from
one generation to the next.
And we don't take that
seriously anymore.
The number of hours we spend on
civics lessons in our schools
has plummeted over
the past decades.
Even when you're teaching at
college, as I do at Harvard,
I think very few professors
think of their role in part
as being to instill
our political values
and a pride in what's good
about our political values
in the young.
We talk a lot about what's
wrong with our political system.
And that's good.
There's lots of
things wrong, and we
need to be upfront
about those things.
But we never explain why it
is that despite the injustices
in the United States today, it
is better to live in America
than it is to live in
Russia or China or Venezuela
or any number of other
authoritarian regimes
around the world.
And that's something that we
need to do more proactively.
Now, sometimes
when I talk, people
tell me that I'm a
little depressing.
So I hope I haven't
depressed you too much.
But I want to end
on a hopeful note.
I went to see a talk by
Amos Oz a few months ago,
and he said, look, there's
a big fire burning out there
in the world.
And it can feel helpless to know
what we, as individuals, can
do about it.
But frankly,
there's a lot of us.
There's a lot of us in the
room and watching the video,
and there's a lot
of people out there
in the world whom we can
reach with our message.
And if each of us pours a little
bit of water on the fire, then
collectively, we might
just be able to put it out.
So I think one of my
goals in this talk
is that if you agree with me
on some of the analysis, then
you'll have some ideas of
what you can go and do.
If you disagree with me,
you'll have your own ideas
about what we should do in
order to fight populism.
But there's things we can do.
Unlike people in Russia
and Venezuela and Turkey,
we still have the ability to
go and fight for our values
without living in fear of
being imprisoned or murdered.
So let's fight for our values.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: So if we accept
that economic stagnation
and inequality are very much at
the base of what's happening,
a big question that I
have is, why hasn't there
been more of a successful
leftist response
to this instead of an
authoritarian populist
response?
Seems to me there are two
rather obvious things.
One is all of the animosity
toward immigrants,
blacks, et cetera.
The other is the decline
of labor unions, which
I think needs to be explained.
I don't think it should
just be taken for granted.
But even with all that, we had
a very popular Bernie Sanders
movement.
What's a little more
mystifying to me
is what's happened in
Europe, where there
is a much stronger
labor movement,
much stronger socialist
party kind of movement.
And yet, all of those
socialist parties
seem to be falling apart.
And I don't know that much about
the situation with the labor
movement in Europe,
but in general,
what is there that's inevitable
about a move to the right
rather than a move to
the left, which one
might expect to see more of?
YASCHA MOUNK: So I
think part of the answer
is that there
certainly are countries
in which there has been a
rise of far-left populism.
Obviously, Venezuela, which
had many decades of economic
stagnation before Hugo Chávez
took power there and eventually
really did destroy democracy
there in a terrible way.
But also parts of
southern Europe, right?
So when you look at Greece and
Spain, in certain ways, Italy--
though a little less so than it
looked a couple of years ago--
you do see some of that.
But I think, in the end--
and this is my
response to people
who want to defend
left-wing populism-- now,
on my definition of populism,
it's not clear to me
that Bernie Sanders is
a populist, by the way.
I don't actually
think he is, right?
So you can have a robust
left-wing economic policy
program without saying,
my political adversary
is illegitimate and I should
be given all of the power
and so on, right?
But one of my
responses to people
who are tempted by a form of
actual left-wing populism that
says, get rid of all
of these institutions.
Who cares about any of that?
We just care about
economic or social justice.
Well, one of the answers
is that you might end up
in a place like Venezuela, which
is not a great place to live.
But the other answer
is, I think, in the end,
you're not going to win.
I just think that between saying
the banks are screwing us over
and capitalism is a
problem and saying,
you know what your problem is?
That guy over there.
He's coming into your country.
He's stealing your job.
I just think that's
more powerful.
And so whenever you
get a competition
of left and right populism,
you get a fracturing
of a coalition you need to
actually defend democracy.
And in the end, the people
who tend to win out--
and we've seen this many times
over the course of history--
is the far-right.
AUDIENCE: My question's
about populism and education.
Is there a connection
where lowered education
drives populism, or maybe
the other way around?
Or is there no
connection at all?
YASCHA MOUNK: Well, so
there's definitely--
I mean, as Donald Trump famously
said, "I love the uneducated."
So there's definitely,
in many countries,
a link between people
who are less qualified,
less educated, and
the willingness
to vote for populism.
There are some interesting
cases where that's not the case.
I mean, actually, in Germany--
I'll take a wild
guess that that's
where you're from, as am I--
interestingly, there's
not a very clear pattern
in support for the
alternative for Germany.
It's actually a lot of more
educated people as well,
so there are some
exceptions to that.
But yeah, by and
large, I would say
there's two educational
roots of populism.
One of them is just
that the less educated
you are, the more
reason you have
to be afraid of the
future, the more you
might act out in that
kind of populist support.
And the second is,
well, I think we haven't
done a good job of transmitting
our values through education,
and that's a broader
set of reasons
why people don't do that.
Now, I think that needs
to go, by the way,
beyond critical thinking.
So both in Germany and, to
some degree, in the States,
the well-meaning
response to this
is, well, we just have to teach
people to think critically
about the world.
But actually,
populists always claim
that they think critically
about the world.
Don't trust the institutions.
Don't trust what the
mainstream media tell you.
You're sheeple.
You have to go and
research for yourself.
So it has to go beyond critical
education or critical thinking
skills.
It has to be critical
thinking skills
rooted in a defense of our
institutions and of our values.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned economic
stagnation in the last 40 or 50
years in the United States.
Are there examples of that
in other countries, too?
I'm just not familiar
with the history
in, for example,
Germany and the UK.
YASCHA MOUNK: So absolutely,
in most of Western Europe,
you have a less extreme
set of developments,
which is one of the
signs that the reasons
for the absolute stagnation
of middle-class incomes
in the United States is not
globalization and automation,
all of those things.
A good part of it is
political choices.
And those political
choices have, by and large,
been little better
in Western Europe.
And so as a result, you have
a little higher improvements
of living standards
for ordinary people.
But absolutely, when you look
at most of Western Europe
from 1950 to 1975, 1980,
you went from lots of people
not having central heating,
definitely not having a car,
not having a television, in
some cases not having access
to doctors, to living a
comfortable life with a house
and a car or two and a
big entertainment system
at home to boot, right?
And though there's been some
increases in living standards
for the past 30 years,
it's been nothing
comparable to that
moment of transformation.
Now, the case gets a little more
complicated in Central Europe
and in parts of Asia.
But there, I think,
it is people have
fallen short of expectations.
So though Poland
and Hungary have
done very well economically
over the last 30 years,
people thought they were
going to have living
standards like in the West.
And what they've seen,
especially in rural areas,
is not nearly close
living standards.
And the people who have
done best in this system
are the people who are
politically connected,
often who are old Communist
elites, often who are crooks,
right?
And so there's a real
anger there that's
economically rooted as well.
AUDIENCE: There
are some people who
allege that some of the
elections that we've
seen strong populist
results from
are, in part, the result
of active state-sponsored
campaigns of propaganda
and misinformation,
and that some of those
votes, arguably-- or that
those elections, arguably--
have already not been
free and fair here and
in France and in Italy.
And I wondered if you
had thoughts about that,
and if there are structural
approaches to combating
that state-sponsored
action from nation-states
with an active interest in
destabilizing democracies?
YASCHA MOUNK: Yeah.
So look, that's
another area where
I think there's all of these
weird, fruitless either/or
discussions, when it
can clearly be both.
Sometimes, when you
look about debates,
it's obviously
the Trumpist right
that has an interest
in just downplaying
any kind of Russian
meddling, because they just
want to defend Trump.
But even on the left of that,
even among people who dislike
Trump, for some, there's this
weird debate between more
of a center-left than
the far-left in certain
incarnations, but it can
take different forms as well,
where it--
to caricature one
position, it's--
well, Russia is the only reason
why Hillary Clinton lost,
and so let's just focus on that
and everything else is great.
And then on the other side,
let's not talk about Russia.
All the people who want
to talk about Russia
just want to talk about
Russia because they
love Hillary Clinton and
don't want to-- right?
And it can be both, right?
I mean, it's
absolutely plausible
that various forms of
meddling and the data
breach with Cambridge
Analytica and all
of those kinds of
things may have
made a difference of 80,000
votes in three states.
It's very, very
difficult to test that.
It's plausible that
it may have been.
At the same time,
it's obviously true
that even if that
hadn't happened,
Donald Trump still would have
been within striking distance
of winning the presidency.
And if everything was fine,
if people weren't pissed off
at the political
system, if it had
a non-populist political
candidate they were really
excited about, Donald Trump
shouldn't have been anywhere
within striking distance
of winning the election.
So we can take the threat
of Russian meddling
and other forms of
outside interference
very seriously without having
to fall into the trap of saying,
well, if that's the case, then
there's nothing else we need
to change, right?
Now, to your specific question
of what can we do about that?
Well, in lots of
European countries,
the answer is
really simple, which
is that they don't have
the laws that America has.
Until I became a citizen
about a year ago,
I wasn't allowed to donate
to political campaigns.
It was actually a
reasonable law, right?
In Europe, there
isn't such laws.
So Russian state
banks can bankroll
European political parties.
They usually don't do it openly,
but they do it legally, right?
Well, we can change that.
In the United States,
I think we can
be much clearer in
investigating what's going on,
obviously protecting
the Mueller probe.
But also actually improving
our electoral infrastructure.
It's very, very easy to hack
into our voting machines.
And an outside
power can do that--
in one county, change
a couple of votes
around, not have an impact on
the outcome of the election,
and have a huge de-legitimizing
impact on people
trusting their democracy.
So we need to act on that
really, really urgently,
and we're not, and
that's really scary.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, I want to
pick up on the electoral system
question.
I'm wondering to
what degree you see
a connection between
the rise in populism
and the electoral
systems we have,
particularly in
the United States.
Donald Trump won the election,
but he didn't actually
get the most votes.
And--
YASCHA MOUNK: He did, because
it was all fraud and fake news.
AUDIENCE: He got the
most electoral votes,
but he didn't get the
most votes of the people.
YASCHA MOUNK: No, I
mean Donald Trump claims
that he won the popular vote.
AUDIENCE: Sure.
YASCHA MOUNK: But
we'll ignore that, so.
AUDIENCE: Ignore that part.
And most jurisdictions, we
don't have any kind of majority
runoff or ranked choice system.
We don't have proportional
representation
in the United States,
which restricts
the degree to which people
have a say in their government.
So just comment on that and
what connections you see.
YASCHA MOUNK: So
look, I think there's
one set of institutional
failings that is a big part
of a [? book, ?]
that I didn't talk
about in this particular
talk, which is just
around the
unresponsiveness of a lot
of our political
institutions and the role
that money plays in
politics and the revolving
door between lobbyists
and legislators,
and the rise of a
very complicated
bureaucratic and
technocratic state
which makes people
feel like nobody's
listening to me anyway.
I think that's one
particular reason.
I also think that
there are, obviously,
problems with gerrymandering
and with the electoral college
in the United States that
are specific to this country.
But I'm not sure that
institutional explanations
have a lot of weight in
understanding populism
in general.
In political science--
I'm a political
scientist-- the last 40, 50
years of political science have
only been about institutions.
They've all been
about before us,
people ignored institutions.
It's actually all
about institutions.
Well, what's
fascinating is that you
have a rise of populists
in two-party systems
like the United
States, but you also
have them in
parliamentary systems
like Hungary and Poland.
You also have them in
presidential systems.
So actually, since
this similar phenomenon
is going on in all kinds
of different countries
that don't have a
two-party system, that
don't have the
electoral college,
I don't think that that's the
most important driving force,
though it certainly exacerbated
the [? former ?] talk
in the United States in 2016.
AUDIENCE: You touched a
little bit on the impact
that economic instability
can have on people's
long-range viewpoints.
So we've got a big rise
in automation and lots
of jobs disappearing
because of it,
and it's not really
going to stop.
It's going to get worse.
What do you think institutions
or nations or governments
can do to address that
underlying instability, where
we may be in a scenario
where 10%, 20%,
30% of people in a
country don't have jobs,
or they don't need to have jobs?
YASCHA MOUNK: So a few points.
First, I know that universal
basic income is something
that people who work for
companies like Google
like to think about.
And I think there's a serious
discussion to be had there.
I'm a little
politically skeptical
of it, because I think
a lot of the people who
vote for populists are people
who think of themselves
as superior to some
other people in society.
That's true of most people.
We think of ourselves,
in various ways,
as superior to some other people
in society, so don't judge.
But they say, I'm lower-middle
class and middle class,
and I'm not somebody
who's unemployed.
I'm not somebody who's
working class, right?
And to go to those people
and say, hey, you know what?
You're probably going to lose
your job, but it's fine--
because life for people at
the very bottom of society
who are going to get
universal basic income
is a politically difficult
conversation to have.
And so I have some skepticism
about the political feasibility
of that.
More broadly, I think that,
look, if 50% of our jobs
are just going to go away
because of automation,
it's going to be very difficult
for democracy to survive.
But thankfully, that
may be overblown.
It may not be 50%.
So in the meanwhile,
what we can do is--
I'm sometimes asked about
whether I support a robot tax.
And I say, no, I don't, but
I'm against the human tax.
At the moment, a company that
makes a billion-dollar revenue
a year and has 10 employees
pays a lot less in tax
than a company that has a
billion-dollar revenue a year
and has 1,000 employees,
because of payroll taxes
and all kinds of other things.
So there's all kinds of things
we can do to actually encourage
investing in humans and
employing humans that
is short of either the universal
basic income or something
like a robot tax.
AUDIENCE: I just have
a question that's
building off one of
the prior answers
about how we see people
ultimately lean to the right.
I think, in some of the
texts that I've read
and so forth, particularly
within the political system
in the United States, more
of the left-leaning policies
require a little more research
and a little more understanding
to see how they can benefit the
population, as opposed to some
of the more populist
policies that
feel more visceral for certain
populations and so forth.
So with this rise of populism
and with this impulse politics
that is just fundamentally
easier for a lot of people
to grasp--
and this question may be too
big for anyone to answer,
but how do we, as a
country or as a society
or, as the cautiously
optimistic few that are
trying to put out the fire--
work to educate people to see
the benefit of not defaulting
to impulse?
YASCHA MOUNK: Why don't I take
both questions, and then--
AUDIENCE: I was just
wanting to follow up
on the basic income thing.
I understand that there are
two different variants of it
around.
One that phases out
as one has a good job,
and I can easily see how
that would be very insulting.
What about an actual
universal income,
where the government sends out
per capita checks to everyone,
whether they have a job or not?
YASCHA MOUNK: Yeah,
so I didn't mean--
I had that in mind, right?
And I don't mean that it's like,
oh, once you lose your job,
we're going to help you
and people [INAUDIBLE]..
I think that's the
big answer, right?
We assume that 50% of
jobs are going to go away.
Now, our big answer is, it's OK.
Like everybody else in society,
you're going to get a check.
It still basically tells
people that the social distance
between them and other people
in society is being flattened,
and they're not going
to be happy about that.
Now, perhaps that's
the best we can do.
And we certainly don't have
a claim to feeling better
than other people in society.
It's not like there's
a God-given right
to feel superior to others.
I'm just saying that I think,
as a political response,
it's not going to
be very effective.
Because if you tell people, hey,
I know you're losing your job,
but don't worry,
everybody inside
is going to get a basic
income and you still
get to have a
basically decent life,
I'm going to say, oh, but
I once was somebody, right?
This is a way of--
to go back to that intersection
between economics and culture,
I talked to a
politician who said,
look, 25 years ago, when I
asked people, who are you,
in my district, they
said, I'm a Teamster,
or I'm a steel worker, or I'm a
foreman in the factory, right?
Today, they don't have that.
They don't have that
earned identity anymore.
They don't get the same
belonging and pride out
of their job.
And so now when I ask them,
who are you, they might say,
well, I'm white, and I don't
like those people over there,
right?
And I fear that
basic income is not
able to give people an earned
identity in the kind of way
that pushes them away from
the temptation of that kind
of ascriptive identity.
Now, in response to
the other question--
look, one way of
talking about this
is that, to me,
the 2016 election
was a competition between a
moderate politics of the status
quo and an extremist
politics of change.
Now, a lot of people vote for
the extremist politic of change
perhaps because
they're extremists.
I think, more likely, because
they really wanted change.
They really wanted a
vision of a better future.
And so I think
what we need to do
is to give them a realistic,
non-extremist vision
of what that future looks like.
In the end, as long as people
say, the system is screwed
and nobody cares about
me and there's not
much for me in
the future anyway,
they're always
going to be tempted
by the most extreme people.
And so what we need to do is to
give people a realistic sense
that no, you know what?
If [INAUDIBLE] people
who are [INAUDIBLE]
[? accept ?] an equal
multi-ethnic society,
if I do my bit,
then you know what?
Actually, life is going
to be better for me.
Politicians do have
something to offer me.
The system has
something to offer me.
And that's really hard
work, because there's
all kinds of complicated reasons
why a system doesn't do it
effectively at the moment.
But if we manage to do that,
if we manage to actually
give people hope
for a better future,
then I think they're going
to be willing to vote
for people who can actually
make that possible.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
