Conversation on August 4Th 2016 in London, UK

Conversation on August 4th 2016 in London, UK

Between Melissa Lane, Class of 1943 Professor of Politics and Director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and Victoria Preston, strategic communications advisor.

VP – Melissa, welcome to London. You have a highly distinguished academic career on both sides of the Atlantic and you have been intellectually fearless in addressing some of the most difficult social and political issues of our age including climate change, consumerism, and, most fundamentally, ethics. But you are perhaps best known for your expertise in ancient Greek thought and its applications in the modern age. I’m hoping that we can tap into that today to explore a growing phenomenon that many of us find perplexing and increasingly concerning—the rise of the demagogic voice in the political arena we might broadly call the liberal west.

Over the last decade or more, we’ve seen the rise of populism in countries like Brazil, Bolivia, and Venezuela. In these cases we’ve really been curious bystanders, watching populist leaders such as Lula, Morales, or Chavez with interest, reassured that this political trend was happening elsewhere and unlikely to impact either Europe or the United States directly. But over the course of 2016, the tide of populism has washed up directly onto our own shores. I’d like to explore three manifestations of that, namely the nomination of Donald Trump as US Presidential candidate, the Daesh recruitment drive in Europe, and the UK’s ‘Brexit’ referendum result.

On June 24th, the morning after the UK electorate had voted in a referendum to decide our future membership of the EU, the so-called Brexit vote, we woke up to the realization that a seismic political event had occurred.

ML – I was in the UK at that time and what this result brought home was the critical importance of politics: the way that a political decision can change the whole trajectory of millions of people’s lives for decades, in this case first by the leader who called the referendum and then through the collective decision of the voters.

This power of politics to deliver seismic change is easy to forget when you live in a country that has been relatively stable for long periods. And it is precisely this stability that creates the false sense that people will always cling to the status quo. When people face votes thinking that their vote doesn’t matter and they can afford to cast a protest vote for example without expecting it to change the outcome, they need to remember—it does matter. Your vote is not negligible. It matters, and politics matters.

VP – In addition to the Brexit result, 2016 also saw the surprising nomination of Donald Trump, and actually by the time this conversation is published, we will know whether or not he is the next US President. But whatever the final result, the fact remains that he was selected by Republicans from a field of seventeen possible candidates to stand in the 2016 US presidential elections.

Looking across from this side of the Atlantic, we see a country with 300 million people and say, ‘many people have chosen this person to represent their values and interests’. This is perplexing in part because of how and what Trump communicates. His specific use of language, tone, vocabulary, and attitude is really contradictory to the liberal narrative. The way he talks about women, the way he talks about ethnic minorities, the way he talks about human rights; none of this conforms to the norms of Western liberalism. And to see such support for a narrator who uses language so at odds with the ‘norm’ has woken us up to the existence of a powerful demagogic voice in our own society.

The third manifestation of this trend is the phenomenon we are experiencing here in Europe, and to some extent in the US and Canada—that of young people responding to the rhetoric of `Daesh’ or ‘ISIS’, either by travelling to Syria and Iraq to fight, or as is now more commonly the case, signing up online to carry out attacks in their home cities and towns in Europe and North America.

And let’s be clear, these are young people who have enjoyed the benefits of a liberal democratic system—free education, freedom of voice, freedom of the press—who are pushing back against the liberal system from within. And it’s proving difficult for us to comprehend, or perhaps acknowledge, why that might be the case.

So there are really two major questions that I want to explore with you.

First, to what extent do you think that the popular pull of these three expressions of the demagogic voice—Brexit in the UK, Trump in the US, and ISIS recruitment in Europe—are part of the same phenomenon?

And second, whether you believe that in this moment the liberalist cause or the liberalist narrative is facing an existential threat through the rise of the demagogic voice?

To begin can you help us think about what we mean by the demagogic voice?

ML – These are such challenging and important questions; it’s quite an opportunity to have this conversation.

Regarding the first question, I think there is certainly a common element to these three phenomena. I’m thinking of historical parallels and, of course, many people have been reflecting on to what extent the current situation is similar to the challenges to liberalism that emerged in the late 20s and 30s.

Today, as then, there was a critique of liberalism, and democracy as a whole, being impotent.

At that time, the attacks on parliamentary democracy might typically have been expressed in terms of it being ‘just talking shop’, whereas real force or vitality could only be exercised through doing rather than through talking. In the wake of the First World War we saw the rise of violent masculinity that was expressed right across the political spectrum, both on the extreme left and the extreme right.

And there is an inherent emotional aspect to this, where liberalism is construed in terms of ‘coldness’ and ‘callousness’; where liberal policies are seen as indifferent to the suffering that they either cause or that they fail to rectify. The sort of economic ‘left behind’ phenomenon is felt as a kind of callousness that in some way liberalism isn’t addressing. And then there’s also coldness in the sense of ‘meaninglessness’, where, in contrast to religious value systems, secular liberalism can seem to be meaningless, allowing the erosion of the ties of community and ultimately allowing communities to dissolve.

So I think it’s this sort of ‘coldness’ of liberalism that provokes the search for either a different kind of community, or for turning back the clock, as in the case of those interested in supporting Trump who want to go back to something simpler or stronger, or to a time where there was more certainty and they felt their place in society was more secure. Or in some cases it can mean turning the clock forward, by building a caliphate as a means of bringing about this kind of transformation.

If I had to try to pinpoint the commonalities it would be there, but there are some really important differences that we should also talk about. I would also want to caution that we need to be careful in thinking about demagogues. As I’ve written elsewhere, the ancient Greeks took quite a while before they solidified the concept as meaning someone appealing, possibly through fraudulent means, to partisan ends; in particular the partisan ends associated with the common people or the poor. For a long time in the life of ancient Athenian democracy, there was no single fixed stereotype of a ‘demagogue’, rather the Athenians recognised a wide range of ways in which politics could go wrong. So while I think demagoguery has come to have a more definite meaning (as I outlined above) and I’m willing to talk about the ‘demagogic voice’ on those terms. I think we still do well to remember that demagoguery is one kind of political danger, but not the only kind. Pure intra-elite machinations can be as dangerous as demagoguery, for example.

VP – Are you saying that, while at one time the liberal voice was the passionate voice, passionate about human rights, and passionate about a fair society, inclusive democracy, universal suffrage, and so on, liberalism has gone quiet in some sense and the passionate voice is now on the other side? Now it’s the ‘What about us?’ voice that is passionate.

ML – Yes, and I think that is part of the great challenge, especially in terms of communication.

The worldview and the problems and the solutions offered by the demagogic narrative are very simplistic. For liberals who are passionate about pluralism and embrace complexity this is a very difficult thing. I think the current media conditions make it an even more difficult thing.

So, a key part of what liberalism has stood for, its recognition of complexity and pluralism, is what I think is threatened by demagoguery.

This brings us to the question of what we mean by the demagogic voice. Demagoguery works through over-simplification: the demagogue claims to speak for a vision of the people which is both homogenous and idealized. Anyone who challenges or opposes that voice is thrust out and seen as an enemy of the people or alien. This can lead to all kinds of nativism, including anti-foreign and anti-immigrant sentiments, and also demonizing the people who disagree with you from within a given community.

Demagoguery also tries to do away with the normal mechanisms of the nation, which themselves involve polarity and complexity. Parliamentary democracy works through having hundreds of people, who claim to speak for the people, having to work out ways of negotiating to resolve disagreement. Whereas the demagogue wants to be the sole embodiment and the unchallenged decider.

We saw Trump say ‘I am your voice’, not ‘we are your voice’ or ‘the party is your voice’ or ‘congress is your voice’, but ‘I’ in the sense that ‘I alone can be the pure voice’. Many times in history we’ve seen demagogic movements emerge, and they work through this kind of exclusion and simplification.

So again, one historical analogy that has often been used and is very relevant is that of the French Revolution. The dynamics of the French Revolution were all about constantly having to purify and exclude in order to hold on power and to explain failure.

As is often the case with these movements, the thought is ‘well of course we failed, because we were infiltrated by elements that were not pure’. This can mean impure ideologically or, in some cases, ethnically. And again this leads us to the narrative of exclusion or separateness. But of course that’s never going to work, because you can never have that view, which is entirely pure. There is always bound to be residual disagreement or difference.

So that is the challenge—how do you hold on to passion about pluralism and complexity and expertise and all the things that liberalism depends on, and how do you communicate those things in a world that is increasingly employing oversimplified communication strategies?

VP – Moving on to the political aspects of liberalism, the West has promoted an agenda of representative democracy as a ‘universal good’. Our common refrain is ‘democracy is not perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got’. And after the Second World War, and more recently since the end of the Cold War, our view of democracy as the best inclusive political system has, to some extent, been vindicated as many former socialist and communist states in central and eastern Europe have joined the EU project.

These are the same principles that led us to take the democratic model to Iraq after the end of the war when we said ‘now the war is over, now come the elections’, and then ‘now a government has been elected by the people and we’ve given the Iraqis the handbook on democracy so now they can get on with it’. It hasn’t been a huge success since, more than a decade on, there is still a civil war in Iraq. And, quite aside from the number of Allied troops who have lost their lives, the numbers of Iraqis that have been killed are so huge that there’s no consensus on how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died since democracy arrived in Iraq in 2004.

So my question is whether you think that that failure of democracy in Iraq has somehow undermined our own implicit trust or faith in democracy and allowed these more demagogic voices to prevail?

ML – There are so many tragedies in what has happened in Iraq, and one of them is a profound misunderstanding of democracy—what democracy means, what it requires, and, in particular, the thought that elections alone are sufficient to make a regime count as a democracy. Whereas the work I’ve done on ancient Greece suggests that the accountability of officials is as fundamental to democracy as elections, and elections are only really valuable if they lead to and enable the accountability and scrutiny of people holding power. That we often fail to realize the importance of accountability is a great tragedy.

If you impose democracy in a place where the occupying power still controls the purse strings and the military, at least in the immediate aftermath of war, how do you establish meaningful accountability to the people in the democracy when so much real power is exercised from the outside? The paradox of trying to impose democracy from the outside is that too often it undermines the very possibility of accountability that democracy is meant to deliver.

I think that’s one of the reasons for the failure in Iraq, and there’s a terrible irony about that. This lack of accountability is a problem that also attends foreign aid more generally, whereby foreign donors can, in effect, undermine the conditions for local democracy by undermining the conditions of accountability. That point isn’t meant to rule out all forms of engagement abroad, but it does suggest the need for reflection on how any such engagement is carried out, and on limits to what it might be able to achieve.