Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The People vs Democracy" with Yascha Mounk

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"The People vs Democracy" with Yascha Mounk · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, humans. Welcome to Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. I'm Josh Zepson. One of the
• 0:07
  most dangerous ideas of all time was the idea that ordinary people, regular folks, you
• 0:14
  and me, baby, should be champions of our own future, should be the source of authority
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  for the people who rule us that we should be the ones calling the shots, not our kings
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  or queens or leaders. How, though, do you sustain that idea when the you and the me and
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  the they gets bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more diverse? And we invite more
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  and more different kinds of people from all over the world into our little camp. And
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  then we all have to quarrel and argue and figure out what we think about the people who
• 0:52
  are ruling us, what norms we want, whether or not we're going to have feminism or sharia
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  law, whether or not we're going to have hijabs or who knows what other kind of theocratic
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  nonsense people might be importing from whatever part of the world they happen to come from
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  as they settle in our safe, liberal, tolerant democratic societies. Yasha Monk is an academic
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  who has wrestled with this kind of thing. He's a total delight. I read his most recent
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  book called The Great Experiment, why diverse democracies fall apart and how they can endure.
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  I didn't actually read it. I listened to the audio book. You'll hear us talk about that
• 1:31
  in this interview because he's really trying to wrestle with this idea of how do you
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  take countries that have previously sustained their democratic consensus on the basis of
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  some kind of homogeneity. He's talking mostly about European countries here, Western European
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  countries. And then encourage them to retain the same sense of unity and the same coherence,
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  even as you pour in large numbers of people from abroad and as you open up people's lives
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  to the erosion of traditions that they are norms that they thought were that they could take
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  for granted, whether that is sexual norms, gender norms, transgender norms, gay norms,
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  feminist norms. He is an interesting thinker because he doesn't have the normal left wing attitude
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  which is, don't worry about it. If you have any demographic concerns about the changing look
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  of your population or if you have any worries about the decline of religion or tradition,
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  you're just a bigot and you have to get with the program. During the 21st century, baby,
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  he thinks that's counterproductive and that will just lead to an increasing flare-up of people
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  on the right. And he's not a right winger. He's a traditional, small L liberal Democrat. He was
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  born in Germany to Polish parents. My dad was also born to Polish parents. And my dad was born in
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  German speaking Switzerland while grew up in German speaking Switzerland. So there are a lot of
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  parallels here. Yasha is a contributing editor at the Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Council
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  on Foreign Relations. He's written four books. I won't go through all of their names. You can
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  look them up. He's controversial. The progressive left tends to hate him and think he's an apologist
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  for the right. The right hate him and think that he's an a feat lefty who doesn't understand what
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  robust, white, traditional values are. That's kind of why I love him. I hope you do too. Enjoy. Yasha
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  monk. I had a lovely time recently while I was wandering around the streets of Bangkok
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  listening to the great experiment. When I listen to something in a place where I'm exploring,
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  it creates these really vivid memories. I've done it with other books and it gives me great
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  pleasure to think of you wandering around Bangkok listening to it. Good. I hope that it would.
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  Yes, I love getting messages from people saying that they were listening to my podcast while
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  they were on a ferry from Santorini to somewhere or other. It sounds so romantic. It's lovely to
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  think of these. What do you think of recording? I thought it was pretty good, but I haven't listened to
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  all of it. I thought it was fine. I think in general, I'd rather hear you do it. Are you going to do
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  your next audio book? You know, they never want that. It's funny. I think pub because I have an
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  accent or you know, they don't want that. I think for people who are either like a level up on
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  celebrity or if it's a memoir, obviously. But at the beginning, I was like, I want to record my
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  own book. I'm like, I will have somebody who knows what we're doing. I think you're at a point
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  to, I think you're at a point of celebrity where you can pull off insisting on it. I think it
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  depends. Yes, this probably is anti-Bavarian bigotry that you're suffering. I think so. I think
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  I should now it's my publisher for this. Right now. Exactly. Let's just call them Nazis. Just say
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  you're not going to tolerate the Nazis in the 21st century. And so you don't want to be persecuted.
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  Nazis had a strong anti-Bavarian vent for that.
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  Who is bigger than against Germans? I mean, maybe you could claim that they're Jews, but that
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  wouldn't really work in the oppression Olympics. But funny thing is that even Jews kind of aren't.
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  I mean, some older, you know, some of the people in the 70s or 80s or whatever for understandable
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  reasons, but no, it's amazing. You know, it's like BBC, is it BBC? I think the BBC publishes these
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  surveys of people's reputation, the country's reputation's around the world. And Germany is
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  always like, at the top. And you're like, wow, I mean, you know, you know, that PR firm should
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  really, should really advertise. It's true. Everyone thinks that the Germans is being very
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  reasonable. In fact, I cited Germany to just today in a tweet. Someone was making the
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  horrid, tired old claim that I hate that America, the reason why America is bad, they're so bad
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  that that is because it's just too big. This is something I hear a lot from Americans. The other
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  of the population is so large. Of course, we can't do healthcare right. And of course, we didn't get
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  COVID rights. And of course, the DMV has long lines. And of course, the post office is staffed
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  by part human parts, sloth creatures who can't do anything and move in from this early and
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  are incompetent. America is so big. You know, there are too many people. And so my general
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  retort to this is that America is, is, is, is less larger than Australia than Germany is than
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  New Zealand. And nobody goes around saying Germany is so much larger than New Zealand. We can
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  possibly do things the way that New Zealanders do. But Americans are constantly saying this about
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  Australia whenever I say, look, you could do this or that. I mean, Australia does. They say,
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  well, Australia's got such a smaller population. But everything scales. I mean, everything,
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  yeah, we have a smaller population. We have a smaller budget. We have a smaller government. We have
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  fewer federal workers. And if we were the size of the United States, you could scale all those
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  things up just as Germany has scaled up New Zealand to be much, much larger. And yeah, Germany is
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  always the argument you can take to the bank. Because I think everyone in the sort of agrees,
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  oh, the Germans do things right. Well, yeah, well, it's funny because actually, I guess Australia
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  is in a way of frontier society as well, right? Yeah, yes, yes. Because we have a,
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  we have an explanation for Marcus Craziness is just that it's a frontier society. But that doesn't
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  really work either. No, it doesn't. Australia is a different kind of, Australia is a frontier
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  society in which for some reason, communitarian ideals and conformism were more important. And I
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  wonder if it's because the, the landscape is so much more hostile. But then it's not, it wasn't
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  where the people were actually living. It's not like everyone was living in the outback. Yeah,
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  I can't explain it, but I've been, I've been sort of noodling on, this is a tangent, but I,
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  Ross Dathat and Madaglaceus were having an exchange on Twitter recently about whether or not
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  America's failures during COVID could have been otherwise. And Madaglaceus was sort of saying,
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  you could imagine an alternate history in which the Trump administration makes different
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  decisions. And Trump declares the vaccines to be a great success and, you know, a triumph of his
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  administration and blah, blah, blah, and Matt sort of pulled, you know, lays out this alternate
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  scenario. Ross Dathat jumps in and says, not sure that that's true. I think there are fundamental
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  things that could, and Matt says, just look at Australia, which is the most culturally similar
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  country to America and did chose a completely different path. Ross says, I don't think that's true.
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  Someone else jumps into that conversation and says, Josh, what do you think knowing that I've
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  lived for 12 years in the States and, and, and Australian? And so I wrote a thread about this,
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  which could become the basis for an article or even a book or a thesis, I suppose, about,
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  I don't think you could have done Australia, what Australia did in the States. There's something
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  about the American, there's something about the libertarian kind of frontierism in America
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  that is different from the Australian communitarian frontierism. Like we have a term called
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  mateship in Australia and, and the concept of a fair go, which are embedded in the national
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  identity and have and loosely sort of mean a egalitarianism, a focus on doing on falling in line
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  and doing the right thing and being a good member of the tribe that doesn't exist in the States.
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  And so I get a meet ship as a concept sort of, at least I assume I do, just sort of
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  from knowing how people use the term meet inside what what what what what what what what what what
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  fair go I'm not sure I quite understand that. A fair go is giving someone a fair have a fair go
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  having a fair go means um I don't know do you have fair crack of the whip in America?
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  Is that a term? Not really no, but is it sort of like everybody should have a chance like
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  everybody should have like an ad bat I guess. No, what before I even say anything I'm going to look
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  at what dictionary says it is because I don't want to contaminate it with my own preconceptions
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  a fair go. Let me see let me see this
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  informal Australian used for emphasis or to request someone to be reasonable or fair
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  fair go. Yeah it's right so it's so it's more like a reasonable kind of it's like yeah it's
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  yes exactly it's like don't don't fuck with me sort of it's kind of like get down it can be
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  used to mean get down off your pedestal stop either ripping me off or fucking around uh like
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  fair go. I mean if someone was trying to I was trying to someone was trying to sell you something
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  for more than it was worth you might say fair go uh the land of the fair go is also sometimes
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  invoked as a sense of yeah an Australia where everyone is is able to get ahead it has it has a
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  great many meanings like the word mate does as well. Well all right interesting yeah um great.
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  Anyway don't know how we got there uh you're in the UK now. Yeah yeah I'm just spending
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  with terminoxfit. What are you teaching? I'm not teaching anything I'm just hanging out and
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  going to some seminars and strange dinners and oh fantastic are you studying or are you there
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  on some kind of a oh no I'm a I'm a visiting fellow or whatever. Ah right yeah yeah
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  I'm just sort of on sabbatical as a way. How did you become the the person who is an expert on
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  democracies and the the ability of human beings to get along?
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  Um how have I become that person um I was in grad school I was uh doing political theories so
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  I was writing a PhD thesis on um how to think about lack of responsibility in the welfare state
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  so topics that are pretty far away from that and I was just struck by the way in which
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  populism was rising in Europe and in other countries and people sort of assumed you know
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  they talked about it they worried about it but within constraints right they worried about it like
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  oh that's kind of annoying and sort of like these political forces are kind of you know
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  concerning but of course they'll never be in power right of course they'll never actually win
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  of course they'll never actually be able to transform the country and I just sort of thought
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  well why you know we we we see the support continuing to rise um and there was these other signs
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  of troubling the political system of people being pretty unhappy with governments uh
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  participating in less than the political system um you know these these political parties in
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  Europe but used to have mass membership um uh you know really having a dwindling engagement
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  from the general public and I thought perhaps these are all signs of something and so I sat down
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  with with my friend Rebecca for who took in uh three or four while actually um and looked at some
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  data not about how to feel about governments but how we feel about democracy how we feel about
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  democratic system and it turned out that um they were getting much more critical much more
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  dissolution much more over to alternatives to it so we published some research about that um and
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  that sort of went viral and and was the beginning of me being an expert on a topic I suppose
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  did what is what makes a system democratic what makes a system democratic um I ask because
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  because when I I'm sometimes skeptical about those surveys and I want and maybe you can
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  flesh it out better for me because if I said to my friends do you care more about the freedom to
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  do what you want and everyone being treated equitably and fairly or do you care about being able to
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  vote then most of them probably would say no I mean if all of those other things were held
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  constant then I don't I wouldn't care about voting in which case you could say ah the young people
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  these days they don't care about democracy but of course democracy involves more than just voting
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  they vote in Russia they vote in Iran they vote in all kinds of places which are not democracies
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  so what are we talking about yeah of course and if you you know so I think it actually does make
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  sense to distinguish between two basic aspirations of our political system um so one is
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  collector self-determination right there's some mechanism by which we ourselves decide
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  how we're governed rather than letting some you know priest or general you know king do that
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  and that's a sort of voting element or that's the way we we try to accomplish that goal
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  you know in modern representative democracies is through voting for representatives um and then
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  there's the element of individual liberty um that we actually want to be able to decide in our own
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  what to say and who to worship whether to worship what kind of relationships to have who to
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  have stay over for dinner or stay over after dinner and um you know those two things don't
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  necessarily have to go together right you could have a majoritarian political system in which a
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  majority decides you're not allowed to play this kind of music you're not allowed to have that
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  kind of sexual orientation and there's some examples of that so I think you're right that there's
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  sort of good reason to think well what do we care most about is it the the the element of collective
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  self-determination or is it individual liberty or is it just some simply government performance
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  right is it simply making sure you live in a place where um you know you know that you're going to
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  be able to eat dinner and have afterwards rather than a place where um you know you you you you
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  worry about being able to feed yourself so so all of that is fair but the kinds of surveys we looked
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  at for um didn't put verse into competition right and so it said how important is it to to live
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  in a democracy and it turns out with a number of people who say it's important it must really
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  come down um it asks things like uh uh how do you feel about army rule and for a minority of
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  people uh I believe that's a good idea as we did in the past the number of people who say that
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  that would be a good idea has really gone up especially uh among among young people actually um
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  and so that's uh you know you can try to tell some story with a person saying well if we had army
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  rule and everything would be miraculously 10 times better um but that's some of the question asked
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  right they're saying hey army rule is a good idea it's because they're thinking there's something wrong
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  with a democratic system but we can only get good outcomes if we get rid of it and embrace these kind
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  of for a time alternatives it's interesting that you split apart those two components of collective
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  self-determination on the one hand and then personal freedom on the other because it's
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  there more than one way of articulating a collective self-determination is there more than one way
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  for the demos to express its will I had a talk back caller on my radio show recently and she was
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  saying that she can't believe how undemocratic our societies are because she's remembering we
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  were talking about blacks one events unexpected things we were talking and she said the Iraq war she
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  said before the Iraq war when there were people marching in the street all over the world the biggest
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  rallies in Sydney and London uh and in the United States and nonetheless our leaders continued to
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  persist with that policy she said she couldn't believe that we could be so undemocratic and I said
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  well I mean it's not undemocratic in the sense that those governments knew that they were going to
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  face the the voters at the next election and they would be judged on that and she was making the
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  point that but yeah they're going to be judged on a whole range of different things possibly up
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  against another party that also sucks in its own unique way and if people are expressing themselves
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  through some protest like that that needs to be heated like are those active collective self-determination
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  valid and if they're like that almost gets up to a question of should we be voting and you know
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  having more say in more things than just tweet or dumb or tweet or the every three four or five
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  years well let me speak to to a specific question and we brought a question I think the specific
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  question you know you always have to distinguish between uh very motivated and very visible minorities
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  of activists and the opinion of the majority now by the way in 2003 I was in the street on
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  London protesting against the Iraq war I was against the war at the time I continued to be against it
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  up what it was very bad idea um but as a recall at least in the United States and the United Kingdom
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  to crucial countries making the decision there was majority of the favor of the war at the time
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  so in the United States I think there was a clear majority in favor and in the UK I think the polls
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  oscillated more and I think they're less clear cut but what about the UK and Australia?
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  Definitely the US I've thought that in the in the UK and Australia it was well I suppose it
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  probably depended at what moment you you pulled people and exactly how but if it was it was
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  was raise a thing if it existed at all.
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  Yeah, so again, I don't want to speak,
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  you know, this is sort of the vague memory I have
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  from, you know, nearly 20 years ago,
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  but I believe at the point which UK entered the war
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  there was actually at least in some polls
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  and our majority in favor of it, right?
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  So this is an important point, right?
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  I mean, there's this tendency we sometimes have
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  in deep divided societies, especially to say, you know,
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  wow, the government is under democratic,
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  nobody I know voted for this guy.
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  Well, yeah, because he did in a particular kind of bubble,
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  right?
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  And of course, you can have an effect on social media.
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  You can have, you know, you just follow people
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  who agree with you, most people,
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  most people that agree with him, and I do too.
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  And so you can have a sense of like,
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  well, we all agree that this should happen, you know,
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  if that's not what's happening, it must be undemocratic,
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  it must be that people are going against what we want.
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  And so I just think it's important to sort of
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  check ourselves and be a little bit careful
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  not to fall foul to that bias.
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  Now, sure.
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  Now, to ask you a question,
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  to answer questions perhaps in a profound way.
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  Yeah, I mean, democracy promises the rule of the people.
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  And we have a very particular kind of way
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  of trying to bring about that outcome
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  and it involves, you know, voting for parties
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  or political candidates, every, you know,
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  six or five or four or two years,
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  depending on where you are.
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  And then we rely on both the fact that, sort of, you know,
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  we pick the team that seems closer to our preferences.
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  And then they have a reason to listen to public opinion
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  because they need to win reelection.
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  But that has real limits, right?
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  They might say, hey, in an office,
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  we're going to do something different
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  from what we're promising because we're not
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  so motivated by reelection.
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  We just want to put through those policies
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  that, for whatever, ideological or non-adilogical reason
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  we care about.
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  And as you're saying, you know,
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  you get a real bundle of policies.
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  So you might be somebody who's very socially liberal
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  and economically conservative
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  or very economically liberal and socially conservative
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  or as voters exist and especially in two party systems.
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  That means you have to choose between, you know,
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  a party who's deeply disagree with
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  on economic issues and a party who deeply disagree with
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  on social and cultural issues.
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  And, you know, that's it.
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  That's a choice you're going to make.
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  You know, when you go back to ancient democracies,
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  that was very different, right?
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  The idea there was that citizens would assemble
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  in Athens in particular and read about politics
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  in a much more concrete way.
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  They had the right, as an assembly,
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  to declare war, to appoint generals,
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  to censor democrats, to censor generals,
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  to banish them if you felt like it was their fault,
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  but you didn't win the war and so on.
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  So it was much, much more extreme involvement in politics.
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  But of course, and by the way,
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  the right essay to read on this
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  is by a 19th century French political queues
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  called Benjamin Constant.
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  He has a beautiful essay called
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  the Liberty of the Ancients
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  compared to that of the moderns.
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  And it really helps to understand ancient democracy.
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  It really helps to also understand
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  the nature of modern democracy.
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  And what he points out is that that was beautiful
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  and really meaningful.
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  But there was also problems with that.
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  It only works if you have a very, very small citizenry
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  because otherwise people are just not going to be motivated
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  to participate in politics that much.
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  You're going to get less out of politics
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  in a nation of 20 million or 200 million
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  when you do a nation of eight, 9,000 citizens.
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  It took an enormous amount of time.
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  So it was only possible because most
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  of opinion citizens had other people do their work for them,
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  including often slaves.
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  And it only worked because they were
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  in a quite poor society.
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  And so the other kinds of demands
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  on the time, the other kinds of distractions,
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  the other kind of luxuries they might engage in
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  weren't all of that tempting.
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  And I think when you tell people in Australia
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  of the United States or Italy or Germany today,
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  you're going to spend all of your time debating politics.
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  This is going to be the majority of your life.
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  We're going to be much poorer.
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  They don't want that and better want that for good reason.
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  And of course, the other thing about the ancient democracies
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  is that they did not have the individual freedoms
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  we take for granted.
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  Benjamin Constance says in a really beautiful line
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  that one musician in Sparta had to seek permission
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  from the census and didn't get it to add a string to his liar,
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  just to say if he just wanted to change
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  your desire for musical instrument a little bit,
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  that would change the melodies in the rhythms of society
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  and its culture and might bring instability.
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  And so that was a decision for the relevant office halls
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  of a majority to make.
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  You couldn't just do that on your own.
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  So that's not the kind of society you want to live in.
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  So I just want to find your house
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  in a particularly heritage listed part of England.
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  He has its rights.
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  So I think there's good reasons why we don't want
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  the kind of direct democracy that the ancients have.
• 24:43
  But I've started to wonder what there's ways of recreating that.
• 24:47
  I've come to agree with a line that I'd rather be ruled
• 24:49
  by the first 100 people on the Cambridge telephone book
• 24:51
  when we assembled Harvard faculty.
• 24:53
  I think often political elites, including intellectual elites.
• 24:58
  And as a professor at a fancy university,
• 25:01
  I realize I'm one of that said, don't often
• 25:06
  get things more right than ordinary people.
• 25:08
  And there are some ways of trying
• 25:10
  to have re-random political representation.
• 25:13
  So in Ireland, when there was a big debate about abortion,
• 25:16
  there had a citizens assembly in which they chose
• 25:18
  100 Irish citizens by law, essentially,
• 25:23
  and had them prepare law, which was then
• 25:26
  voted on in a referendum.
• 25:28
  And that was a very helpful process, a very healthy process,
• 25:30
  which I think came up with a reasonable compromise
• 25:33
  that won a big majority in the referendum.
• 25:35
  And I do wonder what we can use elements
• 25:39
  of that kind of autocracy, use elements
• 25:42
  of appointing certain officeholders by lot
• 25:45
  as we do for juries in a different way today.
• 25:50
  That's very interesting.
• 25:51
  I mean, it does remind me when you articulate
• 25:53
  what the Athenian situation was with people gathering
• 25:58
  in the Agora and hashing things out.
• 26:00
  Of course, we do still have that in the sense
• 26:02
  that our parliaments were supposed to be a way
• 26:04
  of just delegating that responsibility to other people, right?
• 26:07
  I mean, the idea that our parliaments
• 26:10
  would be inhabited by career politicians
• 26:13
  who spend their entire lives doing deals
• 26:15
  with each other and lobbyists and powerful people
• 26:18
  to try to entrench their power was not really the way
• 26:22
  that things were supposed to work.
• 26:24
  We were supposed to just say, hey, Joe down the road
• 26:26
  has a lot of good ideas.
• 26:27
  Why don't we send him and get him to be our representative
• 26:30
  because we're all too busy to be making
• 26:32
  those democratic decisions for ourselves?
• 26:35
  Well, there's two differences.
• 26:36
  So one is that in the 18th century America, for example,
• 26:43
  though the population of a country was low enough.
• 26:46
  And of course, the people who actually allowed
• 26:49
  to take part in the political system
• 26:52
  were sufficiently restricted.
• 26:53
  But there wasn't an idea that you'd vote
• 26:55
  for sort of local notables who, you know,
• 27:00
  probably in person or at least by reputation, right?
• 27:03
  So there was a sense of we would get these
• 27:05
  really high quality decent human beings
• 27:09
  who have the deep support of a community, right?
• 27:12
  The people where you'd say, well,
• 27:13
  you know, you can always count on this person.
• 27:14
  He's really well, you know, let's send him.
• 27:17
  But I think the, and let's change
• 27:19
  because of the scale of modern societies
• 27:21
  and because we enfranchisement
• 27:24
  of more and more people, which is obviously
• 27:26
  an incredibly good thing, but it makes
• 27:30
  that kind of notable models simply obsolete.
• 27:34
  I think there's more important difference though.
• 27:37
  If you look at the constitution of the United States,
• 27:41
  certainly, but of a good number of countries.
• 27:44
  And when you compare to the actual functioning
• 27:46
  of our society today, the one thing you're missing
• 27:50
  is political parties.
• 27:52
  Political parties are a fundamental modern
• 27:54
  political institutions that aren't really
• 27:59
  imagined in most, in most constitutions.
• 28:03
  So the United States only takes about 10 years
• 28:04
  for political parties to form.
• 28:07
  But when the country is founded,
• 28:09
  people don't assume that there's going to be
• 28:12
  a really strong loyalty to, you know,
• 28:15
  the leader of a political faction in that kind of way.
• 28:19
  And that changes things in much more concerning ways.
• 28:23
  A, it undermines the purpose of parliament,
• 28:26
  which is to deliberate, right?
• 28:27
  The idea when you read the founding fathers of the United States,
• 28:30
  when you read Edmund Burke, when he holds a speech
• 28:33
  as he's standing for parliament in Bristol
• 28:35
  in the early 19th century, they're saying
• 28:39
  the point of parliament is not just
• 28:41
  to be the sort of bearers of interest.
• 28:44
  And it's not just to represent what people want, by the way.
• 28:47
  It is to come together and actually
• 28:49
  deliberate about what's in the interest of a common good,
• 28:51
  of a greater good of a nation.
• 28:54
  And, you know, the rise of very ideological political parties
• 28:59
  that siege other as rivals at best and often as enemies
• 29:05
  just has undermined that to a significant extent, right?
• 29:09
  When you go to Washington DC today, which is very little
• 29:13
  exchange of arguments in a genuine spirit
• 29:17
  where you think if I come up with a good point,
• 29:19
  then the other side might actually incorporate that
• 29:22
  in a sensible way.
• 29:24
  And so the political parties have undermined
• 29:28
  what was supposed to be the problem of faction.
• 29:31
  That's what the founding fathers do think about as every attempt
• 29:34
  itself government in history is eventually fails
• 29:37
  because you have these factions battling each other, right?
• 29:40
  I mean, this is not in that democracy,
• 29:42
  but the Montague's in the Capulets, right?
• 29:44
  It's pretty typical of a kind of factions you get
• 29:47
  in the Talling City States, in the Middle Ages.
• 29:50
  They just hate each other battle each other
• 29:51
  and up to civil war and the destruction of a republic
• 29:54
  of some monarch arises.
• 29:57
  And so the founding fathers would be worried about that.
• 29:59
  And the answer they gave to that is, let's make the country
• 30:02
  so big and let's make it so free that you get such a
• 30:04
  coffeany of voices that no faction
• 30:07
  have a things they can rule.
• 30:08
  You always have to find these compromises
• 30:11
  and argue for the common good.
• 30:13
  But in America today, we don't have a hundred
• 30:15
  or a thousand factions as they envisage.
• 30:16
  We have two factions, democratic republicans,
• 30:19
  not super representative of what people actually want.
• 30:21
  A lot of people are frustrated with being squeezed
• 30:24
  into those two factions.
• 30:25
  When you look at what's actually going on in Washington DC,
• 30:28
  we don't have a hundred factions.
• 30:29
  We have two factions and that's exactly what the founding
• 30:31
  fathers were concerned about.
• 30:34
  In another respect, of course, we have 300
• 30:36
  and how the many million factions all wanting
• 30:41
  their own individual things and a society that respects
• 30:45
  the liberty of the individual is one that has to be
• 30:49
  sort of a large enough capacious enough in its understanding
• 30:53
  of how to fulfill the desires of all of those people
• 30:57
  to keep them knitted together.
• 30:59
  And I mean, this sort of brings us to your specialty,
• 31:02
  which is I suppose populism and tribalism
• 31:05
  and the way that we'll bump into each other.
• 31:08
  There's a growing sense on the right in Europe
• 31:12
  and the rise of the far right in Europe
• 31:15
  in the alt-right in America and Trumpism
• 31:18
  and it has its echoes all over the place that the,
• 31:23
  I don't know, the fracturing of a common culture,
• 31:26
  the demise of agreed upon Judeo-Christian traditions
• 31:31
  and norms, the importation of other cultures
• 31:35
  from abroad are putting too many strains on our ability
• 31:39
  to conceive of ourselves as a common people
• 31:42
  with a common mission and it's all splitting a sander.
• 31:48
  What do you make of that critique?
• 31:53
  Yeah, so there's two different ways in which,
• 31:58
  you know, so I think you are right,
• 32:01
  but as we're all tension between,
• 32:03
  we have two political parties and they pretend
• 32:06
  to stand for everybody.
• 32:08
  That's obviously mostly true in political systems
• 32:11
  that have something like first-party posts
• 32:14
  that have majoritarian political systems right where
• 32:16
  a district or constituency is one by the person
• 32:19
  who has the most votes, which puts a lot of pressure
• 32:22
  on voters not to waste a vote, right?
• 32:25
  You might be, maybe some third or fourth or fifth party,
• 32:27
  some tiny party that you feel like really represents
• 32:29
  what you think, but since you know that voting for them
• 32:32
  is unlikely to get a candidate elected,
• 32:34
  most people say, well, I vote for one candidate,
• 32:37
  one of two major parties because that way,
• 32:39
  at least the people I read it is like out of office.
• 32:41
  So that's why countries like United States and Australia
• 32:45
  and Britain tend to end up with few political parties
• 32:50
  and mostly with two political parties.
• 32:51
  Yeah, although we don't actually,
• 32:52
  we don't actually have first-party posts.
• 32:54
  We have preferential system which I hear
• 32:56
  and talked about in America a lot.
• 32:57
  I can't remember what they call it there.
• 33:00
  There's some American term for it.
• 33:01
  Do you know what I'm talking about?
• 33:04
  Oh, is it, well, describe a system for me.
• 33:06
  Oh, ballot, they call it ranked,
• 33:09
  they call it ranked choice voting.
• 33:11
  So it is still, the system in number,
• 33:15
  you allocate a number in order of preferences
• 33:18
  and then whoever gets knocked out has the right,
• 33:21
  then your next preference goes bouncing up.
• 33:23
  So your vote is never wasted by voting for a minor party
• 33:26
  which means that we do have a Greens party
• 33:29
  and we do have small minor parties.
• 33:30
  But nonetheless, so it's not as bad as it is in the US and the UK.
• 33:34
  But we don't have what you have in, for example, Germany,
• 33:36
  where you actually have a fully,
• 33:38
  it's not a proportional represent.
• 33:40
  But it's still a major or a terrible system, right?
• 33:42
  Like you have a specific constituency
• 33:44
  and that specific constituency has one MP in the one
• 33:48
  because yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 33:50
  Yes, with the exception of the fact that we have a Senate
• 33:52
  like the United States,
• 33:53
  but the lower house is more akin
• 33:55
  to the House of Commons in the UK.
• 33:57
  But yeah, it's sort of a wash minster system, we call it.
• 34:00
  Interesting.
• 34:01
  Yeah, so that's sort of a variation
• 34:02
  on a majority and political system
• 34:04
  which does, as you say, sort of solve a problem
• 34:06
  of a wasted vote a little bit
• 34:08
  that still pushes people towards the two party system.
• 34:13
  It's sort of, yeah, to a lesser extent,
• 34:17
  but it's very different from a system
• 34:18
  for proportional representation, right?
• 34:19
  Yes, that's right.
• 34:21
  You know, if you have a political party standing nationwide
• 34:25
  and get 7% of a vote,
• 34:27
  then roughly speaking, 7% of votes in parliament
• 34:30
  are gonna go to that party, right?
• 34:31
  Where's it?
• 34:32
  Exactly.
• 34:33
  You're talking about that.
• 34:34
  You're selling people vote for you on the first round.
• 34:37
  You're gonna get eliminated.
• 34:38
  And perhaps a vote isn't wasted,
• 34:41
  so if I look at the second preference,
• 34:44
  but it still sort of pushes people towards
• 34:45
  the main political system.
• 34:47
  Correct.
• 34:49
  And so anyway, but even if you have, say,
• 34:50
  five or six political parties, right,
• 34:54
  then you have just this huge variety in society.
• 34:57
  And that variety, I think, comes from two different sources.
• 35:01
  One source of it is actually technological, I think.
• 35:07
  You know, it used to be the case
• 35:09
  but we have a few TV channels, a few newspapers.
• 35:15
  And that, you know, to have an identity, political or otherwise,
• 35:20
  you really need to agree with millions of people, right?
• 35:22
  You had an identity as a worker,
• 35:23
  or perhaps as a Protestant or Catholic or Muslim or Jew.
• 35:27
  You know, within schools, you might have had four or five identities
• 35:31
  as sort of, you know,
• 35:33
  having to be a American, high school movie, right?
• 35:34
  As a job or as a nerd or as a theater kid
• 35:38
  or something like that.
• 35:39
  But, you know, there was a limit
• 35:41
  because you needed to have a lot of people who are like you
• 35:46
  in order to be able to stay in a real strand of culture.
• 35:52
  And I think what's happened because of the rise
• 35:54
  of the internet and of social media
• 35:56
  in particular, the ability to tag yourself
• 36:01
  to find the people nationwide or worldwide
• 36:04
  who happen to share very specific interests or views
• 36:08
  is just a huge proliferation in how people identify.
• 36:12
  So that some people now identify, you know,
• 36:16
  as vegans in a very strong way
• 36:20
  that wouldn't have been the case earlier,
• 36:22
  or some people identify as, you know,
• 36:25
  through a fandom, through some anime.
• 36:29
  Or some people might identify very strongly
• 36:31
  with a sexual orientation,
• 36:33
  which is not just being straight, okay,
• 36:35
  or lesbian or trans,
• 36:37
  you know, a much more sort of variegated sexual
• 36:39
  and much more specific.
• 36:41
  Because rather than saying, hey, you know,
• 36:43
  I want an identity, but I need friends
• 36:44
  who sort of share that identity.
• 36:47
  And in my school, there's only so many people.
• 36:48
  And so, you know, that sort of puts a minimum limit
• 36:51
  on what kind of identity is viable.
• 36:53
  I can say, well, there's millions and millions
• 36:55
  of people on the internet.
• 36:56
  And as long as I find, you know,
• 36:57
  500,000 people somewhere in the world
• 37:00
  who share that identity, that can create,
• 37:02
  that can allow us to cook, create that kind of culture.
• 37:04
  And so I think in an odd way,
• 37:06
  society has become much more kaleidoscopic
• 37:11
  as a result, with these really strongly held identities
• 37:16
  and a much larger number of them in the past.
• 37:19
  And that makes it hard to then project that variety
• 37:22
  onto those two political parties,
• 37:24
  perhaps in some kind of five or six political parties.
• 37:26
  How are these parties supposed to cater to these,
• 37:30
  you know, hundreds and thousands of different identities?
• 37:32
  That's a fundamental problem
• 37:34
  that our technological movement presents as well.
• 37:37
  The other problem that you alluded to
• 37:39
  is really the subject of my last book,
• 37:43
  The Great Experiment,
• 37:44
  A Wide Averse Democracy is full apart
• 37:46
  and how they can endure.
• 37:47
  And that's that, you know, most democracy in the world
• 37:52
  have historically functioned in one of two ways.
• 37:55
  Either they're pretty diverse as the United States
• 37:57
  and Canada, where, since we're founding,
• 38:01
  but they had very strict racial religious hierarchy
• 38:04
  in which one group that was reasonably homogeneous
• 38:06
  dominated politics and culture.
• 38:09
  Or you had societies that were actually pretty homogeneous
• 38:13
  as many Western European societies were,
• 38:17
  certainly in the wake of World War II.
• 38:20
  And so then you said, look, we just have this set of people
• 38:24
  who agree mostly in religion,
• 38:25
  who agree mostly on the kind of answers to the have
• 38:29
  who've filled a pretty thick culture together over time.
• 38:32
  And, you know, that helps to keep certain kinds of cultural
• 38:37
  and other conflicts to a minimum.
• 38:39
  What we've got now is the Great Experiment,
• 38:43
  a unique experiment, something that is historically unprecedented.
• 38:48
  And we sort of stumbled into it in a way,
• 38:51
  which is these deeply ethnically and religiously diverse
• 38:53
  societies, but I actually try to treat the members as equals,
• 38:58
  who is exceeding as much progress to be made there.
• 39:00
  But certainly don't say we have a clear hierarchy
• 39:04
  and if you're not part of this group,
• 39:07
  we don't care.
• 39:08
  We were trying to give them the same rights,
• 39:11
  the same participation in our culture and politics and so on.
• 39:15
  And so that's another sort of source of great diversity,
• 39:18
  a source of, and therefore sometimes also source of tension
• 39:23
  and contestation and conflict.
• 39:27
  Yeah, what are the roadblocks there?
• 39:28
  Because I mean, and maybe they're different in countries
• 39:31
  that are new versus countries that are old.
• 39:34
  Australia was formally a white country.
• 39:37
  I mean, formally in both sense, formally and also formally,
• 39:41
  a white country.
• 39:42
  And then after the Second World War needed a lot of labor
• 39:45
  and sort of gradually started fudging the definitions
• 39:48
  of whiteness to include Greeks and Italians and so on.
• 39:51
  And then that was abolished in the 60s.
• 39:53
  And since then has been completely transformed
• 39:56
  and is now more multi-ethnic, I mean,
• 39:59
  with the exception of Mexicans and black Americans
• 40:02
  in comparison to America is more multi-ethnic
• 40:05
  than the United States even.
• 40:07
  And more than half the population has arrived since World War II.
• 40:10
  One in five households don't speak English at home.
• 40:14
  You know, three of the top five countries
• 40:15
  that come to where people come to Australia from,
• 40:18
  are in Asia, Vietnam, China and India.
• 40:21
  And it's been, I think, touch wood quite successful
• 40:27
  at being able to incorporate these very large numbers
• 40:30
  of very diverse communities with seemingly less of the pushback
• 40:35
  and less of the scapegoating than I hear from my friends
• 40:39
  in European countries, especially France,
• 40:42
  where I have family, where there seems to be more friction.
• 40:45
  And I wonder what you attribute that friction to.
• 40:50
  Yeah, so a couple of points.
• 40:52
  First is the transformation of some of the societies
• 40:57
  we're talking about is really striking,
• 41:01
  including some societies that outside
• 41:04
  is don't yet think of as typical examples
• 41:09
  of that form of deep diversity, right?
• 41:11
  So people realize that the United States
• 41:13
  and Canada are deeply diverse countries.
• 41:15
  We sort of understand that Britain is to some extent perhaps,
• 41:19
  but France has had a lot of immigration
• 41:21
  from North Africa and so on.
• 41:23
  But in places like Sweden or Denmark or Norway,
• 41:27
  where very, very homogeneous 50 years ago,
• 41:30
  I mean, some of the most homogeneous societies on Earth,
• 41:33
  and now are very diverse.
• 41:35
  I think well over 20% of people living in Sweden today
• 41:39
  were born outside of a country.
• 41:40
  Most of them are not neighboring European countries,
• 41:44
  but stem from much further away.
• 41:47
  And Australia, as you're pointing out,
• 41:49
  I think this is an example of a society
• 41:51
  that is just fundamentally transformed
• 41:53
  in those kind of demographic terms
• 41:55
  over a course of a few reasonably short decades.
• 42:01
  And so we should recognize,
• 42:02
  but we don't really have much precedent
• 42:03
  for what that looks like and for how to make that work.
• 42:06
  So the second point, let me sort of talk you through
• 42:09
  some of the deeper psychological and historical reasons
• 42:13
  why I think, but that's create some challenges,
• 42:17
  or we should take seriously in order to be able
• 42:19
  to make them work.
• 42:21
  And so the first challenge to me
• 42:23
  is just simply psychological, right?
• 42:26
  I have students who are very diverse,
• 42:30
  who come from all over the world,
• 42:31
  certainly from every ethnicity and who think of themselves
• 42:35
  as most foreign people in the world,
• 42:37
  people who would never sort of say,
• 42:39
  my group is more important than your group and so on.
• 42:42
  But when I asked them at the beginning of lecture class,
• 42:46
  well, we're not a hot dog as a sandwich.
• 42:48
  And you know, they look at me a little confused
• 42:50
  and the faddles, like why are we talking about hot dogs?
• 42:53
  And when we get into the debate, you know,
• 42:55
  and that's always passionate,
• 42:56
  people on each side of the debate,
• 42:58
  and I let them have some fun for five or 10 minutes.
• 43:00
  And when I have them play a simple distribution game,
• 43:03
  whether I have to decide essentially,
• 43:05
  whether they want to give a little bit more money
• 43:08
  to the other side of the argument
• 43:10
  but come out with a nice little stash of cash themselves,
• 43:13
  or whether they would rather penalize everybody
• 43:16
  including themselves, take home less money themselves,
• 43:18
  just to make sure that they get more money
• 43:19
  than these other idiots who think
• 43:21
  where the hot dog is a sandwich,
• 43:22
  where the hot dog is not a sandwich.
• 43:23
  And what do they do?
• 43:26
  They discriminate against the other group
• 43:28
  where they'd rather take home less money themselves,
• 43:30
  just to make sure that these assholes
• 43:33
  who think where the hot dog is a sandwich
• 43:34
  don't get more money.
• 43:37
  And you know, that shows a really fundamental aspect
• 43:41
  of human beings, which is that they're groupish, right?
• 43:45
  But we are, we have a deep tendency to form groups
• 43:49
  and the drop of a hat essentially,
• 43:51
  to treat the members of our own groups very well
• 43:55
  under certain circumstances
• 43:56
  from incredible courage and altruism,
• 44:00
  but also to have indifference,
• 44:03
  and sometimes much worse than indifference
• 44:05
  towards members of the other group.
• 44:06
  And we just always have to think about how to manage
• 44:09
  that fundamental human instinct
• 44:11
  because it'll always be a big part of social layout.
• 44:13
  So that's wonderful.
• 44:15
  The second difficulty is that you can get this going
• 44:18
  or the anything, you can get this going
• 44:20
  or the other hot dog as a sandwich.
• 44:23
  But we know from history that there are some kinds
• 44:26
  of dimensions of a scripted identity in particular
• 44:31
  that I especially motivate him.
• 44:34
  So many of the worst, you know, crimes,
• 44:38
  many of the worst wars and civil wars
• 44:40
  and forms of genocide and ethnic cleansing in history
• 44:44
  have pitted members of one ethnic, religious,
• 44:51
  sometimes linguistic group against another.
• 44:57
  That's, that's, you know,
• 44:58
  many of the worst catastrophe of human history.
• 45:03
  I mean, third, by the way, you know, democracy,
• 45:06
  but voting mechanism we talked about,
• 45:08
  you would hope it would make things easier and better,
• 45:11
  but it doesn't necessarily,
• 45:13
  because if you think of a kind of traditional, you know,
• 45:17
  multinational empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire,
• 45:19
  the Ottoman empire or something like that,
• 45:21
  people might have said, look, I don't really have
• 45:24
  any political power, you don't really have any political power.
• 45:29
  You know, but as long as we kind of trust the monarch
• 45:31
  to be tolerant towards each of us,
• 45:33
  it doesn't matter to me if you have more kids than I do,
• 45:37
  if your group is growing more quickly than mine is,
• 45:39
  if more immigrants are coming in,
• 45:40
  who look like you love them and me, right?
• 45:42
  In a democracy, you're always searching for a majority,
• 45:47
  that's the nature of the electoral mechanism,
• 45:50
  right, you're trying to build a majority.
• 45:52
  And if I feel like I used to be in the majority,
• 45:54
  my group, my ethnic group, my cultural group,
• 45:56
  whatever it may be, used to be in the majority,
• 45:59
  but now your group is growing more quickly than mine is,
• 46:02
  because there's more immigrants coming in,
• 46:03
  who look like you, you have more children, whatever it is.
• 46:05
  Hang on a second, suddenly, you know, I have a power now,
• 46:08
  but I might be in a minority tomorrow,
• 46:10
  and many of you might have overpower,
• 46:11
  and that might be a disaster for me.
• 46:12
  So, you know, perhaps I need to stop this,
• 46:14
  and so this creates these really deep fears
• 46:19
  that have been exploited with conspiracy theories,
• 46:22
  like the idea of a way to replace them and so on,
• 46:23
  but that's a big part of our politics today, right?
• 46:26
  With dwindling, majority sort of being fearful
• 46:29
  of what might happen when we're in a demographic
• 46:31
  composition of a country changes.
• 46:33
  And so, we take these three points together,
• 46:35
  the tendency to be groupish,
• 46:38
  be the power of, you know, ethnic, religious, linguistic,
• 46:42
  divisions in particular to inspire this kind of hatred
• 46:48
  of the outgroup, and in fact, would be a electoral mechanism
• 46:51
  of democracy actually aggravates this.
• 46:53
  And you see why some of this is difficult,
• 46:55
  why, you know, there's real contestation
• 46:59
  around the demographic changes we've had over the last decades.
• 47:04
  Now, I think here's the good news,
• 47:05
  which is we can go more into that.
• 47:07
  I think we're doing much better than many people are thinking,
• 47:09
  we're doing much better than people
• 47:10
  on the far right of say we are,
• 47:13
  but I think actually we're doing better than many respects
• 47:15
  than many of my friends who are on the left
• 47:17
  or who are more politically moderate are thinking as well.
• 47:21
  And I think Australia is one example of that.
• 47:25
  And I've been talking for a long time,
• 47:26
  but let me ask answer the last part of a question you posed,
• 47:28
  which is why is Australia doing better than many other countries?
• 47:31
  I think that has a pretty straightforward reason,
• 47:33
  is the other country that's doing pretty well is Canada.
• 47:35
  And Canada and Australia have something in common,
• 47:40
  which is kind of cheat code.
• 47:42
  You know, they have, they don't have,
• 47:46
  they have very strong control over who comes into their country
• 47:50
  in part because of a geographical location.
• 47:52
  And they have chosen, understandably,
• 47:55
  to prioritize high-skill immigrants.
• 47:58
  And for a variety of reasons,
• 47:59
  I think it's just easier to integrate people
• 48:03
  when they come to the country of their own free religion,
• 48:06
  they're not fleeing some terrible war by and large,
• 48:09
  but they're deciding to uproot themselves or better lives
• 48:12
  or they choose the country they want to go to,
• 48:15
  they come with a higher educational standard,
• 48:17
  they usually come already speaking the language,
• 48:19
  because that's one of the conditions of being able
• 48:21
  to get most of us immigrant visas.
• 48:24
  And so I think, you know, you're doing very well,
• 48:27
  but I'm afraid to say you're playing on easy mode.
• 48:30
  Yeah.
• 48:31
  Yeah.
• 48:32
  Well, the playing on easy mode is not an accident.
• 48:38
  It's not happenstance.
• 48:40
  You know, there was a Faustian pact made in Australia
• 48:45
  that we needed lots and lots more people
• 48:47
  and the way to convince reticent,
• 48:50
  enough reticent people that you weren't gonna get a pushback
• 48:52
  against immigration was to make them feel like
• 48:55
  we have control over the borders
• 48:57
  and to make them feel like we're choosing to do this.
• 49:00
  I mean, I think one of the great dysfunctions
• 49:02
  of America's immigration policy
• 49:04
  without which Donald Trump would never have become president
• 49:07
  is that the left has seemed to lose track
• 49:11
  of the possibility of having a generous immigration policy
• 49:15
  that is also functional.
• 49:16
  In other words, like I, from the perspective of an Australian,
• 49:20
  I've never understood why it is necessarily racist
• 49:25
  to build a wall between America and Mexico.
• 49:28
  I understand that in practice,
• 49:30
  that build the wall, jingoistic chant
• 49:33
  is used by people who also happen to be xenophobic.
• 49:36
  But in principle, I don't see any reason why it is xenophobic
• 49:40
  to say that America should be taking more people
• 49:42
  from Bangladesh or as in Babui
• 49:44
  and fewer people from Mexico.
• 49:46
  Why Mexico gets special treatment just
• 49:49
  because it happens to be next door?
• 49:51
  I mean, a sane immigration policy could be very pro-immigrant,
• 49:54
  could be xenophilic, could be very welcoming
• 49:58
  and could also have secure borders,
• 50:00
  which is what Australia is
• 50:01
  and we have the good fortune to be surrounded by a lot of water.
• 50:05
  But nonetheless, have also made these difficult moral choices,
• 50:10
  many of which I object to,
• 50:12
  because I think they're too harsh,
• 50:13
  like locking up refugees on desert islands
• 50:16
  in the Pacific in perpetuity,
• 50:18
  simply as a warning to other people not to come by boat.
• 50:22
  But the case can be made that if that is the price
• 50:25
  that has to be paid comically and morally
• 50:27
  to have 25 million people all supportive
• 50:30
  of one of the highest humanitarian,
• 50:33
  like resettlement rates in the world
• 50:36
  and of very, very high rates of, as you say,
• 50:38
  highly skilled immigration as well,
• 50:40
  then maybe that's a price worth paying.
• 50:44
  Why are people on the left?
• 50:46
  I mean, you say that, you know, right wingers think
• 50:48
  that democracy is sick,
• 50:51
  but many of your colleagues on the left do as well.
• 50:55
  I mean, yeah, in my experience,
• 50:57
  my colleagues on the left are actually more pessimistic
• 51:01
  than I think the right wingers.
• 51:03
  I think they think the whole edifice of democracy
• 51:06
  is falling apart and I'm not sure where that comes
• 51:10
  from or what you would say to them.
• 51:12
  Well, let me go back to immigration question for a second
• 51:15
  because I think it's super interesting.
• 51:17
  I don't want to get to the other one as well, of course.
• 51:20
  You know, one of those fascinating polls
• 51:22
  I've seen in the last few years,
• 51:23
  which was perhaps in 2017, 2018,
• 51:25
  is that it was a clear majority in a poll
• 51:29
  for building a wall on the southern border,
• 51:33
  but this was a poll in Mexico
• 51:35
  and it was a majority of Mexicans
• 51:37
  who wanted to build a wall on the southern border of Mexico.
• 51:41
  So, you know, the polls are,
• 51:42
  there's a much more complicated than people think.
• 51:44
  And by the way, one of the huge problems in America
• 51:47
  is sort of, you know, Trump and narrative
• 51:49
  of a democratic party who think about all quote, unquote,
• 51:52
  people of color somehow metaphysically the same category
• 51:55
  and are always going to vote in lockstep and we're seeing,
• 51:59
  no matter as many total Latinos from Mexico
• 52:02
  who don't want immigration to their country
• 52:04
  from our countries in central America,
• 52:07
  poorer and so on when Mexico is.
• 52:10
  So, you know, I think you're right with often the instinct
• 52:13
  to just label things racist
• 52:15
  and sort of have at the end of a discussion.
• 52:17
  Obstacles, these really interesting dynamics and divisions
• 52:20
  that are going on underneath the surface.
• 52:25
  You know, walls are somebody who grew up in Germany
• 52:28
  not so far from the building wall,
• 52:29
  always a particular stomach ache for me
• 52:31
  and I do have, you know, I'm not a big fan of the idea,
• 52:38
  but more broadly, I agree with you
• 52:42
  that, you know, what those of us who think
• 52:46
  but actually some level of immigration is good and healthy
• 52:50
  should be doing is to tell people, hey, we're democracy,
• 52:54
  we're going to have the immigration levels
• 52:57
  that people actually want, we're going to listen
• 52:59
  to what the citizens are telling us
• 53:02
  because if we don't, then eventually we're going to vote
• 53:04
  for, you know, really nasty politicians like Donald Trump
• 53:09
  who they trust to finally do the job
• 53:13
  that everybody else refuses to.
• 53:14
  So that's one thing we should do, I think,
• 53:17
  is that we should show very strongly
• 53:20
  that we have control of our borders
• 53:21
  because as you're pointing out to the case of Australia,
• 53:24
  that is the precondition under which you can win
• 53:27
  a democratic debate to say, hey, you know,
• 53:30
  we should have immigrants who can contribute
• 53:33
  to a lot of our society.
• 53:34
  And by the way, you know, when people are generally
• 53:38
  fleeing for their lives and they might die
• 53:41
  unless we admit them in a temporary way
• 53:43
  then we should be admitting refugees as well.
• 53:46
  I think you can win those arguments
• 53:48
  with good moral, you know, case that you can make
• 53:53
  if people have the feeling that the politicians
• 53:56
  are honest about their intentions
• 53:58
  and that they're willing to, you know,
• 54:00
  do what it takes for a country
• 54:01
  to actually make those decisions in a meaningful way.
• 54:04
  Now here's the basic problem for, right?
• 54:07
  Huge majorities of people in every country
• 54:10
  want control of a border.
• 54:12
  Huge majorities in every country also object
• 54:14
  when the government does really, really cruel things.
• 54:18
  And one of the, you know,
• 54:21
  and that is just a set of policies
• 54:23
  that is very hard to have at the same time
• 54:26
  because when people are desperate enough,
• 54:28
  they are willing to go to extreme lengths
• 54:31
  to escape their countries and to go somewhere
• 54:33
  where they'll have more opportunity and so on.
• 54:36
  And so it often takes pretty extreme cruelty
• 54:38
  to keep them out.
• 54:39
  So, you know, the devil here is in the details
• 54:43
  and how you maintain real control over your borders
• 54:48
  without engaging in the kind of cruelty
• 54:51
  that for good reason most people find objectionable
• 54:55
  is not a trivial problem to solve in practice.
• 54:58
  But I think in sort of at least in broad outlines
• 55:01
  for policies should clearly be, you know,
• 55:04
  have clear control of your borders,
• 55:08
  take seriously the expressed democratic preference
• 55:11
  of your citizens, but make the case
• 55:13
  for the kind of immigration that either
• 55:16
  is really healthy for your own country
• 55:18
  or is just required for deeply compelling moral reasons
• 55:21
  like, you know, people fleeing a terrible war
• 55:24
  as they might be in Ukraine.
• 55:25
  Mm-hmm.
• 55:27
  Yes, I mean, and I should say when I say
• 55:30
  that I don't have a problem with building a wall,
• 55:34
  there are so many things you can do
• 55:36
  before you need to get to building a physical wall
• 55:38
  that the US isn't doing, that for me the wall
• 55:40
  is sort of a moot point or a distraction.
• 55:42
  I mean, you could just enforce employment law
• 55:44
  and put proper fines on companies
• 55:48
  that hire illegal workers, you know,
• 55:51
  supposed to call them illegal workers,
• 55:53
  you first call them undocumented persons or whatever,
• 55:55
  but you know, they're workers who are working there illegally.
• 55:57
  And this is done with the tacit agreement of industry
• 56:00
  and of captains of business and politicians.
• 56:05
  I mean, if you just seriously required people to have proper ID
• 56:08
  and if you've made, you've fixed up some of the holes
• 56:11
  on the social security number distribution system
• 56:14
  in the United States so that there was great employer verification
• 56:18
  and companies that got around it
• 56:20
  were effectively fine so much that they were sent out of business.
• 56:24
  Then very quickly the problem would go away
• 56:26
  because people wouldn't be able to get illegal jobs
• 56:28
  and you wouldn't need to build a wall in the first place.
• 56:29
  And by the way, you know, Mid Romney, who, you know,
• 56:33
  I wasn't yet a citizen in 2012,
• 56:34
  I would not have voted for him,
• 56:35
  I would have voted without hesitating for Barack Obama.
• 56:40
  But he was talking about that in 2012.
• 56:42
  He was saying, you know, the way to deal with this problem
• 56:45
  is to have much, much stricter enforcement of employment law
• 56:50
  and to punish very heavily companies
• 56:52
  who employ and document migrants.
• 56:55
  And that's just going to reduce the demand
• 56:57
  for people to come into the country
• 56:59
  because we're not going to be able to reap the kind
• 57:02
  of economic benefits that they understand
• 57:03
  or they're hoping for.
• 57:06
  Yeah, I mean, all that.
• 57:07
  And there should be a lesson,
• 57:10
  you know, a response to that should be a lesson to Democrats
• 57:12
  because, you know, they really, really
• 57:16
  taught Mid Romney as a racist
• 57:18
  and as a horrible and cruel person for that set of policies
• 57:23
  and then what do they get the next time around?
• 57:25
  They got Donald Trump, who is the real deal.
• 57:29
  So, you know, we need to be able wherever you stand
• 57:32
  on a proposal like that
• 57:35
  to discuss that kind of policy and good faith
• 57:38
  and without impugning the mergers of the other person
• 57:41
  because otherwise, you know,
• 57:45
  you're just creating an incentive for your position
• 57:47
  to become more and more extreme
• 57:48
  and for ordinary people to say, you know, what I think
• 57:51
  what Romney suggested is pretty reasonable
• 57:53
  and if you're saying he's racist for suggesting that
• 57:54
  then I guess you're saying I'm racist.
• 57:56
  So you just look down on me, screw you next time.
• 57:58
  I'm going to vote for a bomb for our like Donald Trump.
• 58:02
  Yeah, and for pointing out these cultural dynamics,
• 58:05
  you get accused of being an anti-immigrant,
• 58:08
  which means that you're also racist,
• 58:10
  which means that you're a proto-fascist
• 58:13
  by swathes of the left.
• 58:17
  How does one recapture, I mean, so do I,
• 58:20
  for having these kinds of conversations in the first place?
• 58:24
  Is there a center ground to be recaptured
• 58:27
  because all I see is, I suppose the old,
• 58:31
  I think it was David from who coined the term
• 58:34
  if, you know, if liberal, if smaller liberals
• 58:37
  don't secure borders, then fascists will,
• 58:41
  because people ultimately are going to want to have
• 58:42
  some control over their country.
• 58:45
  But again, for pointing that out,
• 58:46
  that supposedly makes you a fascist yourself,
• 58:48
  is there a way to capture this center ground
• 58:50
  on which smaller liberals can stand?
• 58:53
  Yeah, I mean, look, I think the bad news is that
• 58:56
  if you depart from a very narrow range of opinions
• 59:01
  or views of language or policies,
• 59:03
  when somebody on social media is going to, you know,
• 59:07
  denounce you as a racist or a bigger,
• 59:10
  to a sexist or a transfer or, you know,
• 59:13
  million other things.
• 59:17
  And that is generally scary to a lot of people
• 59:20
  for good reason, mostly,
• 59:23
  because all of those are adjectives,
• 59:27
  but I uphold, right?
• 59:29
  I mean, the last thing I want to be in the world
• 59:31
  is a racist or a transfer,
• 59:34
  because, you know, I'm a tolerant person,
• 59:38
  and I want people to thrive
• 59:40
  irrespective of the ethnic origin or gender identity.
• 59:45
  And so, you know, of course, I'm horrified
• 59:47
  when somebody says that or when somebody incinerates that.
• 59:51
  But I think it's also important to remember
• 59:54
  that those are the voices of very few
• 59:57
  and very extreme people,
• 59:58
  and who are not representative of those groups, right?
• 1:00:02
  And so, you know, yeah, I'm in a weird position
• 1:00:05
  where, you know, some people on social media
• 1:00:09
  say, you know, essentially incinerate
• 1:00:11
  that, you know, I'm some kind of a bigot.
• 1:00:14
  And when at the same time, you know,
• 1:00:15
  Barack Obama, politician who are greatly admire,
• 1:00:18
  and of course, the first black president of the United States,
• 1:00:21
  recommended that people read my book on this topic
• 1:00:24
  on democracy and diversity,
• 1:00:26
  on his reading list this summer, right?
• 1:00:28
  So, I think part of it is just you, you know,
• 1:00:32
  as a writer, you have no excuse.
• 1:00:34
  As a writer, you just have to have a stomach.
• 1:00:36
  You know, my job is to tell the truth.
• 1:00:38
  You know, my job is to write things that are true
• 1:00:42
  and interesting.
• 1:00:45
  It doesn't matter whether convenient or not.
• 1:00:46
  If a true and boring, I don't write them.
• 1:00:48
  I mean, you know, today, you know, it's vaguely, you know,
• 1:00:53
  it's drizzling.
• 1:00:53
  That's not a very interesting sentence.
• 1:00:54
  I'm not gonna write that.
• 1:00:56
  But if it's true and interesting,
• 1:00:58
  I'm going to write it without thinking too much
• 1:00:59
  what Frita says about me.
• 1:01:01
  That's my job.
• 1:01:03
  And I think writers who fail at that job
• 1:01:06
  should look for other work.
• 1:01:07
  Now, I'm not gonna be as harsh about ordinary people
• 1:01:10
  because what I completely understand
• 1:01:12
  is people who say, look, you know,
• 1:01:14
  I'm a lawyer or a doctor or nurse or a teacher
• 1:01:17
  and, you know, or perhaps I'm in the artistic field
• 1:01:20
  where some of those constraints are very strong.
• 1:01:22
  You know, I'm an actor or a painter.
• 1:01:24
  And politics is not my life.
• 1:01:26
  You know, I'm interested in politics.
• 1:01:28
  I'm disturbed by some things I see.
• 1:01:29
  I want to push for an opinion.
• 1:01:30
  But, you know, what?
• 1:01:32
  If expressing that opinion, you know, risks my life,
• 1:01:38
  you know, my livelihood risks losing me all of these friends,
• 1:01:41
  risks, you know, with huge reputational damage.
• 1:01:44
  Is it really worth it?
• 1:01:45
  Perhaps just, you know, shut up and stay out.
• 1:01:47
  And I understand that much more.
• 1:01:48
  I think as writers, you know, we have no excuse.
• 1:01:51
  But, you know, civilians, they don't have to get drawn
• 1:01:55
  into the war and it's everybody's choice.
• 1:01:57
  But I will say that if you express yourself calmly
• 1:02:00
  and carefully and you set out your point of view,
• 1:02:05
  you'll have as many friends as enemies.
• 1:02:08
  And if you, you know, have a stomach
• 1:02:10
  but a couple of people are gonna call you and ask your words.
• 1:02:14
  You know, also know that if you're saying something
• 1:02:17
  reasonable, most people will actually agree.
• 1:02:21
  And, you know, if we all collectively have a courage
• 1:02:24
  to, you know, express ourselves
• 1:02:27
  and some of us complicate in sensitive issues
• 1:02:29
  in a spirit of charity and a spirit of,
• 1:02:34
  you know, not shouting and I'm saying,
• 1:02:35
  now you ask, you know, but just actually putting forward
• 1:02:39
  a considered and tolerant point of view
• 1:02:42
  that expresses some of our concerns about, you know,
• 1:02:45
  parts of how we frame things, you know,
• 1:02:48
  things are going to change very quickly,
• 1:02:50
  there's power and numbers.
• 1:02:52
  I mean, that's very good advice on the,
• 1:02:53
  on a personal and cultural level.
• 1:02:56
  It's less reassuring on a political and public policy level
• 1:03:00
  because when I see the way that the parties
• 1:03:02
  are able to frame things that they disagree with
• 1:03:06
  and when I see what seems to me to be the capture
• 1:03:09
  of the parties, I mean, I'm especially talking
• 1:03:11
  about the United States here where the right is enthralled
• 1:03:15
  to a bunch of total bullshit around Trump and the election
• 1:03:20
  and it just seems to have creamed off into delusional territory
• 1:03:24
  and the response on the left has not been
• 1:03:26
  to do what you're talking about,
• 1:03:27
  to step up and reasonably and rationally and calmly
• 1:03:31
  articulate the valid concerns of the opponents
• 1:03:36
  who they could win over, the Republicans out there
• 1:03:39
  in the heartland who are just craving
• 1:03:42
  someone who sounds reasonable.
• 1:03:44
  Instead, the Democrats just seem to have swung
• 1:03:48
  into a whole bunch of ideas of their own,
• 1:03:52
  I mean, just to stick with the one that we've brought up
• 1:03:55
  about the war and immigration.
• 1:03:57
  If someone as tolerant and anti-racist as me
• 1:04:02
  can feel the jingoism in me being stirred,
• 1:04:05
  when I hear the unfettered immigration,
• 1:04:10
  the unfettered escalation of people just wandering
• 1:04:15
  across the southern border and being able to get whatever job
• 1:04:17
  they want, after I spent more than a decade
• 1:04:20
  in the United States doing everything I needed to do,
• 1:04:24
  paying a fortune to an immigration attorney,
• 1:04:27
  going to all of the stupid meetings
• 1:04:29
  at the immigration people, jumping through ridiculous hoops
• 1:04:33
  and an enormous amount of time and energy
• 1:04:35
  in this Kafka-esque bullshit system
• 1:04:37
  so that I could do everything perfectly right
• 1:04:39
  and dot every eye and cross every T
• 1:04:42
  at paying all of the taxes that I needed to pay
• 1:04:44
  and doing all of that, you know, I think
• 1:04:47
  where the hell did these, you know,
• 1:04:49
  university educated, white, politically correct,
• 1:04:53
  Democrat lefties get off saying that any attempt
• 1:04:57
  to enforce immigration law is racism.
• 1:05:01
  When I've been through all of that
• 1:05:04
  and these people can just come wandering in
• 1:05:06
  and I mean, that is ludicrous like you're off the reservation
• 1:05:11
  and we could both sit down and rattle off
• 1:05:14
  a dozen different areas on which the left has chosen
• 1:05:17
  to take the maximalest possible position.
• 1:05:22
  When right in front of them is the opportunity
• 1:05:25
  to win over heartland voters in the absence of a
• 1:05:29
  sane opposition and they refuse to do that,
• 1:05:32
  they refuse to just meet someone like me halfway
• 1:05:35
  and go, okay, you're right,
• 1:05:37
  this should, there are much smarter ways
• 1:05:40
  of constructing this and we probably actually need
• 1:05:42
  to make a difference to clarify in our mind
• 1:05:45
  the difference between being anti-immigrant
• 1:05:47
  and being opposed to the completely uncontrolled
• 1:05:51
  movement of people across the southern border.
• 1:05:55
  If you can't even meet me there,
• 1:05:57
  then you're not even trying anymore to find common ground
• 1:06:01
  which means that you've given up on essentially
• 1:06:03
  the third point of that you were talking about earlier
• 1:06:06
  that you need in order to, or the third challenge
• 1:06:08
  in stitching together multi-ethnic countries
• 1:06:11
  and diverse countries which is that the majority
• 1:06:14
  needs to feel like it's in control.
• 1:06:18
  Yeah, look, I mean, when it look in the United States
• 1:06:20
  today, the weird thing is that Donald Trump
• 1:06:23
  is way out of a cultural mainstream of the United States.
• 1:06:27
  He's not popular, what he says is not popular.
• 1:06:33
  A portion of a country generally hates him.
• 1:06:35
  A lot of a country just finds him distasteful
• 1:06:39
  and too much and unpleasant.
• 1:06:43
  So it should be very easy to beat him
• 1:06:45
  and it should be very easy to beat him by huge margins.
• 1:06:48
  Right.
• 1:06:49
  So why are Democrats failing to do that?
• 1:06:51
  Well, the simple answer is, I'm not,
• 1:06:53
  I don't know, they're equivalent.
• 1:06:54
  I have no doubt deciding between whether to vote
• 1:06:57
  for Joe Biden or Donald Trump and not a hard decision.
• 1:06:59
  I know I'm voting for, but for a lot of people,
• 1:07:03
  they look at Democrats and they say,
• 1:07:06
  you all are equally out of a cultural mainstream.
• 1:07:09
  You're embracing very extreme positions
• 1:07:12
  that are not rooted in reality.
• 1:07:14
  And if somebody pushes back against them,
• 1:07:17
  if somebody says, we said bad ideas,
• 1:07:20
  then you just say they're bad human being.
• 1:07:24
  So why should we trust you?
• 1:07:28
  And if you look down on us in that way,
• 1:07:31
  then I guess I'll hold my nose and vote for the other guy
• 1:07:35
  who at least doesn't seem to hate me in the same way.
• 1:07:37
  And if Democrats don't get a handle on that
• 1:07:40
  from the mental dynamic,
• 1:07:43
  then we might end up with Trump back in the White House
• 1:07:46
  in 2024, even though he's deeply unpopular.
• 1:07:50
  And that I'm really concerned about.
• 1:07:55
  I just want to talk about populism before I let you go.
• 1:07:58
  We've seen, in recent decades,
• 1:08:01
  the collapse of democracy in democratic countries,
• 1:08:06
  countries that we've thought previously were
• 1:08:08
  robustly democratic, like Hungary.
• 1:08:10
  Countries that we had hoped would be more democratic,
• 1:08:13
  like Turkey and Thailand.
• 1:08:16
  You know, we've seen an acceleration of authoritarianism
• 1:08:19
  in China and Russia.
• 1:08:22
  We've seen the rise of populist right wingers,
• 1:08:25
  like Trump in the United States
• 1:08:26
  and the new Italian government.
• 1:08:29
  What's going on?
• 1:08:29
  And how do we stop it?
• 1:08:33
  Ah, nice, easy little question.
• 1:08:38
  So look, I think when something really changes,
• 1:08:44
  you've got to figure out what changed
• 1:08:47
  from the background conditions, right?
• 1:08:49
  So I sometimes tell the story,
• 1:08:50
  but originally comes from Bertrand Russell
• 1:08:52
  off a chicken on a farm.
• 1:08:54
  And, you know, every day the farmer comes and feeds the chicken
• 1:08:56
  and because it's some food and the chicken couldn't be happier.
• 1:08:59
  He thinks he's hit the jackpot in life.
• 1:09:02
  And we have a farmer and we'll say,
• 1:09:04
  hey, chicken, be careful.
• 1:09:05
  The farmer only seems nice.
• 1:09:06
  One day he's going to come and kill you.
• 1:09:08
  I'm just going to say, well, what do you know of?
• 1:09:09
  You know, he's been nice to me every day.
• 1:09:12
  He might as well be encouraging words
• 1:09:13
  as he gives me plenty of food.
• 1:09:15
  What should I worry about?
• 1:09:18
  And of course, as Russell says,
• 1:09:20
  one day the farmer does come to ring with chickens neck,
• 1:09:22
  showing that quote,
• 1:09:24
  more sophisticated views as to the nature of causation
• 1:09:27
  would have been to the chickens benefit.
• 1:09:31
  So what happened here?
• 1:09:32
  Well, we know what happened, right?
• 1:09:34
  The chicken needed to be at a certain kind of weight or age
• 1:09:37
  in order to fetch a good price ever market.
• 1:09:39
  So, you know, the farmer was trying to get it there.
• 1:09:42
  And once the weight was reached, the behavior changed a lot.
• 1:09:46
  So there's sort of scope conditions
• 1:09:48
  that govern the behavior.
• 1:09:49
  Now, if we look at, you know,
• 1:09:51
  these democracies, especially in, you know,
• 1:09:55
  Western Europe, North America, Australia, and so on,
• 1:09:57
  which were very stable for a long time,
• 1:09:59
  and then became a lot less stable.
• 1:10:00
  Australia still is pretty stable.
• 1:10:04
  You know, we want to ask, well, what was true then?
• 1:10:07
  But isn't true now?
• 1:10:08
  How do the scope conditions change?
• 1:10:10
  And in my first or really big book,
• 1:10:12
  The People versus Democracy,
• 1:10:14
  which is about the rise of populism
• 1:10:16
  and how to think about it,
• 1:10:18
  I make a few arguments,
• 1:10:22
  three arguments about the structural conditions
• 1:10:24
  that have changed.
• 1:10:25
  And now I would add a fourth one.
• 1:10:28
  So the first is about economic stagnation, right?
• 1:10:32
  From 1945 to 1960 living standard
• 1:10:36
  from the average market doubles.
• 1:10:37
  From 1960 to 1985, the doubles again.
• 1:10:40
  And since then, it's been more or less stagnant.
• 1:10:43
  You know, depending on the calculation,
• 1:10:44
  it probably went up a little bit.
• 1:10:46
  It's not going to sum economists,
• 1:10:47
  it hasn't gone up at all for a median American.
• 1:10:50
  But the point is, with very far,
• 1:10:52
  from that rapid improvement in transformation
• 1:10:55
  and living standards,
• 1:10:56
  that occurred during the period
• 1:10:58
  when democracy was really stable.
• 1:11:02
  The second point is about the rise of the internet
• 1:11:05
  and social media, right?
• 1:11:06
  This obviously fractures the public
• 1:11:09
  and the way I was talking about earlier.
• 1:11:11
  But it also makes it much easier for political newcomers
• 1:11:14
  to organize themselves.
• 1:11:16
  And for people to head, to spread sort of hatred
• 1:11:20
  and sometimes lies on the internet.
• 1:11:24
  I don't like to term misinformation,
• 1:11:25
  disinformation, by the way, either it's a lie
• 1:11:27
  or what you're talking about what it is.
• 1:11:29
  This term misinformation is just sort of
• 1:11:31
  can mean anything and everything.
• 1:11:33
  But it's actual lies, but it's spreading on the internet.
• 1:11:35
  That's a problem.
• 1:11:37
  The third point is what we've talked about a little bit
• 1:11:40
  would became the subject of my subsequent book,
• 1:11:43
  where this paramount, which is the huge rise
• 1:11:45
  in ethnic and religious diversity,
• 1:11:47
  the fact that what we're trying to do
• 1:11:49
  in terms of building equal societies,
• 1:11:51
  whether that profoundly diverse,
• 1:11:53
  is historically pretty unprecedented.
• 1:11:57
  So those are the three things I talked about
• 1:11:59
  in the people versus democracy
• 1:12:00
  and I think we continue to be relevant,
• 1:12:02
  they explain a lot of what's going on.
• 1:12:03
  But I think there's a fourth thing
• 1:12:05
  that I was a little bit blind to
• 1:12:07
  and that I would now say is equally important.
• 1:12:10
  And that is that in many countries,
• 1:12:13
  you've had a fundamental growth
• 1:12:16
  of a 5% or so of a population,
• 1:12:19
  perhaps 10% of a population,
• 1:12:21
  but have a real notables.
• 1:12:24
  Doctors and lawyers and academics and journalists
• 1:12:27
  who live in the big cities,
• 1:12:33
  who are often very affluent,
• 1:12:34
  but not necessarily the very richest people in society,
• 1:12:38
  but they live good lives.
• 1:12:41
  And they've created a cultural bubble
• 1:12:45
  in which they consume very different media products
• 1:12:48
  and journalism in which they're much more concentrated
• 1:12:53
  in particular neighborhoods than they used to be.
• 1:12:57
  And where they really lose touch
• 1:12:59
  from a lot of the rest of society
• 1:13:02
  and start not only to be very influential
• 1:13:04
  on the politics of left-wing parties
• 1:13:07
  in the ways we've been talking about,
• 1:13:09
  but also to have real disdain for ordinary citizens.
• 1:13:11
  And this is stronger in some countries than in others,
• 1:13:13
  perhaps with Meatship in Australia,
• 1:13:16
  it's not as strong as it is in the United States, for example.
• 1:13:18
  But I'm consistently surprised about the way
• 1:13:22
  in which trends and acquaintances and colleagues of mine
• 1:13:24
  were decent people, you know.
• 1:13:26
  And we think of themselves as very moral people,
• 1:13:29
  just to have a fundamental instinct
• 1:13:30
  to look down on the average citizens,
• 1:13:32
  just have the assumption that the average American
• 1:13:34
  is just a bad, you know, bigger to human being.
• 1:13:38
  I mean, truth matters in a democracy that really matters
• 1:13:41
  because the one thing that nobody's ever gonna do
• 1:13:45
  is to vote for somebody who they feel votes down on them.
• 1:13:47
  If you can avoid voting somebody
• 1:13:49
  who you feel like that person, you know,
• 1:13:51
  they came into my house and I talked to them
• 1:13:53
  like I talked to my friends and they looked around
• 1:13:55
  and they'd say, well, that's a bad,
• 1:13:57
  that's a bigoted person, you know,
• 1:13:58
  why would I vote for that person?
• 1:14:00
  And I think that's one of the things, sadly,
• 1:14:02
  that's driving a lot of voters who should be winnable,
• 1:14:05
  who are not bad human beings,
• 1:14:07
  into the arms of people like Donald Trump.
• 1:14:12
  All right, I suppose the way around that is,
• 1:14:15
  I mean, it is just as complicated as the way into it.
• 1:14:17
  But does it have something to do with us consuming more media
• 1:14:22
  or getting out of social media silos
• 1:14:24
  or talking to our neighbors more?
• 1:14:27
  What is, what's the low-hanging fruit?
• 1:14:31
  Yeah, there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit.
• 1:14:33
  I can talk to you about some medium and high-hanging fruit.
• 1:14:35
  What's the medium-hanging?
• 1:14:37
  Well, look, we need real economic growth
• 1:14:41
  that actually makes people optimistic about the future.
• 1:14:44
  We need secure prosperity where people feel like, you know,
• 1:14:48
  if they have an accident or some kind of, you know,
• 1:14:53
  personal tragedy before them,
• 1:14:54
  they're still gonna be able to be dignified and decent
• 1:14:58
  and full lives.
• 1:15:01
  We need to build a welfare state
• 1:15:03
  that doesn't pit members of different ethnic groups
• 1:15:05
  against each other in the way that they're sort of bad
• 1:15:09
  for, of course, or what race-sensitive public policies,
• 1:15:12
  sometimes frightens to do.
• 1:15:14
  We need inclusive and responsive political institutions,
• 1:15:19
  which mean that if voters keep shouting,
• 1:15:21
  we are really worried about topic acts.
• 1:15:24
  Politicians will actually act on it
• 1:15:26
  and therefore keep the loyalty of voters,
• 1:15:28
  stop them from going to extremists who voters will feel
• 1:15:32
  are the only ones who might actually listen.
• 1:15:36
  And we need a public culture that is more open
• 1:15:42
  to political difference.
• 1:15:43
  We need to push back against the people
• 1:15:47
  who would shame anybody who disagrees.
• 1:15:50
  And perhaps some of that has started
• 1:15:52
  to happen on social media.
• 1:15:53
  I've seen that in two or three years ago,
• 1:15:55
  many kind of pylon attempt would essentially work
• 1:15:59
  because people are too scared to stand up to it.
• 1:16:00
  And now often when somebody tries the pylon like that,
• 1:16:03
  those people are sponding and saying,
• 1:16:05
  hey, what on earth are you doing?
• 1:16:08
  And so actually, there starts to be a risk to the pylon.
• 1:16:10
  If you try to pylon, you might be pylon yourself.
• 1:16:15
  That might make change the kind of equilibrium win
• 1:16:21
  where people are just not gonna be trying those pylons.
• 1:16:24
  And we have a much more respectful way of dealing
• 1:16:26
  with each other.
• 1:16:27
  And I think we need much more self criticism
• 1:16:31
  from members of, again, I'm gonna include myself in this,
• 1:16:35
  this sort of political academic intellectual elite.
• 1:16:39
  I think we need to realize how out of step
• 1:16:40
  we become with our compatriots
• 1:16:46
  and that we don't have monopoly
• 1:16:49
  and all of political wisdom.
• 1:16:51
  We're not better human beings than others in our society.
• 1:16:56
  And I'm going to continue to oppose
• 1:17:00
  strenuously politicians like Donald Trump,
• 1:17:03
  but I don't feel like I have a right
• 1:17:04
  to sit in judgment of anybody
• 1:17:07
  who has a different political opinion from me
• 1:17:10
  and the citizenry and my compatriots.
• 1:17:13
  So we need to actually make a hopeful case
• 1:17:16
  for the kinds of societies that we can build together.
• 1:17:19
  That's a lot of what I do in my last book
• 1:17:21
  in a great experiment to say, look,
• 1:17:23
  what we're going through is this unique experiment.
• 1:17:26
  It's unprecedented, it's hard, the challenges are there.
• 1:17:28
  But you know what, kind of like Australia
• 1:17:30
  and actually on this count,
• 1:17:31
  the United States as well on Canada and Germany,
• 1:17:34
  we've made great progress towards building societies
• 1:17:37
  that are equal as well as much more ethnically
• 1:17:41
  and religiously diverse.
• 1:17:43
  We actually have a lot in common immigrants to these societies
• 1:17:47
  are deeply patriotic by the way
• 1:17:48
  and they're quite optimistic about the future.
• 1:17:51
  Let us build together the vision of a future
• 1:17:55
  in which we're not defined by our divisions,
• 1:17:57
  not defined by which demographic group we're in
• 1:18:00
  and which politicians don't try and dice the electorate
• 1:18:03
  as Barack Obama used to complain about,
• 1:18:06
  but in which we actually argue in good favor
• 1:18:08
  about our political differences
• 1:18:09
  and try to build a country in which all of us
• 1:18:11
  would be happy to live in.
• 1:18:14
  From your lips to God's ears, Yasha,
• 1:18:16
  and may you also voice the next audio book
• 1:18:20
  in which you continue to articulate such ideas.
• 1:18:23
  Thanks for being on the show.
• 1:18:25
  I have a comment in the question, if I may.
• 1:18:28
  Please, yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:29
  The comment is you have great podcasting technique.
• 1:18:31
  I'm gonna steal this because I was assuming
• 1:18:33
  we're just chitchatting at the beginning.
• 1:18:34
  I didn't realize it would be part of the recording.
• 1:18:37
  It's all part of my trick.
• 1:18:39
  It's a very good trick, I'm gonna copy that.
• 1:18:41
  But my question is why was called uncomfortable conversations?
• 1:18:45
  I didn't find this to be particularly uncomfortable.
• 1:18:47
  No, sometimes I talk to people who I mostly agree with,
• 1:18:50
  who I just think are interesting,
• 1:18:51
  but I think that they're broaching subjects
• 1:18:53
  that are uncomfortable for people to talk about.
• 1:18:56
  So it began as a way to have conversations
• 1:19:00
  that we are not having because we're too afraid
• 1:19:03
  of triggering cultural tripwires.
• 1:19:06
  And that's generally with people who I disagree with.
• 1:19:08
  But then I didn't wanna keep it to be a closed off space.
• 1:19:13
  I wanted to also talk to people whose opinions
• 1:19:15
  I really appreciate.
• 1:19:17
  The common theme being that we're generally talking
• 1:19:20
  about things that if you're at a polite cocktail party,
• 1:19:23
  you would tread carefully around
• 1:19:25
  that hence the uncomfortable us.
• 1:19:27
  Amazing.
• 1:19:28
  Well, I'm going to subscribe to your podcast immediately.
• 1:19:31
  And if I may, I'm gonna invite your listeners
• 1:19:33
  to subscribe to my podcast called The Good Fight.
• 1:19:36
  Absolutely.
• 1:19:37
  We will all subscribe to The Good Fight.
• 1:19:39
  And you can go and talk about uncomfortable conversations
• 1:19:42
  on every charming little English Oxford Square
• 1:19:46
  you can find.
• 1:19:47
  Thank you.
• 1:19:48
  Thank you.
• 1:19:54
  Uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postuma.
• 1:19:57
  Follow me, Josh Zeps on Twitter and Instagram
• 1:19:59
  for all the latest, may your day be fruitful,
• 1:20:02
  your mind humble, your enemies generous,
• 1:20:06
  and your conversations perfectly,
• 1:20:07
  sparklingly, delectably, uncomfortable.