Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. Since four in the morning on the
Speaker 1: day after Donald Trump was elected, it's been clear to
Speaker 1: me that democracy in the United States is facing a
Speaker 1: kind of stress test. In the months that follow that
Speaker 1: bregsit kicked in and we discovered that the United States
Speaker 1: is not alone in this regard. Indeed, those who care
Speaker 1: a lot about democracy worldwide have worried that everywhere in
Speaker 1: the globe democracy is in retreat, under attack, and under pressure.
Speaker 1: To discuss these challenges that democracy faces today, I'm joined
Speaker 1: by David Runsman, who's professor of Politics at Cambridge University.
Speaker 1: He's the author of two highly relevant books, one called
Speaker 1: How Democracy Ends, published in the United States in twenty
Speaker 1: and eighteen, and the other Where Power Stops The Making
Speaker 1: and Unmaking of Presidents and Prime Ministers, which is coming
Speaker 1: out in two and nineteen. Professor Runsman is also the
Speaker 1: host of the Talking Politics podcast produced by the London
Speaker 1: Review of Books. David, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. You've written a fascinating book called
Speaker 1: How Democracy Ends, in which you characterize democracy is having
Speaker 1: hit a midlife crisis. I am somewhere in midlife myself.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you count yourself in that same
Speaker 1: category of life, But tell us something about why you
Speaker 1: think democracy is hitting a midlife crisis and what you
Speaker 1: think a midlife crisis looks like. So I think, full disclosure,
Speaker 1: I am. And people always say to me that presumably
Speaker 1: I'm writing about myself and I'm just transposing it onto democracy,
Speaker 1: and I don't think I am. But the reason I
Speaker 1: characterized it like that is I do think we're in
Speaker 1: the middle of this story, particularly in the older democracy.
Speaker 1: So I don't think it's a midlife crisis in Hungary
Speaker 1: because that democracy is too young. But the democracies that
Speaker 1: are really well established since the Second World War are,
Speaker 1: in political terms, in a kind of middle age. And
Speaker 1: my feeling about a midlife crisis is that it's characteristic
Speaker 1: is a desire to change and at the same time
Speaker 1: a real resistance to change because we're comfortable, because we're
Speaker 1: well off, because we're prosperous, because we're settled in our ways.
Speaker 1: Because actually a lot of what we are angry about
Speaker 1: we're also deeply familiar with and it's that kind of
Speaker 1: quality to our democracies, and by our I mean mine
Speaker 1: and yours, I mean particularly Brexit democracy and Trump democracy.
Speaker 1: There is a lot of acting out going on here,
Speaker 1: but it's middle aged acting out. It's not wild young
Speaker 1: person acting out. It's that desire for something new, something
Speaker 1: maybe exciting, along with a really deep reluctance to embrace newness.
Speaker 1: Means so we kick away at our system, we were
Speaker 1: angry with it, we shake it up a bit, but
Speaker 1: deep down we don't want anything different. May I ask
Speaker 1: about the midlife their model? You mentioned the Second World War,
Speaker 1: but both British and American democracies, at least at their
Speaker 1: present scales, are really products of in the middle of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, and so they've been actually around for
Speaker 1: a good long time, not just since the Second World War.
Speaker 1: If one thinks of post World War two democracy, is
Speaker 1: one thinks of Germany and of Japan perhaps some of
Speaker 1: the other European democracies. Can we really be described yours
Speaker 1: or mind as being in midlife or are we at
Speaker 1: the edge of our dotage? As as a North Korean
Speaker 1: had to say about my president, it's a really good question.
Speaker 1: I think it's a mixture of both, and that some
Speaker 1: of the characteristics of German democracy or Japanese democracy we're
Speaker 1: in the same historical arc, so mass franchise, mass communication,
Speaker 1: and professionalized political party democracy. It's a twentieth century product.
Speaker 1: In the British and American case, you can probably take
Speaker 1: it back to the First World War. I don't think
Speaker 1: you can take it back much further. What makes ours
Speaker 1: different is that that form of democracy was channeled through
Speaker 1: institutions and institutional arrangements that are much older, and in
Speaker 1: the case of the British State, maybe it goes all
Speaker 1: the way back to sixteen eighty eight. In the American State,
Speaker 1: it goes back the end of the eighteenth century. So
Speaker 1: our institutions have that really elderly feel to them. The
Speaker 1: Electoral College, the House of Lords, the way the British
Speaker 1: Parliament operates often strikes many people in the twenty first
Speaker 1: century is feeling not just old but antique. And yet
Speaker 1: some of the qualities that make our democracy democracy. Everyone
Speaker 1: gets a vote at election time, people try and communicate
Speaker 1: with the broadest possible cross section of a literate and
Speaker 1: at some level informed population. That's a more recent thing,
Speaker 1: but it's still relatively old. I mean, even if you
Speaker 1: take it back a hundred years, say in the British
Speaker 1: or American case, you take it back to nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: a hundred years for a political system, it doesn't make
Speaker 1: it decrepit, but it means that it has outlasted the
Speaker 1: living memory of any human being who currently inhabits it,
Speaker 1: so no one can remember anything different, and that's what
Speaker 1: gives it that kind of middling quality. To me, it's
Speaker 1: not dying. Ending is something very different from dying. Now
Speaker 1: you can end in an open way. There is something
Speaker 1: called being open ended, and ending is also about transition,
Speaker 1: whereas death is about death. So we're in the middle.
Speaker 1: But I think over that hundred year period that combination
Speaker 1: of a way of doing politics where the parties are
Speaker 1: the same. So in your country, in my country they
Speaker 1: have the same names. The Labor Party, our current opposition party,
Speaker 1: is something that was born roughly a hundred years ago
Speaker 1: as a mass professional political party Labor, Conservative, Republican Democrat.
Speaker 1: Of course, these parties have been through changes over this period,
Speaker 1: but you know that gives them, in political terms, extraordinary
Speaker 1: roots and longevity. But also they're tired, they feel tired,
Speaker 1: they feel tired to me, they don't feel dead. They
Speaker 1: could evolve. They could also have quite a lot of
Speaker 1: life left in them, decades of life left in them,
Speaker 1: but they feel tired. And it's that kind of quality
Speaker 1: of tiredness rather than panic, despair, collapse that I was
Speaker 1: trying to capture. It sounds a bit like the midlife
Speaker 1: person that you have in mind is driving a car
Speaker 1: that is perhaps in many ways one hundred years old
Speaker 1: and has been patched together and peace together and changed
Speaker 1: and transformed. And that's the institutions that you're describing, the
Speaker 1: political parties, some of our constitutional institutions in the US
Speaker 1: which changed very very slowly. That the electoral college comes
Speaker 1: to mind. And so here we are in midlife, but
Speaker 1: equipped not with the latest coolest machinery or computers or
Speaker 1: software that would help us deal with the current circumstances,
Speaker 1: but rather to some degree constrained or limited by those institutions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm happy with that analogy. And I do
Speaker 1: have a variant on that in my book where I
Speaker 1: describe Donald Trump as being like the motorbike that the
Speaker 1: middle aged man buys partly because there is that feeling
Speaker 1: in a midlife crisis. The car is old, or the
Speaker 1: other analogy you could draw here is the marriage is
Speaker 1: old or the relationship is old. You know you've been
Speaker 1: start in something or with something for years or decades.
Speaker 1: You're frustrated with it. You have a sense that it's
Speaker 1: over familiar. It served you well in the past, but
Speaker 1: you have a feeling that somehow it's not quite fit
Speaker 1: for purpose anymore. One classic midlife response is to think, well,
Speaker 1: I need the up to date version of this thing,
Speaker 1: so I need the motorbike, or I need the affair,
Speaker 1: I need you, I need to find the new version
Speaker 1: of this thing. When that's not the issue here. You're
Speaker 1: not going to solve your midlife crisis because you're frustrated
Speaker 1: with your car by buying a motorbike. And that's what
Speaker 1: it feels like to me, is that, yes, these institutions
Speaker 1: are old and tired, they're also adaptable, so in a way,
Speaker 1: they're not like a car from one hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: They're like a car that has been updated regularly and
Speaker 1: yet we can still see the original model behind it.
Speaker 1: But the idea that somehow the solution to this is
Speaker 1: just a faster car, the latest model, rather than to
Speaker 1: ask ourselves genuinely. If we want this thing that we
Speaker 1: call democracy to work and to continue for another hundred years,
Speaker 1: we've probably got to think much harder about how we're different,
Speaker 1: how the societies that we live in are different. You
Speaker 1: can't just plug in a faster, newer version of this
Speaker 1: thing and think it's going to make all the difference.
Speaker 1: What I think that we're missing always when we think
Speaker 1: about what's wrong with our democracy is genuinely thinking about
Speaker 1: the future. And you know, we can leave this image
Speaker 1: in a moment. But that's the other thing about a
Speaker 1: midlife crisis. It's often nostalgia. You wish you were younger,
Speaker 1: You want the moment when you could drive the car fast.
Speaker 1: So if Donald Trump then is the motorbike Brexit is
Speaker 1: the walking out on one's spouse and going walk about.
Speaker 1: Yeah it is, and it's that thing of it underneath it.
Speaker 1: There's a kind of complacency too, which is a characteristic
Speaker 1: of this kind of psychology, which is people are frustrated
Speaker 1: and angry, but they also believe we can take this risk.
Speaker 1: Maybe our marriage will survive it. Now, maybe we won't
Speaker 1: crash the motorbike. Because we're older and wiser. We're conflicted
Speaker 1: about these things we want to change, but deep down
Speaker 1: we don't want to change. And what people do in
Speaker 1: middle age when they have that feeling is they do
Speaker 1: something impetuous and impulsive but not actually long lasting. The
Speaker 1: thing that we're missing is the long lasting reform. One
Speaker 1: of the things that representative democracy was meant to do
Speaker 1: from start, according to its theorists at least, was to
Speaker 1: protect government against impulsive acts by the public. And that's
Speaker 1: one reason why the referendum would have been very much
Speaker 1: doubted as a good way of doing business by certainly
Speaker 1: by eighteenth century theorists of democracy, and then in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century some people began to argue that, after all,
Speaker 1: the referendum was a more direct direct way of reaching
Speaker 1: the people. I wanted to ask you a question that
Speaker 1: I've really been obsessed with in watching from across the
Speaker 1: Atlantic the entire bregsit melt down. And that is why,
Speaker 1: at this moment in time did Britain use a referendum
Speaker 1: when it's in possession of the most evolved representative democratic
Speaker 1: institutions that there are. Because it's frequently struck me that
Speaker 1: the impossibility for Parliament of working out a solution to
Speaker 1: bregsit has come from the fact that there was a
Speaker 1: referendum with a yes or no question attached to it,
Speaker 1: and then that was being pushed upon an institution very
Speaker 1: different or represented institution that I've got its own internal logic,
Speaker 1: in its own internal structures of politics. So why the referendum?
Speaker 1: And am I right that the referendums mismatch with parliamentary
Speaker 1: government has been part of the problem. You definitely are right.
Speaker 1: I think there is a context here, which is the
Speaker 1: Brexit referendum was not the first referendum, so it was
Speaker 1: one of a series. Governments had recourse to referendums in
Speaker 1: Britain for nearly a decade now, so there was one
Speaker 1: about changing the voting system. There was more famously one
Speaker 1: about Scottish independence. And the conclusion that I think that government,
Speaker 1: in particular that David Cameron government drew was that referendums
Speaker 1: are a good fit with representative parliamentary democracy when the
Speaker 1: answer basically comes back as no change, and that therefore
Speaker 1: they are a useful outlet. You give the people a
Speaker 1: chance to have their moment, their flirtation with radical change,
Speaker 1: they will come to their senses, they will sort of
Speaker 1: snap out of it when they realize just how dangerous
Speaker 1: the motorbikes or whatever, or the relationship, and they won't
Speaker 1: do the really dangerous thing. What we've discovered with the
Speaker 1: first referendum, when the answer didn't come back no change,
Speaker 1: the answer came back change please. We don't know what
Speaker 1: change means. We just want change. And you hear anecdotally
Speaker 1: all the time in Britain when people who asked why
Speaker 1: they voted for this they wanted some form of change.
Speaker 1: It was an expression of frustration. There is no fit
Speaker 1: because then Parliament has to decide what change means. And
Speaker 1: Parliament can't decide what change means because Parliament doesn't agree
Speaker 1: on the necessary change. And the referendum doesn't tell you
Speaker 1: what change means, it just tells you there was an
Speaker 1: appetite for change. So the shock to the system has
Speaker 1: actually again come from a kind of complacency, and you
Speaker 1: really saw it in the Brexit referendum. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think the catastrophic mistake that the Cameron government made was
Speaker 1: that they thought that the Scottish referendum had shown them
Speaker 1: that when you get to the day of the choice,
Speaker 1: people shy away, and they didn't appreciate that the data
Speaker 1: set there was very small. It was just one yes.
Speaker 1: And actually I also think they learned the wrong lesson
Speaker 1: because there was this phrase used about the Scottish referendum,
Speaker 1: which was project fear, which was that what people shied
Speaker 1: away from in the end in Scotland from independent when
Speaker 1: they offered independence was the thought of the possible chaos,
Speaker 1: particularly financial monetary chaos, what currency would we have, what
Speaker 1: would our relationship be with the Bank of England and
Speaker 1: so on. But actually, if you look at the evidence
Speaker 1: from the Scottish referendum and the polling evidence, people were
Speaker 1: moving towards independence and they didn't shy away from it
Speaker 1: at the last minute because they suddenly got afraid. What
Speaker 1: happened was the politicians got afraid and at the last
Speaker 1: minute all of the leaders of the British parties, the
Speaker 1: Westminster Parties, went up to Scotland and made all sorts
Speaker 1: of concessions to great a devolution, to more financial support.
Speaker 1: It wasn't fear on the part of the voter, that
Speaker 1: was fear on the part of the politicians. They didn't
Speaker 1: do that in the Brexit case. So in the last
Speaker 1: week there wasn't from Cameron or anyone else a recognition
Speaker 1: that this thing was getting away from them, and they
Speaker 1: would actually have to say something to the people who
Speaker 1: wanted change which sounded like change. They carried on with fear,
Speaker 1: and now we are, as you described, in a position
Speaker 1: where we have two forms of democracy in this country
Speaker 1: that cannot be meshed together. But it wasn't. It wasn't
Speaker 1: a one off, and I think the history of it
Speaker 1: only makes sense when you understand that it was the
Speaker 1: politicians who drew the wrong lesson about referendums because they
Speaker 1: thought it gave them a safe outlet. And the thing
Speaker 1: about safe outlets is that they're safe until they're not,
Speaker 1: and then you've got a disaster on your hands. It's
Speaker 1: a genuinely fascinating answer because it also explains another puzzle
Speaker 1: that I was never clear on, which is why it
Speaker 1: was conservatives in particular who would have taken this risk
Speaker 1: with the referendums, since the referendum form, at least in
Speaker 1: its historical form, is always thought to be precisely about populism.
Speaker 1: It's about the whole reason to have a referendum rather
Speaker 1: than going through the legislature, is to get to the people.
Speaker 1: On the theory that the politicians are in some way
Speaker 1: interfering with the will of the people and one has
Speaker 1: to get around them. And what I hear implicit in
Speaker 1: your answer, tell me if this is the right lesson
Speaker 1: to take away from what you're saying, is that it was,
Speaker 1: in a way the nostalgic or aspirational view of the
Speaker 1: contemporary Conservative Party that thinks of the ordinary British voter
Speaker 1: is really very sensible in the end and likely to
Speaker 1: do what the Conservative Partian imagines ought to be done,
Speaker 1: at least what Cameron imagined ought to be done. That
Speaker 1: was the driving force behind them making the mistaken inference
Speaker 1: from one or two data points. I definitely think that's
Speaker 1: part of it. I think what we've discovered, and it's
Speaker 1: clearly not just in this country. Elections, both general elections
Speaker 1: and referendum results have been surprising people for a few
Speaker 1: years now that there was also this feeling. The Conservative
Speaker 1: Party often describes itself as the historically most successful election
Speaker 1: winning machine in the Western world. It's been winning elections
Speaker 1: in one form or another two hundred years, and somehow
Speaker 1: it always stumbles across the right answer, and there is
Speaker 1: that feeling that the Conservative part he has an instinctive
Speaker 1: understanding of its people, and it didn't in this case.
Speaker 1: But there was also this other weird complacency at work,
Speaker 1: and I heard it a lot after the results. So
Speaker 1: the result profoundly shocked the party establishment, but it quickly adapted.
Speaker 1: Theresa May became Prime Minister and the thought was, well,
Speaker 1: at least the thing that we have done as true
Speaker 1: Conservatives is that we have co opted populism. We offered
Speaker 1: this referendum, it didn't produce the result that we were expecting,
Speaker 1: but now that result can be channeled through the party
Speaker 1: and we have killed our populist party. So the populist
Speaker 1: party was UKIP Nigel Farage's party, which was polling pretty
Speaker 1: high in the run up to the referendum, and then
Speaker 1: when they got what they wanted leaving the EU, the
Speaker 1: Conservative Party just took it over and performed its historic mission,
Speaker 1: which was basically to take over whatever was on the
Speaker 1: table and conservatize it. That's a word, you make it
Speaker 1: fit conservative politics. And Theresa May and her supporters I
Speaker 1: heard them saying for a year eighteen months, we have
Speaker 1: performed our historic function. We have killed populism in Britain.
Speaker 1: It's rampant in Europe. It's frankly rampant. In the United States,
Speaker 1: Donald Trump has just used populism and actually infected Republicanism
Speaker 1: with it. We've done the opposite. They claimed, we have
Speaker 1: allowed a traditional conservative party to take it on and
Speaker 1: then basically to defang it, and they were wrong. So
Speaker 1: here we are three years later, because they had no
Speaker 1: means of translating the referendum result into meaningful politics, and
Speaker 1: they still haven't worked out how to do it. We
Speaker 1: have Boris Johnson about to become Prime Minister on a
Speaker 1: frankly populist Trumpish platform because he has got to compete
Speaker 1: with Nigel Farrage his party yukit was killed and then
Speaker 1: reinvented itself as the Brexit Party and is polling at
Speaker 1: double the level yukit was ever polling out. There has
Speaker 1: always been in British Conservatism a deep complacency which is
Speaker 1: somehow as long as it passes through us because we're Conservatives,
Speaker 1: it will be all right. And even a party that's
Speaker 1: two hundred years old is eventually going to make a
Speaker 1: fatal mistake. And I know conservative politicians in this country
Speaker 1: who believe the British Conservative Party maybe in its death throws.
Speaker 1: So British democracy. I don't think it's in its death throws,
Speaker 1: but one of its traditional parties, and maybe even both
Speaker 1: of them, could well be dying. So tell me a
Speaker 1: little bit about your view of Johnson and in what
Speaker 1: way does someone who know sociologically looks not so different
Speaker 1: from Cameron turn into a Trump figure. Frankly, even six
Speaker 1: months ago, the prospect of Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister
Speaker 1: looked very very remote. So this is British politics has
Speaker 1: turned around, very very quickly. And the reason Johnson is
Speaker 1: now seen by many Conservatives as the answer is partly
Speaker 1: because May's failure was total. It's partly because the last
Speaker 1: thing that Theresa May did was to try and forge
Speaker 1: some bipartisan consensus to get her Brexit deal over the line,
Speaker 1: which meant negotiating with Jeremy Corbyn. And it's almost like
Speaker 1: the bin is not just our Bernie Sanders. He's for
Speaker 1: many Conservatives, he's further along the line to what they
Speaker 1: think of as Leninist catastrophe than that he is to
Speaker 1: the left of Bernie Sanders on substantive policy. I think,
Speaker 1: for what that's worth quite a part from any allegations
Speaker 1: of Clinism Yeah, So what we had was a Conservative
Speaker 1: leader offering to negotiate with someone who, genuinely, I think
Speaker 1: for almost every conservative politician, is beyond the pale, and
Speaker 1: that seemed to sort of trigger in the Conservative Party
Speaker 1: a desire for the politician who would never think that
Speaker 1: that kind of bipartisan consensus was a way to solve
Speaker 1: this problem. And it was almost a reaction to that
Speaker 1: that produced Johnson. Johnson's claim and he's repeated it throughout
Speaker 1: this campaign, which is about to end, but he's more
Speaker 1: or less already won. It is that he can be
Speaker 1: trusted because he was quite a successful mayor of London.
Speaker 1: But when he was mayor of London, if you looked
Speaker 1: at Johnson, you would have said he was another of
Speaker 1: that generation of Conservative politicians of whom Cameron was another,
Speaker 1: who saw themselves as twenty first century Thatcher rights, and
Speaker 1: that Margaret Thatcher was their model. Margaret Thatcher is on
Speaker 1: no account a populist and on no account was anything
Speaker 1: like a Trump politician. She was radical in her way,
Speaker 1: but she was also small c conservative, particularly about institutions.
Speaker 1: So there was none of that sense that you get
Speaker 1: with the current generation of populace that they're here actually
Speaker 1: to undercut the institutional basis of democratic politics. Margaret Thatcher
Speaker 1: was a classic politician We've had fifty years of them
Speaker 1: at that period, maybe coming to an end, who saw
Speaker 1: the challenge of democratic politics, to test the institutions, to
Speaker 1: push them, but never to think about breaking them. And
Speaker 1: Johnson was one of those. It is the phenomenon of
Speaker 1: the last three or four years that has changed him
Speaker 1: into what looks like a more trumpish politician. He's also
Speaker 1: a journalist. His journalism has always been you know, the
Speaker 1: people have been trawling through it and have found statements
Speaker 1: which you would think would rule someone out from needing
Speaker 1: a mature democracy because of the implicit racism in a
Speaker 1: lot of it, the imperialism, the nostalgia for a time
Speaker 1: when Britain ruled the world and people of different colors
Speaker 1: and different creeds knew their place. That's there in Johnson's past.
Speaker 1: But I think in his own mind he would have thought, well,
Speaker 1: my journalism was kind of a sideshow to make me famous,
Speaker 1: and then my politics will be conventional thatch right politics.
Speaker 1: And I think he's noticed in the last two or
Speaker 1: three years that his journalism and that persona is the
Speaker 1: one that other populists around the world are using to
Speaker 1: win power. How far he's willing to push it, I
Speaker 1: don't know, but we're seeing signs of it already, that
Speaker 1: he thinks that the climate has changed and he's changed
Speaker 1: with it. The way in which he's not Trump is
Speaker 1: that he is a professor politician. I mean, he's a journalist,
Speaker 1: but he's also a professional politician. He is flirting with
Speaker 1: this form of politics, and I think he's trying it out,
Speaker 1: and no one knows in the British context how far
Speaker 1: you can go. The one other thing I would say
Speaker 1: about Boris Johnson is that say Britain, like the United States,
Speaker 1: is a country where that kind of politics populist, appealing
Speaker 1: to older voters, appealing to voters who didn't go to college,
Speaker 1: and speaking a language which flirts with racial stereotypes and
Speaker 1: other kinds of politics which would five years ago been
Speaker 1: thought to be outside the bounds of democratic decency. Say
Speaker 1: you can get to forty percent with that. Trump's sealing
Speaker 1: forty five, forty seven when he's lucky, But say forty
Speaker 1: is the limit you can get to in a British context, Well,
Speaker 1: we do not have a presidential system we have a
Speaker 1: parliamentary system, and if Boris Johnson polls forty percent at
Speaker 1: the next British general election, given the other parties divide
Speaker 1: up the rest, he will be Prime Minister with a
Speaker 1: massive majority in Parliament. If it is true that that
Speaker 1: kind of politics does undercut Farrage wins back the Farage
Speaker 1: people of the Conservative body, and it's feeling is forty
Speaker 1: percent Johnson wins, and he's not stupid, So there is
Speaker 1: some political calculation at work here too. One more question
Speaker 1: about Baris Johnson before we start talking about other potential
Speaker 1: approaches to the midlife crisis, and it's this A central
Speaker 1: theme in your brand, brand new book, Where Power Stops,
Speaker 1: is that power reveals, a phrase that you I think
Speaker 1: rightly attribute to Robert Carrow and his fantastic books about
Speaker 1: Lyndon Johnson. In the case of Johnson, he hasn't yet
Speaker 1: assumed power, and so it's too soon to say with
Speaker 1: any confidence what it will reveal. But what you describe
Speaker 1: as somebody who has already had two sides, the professional
Speaker 1: politician side a little bit more cautious and that right
Speaker 1: than the journalist side, much more outspoken, bordering on racism.
Speaker 1: Under some circumstances capable of populism, if that's what's called for,
Speaker 1: and they're in some sense in counterpoise with one another.
Speaker 1: And now if he does indeed take power and exercise it,
Speaker 1: I suppose we'll find out. Power will reveal which of
Speaker 1: these two he really is, or really means to be.
Speaker 1: And I guess the question I have is, do you
Speaker 1: have an instinct do you think that he is? It
Speaker 1: sounds like you don't think that he is at heart
Speaker 1: a populist or at heart of Thatcher right, but rather
Speaker 1: at heart something of an opportunist, and that you think
Speaker 1: he'll go with whatever works. But I don't want to
Speaker 1: push an interpretation around you that that isn't yours. Do
Speaker 1: you have an instinct about which way he will go
Speaker 1: in power? If he does acquire power. The lesson that
Speaker 1: I'm trying to draw is slightly different from the Karrow ones.
Speaker 1: A Caro's line is indeed that power reveals the true person,
Speaker 1: the true man, because he's writing about a man, Lyndon Johnson,
Speaker 1: and that when Johnson becomes president Lyndon Boris, we discover
Speaker 1: that deep down there was a man of compassion there.
Speaker 1: And my argument is that most of these people don't
Speaker 1: really reveal anything about themselves in the highest office that
Speaker 1: we didn't know about them anyway. What we discover is
Speaker 1: more not who they are, but the nature of the
Speaker 1: power that can be wielded in these roles as president
Speaker 1: or prime minister. So in a way, with Johnson, we
Speaker 1: discovered more about what a president could do than who
Speaker 1: Lyndon Johnson really was. I don't think politicians change when
Speaker 1: they reached the top. If anything, I think they become
Speaker 1: more fixed because the person they were is what brought
Speaker 1: them to the top. What we will discover if and
Speaker 1: when Boris Johnson becomes prime Minister is not who he
Speaker 1: really is. We know that what we'll discover is what
Speaker 1: a man like that can do as prime minister? Can
Speaker 1: the office a prime minister be stretched so opportunistically beyond
Speaker 1: what we might have thought was possible over the last decades,
Speaker 1: that a character like Johnson's, so in its way fickle,
Speaker 1: are so capable of playing both sides, is able to
Speaker 1: achieve things that someone liked the reason may couldn't. And
Speaker 1: the character of the office of prime minister is changing,
Speaker 1: just as the character of the office of president is changing.
Speaker 1: And I think we get acclimatized so quickly, you know,
Speaker 1: we forget that Trump is doing things that would have
Speaker 1: seemed inconceivable five years ago, and I suspect with Johnson
Speaker 1: the same will be true. But we will also find
Speaker 1: the limits. And in a sense, I think what we
Speaker 1: discover with these characters are the limits, but the limits
Speaker 1: aren't quite where we thought they were. And again with Trump,
Speaker 1: we're finding that some of the things that we thought
Speaker 1: were limits aren't. But I think we're also finding that
Speaker 1: it's not that Trump has just achieved something with that
Speaker 1: office of president, which means that none of the old
Speaker 1: rules apply. Some of them still do. That leads me
Speaker 1: to then the real question of what is going to
Speaker 1: happen next in these midlife crises. You're careful not to
Speaker 1: say in either book that you have a solution or
Speaker 1: that there's a simple answer of where we're headed. But
Speaker 1: in both cases of the United States and of Britain,
Speaker 1: these crises generated by midlife are going to have some trajectory.
Speaker 1: They're going to come out somehow or other. I tend
Speaker 1: to agree with you that the presidency will survive at
Speaker 1: Donald Trump, even if a bit changed, and no doubt
Speaker 1: the prime ministership will survive. Baris Johnson. The question I
Speaker 1: have is what do you see as plausible roots out
Speaker 1: of these crises now, not normative solutions, but possible paths
Speaker 1: that we might be following. So I increasingly think that
Speaker 1: we have to recognize that when we tell the story
Speaker 1: of democracy, we're telling these overlapping stories. There is the
Speaker 1: story of what we think of as democracy, modern liberal, representative, constitutional,
Speaker 1: mass franchise, mass communication democracy, basically the twentieth century story,
Speaker 1: and we could not just be in the middle of that.
Speaker 1: We might be quite late in that, and some of
Speaker 1: those institutions I think are in real trouble. Of which
Speaker 1: political parties are first in the firing line, I think,
Speaker 1: especially the established political parties, ten fifteen years down the line,
Speaker 1: that scene could look very very different. I think you
Speaker 1: can see these parties breaking up. So I think some
Speaker 1: of the institutions that are familiar, over familiar to us
Speaker 1: could be in real trouble. But there's a longer story.
Speaker 1: There is the story of representative democracy which does go back,
Speaker 1: particularly in the British and American case, not just one
Speaker 1: hundred years, but two hundred plus years. The idea that
Speaker 1: most of us don't do politics except very, very occasionally,
Speaker 1: but we vote for people who do it for us,
Speaker 1: and that there is a group sometimes called a class,
Speaker 1: who are the political class. I'm almost more interested in
Speaker 1: what's going to happen to that story, and I think
Speaker 1: that one might be starting to slowly, very slowly break down. Two. So,
Speaker 1: to go back to your question about referendums, I mean,
Speaker 1: it wasn't just a political calculation. There's also this sense,
Speaker 1: I think from elected politicians that there is growing pressure
Speaker 1: from the voters for more direct input. I am starting
Speaker 1: to think that there is a deeper story, you know,
Speaker 1: the two thousand year old story two and a half
Speaker 1: thousand year old story about democracy, which is the ancient
Speaker 1: Greek story about direct democracy. But also people feeling that
Speaker 1: what democracy gives you is not a quiet life, a
Speaker 1: comfortable life. Prosperity also gives you a sense of control
Speaker 1: of your fate, and that we have to recapture that.
Speaker 1: And we're going through the spasms of democratic societies where
Speaker 1: too many people, for different reasons, feel that giving that
Speaker 1: small group of professional politicians the ultimate decision means that
Speaker 1: we have lost control of our fate. I don't think
Speaker 1: this will end dramatically with something happening in the next
Speaker 1: five or ten years that signals the end. I think
Speaker 1: it's a gradual unraveling of these hundred two hundred years stories.
Speaker 1: But over the next decades, those institutions, and particularly the
Speaker 1: institutions that have anchored professional politics as we've known it
Speaker 1: for the last couple of generations, that's the thing going
Speaker 1: to unravel. And when you look at that hundred years story,
Speaker 1: that incredible success story, the twentieth century story, the democratic century,
Speaker 1: the liberal constitutional, representative democratic century, the professional democratic century,
Speaker 1: and you look at our politics now, and you look
Speaker 1: at how fast everything else has changed, it does look
Speaker 1: not just tired and old, but it looks like it
Speaker 1: got stuck twenty thirty years ago, sort of at the
Speaker 1: dawn of the digital revolution. We must be on the
Speaker 1: cast like I can't believe that in ten twenty years
Speaker 1: time we won't look back to this period and see
Speaker 1: this was the beginning not just of the unraveling, but
Speaker 1: of the transition to something that we would think of
Speaker 1: is genuinely twenty first century democracy, and that will be
Speaker 1: more fragmented, more local, more digital, more direct, less professional,
Speaker 1: probably for a while, more chaotic. It could be better now.
Speaker 1: The future is not determined by how democracy failed in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties or the risks that we ran in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies. The future is infinitely more open than
Speaker 1: the past. And this form of democracy has been really
Speaker 1: set in place for about a hundred years now, fifty
Speaker 1: to one hundred years. If it has an open future,
Speaker 1: it's going to look radically different. And say, we're at
Speaker 1: the start of that. It's challenging, it's scary, but it
Speaker 1: could be hugely exciting. And I don't think we've I
Speaker 1: don't think we've opened our minds up to that yet
Speaker 1: enough because we're too preoctopied with Brexit and Trump and
Speaker 1: say they are the signals not of fascism or populism
Speaker 1: or racism. I mean, they do signal those things, but
Speaker 1: say they're not the signal that that's what's coming down
Speaker 1: the track. They're signaling that what's coming down the track
Speaker 1: is meaningful change. They are not the meaningful change. There
Speaker 1: is optimism to be found in a midlife crisis too.
Speaker 1: It's very good to hear the chastened realist, nevertheless optimistic
Speaker 1: picture of what the future could hold. And I'm very
Speaker 1: grateful to David for speaking to us and share that,
Speaker 1: and then perhaps the next time we speak we can
Speaker 1: talk about the end of the end and how old
Speaker 1: age reaches everyone, even if it doesn't come in the
Speaker 1: form of total collapse. But we have some time for
Speaker 1: you to write your next book on that topic or another.
Speaker 1: Thank you again very much for your time. David Runsman
Speaker 1: likens the challenges facing democracy in Britain and the US
Speaker 1: to a midlife crisis, and, in his faintly optimistic view
Speaker 1: about how such midlife crises come to an end, he
Speaker 1: thinks that will slowly take on a better stage of life,
Speaker 1: one with gradual changes in institutions, rather than a genuine
Speaker 1: crash and burn for the institutions of democracy as we
Speaker 1: know them. Is he right well to find that out,
Speaker 1: We're going to have to watch developments very very closely,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna have to pay special attention to the
Speaker 1: question of whether we actually develop new approaches and methods
Speaker 1: for solving our democratic problems, like changes in our fundamental
Speaker 1: political parties, or whether we actually, the way a lot
Speaker 1: of people do after a midlife crisis, just go back
Speaker 1: to the same old, same old. The test will come
Speaker 1: especially in the years after Britain in fact leaves the
Speaker 1: European Union, if it ultimately does, and after Donald Trump
Speaker 1: is no longer President of the United States, then we'll
Speaker 1: see whether we return to ordinary politics, to ordinary politicians,
Speaker 1: or whether the changes wrought by this moment of crisis
Speaker 1: are lasting and significant. Runsman thinks they will be, but
Speaker 1: it seems entirely possible to me that we may end
Speaker 1: up right back where we started. Deep Background is brought
Speaker 1: to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Jane Coott,
Speaker 1: with engineering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner
Speaker 1: is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gara.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass. Welcome Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg
Speaker 1: and Miah Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background.