A. C. Grayling: Democracy and Its Crisis

well good evening everyone i'm joanne myers director of public affairs programs here at the carnegie council and on behalf of the carnegie council penn america and becky i want to thank you all for joining us this evening for those of you who are not familiar with our co-sponsor penn America let me briefly say that it is a membership organization that is composed of the novelist journalists editors poets SAS playwrights publishers translators agents and other professionals who care about the freedom to write and the power of the word to transform the world founded in the years following World War one Penn America is the largest of more than 100 centres of Penn International and as part of this year's Penn literary festival we are delighted to be co-hosting one of Britain's best-known public intellectuals the esteemed philosopher a fee grayling professor grayling whose bio was handed out to you when you checked in we'll be discussing his latest work entitled democracy and its crisis his book will be available for you to purchase at the end of the program today is democracy in crisis ever since the brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump this question is one that is being raised more and more frequently yet it is not only in Britain and the USA democracy is being tested with the advent of authoritarian leaders in Russia Latin America and the Middle East the simultaneous rise of populism and the erosion of liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe it's time to ask whether we have reached a crossroad and if so why for a long time representative democracy a system of government in which all eligible citizens vote on representatives to pass laws for them was morally preferable to other governing systems in its respect for people and their neighbors it provided a feasible mechanism for pursuing social justice with the consent in will of the people but as we move further into the 21st century it has become evident that representative democracy is facing substantial challenges in democracy and its crisis professor grayling posits that not democracy in crisis but it has collapsed as he surveys ancient ideas of democracy and the reformulation our speaker examines the benefits in contradictions of popular sovereignty and tells us why the institutions of representative democracy seem unable to hold up against forces they were designed to manage why it matters and how it can be fixed the question to consider is whether the negative forces now at work on our political culture will prevent or inspire well citizens become more active and be spurred into political action or will our complacency lead to serious consequences further discussion please join me in giving a very warm welcome to our guest this evening professor AC grayling thank you thank you very much indeed thank you well you know what I mean when I mentioned Venn diagrams thank you so this being New York this being Penn this being Carnegie Council that overlap of Venn diagrams makes me quite confident that you were all reading Plato in bed last night so I can remind you of what you encountered when you read book eight of the Republic of Plato Plato's attack on democracy he gave democracies such a bad name in that account that it took more than 2,000 years before anybody stood up and said that something of a democratic order was a necessity for people who live under the laws that a government passes giving therefore a necessity that there should be a voice that people might have in choosing that government and in giving consent to the laws under which they live let me just remind you a pleasure has said the problem with democracy is that it is just really Alcala cracy in disguise so wonderful word that autocracy och means mob rule that the reason why democracy collapses into mob rule is that ordinary people now put that phrase into quotation marks because of course there is no such thing as ordinary people everybody's extraordinary but just to use that phrase and ordinary people are insufficiently well-informed they're too short thermos they're too self-interested they very often to prejudiced and as a result there will always be a great deal of conflict of opinions and different sets of desires and that if you put political authority into the hands of the people what you will get is anarchy pretty soon and when anarchy occurs because it is exhausting and because you can't get anything done people will pretty soon welcome a tyrant somebody who will come in impose order and get things back on track history if you look across the great landscape of time seems to bear this view out think about the French Revolution for example ending as they did with Napoleonic era rule and Plato in fact was himself adducing some historical examples of things that had happened in some of the policies of the ancient Greek city-states where just the sequence of events that happened so he was extremely skeptical about the value of democracy and indeed thought it was only a step away from the very worst possible consequence which was tyranny itself now his reason for thinking that ordinary people again using that phrase were really in competent to be the source of political authority in a state is a reason which has been shared by many people since everybody knows that Winston Churchill said democracy is the least bad of a lot of bad systems but they forget that he also said that the strongest argument against democracy is two minutes conversation with any voter and he meant exactly what Plato meant that you would very very quickly discover or all that short-termism and self-interest and lack of information the point was put much more transiently in fact by HL Mencken your wonderful satirist who said to believe in democracy is to believe that collect wisdom will emerge from individual ignorant and again that is just a reformulation of the Platonic view but I like the anecdote that's told about Adlai Stevenson you remember the great Adlai Stevenson when he ran against the Dwight D Eisenhower back in 1952 it'd be very intellectual rather scholarly man and somebody said to him mr. Stevenson every thinking person in America is going to vote for you and he said I'm pleased to hear it but I need a majority well this is exactly exactly the the difficulty that Pedro had identified and there are many many people who still think that way but in the autumn is recorded in England of 1647 the New Model Army commanded by Fairfax and Cromwell and Arjun was in camp in a place called Putney just outside London it was then a little village outside London in a moment of pause in the English Civil War King Charles the first had been defeated at the Battle of Naseby he had been put into house arrest at Hampton Court I have to say if you're going to be in house arrest and you couldn't do better than Hampton Court I shouldn't wonder but there he was under house arrest and they and the New Model Army was discussing with its commanders who were called the Grandy's of the army what the constitutional settlement would be when the war was finally over and they wanted to have biennial Parliament's Universal adult male suffrage they wanted to have equal treatment in law they wanted the House of Commons the elected house of parliament to be the one where will political authority lay not in the crown and not in the House of Lords in fact they were making a demand for a form of democracy limited of course because it was men only who would have the vote but a demand for democracy which hadn't really been heard for over 2,000 years since Plato had given it that bad name and of course the demand was refused by the Grandy's of the New Model Army who thought that it was unthinkable that people should have the vote merely because they were adults or adult males they thought that in order to be a participant in the government of the country you should have a stake in the country you should own property you should have a property qualification because only then are you really interested in good government only then would you use your vote wisely if you gave the vote to somebody who didn't have any property what would you do with it he would use it to dispossessed the people who had property and redistributed the property to himself so of course you're not going to give the vote to the poor or the people who are not educated and that that marked a moment in the beginning the middle of the 17th century the beginning of people thinking that there is something not to the point about the kind of consideration that Plato adduced about the incapacity of all so-called ordinary people to be the locus of political authority that's not the point not the point about whether you're educated run after informed or not or owned property or not but they're just in virtue of being a citizen just in virtue of your status as a member of the society since you were going to live in that society and be governed by its laws you should have a voice this was the point that was made by one of the contributors to that debate in Putney a man called Colonel rain bruh who memorably said the poorest he in England has as much of a life to live as the richest he and that completely shifts the the weight of the debate away from questions about who is entitled to participate to the idea of your right as a citizen your right to a voice and progressively over the next couple of centuries through the work of John Locke in his second treatise on government they thinking of Montesquieu the very very interesting work done by people like Madison and Jefferson here in the new United States at the end of the 18th century when pretty well from scratch a new set of institutions was being constructed in order to parlay the consent of the people as Jefferson put it to a governmental structure which represented the interests of the people through to de Tocqueville Benjamin constant and John Stuart Mill in a book called representative government published in the 1850s at a time when the franchise was being extended more and more in the United Kingdom or Great Britain as it then was and these ideas their ideas about how you can really get the voice the consent the the agreement of the people to government these ideas were taking concrete form and a development of structures was underway to make that possible because something had been recognized something implicit in that remark that Thomas Ranbir made in 1647 and it's this if there is a right but somebody has just in virtue of being a citizen to having a voice in government then given all the problems that arise of the kind that Plato had identified or other difficulties that might arise or disparities that there might be in wealth and and education and so on in society what about a Carell ative right another right which is very important namely the right to good government we have a right to good government why because if we don't have good government or let me rephrase that slightly because after all outside this room there is nothing perfect in our world so we can't expect to get good government if we mean anything to you tow pian by it but let me use the phrase good enough government let me use that phrase and more modest ambition we have a right to a good enough government because unless we have good enough government really good enough then all our other rights unclaimed herbal we don't have a right to assembly to autonomy to privacy to freedom of expression to all the civil liberties and the human rights that condition our experience as and adult human beings in a grown-up world you can't lay claim to those things unless the order in which you live is sufficiently stable and mature so you have a right to that so the right to a voice and the right to good government constitute two rights which have to be able to connect with one another and what people like John Locke and Montesquieu and Madison and others were thinking was how do you translate the expression of that right the right to a voice into their good enough government that people have a right to and the answer is through a set of institutions and practices a set of institutions and practices which will ensure that the the consent given the agreement given by the people is respected in what comes out of the governmental process underwritten by the politics which produces that governmental process through these institutions and these practices now I want to go into detail about how step-by-step these ideas emerge but the the net effect of these ideas was what Joanne mentioned the idea of representative democracy where the adjective there is of the first importance representative democracy and what that means is this we elect representatives we elect people to go to the legislature and we may elect our chief executive as well and we send them off to wherever it might be to Washington or to Whitehall to do a job of work on our behalf the job of working question is to get the information to do the due diligence to listen to argument to discuss them to debate to form a judgment and to act on that judgment and if we don't like what they do we can kick them out next time and we can put in their place somebody who would do a better job for us we send them there as our representatives to do that not as our delegates or our messenger boys and girls they're not going off to Washington or Y at all just to report what the majority of people in there can see shouldn't see happen to think or in their district we send them there to go and get those facts and do that thinking and to listen to reason we hope and to interact on it that's the idea embodied in the notion of representation the control that we have is a good is the control of recall if we have a good a responsible Fourth Estate and I have to say in the United States of mega you have a you're better served than we are in the United Kingdom in that respect I'm sorry to say because of the very corrosive effect of the tabloid press so-called red top press in in in the United Kingdom but responsible reporting investigative reporting holding to account asking pertinent and tough questions that's a really important part of the process between elections the interaction of citizens and their representatives is very important in a representative democracy too but the thing which is of greatest importance of course is this possession of an extremely valuable thing which it took centuries and a lot of blood to get and that is about and that power of recall that power of appointment that power to confer a plenipotentiary responsibility on people to go and do their job of work on our behalf lies at the very heart of the idea of representative democracy so in the ideal we're talking here about a slightly utopian situation where we have very good honorable intelligent representatives who understand perfectly well that they're what they're representing is the interests of their voters and of their country and so they go off to wherever their legislature convenes to discuss with rationality in a well-informed way what would be the best thing to do in the general interest that's the utopian vision now unfortunately as franchises have extended and we can think of that process in the United States is really similar the UK you know by the first world war there was pretty well a universal adult male suffrage in the UK the franchise had been extended little by little just each doubt by though those in power to stop you know too much revolutionary sentiment my first world war was Universal among males because of the great contribution that women made in the First World War in munitions factories and in the land army and in hospitals women aged 30 and over were given the vote in 1919 I suppose this was on the assumption that by the age of 30 women might have grown a brain cell or two and could read a newspaper the voting age was only equalized for men and women in 1928 the vote was only a voting age was only made 18 in 1968 so you can see that the extension of the franchise has been very very gradual and very grudging but it has happened and we're more or less in the situation now where we can say that the argument is an argument about the margins should be lower the voting age to 16 well that's been discussed in the United Kingdom there are those among us here who've had teenage children who think I'd rather give them a Kalashnikov than the vote you know that might be one of you but but but personally I rather think that the voting age should be 16 but it should be accompanied of course by a very rich offer of civic education in politics and government that in high schools there should be a lot of commitment to you know mooting and voting and debating and before the age of 16 I think also with Belgium and Australia the voting ought to be compulsory I noticed that in the presidential election in this country last year out of a voting population of about 250 million something like 120 million people voted that seems pretty extraordinary really a great pity in Australia it's not compulsory to vote it is compulsory to turn up at the voting booth so you can destroy your your ballot paper if you want to if you really don't want to go the problem with either of the two boys I've asked you you know but but you have to turn up because it's recognized as the civic duty and I think that's very important anyway so this is a pretty well where we are with the the ideal of the structure but of course as the franchise has been extended so politicians and political organizations political machines have recognized that in order to get their agendas through they have had to learn how to manipulate those structures to pull the levers in the right kind of way and to influence from within those institutions so that they that the party agendas can be got through now I make the following remark about the system in the UK but you'll you'll see the parallels with the u.s. situation in the United Kingdom there are two major political parties there are a couple of others there's a third rather small party but mainly it's it's two political parties these two political parties in order to get their agendas through the parliamentary process have to exert a very very strict party discipline they have what's called the whittling system that sounds pretty problematic but it actually comes from fox hunting where with the dogs into pursuit of their of the luckless Fox and the whipping system involves and obliging members of your party to vote for your party line no matter what they personally think about the policies in question whether they against their conscience or against their better judgment they're whipped into it and the whipping system is very is very strict if you don't obey the party with you can lose the support of the party at the next election so you don't get funding you don't get support you don't get the party machine behind you but there's also and so it's rather well-known fact that in the UK Parliament at any rate the threebees standard be employed to ensure the vote and threebees blackmail bullying and bribery the bribery in question is will give you stereo opposition or more support at the next election and so on the blackmail is well it works like this actually if you ever meet a British MP you should say to them tell me the very first thing that happened to you when you reached Parliament and they will say oh the Wits invited me to tea and the whip said to me you are now one of us and we're going to look after you and in order to look after you we need to be able to protect you from from anything that anybody might be able to you know creep up on you and attack you about so any secrets did you ever have your hand in the till or you know what's going on with you and your secretary or anything like that just tell us your secrets and we can protect you in case anybody finds these secrets out three weeks later you want to vote against the party line they come and say to you if you don't vote with us that's going to be all over the newspapers what you did I mean they gather all the little secrets that they can this is the blackmail thing the bullying thing well there was a famous case just a couple of years ago of a member of parliament being frog-marched into the lobby that his party wanted him in with his arm up behind his back held there by two other MPs they you you might ask yourself the following question how is this possible the answer is because the common law of England doesn't apply in the Palace of Westminster the Palace of Westminster has a peculiar I mean that is the literal term and also the correct term status in the in the Kingdom where the common law doesn't apply if Empire is an employer were to bully or blackmail or bribery of my employees quite rightly I would be up in front of an employment tribunal pbq is they say pretty damn quick I'd be there the next morning but in Parliament they do this all the time what is the net result of this the net result is that your representative in Parliament is not representing you any longer but is representing the party line and in there are cases and I'm going to cite one we should really stagger people especially those Brits among you hear that back in March the current government forced through a bill a short bill on triggering article 58 to cause brexit now I'm going to be completely neutral about breakfast and tell you I think it's a damn stupid idea but to trigger this bill this article 50 bill they whipped their MPs both major parties with their MPs into the lobbies to support it an MP after MP after MP our MP did so obediently saying it was the worst thing they had ever done they disagreed with it it was against their better judgment against their conscience but they obeyed the party with now if that isn't the perversion of democracy I don't know what is and it's a much much bigger and more significant issue the idea of party discipline of the control of the party machine of the process in our legislatures than you might think it's a serious matter it's equivalent in seriousness really to the role of big money in politics now it happens that I think this problem is more serious one of the United States even than it is in the United Kingdom but it's bad enough in the United Kingdom here of course as a result of a Supreme Court decision a few years ago which has allowed the formation of super PACs you've now got extremely large sums of money applicable to the purchase of seats in the House of Representatives or the Senate and if you had enough money you could go so far as to buy yourself the White House so that's a very serious matter to when very very very large sums of money are applied to the distortion of the process of selection and representation in a country so those are as functional aspects of how the the institutions and practices which were designed to take the consent of the people into good enough government have been captured and have been distorted by the influences inside the practice of these institutions and there are a number of other things too I'm being a bit mindful about though about the clock but there are a whole number of other things that could be mentioned too there in the book but I do want to mention however a thing which I think is by far the most serious because it is the most recent that is that we've always been conscious of the fact that our politicians because of the nature of the political game have used rhetoric and propaganda and sometimes haven't been completely truthful in what they've offered or promised or said or claimed we've been aware of this we've been aware of the fact that politics is a bit of a rough game and that you can't completely trust politicians to do what they say they will do now one reason why you can't of course is that politics is a very difficult game and government is a very difficult matter it's like herding cats as they say it's it's a very apt description that one you may go into politics full of ideals and aspirations and you want to do a great deal of good and the minute that you arrive there you find you have to compromise that you have to accept half-measures that to get anywhere in to influence in politics you have to be pretty firmly attached to the posterior of the person just above you on the greasy pole so you know get up there and to be able to do anything in politics is quite a hard job and when you find that you will inevitably annoy this group of people and that group of people and eventually you will annoy everybody all political careers end in failure unless they end early and you have to you have to you have to take me they you know the leaf out of the poet's book you ought to be a great poet died early same with great politician get assassinated early and you will be remembered as a great politician but if you go on long enough you will end up as a disaster why because you will eventually annoy everybody politics is a very very difficult game and government is equally difficult so you could have you know one little little grain of sympathy for people to go into politics although it was there and stupid for for doing it but the other that the external problem is this in order to get elected in order to persuade people to give their consent to you as their representative you have to some let's make promises that you don't really think you can keep you have sometimes to put spin on things you're a bit of propaganda or an angle on things that is not exactly telling it like it is and we're all familiar with that I mean it's a babe major reason why we're always more than half you know skeptical about politics and politicians okay so we know that now if you met a politician standing on a soapbox in Central Park talking about his or her views about tax you know levels and the next budget and that what's going to happen with refurbishing the Armed Forces and so on you might be interested but you might be a bit skeptical and you'll take it with the grain of salt what however if the rhetoric if they spin if the propaganda had been weaponized what if it was being targeted at you in ways that you don't know about which are concealed which are not overt well this alas has happened and it has happened because of our enthusiastic embrace of social media and it is the use of social media and what happens on the internet now which has made manipulation of groups of people are so much more serious a matter and so much less obvious a matter let me explain you may remember that your president during the election campaign last year one evening at a rally said I am mr. brexit you remember that occasion I am mr. bracy's he said you will see and he was quite right because his campaign team had employed the services of a company which had been very successful in securing the leave vote in the United Kingdom a company called Cambridge analytical Cambridge analytical is a big data analytics company now big data is an extraordinary powerful tool in the natural sciences in medicine epidemiology in examining social trends what big data analytics does is it draws hundreds of millions of data points with great rapidity tremendously powerful algorithms in the computer terminology and they're able to dig into the patterns that are discerned to get the kind of granular causes of these patterns so it's an extraordinary powerful them very useful tool but when this tool is applied to the manipulation of people's attitudes and beliefs in the political sphere it's a somewhat different matter what happens is this by using the huge amount of data are available in the social media sphere these companies are able to profile people now you know that if you use Google or any one of these major servers that Google will profile you it will profile you in order to be able to target advertising at you in fact it tells you this every time you go on some websites let's say we got to put cookies on your machine so that we can watch you and we can you know work out what to send you so that's familiar we all know about that's been going on for a long time what you may not know is that your profile which by the way they know more about you than you do yourself ok so they've got such a precise and accurate picture of you your age your gender your sex your education level the way you live what you're interested in what you do is it's so carefully and accurately monitors all your activity in cyberspace it's such a knowledge of you that when you go onto the Internet to ask a question to look for some information who was the fourth wife of Henry the eighth what year did the Norman Conquest take place so any question like that ok Google will give you the information that it thinks on the basis of your profile that you would like now that you dwell on that for a moment you think you go on the internet to get some information and you're being information that the server in question that the service in question thinks that you would like to have that's a different matter altogether very good friend of mine here in New York John brought in some of you may know it was over in London a couple of weeks Kerry said to me I put on my Google Calendar the fact that I had to go and have an outpatient appointment at one of the New York hospitals for the next three days I was bombarded with advertisements for my local crematorium well I mean there's an example of how closely Google was monitoring him and he wasn't very very happy about what it was they were bombarding him with but it's just a little indication of how it does it so on the basis of this prep profiling what a company like Cambridge analytic it does when its employed to deal with an election campaign is the following firstly remember that there are two blocks okay there is yes and the nerve in the outer Clinton the Trump whatever it might be there are two blocks of voters you're not pretty well going to change their minds very much but in between there are the undecideds the swing voters they may be in the for big swing states there may be special reasons why they are undecided or vulnerable or open to persuasion or manipulation if you can target them then you might be able to tip enough of them over to get the result that you want so what you do is on the basis of your profiling you identify groups of people this little group here you test messaging on them you you see what it is is bothering them and you test messages to them in the case of the the Trump team Cambridge analytic attests at some of their messaging up to 30,000 times to get the message absolutely right so that that message really resonated with that group now you can see how that works okay you know when you hear some politicians say something that you agree with you think yourself oh he's smart okay man because he's agreed with you okay so this message has got out there to that group and that group says yes that's dead right they've been captured that really really works to them so you've hooked that group in to your man he'll Crump okay now that group there might be something different there's bothering them so you tailor a message to them you get the same effect and so for lots and lots of little groups now these different groups may have nothing in common with one another other than the fact that they've been captured they may load one another they may not even know about one another but they have been aggregated they've been brought together into a single voting bloc enough to tip the balance the clever thing about this is that you don't have to get a majority you just have to get enough as you know Hillary Clinton got somewhere in the region of three million more votes than Donald Trump did in the popular vote but he got the right votes in the right place and he got the White House as a result and those right votes were got by careful targeting regionally and with messaging to groups that were very very carefully specified now in a way this this would be okay it wouldn't matter that you were part of a group that was being targeted by very careful messaging very carefully designed messaging that the people sending you the message know will really work with you it wouldn't matter if you knew that was happening if you knew who it was that was sending you the message and why they were sending the message and who was paying for it and what they wanted you to do about it if it was transparent but the real problem is that this is not transparent this is covert this is hidden persuasion this is the weaponizing of the propaganda and the spin to manipulation and to direct the vote in very very crucial sensitive areas of the undecided voting population in order to get a result it takes money and if if money is going into a process that people are not aware of and they are being indeed nourished is the term after all the nobel prize for economics has just given to the man who introduced that concept of nudging of influencing but i was in australia about a month ago and i was talking to a member of the security services there who's one of his responsibilities the cyber security and we're talking about the russian hacking because by the way it's not only the the messaging to selected target groups it's also the hacking of Facebook and of Twitter and of emails it's also the use not just of of pro-trump messages but of anti-clinton messages in the case of the EU referendum it was a lot of pro leave and sort of anti remain but also o remain is sure to win its gonna win easily so if it rains you don't have to go out and vote that kind of messaging to there was a lot there was quite a repertoire quite a palette of different ways in which different people were influenced by the kind of messaging it was coming out there were claims for example that the bookmakers had said it would be more than an 80% probability of a considerable remain vote it is predictable to you know a sort of a very very tiny margin of error what the drop in the turnout in an election will be if it rains on the day of the poll in London on the 23rd of June last year's of the day of the referendum it rained and the predictable drop occurred and that drop in the turnout was enough to lose the vote to leave ever said a lot of people in London had been told that Romain was going to win easily so of course it didn't matter if they didn't go in vote so the this messaging and the targeting the messages are very weren't very skillful if they were overt as I say absolutely no problem if we knew who was paying for them and why absolutely no problem these techniques are almost certainly going to be used more and more which is why the demand for transparency is going to be key in our democratic process well ok I'm liking bringing messages vijaya and so I'm gonna shut up in one second I'm just going to very very quickly leap across a whole lot of other considerations and say I think that our system of representative democracy in the UK and the United States and there were a lot of similarities to one other they after all come from a common common root can be saved relatively easily a very modest and moderate and small C conservative set of things can be done which should make our representative democracies work as they're meant to work there it's a pretty good system in a way it's a pretty good system because although it would be very desirable for more people to be more actively engaged in politics and for local politics to be more significant feature of people's lives in a way that would feed up into national politics still it's the case that we've all got our jobs to do our families to look after our interests in life and we don't want to be looking over the shoulders of politicians every minute of every day we would like to be able to trust the system we would like to be able to send good responsible people to do this job of work for us and we would like to be sure that the institutions would work properly so that we would get good enough government that I think is is one of the big arguments in favour of trying to make the system that was so carefully and painfully devised over the last couple of centuries to make that system work but in order to do so it has to be transparent it has to be transparent we have to break the grit of party machines on the way of the institutions are run we have to make sure that big money doesn't distort the process in ways that are very partisan that only serve the interests of a particular section of society we've got to make sure in other words that the system works as it was designed to work now a lot of people come up with a lot of very exotic other ideas what about sortition sortition is where we just buy lottery juice people to go to the House of Representatives for a year and make the decisions and then then because the lot of the lots again and another group of people go so that's one suggestion a suggestion that I don't mind is Epis tock recei let mr. Percy was Plato's idea that everything should be run by philosophers well that's okay by me I think it's a bit implausible and then very occasionally I think of some of my fellow philosophers and I think oh hang on a second I think perhaps we will stick with representative democracy but we could make representative democracy work and we should demand that it does transparency being absolutely key breaking of the grip of the party machine and control of the amount of money that is spent on elections and those three things just by themselves but reclaim for us something that is designed to work in our interest I'm sure that we have many questions and I just ask that you go to the microphone and introduce yourself and try to keep your questions brief thank you the United States has had a series of crises of democracy over our our history even since the Civil War reconstruction and the Red Scare period the Karthi period Watergate break-in and so on each time democracy and liberalism it doesn't restored by in the wake of these challenges is there anything about the current challenges current administration and the rise of fake news and Tea Party and so on that causes you to doubt that there will also be a return to the pendulum but do you know what I think there are two very positive signs actually which the Trump phenomenon and I have great dividends here I I sympathize with your pain about this so I don't like to you know in probably into it too much but you have a president who is probably the least qualified individual in the history of the world or at least since Caligula anyway to hold high office and there must be tremendously worrying and embarrassing as it is for us Brits at the moment we're embarrassed by the stupidity of brexit but here in the United States two things that that strike me as being very positive one is that the whole false news faith news agenda has been instantly spotted and and people are alert to it it's not as though we are still in the dark about it it's not as though we're still being manipulated by it of course too many people are but there is a quite a lot of pushback against it and secondly your institutions in the United States are looking very robust look at your courts look how they've you know knock down some of the diktats that have come out of the white house on immigration and people traveling here to the US for example and look at the way some of the states like California for example have just refused to accept the Washington line or the white house line anywhere and climate change this is to me it's evidence of the robustness of some of the structures that you have in your country and that's a great a great optimistic sign I think and probably in the end the the pushback will win I'm wondering you put I'm sorry I'm Seth Siegel how do you do thank you welcome to New York I'm you you talked about some of the negatives of the rise of Technology but I wonder if you could talk about your prognostication about the benefits of it particularly do we need representative democracy at least in the form that we've had it we don't need perhaps to have a centralized government in Washington DC when you could have something akin to the the the the Athenian idea of democracy where every citizen could vote on key issues and in a prompt way you could use technology to have people engaged to learn key issues and moreover to both their opinions even if it's a shifting opinion you talked a little bit about where you think technology is going it's changing every other part of society every industry and why wouldn't it also soon be changing governance yeah for politics sure well I agree with that of course a key issue there is the security issue because at the moment an irate the cyberspace is so poor so hackable so manipulable that you would have to find ways of making it completely secure so that we the government could be enacted through that those media and we could vote online and we could you know introduced although I don't think that referendums are naturally at home in representative democracies but there might be ways in which the voting system could be further democratized that more people could be brought into the system and encouraged to vote especially if it were made compulsory and through these means so I agree with you that it could be a very useful tool if it could be made secure my guess however is that the effective of Technology on democracy is going to be indirect in other and less predictable ways one thing we know for example is that the advent of super intelligent AI is going to make a huge difference to the way people work and even indeed whether they have jobs or not a concept which has been around for a long time now is the concept of universal basic income which may become necessary of very very large numbers of people are displaced by automation in our economy and one of the things which has been noted about the use of basic income in places where pilot schemes run and there are a number of them in South Asia and in Africa is that people become more participative they become more responsible they take more interest in local and national politics they step up more if getting a basic income were annexed to a responsibility to vote or to take part in local political affairs it could actually draw more people into the process and give them a sense of belonging to the process which doesn't for many people who now feel marginalized especially about what's happened in our major economies so in those indirect ways technological advance could have surprising sort of byproducts but in order to make the technological aspect of things directly applicable to the way we run our politics in our government we would have to make sure that it is genuinely secure because what you don't want is your elections being run from Moscow I add Albrecht from Mercy College I hear of developments from the UK where the Home Secretary amber Rudd is enacting legislation which would make reading certain websites extremist websites punishable by 15 years of jail this is for reading not for downloading material or just for visiting the website so I wonder in your opinion is that something that we should welcome in terms of the effect on democracy or is it worrisome development no I don't both what one little bit and of course this is just one little corner in it in a way although maybe because it's the Internet it would be a big corner of the whole freedom of expression and problem and it's a kind of no platforming version isn't it electronic version of denying people access to certain kinds of views and arguments and the rest and now I'm the master of a college in London and I say of my college that it is a safe space for free speech and I won't I won't have anybody no platforming anybody I say freedom of expression should be regarded in the following way bad free expression should be defeated by a better free expression don't drive it underground will refuse you to stop you from seeing it'll punishing them if they do see it so that kind of initiative that you've described there seems to me incredibly retrogressive because all that you do in in refusing access to any points of view no matter how vile those points of view might be is to drive them into a situation where they fester they become more problematic in the long run than if they're out there in the open and you can deal with them you can challenge them but I'm very curious as to why it's so often considered to be the kind of populism that's antithetical to democracy I have a lot of friends in England who voted for brexit who are neither ill-educated ill-informed or even poor and their reason for it was that it was democracy I mean aside from the 53% who stayed home because it was raining because it was making government more account locally it was getting rid of the yoke this was their take on it of an unaccountable unelected micromanaging group in Brussels and bringing back to a more authentic democracy so I'm interested in New York take on that yes very very interesting when that line is argued it happens by the way that the electorate enfranchised for the referendum was a general election electorate rather than the referendum one which means that it was restricted so there were three groups of people who had a very material interest in the outcome of the referendum who were excluded deliberately I mean it was because there was debate about it in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords they were deliberately excluded from from the franchise so of that franchise of that restricted franchise 37% of the electorate voted to leave it happened that it was 51 point nine percent of the votes cast on the day had it had the electorate been said to be mandating then there was already information given to members of parliament before the debates on the referendum bill that there should be a threshold requirement or a supermajority requirement but when requests were made for for that in the House of Commons the minister who was introducing the bill said it's not necessary because this is consultative only it's not binding on Parliament of the government but the government driven by a group of people who were very keen to see breaks it happen and decided to treat it as mandating and have gone ahead with the process against actually quite a considerable ante brexit democratic upsurge in the country some of the arguments about sovereignty taking about control escaping the the rule of Brussels and so on are sheer distortions mainly the result of the tabloid press mainly in particular Daily Mail Daily Express newspapers like that because there's never been the case that any of the sovereign member states of the European Union have been under the inescapable control of Brussels Brussels has a the Secretariat in Brussels which carries out the requirements of the Council of Ministers which are all the member state governments who jointly put forward a European Union legislation and has it ratified by the European Parliament whose members are voted by citizens of all the Member States so it's actually a more democratic system than the UK system is because we have unfortunately like you here we have the first-past-the-post voting system which means that successive governments are always voted on a minority first-past-the-post by the way is a very very undemocratic system you can easily see why I think of a constituency or a district with a hundred electors ten people stand eight of them get ten votes one gets nine votes one gets eleven votes that's the person who goes to the legislature the other 89% people are not represented at all that's what happens in the UK it's not what happens in Europe Europe is proportionally represented the Council of Ministers the heads of state of the European governments are the ones who formulate policy the Brussels this metaphor that people use merely carries out it's a civil service it carries out the instructions of the Council of Ministers so there's a whole business about sovereignty like until you can go online and there's a white paper that was published by the government usually white papers are published before discussions in Parliament but this one happened to be rushed out after a discussion in Parliament the white paper on the article 50 bill a section 2 paragraph 1 says the United Kingdom has never been without sovereignty it's never been the case that it's been under the cosh from any outside body the anigh kingdom has never been without sovereignty but it is sometimes felt like it I'm quoting if that is a reason to be the EU then we're in serious trouble so you should get back to your chums and tell them to read that read that paper website your description of the crisis had a lot to do with technical gee and your sense of the cure had a lot to do with technology with social media I wonder if though if the problem has as much to do with people's vulnerable susceptibility to that technology and if that in turn comes from something that isn't caused by the technology for example a loss of social trust I think the many of the Philosopher's you cited Jefferson Mill Tocqueville assumed a level of social trust in a democracy which we don't seem to have now and perhaps neither and brexit as well is that part of the problem and if it is is that susceptible to the kinds of solutions that you were talking about and I think you're you're dead right about it it's a very good point that you make the the trust has long since been compromised I think and may now have been lost completely and it may take the form of the sense that a lot of people have of being marginalized or left behind or disregarded by people who do have their hands on believers of government this has been cited actually is a in terms of a populist upswell of resentment against the elites and and the current order personally I don't believe in in populism in the form of a grassroots up swelling of sentiment when I certainly believe that there are people always people in economies who in periods of transition or downturn or sectors of the economy which are suffering who do feel very marginalized and left out and good sensible politics and good sensible government should address those problems and help those people and if they don't then a problem arises because the thing that is most toxic in a democratic order is inequality and when inequality grows and becomes palpable very serious resentments arise and anxieties occur and which can be exploited by demagogues there will be people who will claim that they understand the problem of these people and they know who to blame and they're going fix the problem you have here in the United States of America extremely improbable implausible spectacle of a man who lives in a penthouse on top of a high-rise building and 5th Avenue telling the blue-collar workers that he's going to save their bacon for them in the United Kingdom for example you have people who again feel left out marginalized left behind being told that the problem is the EU and actually you were trying to invest money in their areas to regenerate and so on so you get you get that difficulty and there is a serious problem here because people are middle and lower incomes in the advanced economies of the world over the last 25 years or more but certainly since 2008 have seen their living standards stagnate top 1% their wealth has grown fourfold in the same period and with that kind of inequality in society you are guaranteed to have certain sorts of difficulties which can be exploited and so they have been you look at Europe at the moment you see the rise of the right in Austria you see marine lepen doing reason you know better than she's ever done in a presidential election this is because of those kinds of frustrations personally I don't think that the right will stay that high in the polls for very long once those difficulties have been addressed but they certainly exist that is where the lack of trust comes from that if you don't believe that people are interested in what you're doing that the political process is going to be part of a solution to your problem then your disaffection your sense of impotence and futility grows as a result what it takes however is it mean it's terribly important that people should feel that they're they're genuinely are part of the story but it also takes genuine leadership I mean to go and explain what the problem is and why there is a problem and what can be done about it and how to engage people and being part of the solution to the problem is where you get you know people of genuine statesmen and States women stature we are lacking those and you mentioned how institutions working the way that they were designed to and speaking about politicians trying to tip those skills in one direction or another but it seems to me that that's kind of something that politicians have always done and it's update now more malicious and effective but it's to me it seems like that's something that they've always done and I guess my question is does the social contract Leviathan that you're describing still work if people believe that they're represent that their representatives are representing their interests yeah no I acknowledged actually was an important feature of what I was saying that those the tricks of rhetoric and manipulation propaganda and so on which have indeed always been part of the process and have been a growing part of the process as franchises have extended I mean look go back to the England of the 18th century in the 18th century in the time of Walpole MPs were very very independent they didn't need to be party discipline they didn't talk to their electors if they had any most of them had rotten boroughs anyway so there was no need for spin and propaganda this became a feature of the political process the more you had to persuade voters do to back your agenda now however and we've been conscious of that we've always been skeptical we've always discounted for it but now I put it by saying it's been weaponized it's been weaponized because the tremendous power of access to people's thinking and ways of nudging and influencing people through the medium of social media and through cyberspace has turned this into something familiar and something we've been uncomfortable about but we can discount for into something which is genuinely toxic and has made a big difference I think 2016 the brexit phenomenon and the Trump phenomenon have shown that we've reached the tipping point on this because in both those cases the the swing voters were targeted in ways that were covert which involved a great deal of money and which involved the kinds of messaging to them that were specifically designed to manipulate without them knowing that they would be manipulated fortunately as I say we've spotted it we're aware of the problem and now we're trying to push back on it but that's a big part of the story of what happened last year but I take issue one thing I think certain philosophers would make good politicians thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

Views: 14,884

Rating: 4.5939088 out of 5

Keywords: A. C. Grayling, Democracy and Its Crisis, AC Grayling, A.C. Grayling, democracy, liberalism, Brexit, British politics, English politics, Conservative Party, Tories, Labour Party, Theresa May, Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn, UK politics, euro zone, populism, parliamentary system

Id: j4ePIwevm98

Length: 62min 28sec (3748 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2017