Democracy Talks: Condoleezza Rice on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

like to start off talking about your book from 2017 democracy you describe populism nativism isolationism and protectionism is what you call the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse three years later in 2020 how do you feel democracies are faring with those four horsemen well it's certainly I think not a good story in terms of how we're faring in fact it appears and very often crises do this that the co19 crisis if anything has tended to reinforce maybe even exacerbate some of the trends toward isolationism you know it's very interesting what you've gotten is a response where the sovereign state is king in response to the pandemics so it's my citizens my borders my PPE the international organizations seem to have almost been sidelined during this period of time that underlying trend toward nativism take care of my own seems to be stronger than at any other time in my memory and by the way it's quite in contrast to the way that the response to September 11th or the response even to the financial crisis of 2008 where there was very much a sense that these were contagions that couldn't be really contained within borders and so I think we're going to have a lot of hard work to do to rebuild some sense of international cooperation as one of the important elements to responded to crisis once we are through this terrible situation and let me just finally say I understand that impulse but it's still one that I'm sorry to see thank you on maybe a drill down a little bit on the topic of populism if you take a homogeneous country saying like Hungary they're populism is more a sense of Hungary vs. the world Hungary versus outsiders here in the United States populism seems to focus less on that and more on our internal divisions on red versus blue on race on on native-born versus immigrants how do we deal how do we best deal with those tensions in our own country of that have been brought out by populism well you're very right that the response of a country that's homogeneous is around kind of old-fashioned nationalism my nation against others the United States of course is this odd creation and that what it is to be American is not tied in some way to nationality or to religion or to ethnicity we come from and our ancestors came from every corner of the world and so you couldn't have a response that says okay what is it to be American in the way that you see it in Hungary but what we are having an uncomfortable conversation about is then how do we define American and what I see happening to us is that we divide ourselves into ever smaller groups each with its own narrative each with its own grievance each with its own history and it becomes about whether my agreements or my narrative is superior to yours in some way and what has been sacrificed is the kind of sense of a common narrative that was not based somehow on our tribe our ethnicity our nationality that was a common narrative that was based on a belief that you could come from humble circumstances and you could do great things and that was actually a narrative that was without regard to what your race or ethnicity or nationality was even though we know that in reality there were barriers to that dream if you were of a certain color I grew up in segregated Birmingham Alabama to say that the American Dream was fully accessible to the people in with whom I grew up not true but even so we kept working toward that common narrative toward that common idea as Martin Luther King put it the context the content of your character not the kind of about the color of your skin and so that's somehow what we've lost is that sense of a common narrative when we think about divisions it became it's become increasingly clear that that some of our adversaries Russia in particular are seeking to to exploit the divisions that we have we know that they've invested a lot of time and effort and money in things like social media disinformation and so forth not just in the United States but particularly here in the United States how can a free society like ours best respond to to a country like Russia that is attempting to manipulate factions and divisions within our own society well the first thing it goes without saying that we have to actually help to heal the divisions within our society because if they weren't there you wouldn't have anything to to try to stimulate and obviously this is something that the Russians and others the Chinese and others have tried to do take disaffected populations and make them even more disaffected this is by the way an old playbook it goes back to Joseph Stalin's time when he talked about the building of fifth columns within societies which were disaffected populations that would rally to the side of the communist international rather than to their own false consciousness of nationhood with the United States or other places but they would never have dreamed what a gift social media would be in that regard because social media is so much more efficient at identifying referent groups that are disaffected playing to their disaffection because social media allows you to to be within your own echo chamber where you might only engage people who are like you people who think like you then this ability to really rile disaffected populations becomes much more efficient so I think we have several things to confer STUV all my view of this with the Russians is first time shame on them second time shame on us we know what they did we know how they did it there ought to be complete operation between social media platforms and the government to make sure that they don't do it again secondly some of it's actually pretty ham-handed and pretty silly I've looked at some of these people ought to be smart enough to see that these are really concocted from foreign powers you can some of them you look at you think that's not an American so calling that out is really important and then the final thing that we need to do is that we all need to get out of our little social media echo chambers and bastions I've been saying to people you know if you're constantly in the company of people who say amen to everything you say find other company I'm going to date myself but when I was a kid my family watched the huntley-brinkley report every night some people watched Walter Cronkite some people watched our case Smith if you were a generation later you watched you watched Brokaw and Jennings and rather well now I'm that kind of common basis where we all saw basically the same moonshot the same civil rights movement the same Vietnam War has given way to I can go to my website my bloggers my aggregators my cable news channel and you know what happens when you don't encounter people who think differently you think they're either stupid or they're venal and that's also happening to us so some of this is the responsibility of individual citizens to stop falling into this trap of I'm only gonna listen to people who look like me think like me and believe like me I mean I'll ask you one more question and hand it over to my colleagues if that's okay talking again about about populism to what extent have when elites in politics or the media or business or education or other fields are distant from from common people from ordinary people and not understanding kind of the the anxieties that the average citizen is feeling how how does that how does that threaten our politics or threaten our culture when we have these sort of out of touch elites assuming you agree with the premise I do is not actually anti-democratic it can lead to anti-democratic tendencies but when it is as anti institutional and so it says those institutions those elites they don't believe in you they don't have your interest in heart they only have your interest their interest at heart you see social and economic inequality growing between elites and common people that adds to that notion of elites who are distant you hear sometimes the way elites talk about quote common people for me one of the really interesting manners interesting outcomes was after the Trump election the number of my academic colleagues and journalists and others who almost in an anthropological way we're going to go look at those people and what they thought and there's a reason that hillbilly elegy was so popular it was because oh that's what those people think and unfortunately a lot of the common experiences that we used to have whether it was military service or church-going or the like we don't have those to the degree anymore and elites have separated themselves further the other big contributor and I think it's well understood I believe in globalization I think it was beneficial to us to have a kind of integrationist narrative about the world but we seem to have forgotten that those of us who moved easily around the world who spoke different languages who benefited from globalization most people never moved more than 25 miles from where they were born telling the unemployed coal miner in West Virginia well globalization was good for you because you can buy cheap goods at Walmart it wasn't selling and in fact we forgot that while globalization had tremendous macro benefits and indeed benefits for this global elite of which we're all apart it actually left a lot of people behind and they are desperate and they feel disrespected and it's not surprising then that a populace can come along and say those people never had your interest at heart and they believed it actually I'm glad you brought up this notion of globalization and kind of how some people feel left behind and I'm I'm wondering given given whether it's all feeling left behind or a sense of loss of national identity or cultural identity how should democracies respond to this challenge to address the needs of those who are in need around the world but also make sure that others don't feel left behind within the country itself yeah well the answer is different I think for the United States then for some other democracies the problem is different for different places I think Europe has a real problem because they actually did try because of their own history to push nationalism aside to push national identity aside and to subsume it in a European identity and it was sort of represented by the idea that Brussels the unelected the unelected bureaucrats and Brussels we're making decisions about everything from what Italy's budget deficit could be to what constitutes cheese that that's a different problem where the attempt to shop national identity aside actually backfired and people said no I want to be polish I want to be English brexit was a result of that I think Europe is gonna have a very hard time repairing any sense of a European identity particularly because kovat 19 has even more exposed those fissures but in the United States when you look at what has happened I do think as I said earlier this lack of a common narrative has been but so too has our inability to talk across our cultural and ethnic lines in a way that recognizes that a lot of people are are suffering a lot of people are finding that they don't have access to high quality education for their kids you know this again I know I keep returning to the crisis bus and everybody's mine this has really exposed inequalities in ways that I'm not sure we even understood how much they existed so just think about those of us who are on these meetings these zoom meetings we can be a efficient we can be productive we can keep doing our work there's some 4050 percent of us for whom this hasn't been at all disruptive to what we do but if you have to go to the shop floor or you have to go work in a restaurant you're unemployed if you're a small business owner you're unemployed and so this has exacerbated and exposed economic inequality in very important ways and oh by the way talk about education if you're a kid trying to learn at home under these circumstances right I was home-schooled for my first year of school because in Alabama you had to turn 6 by October 31st to go to school that year I was born November 14 my parents were educators there was no way I was gonna miss first grade for a whole year so my mother who was a teacher took the year off and taught me you know she knew how to do that what about the kid who's trying to learn at home with parents who don't even speak the English language at this point so I think that these inequalities and the sense of being left behind is very deep and we have to address that first and foremost and then we do have to address this kind of cultural divide where we don't know each other very well anymore where we live in very separate societies if you are well often if you're not and I've been proponent even of national service as a way to give us more common experiences a lot of kids who students of mine who've gone to Teach for America and they get a really very different look at America when they go into the Mississippi Delta to teach I think we need more of those experiences Thank You dr. ice I did it I'll turn all that bill conclude in a moment if I may ask just a quick follow-up question and maybe you covered it a bit at the end there but given that globalization has benefits but people as you noted rightly are concerned about their national identity is there a way to sell people on combining these two forces to show the mutual benefit for everybody well America always believed that we are better off when the world we've never defined our self-interest is gestured at least not in the last 70 years as just being about us and I believe that Jean is still very much alive that DNA is still very much alive in Americans you see it when there is a natural disaster someplace and there's a great outpouring from Americans often through faith based institutions you see it when they say Isis will not be hit people on television we are going to have to respond to that Americans I understand are tired they're really tired of the big responsibilities of leadership they also don't like what happens when America doesn't lead they don't like when Vladimir Putin annexes Crimea they don't like when the Chinese beat up people in the streets of Hong Kong and so this is about leadership and I think an American president can appeal to that other impulse which says we're better off when others are better off and if you look at something like AIDS relief when under President Bush and continuing under President Obama and now under President Trump we took on this pandemic of AIDS that was ravaging an entire continent and through our leadership a lot of people are alive today who wouldn't have been Americans are proud of that we've just got to give them more examples of why we matter in wait thank you if I can close a couple of questions I'd like to circle back a little bit of what you're talking about tribalism at the beginning if you could comment on what role you think identity plays in some of the Democratic unrest we're seeing not just here in the US but you know around the world what role do you think identity plays I think identity is a fine thing to know who you are know where you came from know your history know the struggles of your people I'm very very proud of my african-american background I have to say American slavery is such that I'm I have 40 percent European DNA which says something about the way slavery was carried out so identity is a complex thing particularly in a country like this but identity in itself it's not the problem the problem is when you weaponize your identity against someone else my identity entitles me to things that you don't have my identity means that you have to step back because I have suffered more it's the weaponization of identity that is really an issue the other thing about identity is that if it just becomes about ethnic or racial or religious identity that innocence can be somewhat dangerous I've said very often to people who promote diversity diversity is really really important we meet people from different backgrounds but we ought to realize sometimes that there's more in common in a diverse group than we would normally expect so if you go to one of the I live in Silicon Valley you go out to one of the tech companies and you you look and it's a pretty getting to be a pretty diverse group of people but you know what they all went to the same height the same schools they all went to the same colleges and they all have the same technical skills I I begin to to think if we could just start to find in our diversity commonality if we recognize that people have multiple identities not just identities linked to color of their skin or identities linked to their economic circumstances they have multiple identities then we will realize what really is the genius of America which is that we aren't of one ethnicity one nationality one religion we are this incredible hodgepodge I won't call it melting pot that's a word that people don't like anymore because it suggests that you have to just kind of conform no in fact a lot of the a lot of the energy comes from oats and somebody mentioned earlier immigrants let me just say that to the degree that we forget that we are a country of immigrants to the degree that we forget that the real appeal of America's great Creed it doesn't matter where you came from it matters where you're going is that that's allowed us to attract people from the the most advanced countries in the world to lead the knowledge-based revolution like Sergey Brin whose parents brought him here from from Russia you would never found in Google and Russia to the person who comes here to make five dollars not fifty cents and they're equally energetic and they're equally vital in revitalizing us and keeping us young and keeping us hungry and keeping us working for that dream and so identity is a is a terrific thing but not if it becomes a prison and to a degree identity is becoming something of a prison rather than something of an asset thank you let me wrap us up this last one you were talking about some of the inequalities that have been exposed through the pandemic here are thinking more globally so what impact do you think the coronavirus the pandemic is going to have on democratic stability around the world going forward until we get a vaccine treatments whatever and and how might I might democracies best remain stable so they don't give in to the Four Horsemen yes well the first thing is to guard against overreach of government into the lives of people we've all been willing to stay home and to do all the things that we needed to do to try to keep each other safe but at some point government needs to let go a little bit oh and and people have to have a sense of control of their lives again one of the things that America has the wait fork that's more very well first I would say in this circumstance is federalism people inherently trust government that is closer to them than government that is further away and so to the degree that localities and states are able to now move at their own speed that's going to help us get around a sense of centralization and too much government I think democracies are going to have to go back to first principles about things like how do they give an opportunity to give opportunity to as many people as possible knowing now what we know about the divisions and the inequalities that we faced but I also hope democracy's going to realize that you can't spend forever you know the the amount that we've rolled up in national debt is ultimately going to come back to to haunt us and so there's gonna have to be a reckoning for some of the decisions that we've taken rightly under crisis to get back to something that is more stable and sustainable and the final thing is I think democracies like the United States Great Britain a little bit fine I worry about the unconsolidated democracies the younger democracies where the temptation for continued authoritarianism might be even pushed further in places like hungry I worry about Poland I worry about the effect on countries in Africa for instance or in Latin America that have only recently begun to have democratic governments especially in Africa where we've only finally gotten away from presidents for life now I was told a very interesting and heartening right by Ellen johnson-sirleaf the former president of Liberia who of course rescued her country from Civil War and we were a big the United States a big part of that but she talked about how in Africa the work that we did comes back to why America matters the work that we did with AIDS relief and malaria relief and and helping them to build better healthcare systems which was one of the real benefits of the way PEPFAR was carried out it has actually helped them to manage these crises they know how to talk to their tribal chiefs they know how to get out to the villages and we helped to build those systems so I hope they will continue to be robust under the strains and stresses but it's going to take leadership to say we're going to do this in a we're gonna we're going to provide security and health in a democratic way and that that means that people have to have a voice

Channel: TheBushCenter

Views: 5,649

Rating: 4.7600002 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: QpGmbs_gAK4

Length: 25min 36sec (1536 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020