Dr Fareed Zakaria | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union

[Music] [Music] can I just stand here lovely it's a huge pleasure to be here I am a former president of the Yale political Union which was very much a copy of the the Oxford original so it's a particular pleasure and delight I was here once many years ago when I was at Yale and I came to an event that looked like it was straight out of evil and wore white tie and Tails sherry in the in the library or the office or something like that I see it seems to have changed a little bit since then or well maybe you still do that quietly on days when the cameras aren't done look what I thought I'd do is there's so much going on in the world that it might be easiest for me to start off by just talking about the thing that we can't stop talking about which we all want to understand better which is how the hell did we get here why are we in this this state of apparently broken dysfunctional crazy politics depending on how you look at it and it's happening there seems to be a competition in the United States and Great Britain as to which one has the crazier politics any given week I don't know which one is winning right now but we certainly have been holding up our own pretty well in in on the other side of the Atlantic so when you think about this question of how did we get here what explains the kind of peculiar rise of a certain kind of right-wing populism that has spread in from the United States from Brit in Britain in through the continent in other parts of the world there is the tendency to focus on economics you know the Big C capitalism that we're sort of living in a world in which inequalities have widened and that the middle class has stagnated and this reality is structural reality is what is at the heart of this problem and it's a it's a familiar analysis because we all tend to think in terms of economics this is one of the great triumphs of of economists over the last 50 or 70 years which is that we tend to assume that every problem is explicable by the idea of man or a woman as a rational economic actor responding to economic incentives and disincentives to changes in his or her economic condition and that's clearly something to it when you look at the way in which capitalism has worked in this last 20 or 30 years in the age of globalization and the information revolution it's clear that fundamentally what has happened is that capitalism now over values and over pays I'm using this metaphorically knowledge workers and under values and under pays other kinds of workers knowledge workers essentially be all pretty much everyone in this room you are all going to end up doing something that manipulates language symbols codes or images when you win when you leave Oxford you'll become software programmers you'll become writers you become lawyers you become consultants you'll be bankers the your none of you are making anything they're a small number of people the small number of people here who will the engineers and that's it that's a peculiar subset because even their high end engineering is essentially now largely software driven and therefore what you're really doing is the the kind of design the you're doing the intellectual work of it of engineering not the actual mechanical application and that work tends to be massively well compensated over over paid is obviously a oh you know a value judgment on the other hand that is increasingly physical or that remains physical it is not paid as much you can think of this most easily by thinking of the example of uber what do bar has done is it has depressed the wages of taxi drivers everywhere by the way there are many more taxi drivers so this is a this is a mixed story you know lots more people have the opportunity to drive cars but their wages are depressed as a result of that a large supply and the largely commodification of it these people can be replaced and the people who are massively well-paid in the in the in that uber example of course the software programmers at Google who does good at uber who designed the programs the angel investors the people who work there or you know maybe a few thousand people largely in the San Francisco area right so that example is a perfect illustration of what has happened in modern economics but I want to tell you about a story about the other sees not capitalism that I think actually contribute as much to this because there's a puzzle about why this is happening when for example in a place like Denmark income inequality is no better or worse than was three decades ago it's been pretty much the same when you calculate in government transfers income inequality in Britain is actually not changed that much in America it has but in large parts of Europe income inequality has not changed that much once again you factor in government transfer even without them by the way in large parts of northern Europe you haven't seen a big uptick people talk about the hollowing out of the manufacturing class you know this white working-class but if you look at Germany that is not a place that you think of as having hollowed out its manufacturing base and yet there is still right-wing populism there when you think about France as a country with enormous worker protections it really never went through the wave of attach right or Reaganite reforms that that happen in the anglo-saxon world and yet there is right right-wing populism there Sweden you know it's not a country you don't Merilee think of as being you know one of rapacious capitalists and such and still you have right-wing populism there so what's going on well the one common feature that you can find wherever you look at this kind of populism is immigration where there are immigrants there is right-wing populism of the kind I'm describing and it is in some ways the central animating force in in certainly in Donald Trump's election if you think about the point at which he announces his candidacy that is when he calls Mexicans rapists if you think about Briggs that the correlation between people voting for brexit and their views on immigration is very tight is the largest divide between the people who vote remain and people who vote for breaks it is on immigration on the other issues there are differences but there are more muted and of course if you look at the National Front and France if you look at the F D and in Germany in all these cases there is that that is animating and so the second C I want to talk about is culture because when you ask people when you probe further what you discover is that there's a great fear of of a kind of cultural revolution that is taking place in their countries and that people want to stop this in some way and by the way there is some basis for this fear now I happen to think as an immigrant that it is unfounded or exaggerated but the data is the data which is in the Western world 1975 the number of immigrants has a percentage of the of the population was about 5% it's now about 15% so in the in the last 50 years you have had an enormous expansion of immigration and a large number of people coming in to the Western world in particular now give you a sense of how this looks in historical grand historical terms and for most of human history for most of recorded history people were worked grew up died within a mile or two of where they were born right and now in the last hundred years people have started moving and in the last 50 years hundreds of millions of people have moved and they have moved largely to two places Europe and the United States and that is why you see this reaction and these people increasingly come from places where they look different they sound different they worship different gods and this causes cultural anxiety and that is the core part of what I think you need to understand which explains by the way why almost everywhere in the world despite the fact that it was only ten years ago that you have had the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression a crisis largely caused by the irresponsibility of the private sector the response of people has not been to move left but to move right right-wing parties are by and large doing better almost everywhere you look then left-wing parties why and usable you were watching this in Britain right now it is because there is a common fallacy to think in times of anxiety people will move left economically to gain economic comfort from better safety nets more more subsidies or better regulation whatever actually what happens is people move right culturally they they have a sense of deep unease about who they are what kind of world they're living in and that sense of unease is better addressed by parties on the right in general and that explains this this extraordinary phenomenon where even in bad economic times people aren't voting the economic interests and this is why people often describe it as irrational I don't think it's a rational is that people are privileges their cultural interests over their economic interests which by the way lots of rich people do as well lots of rich people vote for the Labour Party which presumably will raise their taxes why it's a it's a cultural identification and that brings me to my next C which is class we don't think about this or I should say in England class we don't talk about it much in the United States but we are developing a class system very much like the the the United Kingdom has historically had it maybe not the same because it's kind of a meritocratic class system but the single biggest divide in terms of people who voted for Donald Trump and who didn't his education people with the college education would it was the single best predictor of whether you voted for Trump was whether you were a registered Republican the party identification and loyalty still matters enormously but the second most powerful ID and marker was your education level I think the same is true with brexit the big divide has been education the big divide in terms of the National Front's appeal and France is the same and what has happened is you have created a new identity based on culture based on cultural religious social identities that is very strong because it's sort of multiple forces are layering one upon the other what do I mean by that most of these people tend to be more educated versus less educated live in cities versus rural areas work in the knowledge industry in some way work with their hands in some way they tend to be suspicious of the elites in these urban places versus not there was a wonderful book called white working-class in which there's I think you Berkeley scholar talks about how working-class attitudes about you know about rich people when she points out trying to explain the appeal of Donald Trump to the white working-class she says wouldn't class people like rich people they want to be rich what they despise the professionals again most of the people in this room or most of you'll grow up to be professionals why because professionals they regard as over educated elitist busybodies who think that their superior knowledge entitles them to tell you where you should live how you should you know what what you should eat what exercise you should do you know you should all be eating kale you should all be doing yoga you should all live in downtown lofts and cities and they were coiling that and they recur and they resent the sense of cultural superiority that comes from that but somebody who's just rich they like Trump used to have in his Twitter feed I think it was our Instagram it would be pictures of himself in during the campaign and there'd be this picture of him in his private plane with the gold belt buckles Fogle that always was Donald Trump and there would be a big picture of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken or a Big Mac and what he says is signaling is I'm just like you you know if you were rich you'd want to have a private plane but you'd still married McDonald's right you're in your raw visceral tastes you're you and I are one and that cultural identification has been very important to explaining this extraordinary appeal that that it you know New York billionaire has to the working class the final C I would point out is that we're living in an age when these all these these this kind of mega identity I think one scholar calls it because there each of these identities layer and reinforce the other is reinforced by the communication network that we world that we live in in which people seek out the kind of news that they want to hear not the news that they should or some kind of you know objective reality of it the way I sometimes think about it is people used to listen to watch television or read a newspaper to get information they now do it almost in the same way they go to church they want to hear the Catechism they want to they want reaffirmed to themselves their core beliefs they want to believe that they are virtuous and the other side is evil and that sense of tribal affinity has become probably the defining feature of modern politics so when you asked why is it that people so super strongly support Donald Trump despite everything he's done think of it almost in terms of a sports analogy you support the team you support because you have a tribal affiliation not because it happens to be doing well or because it's executing the most perfect strategy in fact when it's doing badly when your team is doing badly it is an act of greater loyalty to support it that tribal sense that group sense has come to dominate politics there's a fascinating experiment called that sociologists had called a robbers cave experiment where they took ten-year-old boys and they divided them into two groups essentially arbitrarily and they found within minutes of that division people started to denigrate the other group and prefer their own group and one version of this experiment people were given money and they were told you can either give your group everybody gets $5 or your group can get $4 so less money but the other guys will get only $2 overwhelmingly people chose to be poorer as long as their the other group did even worse you see status and competition playing this enormous role now of course you are well familiar with this because it seems to me brags it is a drama about you know eton school kids and the kind of squabbles they have had for their whole lives and so maybe you know in a strange sense people think of that as an archaic throwback but that is now a window into the new political world we are all going to live in thank you all very much [Applause] thank you so much for your talk and for being here today my first question as many of you may expect is about the u.s. elections how do you think once the primaries are over the Democratic nominee can use the four C's that you mentioned to their advantage within the current political climate so there's there's it's a very good question there are two store two approaches that people have had when talking about how did how to deal with Trump or any Republican and generally they take that the argument goes something like this so that the two strategies of something like this the first says look this is a tribal election he's gonna bring out his base you have to bring out your base and you have to find the candidate who excites the Democratic base and to understand what that would mean I suppose you'd look back two Democratic successes which have tended to be when you nominate a kind of outsider who captures the imagination of the of the of the party and the country Kennedy Clinton even Carter Obama right these are all relatively unknown figures who swept onto the political stage captured the imagination of the country and won that when the party nominates a kind of party elder who has stood his time waited his turn doesn't go so well Walter Mondale John Kerry Hillary Clinton and obviously that that would suggest Joe Biden has an uphill struggle not necessarily to get the nomination but once you get the nomination to win the second strategy says look what you really have to do is find those persuadable voters in the five states that are the swing states and it's all gonna be about getting those small numbers of people who voted for Trump last time but had voted for Obama or historically Democrats or whatever to come back to the Democratic Party or two or the move away from Trump I think you have to really dig down into the details to be sure which way do you know to look at it my god is there aren't those many persuadable left in America I think that you know there's a large number of people who are independent but I think that if you drill down what you discover is they call themselves independent but they vote predictably Republican or Democrat or democratic and so my guess is that I would tend to imagine that you have to find somebody who captures the imagination of the party and the country you know there's a saying Democrats need to fall in love Republicans need to fall in line and it's somewhat true the Republican Party is quite hierarchical authoritarian if whatever word you want to use but basically you know think of it this way there was 16 people running against Donald Trump the they all said Trump is that the most bizarre alien creature he's not a conservative he's not a Republican he gets the nomination he has the highest approval rating in the Republican Party ever you know 90 plus percent Republicans voted for him so there's enormous party discipline on that side on the Democratic side I think you do need a little bit more honey and not just not just the width recently you also described the US presidency as being in danger is actually becoming an electric an elective dictatorship um what do you think the focus should be in 2020 to address these institutional failings within yes democracy and to to save the Democratic character of the u.s. you know it's a it's a very good question because I'm not sure the public cares as much as it should you know Americans venerate the founding fathers in a way that I think many other countries might find a little bizarre you know when we think about a question about you know whether how to deal with illegal drugs people routinely say well James Madison would have said this or you know Thomas Jefferson would have said that you know I'm I'm guessing that if the Oxford Union and a lot of people don't say well what would Charles James Fox have said about this so what would the what would the elder bit have said about this and and we do it because there is a feeling that they created this extraordinary experiment in democracy that has worked in survived and flourished and I share that admiration if you would ask one of the founding fathers I think with the explosive exception of Alexander Hamilton what most surprises them about them about modern America about particularly the government I think without question it would be the power of the presidency the president was very much one of three branches Congress was clearly the the superior branch the Supreme Court didn't even have judicial review into the original founding charter so the extraordinary growth of the president where he has tens and tens upon thousands of people working for him you know can essentially at this point post-911 the president can go to war at whim arrest people at whim and execute American citizens without due process if he claims they are terrorists there's an extraordinary collection of powers for the presidency they have and then you have Trump using them in a way that essentially says there is no check on me by refusing to send you know White House officials strip Tessa to testify refusing to hand over documents it it shows you perhaps that there is a kind of an inherent flaw I'm not even sure I'd call it a flaw in in the constitutional structure but you know constitutions are basically based on something of a bluff and the bluff is that when you are asked to you will comply with these abstract and laws and ideas right because the Supreme Court doesn't have an army Congress doesn't have an army Congress has a sergeant at arms and it actually has a jail cell that was last used I think in the 1930s basically it depends on the executive branch to execute to fulfill its its dictates and that that's part of the functioning of the system is that the executive branch fulfills congressional ediot edicts and acts even though it may disagree with them what if Trump simply says he won't I mean he's given every indication of that you know it's very different it's a very it's a different situation from Nixon when the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon had to hand over those tapes instantly it was clear he was going to hand over the tapes I mean there was no doubt that that was going to happen I wonder what happens going forward now the question you asked I don't know is can you make this a big electoral issue does the public care enough about something that sounds somewhat archaic you know separation of powers you know their executive prerogatives things like that I don't know I think it should and I think it's worth trying and I but I think you know maybe if you it's so much politics as how you couch it and whether you can make people understand the stakes you know I think if somebody persuasive enough could explain that this really is turning the presidency into a monarchy and turning it into an elected dictatorship so this is this is deeply on American maybe it would work you also spoke about the creep of right-wing populism and authoritarian authoritarianism around the world in the coming decade do you see any path that leaders can take around the world to reverse this creep you know to me the most fascinating part about the rise of this right-wing populism is when it's happening in places that are not affected by immigration and quite the same way and not affected by the economic issues that we were discussing in the same way so you take a place like Brazil or India where you are seeing versions of the same thing so what is what is similar what is similar in all these places is this sense in which there has become a kind of Great Divide that is essentially based on education and geography where people who live in cities who are better educated have adopted a kind of more cosmopolitan worldview than you know is more liberal and are seen as out of touch by the somewhat lesser educated people in rural areas that tends to be that has tended to be a remarkable factor that can be galvanized by smart charismatic politicians whether they taters or Democrats by the way and used very effectively so bolsa narrow and Brazil has played on exactly they see these same themes Modi in India everyone in Turkey to a certain extent she and Putin in China and Russia even though they are as I said not not elected and that seems to me to represent something again real and fundamental we are living in a world where there is this great sorting that is taking place based on education based on geography the cities are becoming the economic centers in a way that is much more dramatic than it was in the past I know the data from America but I think it's true almost everywhere since the Great Recession since 2010 50 % of the job growth in the United States has taken place in 20 cities think about that America has hundreds and hundreds of cities 50% of the job growth has taken place in just 20 places and so when you have that kind of geographic concentration what you are seeing is a kind of backlash which can be exploited and I don't know what you do about it because this is a kind of big structural factor you know if you look at one of the things that Republicans are now trying to advocate is to break up this federal government and move it out of Washington and have various departments move into other you know parts of the of the country I am I'm not sure it'll actually happen but it it if he comes out of that desire to say why should all these people they go to Washington they all live together they all become liberals and they all become what is that what is now called the deep state you know some then send them to Nebraska and Georgia and wherever else and and maybe the bit you know they'll they the politics of those of those areas will rub off on them I'm not so sure because the cities in those in those states by the way are 10 trending liberal as well so you will look at Georgia Atlanta with in Georgia is actually the most liberal part of Georgia and so on Dallas and in Texas so these are you know I think we're living in it in a time of great of greater cultural and demographic change then people realize and there is a deep unease about that in some cases a backlash to it and that that is the fundamental political narrative of our age and people who understand it and write it are able to do it longer than you might think you know the Liberals always think well the multicultural world is upon us well not yet really you know the America is still 65% white I think maybe maybe 70% white and as long as those people vote more and if they vote on their identity you know it it's it's it's hard to figure out which one is gonna work liberals comfort themselves that in the long run you know the country will be majority minority and such well you know biscayne said in the long run we'll all be dead and with the rise of a bipolar world order with the US and China how do you envision the role of established powers like Europe and then emerging powers like India in responding to global challenges in the next decade so if this one complicated enough these domestic political revolutions are taking place at the same time that we are experiencing a geopolitical revolution because this is really a once in a several century event the rise of China broadly speaking since the Industrial Revolution really before that since the Scientific Revolution which is really around the time of the Renaissance the West has dominated the world militarily technologically and they're therefore politically and militarily the rise of China is the first big shift in that regard the rise of Japan might have done it but it was aborted mercifully in that in the 30s and 40s and then China has risen as a Western Protectorate and Ally so China is really the first non-western power to become fully equal and it is rising it has risen to enormous power it's the second largest economy in the world already so no matter what the the future it's already essentially a kind of you know one of the world's major powers and it has it has grown up outside the Western liberal international order not opposed to it but largely outside it if you think about where it starts Mao's China is totally revolutionary determined to tear it there everything down China has actually moderated its views enormously over the last 30 or 40 years but still it is an uneasy fit and I think it's going to be one of the great challenges of geopolitics to find a way for the established powers and this is not just the United States though though certainly a large part of it it is the case for the United States to accommodate China where it seems necessary and important so that it feels that it has a seat at the table to use that metaphor but to deter it and to contain it where it is trying to be a disruptive spoil where it is trying to water down conceptions of you know human rights or or you know fair play within economic terms where it wants to pursue mercantilist policy while at the same time profiting from the more liberal policies of the of the Western order and getting that balance right of accommodating China in you know where it needs to be accommodated and deterring and containing where it needs to be deterred and contained it's gonna be a very big challenge because this is not like the Soviet Union this is not a black-and-white situation the Soviet Union was a non-player economically China is the second largest economy in the world if you go to Asia it is the largest trading partner of every Asian country except Bhutan if you go to Latin America China is the largest trading partner most many Latin American countries so you will countries are going to want to find a way to align themselves with China economically even if they would rather align themselves with the United States politically and that gray zone of how to play these two things simultaneously is going to be the great challenge of statecraft for the neck generation and within Asia how do you see the emerging power of India playing out in conjunction with what china rising to such a position in the global order India's greatest problem is it is not emerging enough it likes to think that it's an emerging power and of course you know it has grown quite impressively over the last twenty years given where it was coming from but it has nothing it has had nothing like China's breakout growth it's important to understand that you know I ever have I grew up in India many many if friends in India 20 years ago would tell me oh don't worry India's gonna overtake China and I used to say to them okay explain this to me Indians are supposed to be good at math right which is by the way a misnomer obviously but if China is growing at you know one and a half times the speed of India its economy is already twice the size of India's how is how are those lines going to meet you know would you do the compound arithmetic if from you the which which makes this happen so China's economy is now essentially five times the size of India's India is not going to be a counterweight to China India could play a part is part of a coalition of countries but even there India has tended to be much too self-absorbed and and self-obsessed it's not looking out into its into its region and its neighborhood and asking itself what it should do how it should align itself it's been deeply suspicious for example of the alliance with the United States which it would never call it an alliance because of old fears about colonial colonialism and and you know third-world non-alignment and such so you don't see in India a kind of strategic impulse you don't see in India the economic weight that would allow it to be a counter to to China what is more likely to happen in Asia is a kind of coalition of Japan South Korea India Australia helped enormously and shaped and honestly by the United States but again these countries are gonna have to play it very carefully Australia is a good example Australia has gone 20 seven years I think without a recession do you know why one word China it sells enormous amounts of goods to China mostly raw materials and energy so it's going to want to maintain that economic relationship while at the same time maintaining a political relationship with the United States now can I do that you know each side the Chinese side and the American side are both going to try to say no no no it's a one you know this is a package deal if you're with us politically you have to be with us economically look at Trump on Huawei and on tech Chinese technology he says if you want America you want to be an American ally you have to accept our views on Chinese technology and such and most European countries have said no no we're American allies but we like the wall wave phone right and that is more likely than not this is why I say it's going to be a very mixed gray zone that we are operating in and my final question before opening this up to the audience is about the political situation between China and Hong Kong with tensions mounting between Beijing and the newly elected Hong Kong government how do you see a resolution to these frictions forming I was at a meeting of very senior American strategists over the summer focused on China and almost all of them expected and predicted that the Chinese government would not be able to tolerate this you know millions of people creating disorder in one of the most iconic cities and that they would in some way or the other go in so I think what's extraordinary is that the Chinese government has not done that that the Chinese government recognizes that it would be very costly to do something like that I think that we are now in an almost classic standoff where the demonstrators say that they want essentially real democracy in Hong Kong and there's good polling evidence between both opinion polls and the results of the last elections they led the municipal elections that suggest that there's broad public support for them they are not going to get there those those demands men if that is the demand the Chinese government is not going to give you no democracy in Hong Kong and yet they seemed deeply reluctant to actually going and crackdown and so the demonstrators aren't going away the demands aren't going to be met the the troops aren't going in can this go on forever well I mean the people who are paying the price of the people in Hong Kong obviously you know the Hong Kong's economy is in in chatter in tatters if there's a recession I gathered you know that the Hong Kong Disneyland as a kind of metaphor is essentially a empty ghost town now so you know is it possible that China can just wait this out and feel like at some point there will be a greater sense that people will want a return to normalcy people will want to return to normal economic activity they have made some concessions you know the bill the offending bill has been withdrawn and essentially it's been withdrawn permanently possibly Carrie Lam the the chief executive of Hong Kong could resign but it doesn't seem like that would satisfy the demonstrators if as I say the last election suggests they have broad scale support what China has to grapple with is this in Hong Kong and Taiwan both Taiwan has elections coming up in in February it seems as though China has the ability to prevail militarily but it has lost these places politically in other words that if you were at this point one in ten Taiwanese once to be unified which I were China the number in Hong Kong seems to be somewhat similar 80 80 percent seem to support the protesters demands so what would they be gaining if they were to go into a city like Hong Kong or place like Taiwan presumably there would be mass immigration people would flee the country the economy would collapse you know there would be there would be presiding over a kind of angry prison-camp as it were I mean I'm exaggerating slightly but but it's not exact it would be a Pyrrhic victory if there ever were one and again I think the Chinese seem to read the mainland Chinese seem to realize that compounding this dynamic by the way in the case of Hong Kong is the fact that the mainland Chinese average Chinese persons view of Hong Kong is these are kind of rich spoiled brats right they didn't have to go through the Great Leap Forward the Cultural Revolution any of mouths craziness they're they're much much richer than people on the mainland and now they're that's not enough for them right they want they want more so the Dian you know the the dynamic of Xi Jinping were to crack down on the mainland is in China it might actually be popular but so far they have tended to continue the strategy that they have had - at Hong Kong in Taiwan which is a kind of a slow salami style erosion of autonomy and and freedom in the hope then the long run time is on their side but I'm not sure it seems as though with every year the Taiwanese and the Hong Kong Hong Kongers get more of a sense of independence not less we'll be opening up questions to the floor now so if you have a question please raise your hand and wait for the microphone to come to you can you go to the hand at the end over there please hi first of all thank you very much for coming and speaking with us today not too long ago you produced a special episode of your show titled state of hate which tracked the history of the white supremacy movements in the United States my question is on that in kind of in two parts first I was wondering if you might expand a little bit on the thought process and research that went into that episode and additionally I was wondering if you believed that it was an influencing factor in this rising tide of populism that you talked about today yes so the reason I did that it was a it was a special hour-long documentary on on CNN that we did that I sort of wanted to call the return of white supremacy to remind people that you know this is not this is not new you know in the 1920s or 1890s these ideas were animating the Western world particularly the anglo-saxon world and I was somewhat reluctant to do it because I have not wanted to as somebody who's not right I did not want to go there in a sense because it felt like I knew it would trigger you know huge reaction and that I would you know my Twitter feed would be full of nasty comments which it was by the way but I became increasingly convinced that you couldn't talk about the rise of this right-wing populism without getting at the issue of race that you know when we talk about culture when we talk about religion what we you know the the most politically charged aspect of this is race and when you looked at the movements in the United States that were rising of violent movements they described themselves very clearly as white nationalists or white supremacist movements they talked in great with great passion about what they call the great replacement and the great replacement is this idea that they are going to be replaced by a sea of you know brown skinned and black skinned people who are going to swarm through the country and destroy the culture so this is if you remember the chart chanted Martin Charlottesville was the Jews shall not replace us so it became something I couldn't get away from and once you started digging into it what you discovered was that there was you know kind of under the radar screen under the the mainstream culture there's this deep powerful strain of it networks organizations context books pamphlets that were animating people like Timothy McVeigh the guy who blew up the the Oklahoma City bombing the Charlottesville marchers and that you know this is obviously the most extreme stray over of a certain kind of strain but it's growing it's much more violent than it was in the past and you know it's something that people need to start focusing on it is the single biggest force right now killing Americans in terms of domestic terrorism much larger than Islamic terrorism and and I think that what surprised me was the degree to which this fear this demographic fear plays into it because it's you know III look at it and I think it's so obviously untrue or wildly exaggerated I mean you know the United States of all places has this extraordinary history of assimilating people we're all gonna end up in some kind of you know mestizo Hmong mongrelize race in the United States that the immigrants come in and become very patriotic Americans but the you know the racial part seems to be the one obstacle to making people think this way and look they're you know there are psychological experiments that that look at this it's one of the strangest things to me because race is so much a social construct I mean I had this debate with the guy who was a white nationalist leader and I he was explained to me why you know America should be for Caucasians only or the Caucasians should secede and I pointed out to him that I was actually more Caucasian than he was since I came from the Caucasus I mean India is much closer to the Caucasus than the United States and you know the other word they often use is Aryan Aryan is another Indian term it comes from northern Indians as Aryan invasion of India took place in 4000 BC we were taught in in school in in India but didn't persuade him at all he said you know you're not white and I know I'm white that is the end of it can we go to the hand right there in the seat yeah thank you very much on this background of authoritarian race there is one example at least one example that stands out and last year there was a Velvet Revolution in post-soviet country Armenia but interestingly also Armenia is under strong Russian influence like economically and politically it's a member to your Eurasian Economic Union and also collective security treaty organization so I wonder what is your take white occurred under strong Russian watchful eye and what is the future of democracy in Armenia and also related to that is it a topic you might cover on TV on your show so you ask a good question I think it's important to remember when you describe these broad trends the obviously not everything always works out in quite that way so we look at the broad trend I'm describing and then you ask yourself much bigger interesting question is why did Emmanuel macron get elected in France well mark was great talent was that he was able to present himself as an outsider outside of a political establishment that was regarded as you know corrupt self-dealing and that fact the fact that he was both very skilled politician and clearly an outsider allowed him to go through even though his views on on policy are essentially quite mainstream neoliberal in some sense and you would have thought that that would be discredited Justin Trudeau you know similar kind of trajectory so when you look at a place like Armenia the thing one has to remember is each of these countries is going through their own historical cycle so in the case of our meaning I think there is a certain there has been a certain frustration with the old order which was seen as corrupt and in many of these countries the corruption plays a very very large role in terms of producing a backlash you're seeing this in Iran right now in Iraq you know so if you can tie yourself to that force then oftentimes you can you can produce some kind of a backlash and use it to your advantage the the Russian influence look I think in part may be because of the Russian influence in other words because there is a sense that Armenia has not been allowed to have its own political life that you can that you have a kind of reaction to it Russia is not right now seem likely to invade its neighbors as much as it did in the past so I think that you know the the Armenians situation is not it's not likely to spiral out of control like that but in you know often these places have their own in individual history and an individual political cycle that doesn't completely accord with the larger trend even if the larger trend is real as to whether or not I'd cover it I mean I hate to put it to you this way because obviously you come from there Armenia is a very small country I've got one hour to cover the world there was a time when because of nagorno-karabakh it was it was very important right now the situation between Armenia and Azerbaijan seems to be at least not very you know not not spiraling downwards so in some ways you should be glad when when when I cover a small country that is unimportant economically and politically it means things are going very badly could we go to the hand over there by the fireplace wonderful thank you um I was just going to weigh in there a bit you've already started to talk about a possibly emerging new bipolar world order but it seems to me that the real question is whether we see the current strain of u.s. isolationism that that really seems to me a return to pre World War two habits of the USS Henry Kissinger tray system right where do we see that that we've started under the Obama administration but of course now become much stronger and at the Trump administration America first and we retreat from Syria abandonment of allies and all that do you even think that the u.s. is still interested and by the US I mean not a political establishment but the majority of United States citizens who vote for the president are even still interested in being part of the world order at all as a bipolar a unipolar hegemon thank you you know it's a very good question and it's a complicated question because I think that I'm not sure how many people ever ever wanted their country to be a kind of great world power a superpower particularly you know I think um Forster once wrote a book had a phrase about the man and the Clapham omnibus and whether the man and the Clapham omnibus wanted you know British the great glories of the British Empire certainly at least in Britain you had you know poets like Tennyson and Kipling's writing writing pains to do imperialism that certainly has never been true in the United States the Americans were never interested in it they always viewed the world with some suspicion they had in a sense become American to escape the great power conflicts of Europe and so it's understandable that there has always been this kind of healthy suspicion I say healthy from the American context of just engaging in the world it's the Great Depression what rise of fascism World War two and then the Cold War that gets the United States into the world and as a you know in the way that it begot in involve even by the way remember after World War two the United States was ready to demobilize and it was really the Soviet in incursions into Greece and Turkey and then the Korean War which changes all that so it took a lot to get the United States to become a superpower its natural inclination might well be more isolationist but I think that there are enough Americans who understand that the world is a complicated messy place that the United States plays an enormous least stabilizing order and I think that it's quite possible that if you had a different president you would have some you would have a return to a much more constructive American role in the world I sometimes think that people lump together the Obama and the the Trump attitudes unfairly it's true that Obama in fact second half second Bush administration were had started to pull back this is all a response to the Iraq war and how badly it went but I think to look at Obama who you know signed the Paris Accord negotiated the Iran deal was trying to do in all kinds of ways for the international cooperation and made an enormous pivot to Asia where he was adding military bases and personnel to restrain China in the same light as strumpf because they both wanted to kind of stay away from the Middle East is I think unfair I think that you know the common thread there is Americans tend to think that you know there's there's no good that comes from great American involvement in the Middle East that there is no there are no good guys to root for and that you're the best thing you can do is to you know take it take a kind of watch way watchful and and and kind of cautious attitude but I do think that the United States will be able to re-engage with the world the challenge is that this is a very crucial period and you're the world is moving on and so my fear is that could you imagine a situation where the United States is ready to reengage say five years from now if Trump has the second term but by then the world has moved on you know that there is already a new negotiation and relationship with with China and more most importantly that we have moved from a kind of alliance and values based world to a transactional world which is really trumps fundamental impulses entirely transactional and the core belief of the international order that was put in place by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman was that it was essentially based on rules norms values and it was undergirded by this Great Western alliance and if you lose that it's a little bit like Humpty Dumpty I'm not sure you can very easily put it back together we have time for one final question could we go to the hand in the very back hello this trust from a comment that I made earlier in your speech about the rise of the professional and the knowledge worker actually creating a bigger chasm in the political opinions of the population in India however in particular you observe the exact opposite with the rise of these so called as the Indian media would put it the aspirational class you seem to have a higher probability of the right-wing parties gaining leverage the average knowledge worker in India seems to be way more right-wing than their Western counterparts how do you explain this what do you think is the cause as somebody who has grown up in pre liberalisation India you know as I said I when you have these broad trends you don't want to try to over apply them each each situation is is unusual for example you know breaks it is a peculiarly English phenomenon because England has had its obsession with the continent for you know forever and you read Shakespeare's Richard ii and you know the John of Gaunt is going on about how terrible the continent is and how England says it's a sceptre dial separate from the continent right so in India there are several dynamics at work the dynamic that I think is familiar is Modi's ability to say I am not like the old secular urban elites that have governed India for the last of 50 or 60 years I am a man of the people and in that sense he is identifying with this broader group of people who are outside of the old elite and they are as you say new and new aspirational class and in economic terms they might be doing quite well but in cultural terms they are still regarded as outsiders and so that dynamic of the insider versus the outsider and on and whether it's air Dhawan or Modi and in this respect turkey in India very similar identifying with that new aspirational rural class in in Turkey it's the Anatolia the Anatolian peasant class that is becoming a bourgeoisie in India it is similarly the rule that you know outside of the Bombay Delhi phenomenon these people becoming richer and more bin' and he says I'm with you but there is another dynamic of course in India which is the Hindu Muslim dynamic which Modi plays very powerfully and very cleverly and very effectively on and if you know in America the the the racial divide is the central dynamic in some ways in India you know there are probably two central dynamics the dynamic between lower castes and upper castes and their dynamic between Hindus and Muslims and so because Modi is able to effectively play with both of them particularly the Hindu Muslim one he has been he's been more effective than anyone might have imagined it's not an accident that his reelection with a with something almost like a landslide happens on the heels of a Pakistani or suburb parently Pakistani inspired terrorist attack which then allows him to unleash a very vigorous response putting you know and and he casted in very political terms he essentially said the Congress party you know is what you will get if you want these kind of attacks and I will be the guy who defends against them so there's always a dynamic that's different but the fundamental reality I think is we are living in an age where people are regard these cultural changes with great disfavor they want to return to some kind of old order that they believe whether it's Hindu nationalism and Hindutva and in India whether it's in Brazil bowls an arrow saying we are a Catholic Christian country and how did we start doing these you know carnivals and gay rights and all this whether it's you know Trump saying make America great again you know in all of these cases it is a return to the Garden of Eden that is the that is the fantasy that is being being provided or the return to some older more stable order in which everything everything was somehow better you know I I look at those words and they don't look that great to me but maybe I say that hey you know as somebody who you know in my position but I think about the way in which people talk about those older times and if you were a woman if you were a minority if you were you know somebody from the outside who didn't come from the right families really it was a much much less fair equal world I mean I think that for all the cultural change that is taking place it's actually a change being produced by the reality that we are emancipating we are allowing lots more people to fully both enjoy their real legal rights but also to actualize themselves as individuals to be themselves and to be themselves whether a black white male female gay straight in a way that that they are proud of and unapologetic about and this is a great thing and it requires a lot of negotiation and it requires it you know it's it's not easy but the people who who Hawking back to a to a golden age and to tell you know they had the problem is all those Outsiders all those others it's it's a it's a kind of vindictive zero-sum kind of politics that works in the short run unfortunately but you know maybe this is the kind of optimist in me I can't believe that in the long run it'll work I can't believe that this you know the people will will will you know will over time not realize that the world we are living in what it is is one in which you you can you have to negotiate these these differences and negotiate the reality that everybody is now sitting at the table demanding that they be heard thank you very much that's unfortunately all we have time for but please join me in thanking for you for coming you

Channel: OxfordUnion

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Keywords: Oxford, Union, Oxford Union, Oxford Union Society, debate, debating, The Oxford Union, Oxford University

Id: uj3sByRA1Co

Length: 60min 58sec (3658 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020