How to Fix Democracy | David Runciman

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] sir in Cambridge England the home of one of Britain's great universities one of Cambridge's leading authorities leading academics is David Runciman he's a professor of politics and the author were really interesting and important new book how democracy ends so David how does democracy end where does it end with Trump that's for starters I think it's going to survive Trump and it's going to survive now I think we're sort of at the beginning of the end so there is that tendency not just in democracies I think you know contemporary politics to look for these moments that are going to sort of signal something definitive this is a long drawn-out story but I do think that political institutions we have now are struggling and there's a fair chance that this struggle is part of a long slow decline so I think it ends probably this century what we mean by democracies only a hundred years old so it's movie you know we're maybe halfway through two-thirds of the way through this story and we're in a kind of midlife crisis I think Western democracies are we're doing lots of strange things it's quite a lot acting out that's quite a lot of behaving like we're younger and fresher than we are but a midlife crisis is not the end of a life it's it's just intimations of mortality but David many historians and thinkers on democracy don't just give it a hundred year history they go back to the Greeks they do how they go back to the Magna Carta the ideas have a long deep history and some of those ideas are still present here but and I write about this in my book you know if we were in ancient Greek democracy we would not think it was only like our politics not just because it was a relatively small group of men it was incredibly violent it was incredibly volatile it was incredibly demanding our democracy is designed to let us get on with our lives and we pay other people to do it for us it's representative democracy but also the core institutions the modern political party the mass franchise you can't really go back before the First World War for those even in the United States and how would you describe it then everyone over 18 voting is that the core definition of what democracy is yeah I mean so the choice is a big part of it and one of the issues with our democracy is that those kind of earlier versions of it when they got stuck one thing you should always do was enfranchise more people I mean there is a there's a way of telling the story of American democracy which is these early versions of it kind of run into the sand they get stuck they get very partisan and divided and so you bring people in from the outside and we can't really do that the idea I think that there's some obvious group of people who are unjustly on the outside a significant part of society that's that's not an option for us that's one of the reasons why contemporary democracy it's repeating a pattern it's kind of stuck in this divided way but that option is not there for it and that you that is the key institution elections are still the key to it but it's not just elections it does also involve mainstream political parties offering people platforms or programs or at least relatively current here at set some ideas on which they can make a choice it involves charismatic politicians who can communicate mass communication and you put these elements together it's something we can recognize from the 20th century and we can see it in our world but it's much much more strained in our world what then is the the narrative arc of democracy if indeed if it is indeed as you say about a hundred years old what is the narrative arc what has happened over the last hundred years what would you pick out as the most salient events in the history of democracy so this is the other challenge that we face that the good news story about democracy the 20th century story where it it spreads it starts in a few places that model it spreads around the world it brings in its wake prosperity and peace if there is there is that version of it which takes you up to the end of the 20th century if that Ahmet or if that trust it's true but you can only explain it as a result of war so like a peace giving prosperity giving aspects come out of the First World War the Second World War and the Cold War those are the three salient events the reason 1918-1919 is the start not just the enfranchisement of people but also the creation of kind of modern welfare state to get that package that includes security and welfare and enfranchisement and so on there is no historical example of this happening because it happened in the 20th century without it being preceded by catastrophic violence its war and the other thing that we've learned from Thomas Piketty is that Wars also the thing that reduces inequality so without war inequality has an inherent tendency to grow and in the 20th century the periods the glorious years where inequality was finally under relative control in democratic states were the post-war years and and it's post war it's pick at this point good or bad is it encouraging or is it very worried I think that it's discouraging there is a case and he makes it in his book which is it was starting to happen before the wars we want to find a parallel for now we should probably go back to before that nineteen eighty eighteenth story before the first world war the last great age of populism right at the sort of 1918-19 at the dawn of democracy before actually these institutions were there you see populism you see a technological revolution you see was the Gilded Age great inequality and it was peace the difference is that people hadn't tried democracy then so the result of all of this how do you deal with that populism let's try enfranchisement a welfare state income tax the state takes on debt to pay for what public works none of that had been done so if you are a social democratic politician in 1900 you could say there's just a kind of panoply of things we haven't even tried yet and maybe if we do them and a lot of that started to happen and then the first world will come so the optimistic version of the story is there was populism and populism triggered this kind of experimental sense that we should let's let's do democracy the pessimistic version of didn't get very far before the First World War the reason I'm pessimistic in the 21st century is that we don't have that sense of all this untried stuff I mean maybe it's a failure of imagination maybe there are ways of doing democracy that we haven't really but when I compare it to what you might do if you were Woodrow Wilson or Lloyd George or Clemenceau or whoever there was a kind of there was the phrase they use there was just this mass amount of slack system space that could be filled with democracy so might it be fair to say that when we're plotting your history and democracy between 1919 and 2019 that the key year was 1989 but not because of the fall of the Berlin Wall but because of Bernoulli's invention of the World Wide Web yeah I mean there are lots of key is but a absolutely pivotal point was the mid 1970s Watergate and stagnation and dictators coming to power in Latin America and corruption and terrorism across Europe it was violent it was corrupt every government every democratic government in the world fell between 73 and 75 but people didn't talk about it as a crisis of democracy in fact they did and they talked about the risks that we were going to succumb to a coup fascist takeover a military takeover it's there in the newspapers it was part of the discourse it didn't happen and what actually happened in the mid-1970s oh is this kind of fear you know that the other side were winning actually what happened in the mid-1970s is that democracy survived quite easily that crisis Watergate was not the end of anything it was the communist regimes it was the beginning of the end of communism so it's that you know that point it was almost the sort of crying wolf moment where the last time that people really thought oh my god democracy doesn't work was the mid-70s not only did it work it kind of sailed through to the 80s and beyond the other side couldn't survive that period and and the seeds of the destruction of the Soviet empire were of mid 1970s and somehow that's fed into this so part of I think our dilemma at the moment is on the one hand we got this fear that were reliving in the 1930s on the other hand we have this kind of knowledge that democracies get into these terrible fixes and they kind of sail through them and there is that I thought this for a long time there's that it the other way to characterize this age is kind of anger and complacency go together so the thing that provoked me if I said it's the thing that provoked me to write this book was the election of Trump not collateral troubles in a democracy I thought Trump showed how much faith people saw having democracy that they think they can elect Trump and it's it's just that sort of sense we're so angry we can act out we can elect Trump it'll survive but why why aren't the the 2010s the same as the seventies why can't we get beyond this so I think we will get beyond this and I think we will adapt and almost certainly there are things that we can do that we haven't done yet but even relative to the 70s to go back to your question about 89 the technological revolution and we're just at the beginning of it after all this is not like we've been through some revolution and now it's gonna stop and it's gonna give us time to adapt whereas the seventies is a bit more like that actually you know big social change a cultural change and democracy had to kind of catch up and in a way it did catch up um and it did adapt and there was time to adapt the Cold War wasn't it was a drawn-out process we're now at a point of aux he's never gonna catch up with this there's no doubt with what with the pace have changed the pace of social change the pace of cultural change we're living in a world where it's both becoming more homogeneous globalized certain people are known by every human being on the planet and every humans experience of information and communication is in various ways dif micro groups macro experiences I think this is new you know if I had to have a phrase for this age it's the age of fragmentation I mean it's the fragmentation not just of sort of national policies because they're divided of people's experience of their attention the way that we encounter the world and each other is so diverse a lot of this is positive you know we live in our different ways more different lives because we have so many different outlets for our experiences and interests in that age of fragmentation to capture something like the value of the people the value of a large body of voters or contributors to the national gird is so much harder we see it differently we experience it differently and then if there is the case that we are being divided by the technology that we communicate split and is that why you say in your book that Zuckerberg is a bigger threat to democracy than Trump the threat from Zuckerberg is not because he has evil designs and democracy but he's built something of a scale of a power he doesn't understand it we don't understand it and it's just gonna get it explained why Facebook is such a danger to democracy I understand the documentation but but but but be specific how it's not just that Facebook almost certainly has had an impact on elections around the world in ways that we've barely even begun to understood and this is around the world this isn't just Trump or brexit this is in the Philippines is in Indonesia this is in India this is in countries where Facebook is the Internet you can't access the internet except through Facebook so communication is being shaped by this incredibly powerful institution that democratic institutions can't control the democratic institutions are being themselves shaped by it and that relationship between Trump and the Supreme Court Trump and Congress Trump and the American people it could be painful it could be fractured it could be fractious and it is a relationship that we can see and understand I don't think the Zuckerberg any more than you and I understands the relationship between Facebook and that whole set of institution isn't it curious I mean I agree with your point about the this fragmentary age but in this age of fragmentation we seem to be attracted to leaders who claim to bring people together whether it's a trump and Erdogan or Putin well there's a connection between the age of fragmentation and the rise of these charismatic authoritarian leaders so I think it is in a way the obvious one which is there is a longing for something that we haven't got there's also in there is a nostalgia there if twenties and thirties so that's the thing that I'm so there are unquestionably echoes no doubt you hear Trump you hear earlier one say things and I'm sure somewhat in the 1930s within this this reminds us of what was there in the anti-semitism in the conspiracy theories in that deep kind of suspicion of outsider so the rhetoric I think echoes the 1930s and awful we do have similar political institutions I do think the social conditions are so different so the reason I'm skeptical about that idea that we're on a step not towards some next day democracy but back in that there's this phrase that clearly the scientists use we're backsliding we're slipping back to what we thought we'd left behind I don't think we are because the actual social conditions for fascism on there so the social conditions for fascism are a lot of angry young men and we have a lot of angry old men poverty and we're relatively bridge in America's saw it just now lowest unemployment rate since nineteen sixty seven or whatever in it we are richer older and more peaceful less violent than we were we feel it and we like I say we act out in ways that manifest it but to get the conditions for fascism because fascism is a movement of political violence above all its street violence street policies and a movement of you in a movement you so we're doing our violence online it's still violent you know Twitter is still my god it's it's a place of mob violence angry old men can be as angry as angry young men it's not like this is some kind of nice peaceful version of it but it doesn't play out the same way I think it's a huge mistake to think that the thing that comes after Trump or all band is Mussolini or Hitler what comes after Trumbull all band is something that could only happen in the 21st century Facebook and these other platforms are they changing people's ontology particularly the political ontology and is there a been a connection between you know Trump's reality television or always on manner of doing politics and this new world of Facebook and Twitter so I think it's so it's unquestionably changing timeframes and people's the way in which people have their attention drawn to political issues not just the pace of it but the relentlessness of it representative democracy works to a kind of rhythm it has moments of intensity moments of pause it has set peace events like elections after the elections it has moments not of reflection where it settles again your tock fill has this great line about you know the election the river rises right to the peaks of the bank and then it subsides and people think you know what we're getting so worried about that's gone I mean the most striking thing about makes him different I think from any other Democrat posited I can think of is he behaved after he won exactly the same way as he behaved before he won as though he'd lost you know it's like it's that there isn't a parallel for that so is it changing people's ontology I don't know but it's changing the fundamental experience of Democratic life I know you also thinking in a more long-term way in terms of the impact of technology on democracy in the context of AI and that you believe that AI will really shape and perhaps even end democracy how do you see that playing out if we're at the start of this of the digital revolution and the pace of it is picking up and yet we've got these relatively unreformed institutions there must at least be a possibility that what's going to happen is not that democracy snaps or breaks but it just gets bypassed when we can keep going through the motions of Elections we can keep fighting over who's on the Supreme Court and the the pace and power of machine learning particularly to solve problems which is a big part of democracy so I say in this book that the two basic things that democracy has going for it is it's a problem solving foreign politics and it's a dignity enhancing form of politics gives people a sense of respect because they have a voice and it gives them prosperity and welfare because it's good so if the problem-solving goes one way the problem solving essentially becomes an increasingly technical exercise because the machines are so much better of it and the voice and the dignity goes the other way then this thing really really does start to come apart and I think we're starting to see that now a lot of what's driving this populism is that it is anti expert anti technocratic and people use this technology to express anger and voice and at the same time this technology is in the hands of fewer and fewer people being used as a soar problem-solving mechanism if we're at the start of that process you know if the voice is going to be enhanced and the technical problem solving is going to be in the arms it is going to come apart and it's possible that the package the Democratic package which is problem-solving plus voice that was an accident of the late 20th century so there's nothing necessarily incompatible between technocracy and democracy the two can somehow be we yes so what would be incompatible is a democracy which is somehow collapsed into technocracy but a world that has technocratic elements which is the world we live in now central bank's organizations that set the rules by which the internet appraised no one's voted for these guys will these people technocracy in some places democracy in others you could have enhanced versions of both I mean I think the really interesting question is how what would be the issues that cause these two sides of political life to come into conflict in a world where some of it is just totally divorced from democracy just experts deciding for us and some of it where we are empowered and connected in ways we haven't been before well finally David we've got this patient almost a hundred years old you're suggesting getting towards the end of it there's a little the end of the middle and his or I don't know whether we say a he or a she or what what what what gender demand is life how do we extend this person's life so one way to do it is to accept a reduced version of it there's a kind of half life option here where you don't have it all human beings live longer than they ever have but some of the later years are with relatively minimal functions but kept comfortable and so on that is not to me that that's not the way we want to go with this you want it to be a vigorous life that means taking risks so there are there is a risk element to this at the moment we're clinging on to democracy like we can't let's not change any of it if there is that sort of fear of the unknown there's this sort of line that therapists have which is people want to change as long as it doesn't mean changing mmm that's the phase were in so what do we need to change we have to accept where we are not going to have democratic control some parts of our lives so we've sort of half accepted it in finance and so on but we've got to recognize that we because there's also that part of us that's in denial about it we go to experiment we've got to be radical like I said there's a challenge of imagination but we could do radical local democracy participate read democracy we could actually give people more choice in some areas and we shouldn't be thinking of new political parties maybe we should ways of doing military at newest in politics maybe not political parties so the label actually lay Valerie is now it's a movement more than is important there is a kind of movement politics there are all sorts of you know the referendum is not direct democracy that's just a kind of parody of it but there are forms of direct participation we should do where we are now is in that point where we think the threat is this big dark cloud which is whatever it is authoritarianism fascism we've got to protect this thing by not letting any of it go and if we do that it will just have the half-life [Music] you

Channel: Bertelsmann Foundation

Views: 8,105

Rating: 4.6799998 out of 5

Keywords: david runciman, cambridge, cambridge university, liberalism, democracy, how to fix democracy, technology and elections, ai, artificial intelligence, andrew keen, how democracy ends, bertelsmann foundation, end of democracy, history of democracy, how democract started

Id: DHP9yEzTUTM

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 08 2019