Interview with John Gray on political populism HQ

John Gray in the second part of this interview I want to explore the ways of populism in of the strongman in contemporary politics interestingly enough they are or have been until now white man Trump Wilson our duty Etta and and so on in an article in the New Statesman that you published last year you say that liberal democracy is faced with two threats one is populism and the other one is what you are think provocatively called liberalism there's tackle old liberalism first what do you mean by that by all liberalism I mean a kind of hyper version hypertrophic development of certain liberal values of individuality self-realization self creation which are developed or asserted to the point that the preconditions for a sustainable liberal order are ignored or even eroded so if you study liberal thinkers in the 20th and 19th centuries thinking only or even as far back as the 18th century you'll find that they all recognized that there is a kind of pre liberal matrix for a liberal form of life for some of them it's actually Christianity for others it's liberal humanism for others it's simply a body of practices to do with laws and procedures and so on and also in some cases a census of collective identity associated with nationality John Stuart Mill thought that but these are the kind of background conditions without which a sustainable a liberal order won't last long or we'll even destroy itself now I guess hyper liberals are those who want to treat pretty well all Lord anyway most nearly all inherited identities as in some sense oppressive or repressive and in need of deconstruction so nationality the family religion various aspects of gender they've all got to be deconstructed and remade by I guess individuals or possibly groups or communities that we do individuals as they choose to do so and I think that's some a recipe for disorder in the sense that if everything is up for grabs then so are the values of liberalism so if people want to constitute themselves as a white identity or a masculine identity or a racist identity of some kind anything can follow from that how do we then know what is the difference between a civilized or is there was my call progressive or let's say a civilized assertion of identity and one that's barbarous or if you like reaction or aggressive so I mean the underlying philosophy of or the underlying ideology of this kind of altruism I guess it's deconstructionist thinking of some kind or other post modernist thinking so it's taking liberalism almost to sort of its logical maybe in inverted commas extreme so that society actually becomes atomistic and you then can you can rearrange society doesn't even become atomistic because they the atoms are continued are constantly fragmenting or recreating themselves in a new convert Anakin reorganize Society in different launches of clusters of atoms yeah black identity gay identity and white white and white identity is another option and what gets lost then I mean is this this is the question what gets lost then is a kind of universality ascent of a sense of not necessary University but certainly a commonality of practices and values that I held in common I mean a traditional population of this now very unfashionable is the practice of toleration toleration assumes I mean it emerged in a time of war in Europe in its modern form of Wars of Religion which creates the problem created the question how do individuals and even more importantly whole communities all ways of life with divergent and that many points actually it's incompatible demands on ethics and politics how do they coexist how do they live with each other how can they avoid the catastrophic and long and humanly very costly conflicts that occurred in early modern Europe and so from that we get defenses of free speech but we also get the idea of toleration in some of them it's it's never complete it always leaves out large groups but the basic idea is that human beings with very different belief systems and very different practices and very different values need somehow to find conditions of coexistence with each other if they're not to be locked in perpetual conflict and that seems to me to be the main thing the main element of of liberalism in its I mean and how is that eroded by off liberalism well I guess the old liberal position would be to I mean first to reject some views as and and most human identities to date as being repressive and a need of deconstruction demolished or criticized and replaced by others the reason it leads to conflict is that large sections of the society for example who have traditional identities that are let's say religious won't accept this and will resent it and vote for if it's a democracy for politicians which that they think will protect them for example it's interesting and this is where the connection was popular synonyms in I mean for example it's interesting that in the United States Trump who's never shown any genuine attachment to religion ever now has the most solid part of his constituency are evangelical Christians of various kinds now he says he's exploiting that opportunistically obviously but they they believe and interpret their experiences meaning that they are among the groups whose identities so to speak are in need of deconstruction and need of demolition in other words rather than seeing themselves as living in a larger society that they can share however uncomfortably with liberals and atheists and sector and people with other religions other types of Christianity or other religions like Islam or Buddhism or no religion at all rather than seeing themselves as taking part in such a kind of venture of toleration which can break down by the way it's frequently broken down in the United States over issues like abortion so I'm not saying it was ever achieved some kind of peaceful peace but this kind of project of mutual toleration breaks now what happens then is of course the different groups each see their identities as being under attack and so they from having however imperfect regime of toleration which is the kind of project that was inherited in Europe and in parts of the world which became European from the early modern period and which by the way in different forms existed all outside of Europe long before that the Ottoman Empire the Buddhists Empire even Mongol Empire huh forms of peaceful : toleration but forms of toleration in which people with different religions could exist coexist with each other and indeed ancient Greece and Rome had the general practice of incorporating religions into their Pantheon and it was only when Christianity for example refused to be incorporated not the words I suppose anything like the persecution that later on Christianity imposed on others but this this the paradox if you like one of the paradoxes of toleration is that it came from within monotheism but if you put that on one side and say what we want is the complete destruction of reaction identities complete destruction then it's a recipe for culture war for perpetual culture war another the development arguably that's enhanced or aggravated by I supposed to the social media world of today we have these echo chambers of public opinion where discourse is CNN says these Fox News has something else and they own if there were an audiences and never the twain shall meet well you know the thing is you I mean what new social media mediated by new technologies allows and enables is people to interact only within that media with other people like themselves yes so the only news they see is the one that fits their pre-existing and that's not just a passive thing that they do actually the the algorithms that are built into it so people fall for products and services and performative entities others the really pernicious thing about Facebook isn't it that Facebook isn't geared towards the truth and not even towards community it is geared towards targeting advertisements as groups of like-minded people so it sort of encloses people in these groups of like-minded I think some have claimed although I don't think the evidence of this is of having a decisive impact is strong some have claimed that some of the victories of populism have come from the micro targeting of voters this kind of thing I don't think the evidence shows that it really made the decisive difference I mean if I hadn't been sixty-two million or 68 million people predisposed to vote for Trump I mean if they'd only been two million it wouldn't have created 50 million for 60 million people to do so you have to have the divisions in society to start with such a partly cultural or if you like see here's a difference in the 19th and 20th centuries the ideological divisions of Western societies particularly the 20th centuries were really around I think largely in the middle is about issues of nationalism and racism but later on between socialism and capitalism and the thing about the issue between socialism to some extent it's an instrumental rivalry because both would say they wanted more prosperity they wanted poor people to be less poor they wanted wealth and so on so there was an element at least it was an instrumental rival which broadly speaking although socialism is now back on the political agenda in both in the realm of academic theory and in practice capitalism one communists are more central planning collapsed in pretty well or all all of the world although now people are tending to revive some exceptions but the difference is now is the types of conflict which exist in society do have an economic dimension in the sense that the groups the social electoral groups in which populism has been most prevalent are either the so called left behind in globalization people in the American Rust Belt or in dying industries like mining or very importantly insecure elements of the middle class mm-hmm who may not be getting poorer every but are in debt and are anxious about the view and don't expect to get better in the future so there so that's a kind of an economic dimension an important economic dimension seems to me of of the causes of pop but it but they're intimately interwoven intermix with comes with questions of conflicts over identity and their ultra liberalism has played a part I mean my main I don't share any of the populist project but I mean when writing on this subject I may name is Ben to get liberals to admit some responsibility for the situation that has occurred it hasn't come from the devil it's not all created by Russia it's emerged internally these populist movements over quite a long period in many societies in Europe there are populist movements of some strength in most European society is not just a failing or or an inexplicable phenomenon or a local anomaly which we see in one country it's in pretty well all the countries of Europe in America it's also in America it's also in Brazil it's also imminent let's explore that a little bit further and look at the commonalities between these various forms of populism if you take Trump Paulson our du Tertre Xi Jinping a popular well I was going to say and we talked about populism how would you define populist and what do you see as the main features that these various populist sore throat area need is there to cause a common way of defining and then there's a way that I think is more illuminating a common way of defining populism is to say that populist movements are those which see themselves as rising up against a traditional elite or set of elites and saying that this elite the political heat or other elites cultural leaders is oppressive or is monopolistic or is even evil in some way so they're trying to kind of throw it off and assert some kind of I mean the the the yellow vests in France might we're fed up with all of these elites we're gonna install some form of direct popular democracy I think that's actually very dangerous myself but that's a four populism this is a different way of which might be more illuminating to describe it which is I would say that populist movements in Europe and in North and North America and in other parts of the world China there may be different come back to that later are ones which resists the depoliticization of issues that they regard as one switch should be matters of collective choice so if there's a range of policies installed in a regime which are gone whatever happens policies on it could be on immigration it could be on education it could be on if this that if there's a range of policies which has this characteristic then many of the populist movements can be seen as emerging in order to sort of content or or a consensus on certain types of capitalism as well let's say all you needs left-wing over to the left-wing Social Democrats or right-wing but not ultra right-wing conservatives would say well I've got to accept this kind of capitalism it's the only one that really works it's the only one that really is practical furthermore we should really accept the market as being the core institutions right throughout Society I mean I'm old enough to remember the National Health Service when there are no markets in it at all no when you went to a hospital there was one person called the owner who dealt with that you didn't pay for your parking the way there was no boom I mean that was a non-market sector well now in most Western societies even the parts of the sectors which are consist of state services which the consumer of those services don't normally have to pay for not paper all of them all of what they get their mediately through markets so there's a certain type of predominant capitalism which all the major parties have accepted and which nevertheless there's a lot of public discontent with so one can interpret a populist movement as one which is attempting to repel it aside those questions those issues because it's only a generation ago in which there were many people who said there was a whole tradition of socialist thought that said health ins to health care and should not be based on a market principle but should be based on a gift principle like donating blood which we used to do in this country not for money or like in America you just did it got nothing out of it yourself except the sense of doing something for that public good thirty years ago there was a whole tradition of that gone as if it never existed so right across the board I think there is a range of issues that appear were being kind of be politicized in the sense that there's only really one rational way of dealing with them and that's an in that sense revolt against the establishment yes that they are saying to the establishment you've become kind of a technocratic elite yeah thinking that you can decide for words but we want to open them up to problem it also this is one reason why populism is often represented as essentially irrational no undoubtedly contains irrational elements or bad elements if you like I mean the the yellow vests recently abused the French philosopher and a few things wrong I mean it's not necessarily a left-wing movement or if it is left-wing it's also anti-semitic yeah so then it's not the same but the idea that populist movements are always and inherently that there's nothing in them which is there's no kind of rational source to them I think is is a mistake because what it represents is what the populist movements are reacting against which to say there's only one way of organizing public services and that's the market if you don't understand that you're just stupid so I said well wasn't like I said years ago the problem with without though is then that if if there is that sort of rational impetus behind it it's then hijacked by general who then actually end up D complexify yes certainly but especially if it's especially if the response is too represented as wholly irrational to start with because then if you're like irrational is demagogues ethnic nationalists and others will emerge and say well there we are that's what they're saying I mean they're saying you're irrational what's wrong with being irrational in this way so I think I I think the the role of a kind of in this case not hyper liberalism is hyper liberalism is really a kind of deconstructionist ideology it's really just of the liberalism of the last twenty or thirty years which is essentially a being a kind of Homo economicus I know because liberal or more economicus liberalism used to say that liberal society is simply a naked human of market relations and there's no institution that really shouldn't be involved in markets or that shouldn't actually consist of markets the visitors if you think actually the high-water mark of Victorian capitalism it wasn't like that even then there were lots of institutions outside of markets which functioned according to non market principles non market principles and that lasted in this country in Britain right up to foundation of the BBC and thing they were non ma on the International Health so there were non market institutions they weren't supposed to respond to market so it's supposed to have markets inside them and so a kind of market imperialism there's been a feature of the existing order of things that populace rebelled against so if you say well look opening everything to global markets leaves these communities which were based on mining or fishing or whatever it's completely wiped out what's the response to that well that's just the way if there's progress there is not only the economic dimension is it it's also the liberal assumption that cosmopolitanism is good that there is some sort of you know that we're moving towards increasing universality and and and and and and so on and then you get a backlash to that you get a backlash against that among the left you then retreat into sort of various forms of identity politics but then the right has its own identity politics strong and more popular usually yeah that's the danger so and then the whole thing explodes because I mean this would be the question because people can't find sort of a sense of a way to talk about things and bring people together with shared values well there may be a similar way of putting it than that I mean human being I mean it's an example if you take immigration he example look at what angular Marco did in in 20 in 2015 which was criticized by some people but then quite a few people in Germany were in favor of it and it was quite hard actually to criticize that so the idea if someone says for example well actually you know let's take if you have got a group of friends of twenty people and one person joins and that's fine but if you've got a group of twenty friends you know you've known each other for a long time and five join or ten join yeah obviously that's going to impact on that group and then the question has to be you know can we absorb that but it was impossible to answer a little answer the danger comes for liberal cultures when anyone when the people who the only people who asked that question are from the far-right yes that's a great danger because anyone noticed more reasonable people ask the question they are I mean immediately and identified with its using it in inverted commas it because that situation legitimates the far-right inverted commas because they are the only ones responding to perceived and what perhaps widely felt discomfort now you can say the discomfort is racism the thing is to stamp it out another way this is a liberal response in other words one liberal was once a bit like Trotskyists who say well so it Union wouldn't be an infinitely better if it it pressed on with global revolution there are liberals if all this shows his liberalism hasn't gone far enough the project is is okay well my objection to that is partly practical what we know from European history let me give me an example back in the early 1990s I was asked in a eastern mean peen country what will come in Eastern Europe after the new right now the new right there was the the market right the free market right the the neoliberal writing huh can you you know I said yes I think I do know what it'll be at the old right what will come after the new right is the old right and the reason for that which is to say the the Nationals the anti-semitic the anti-gay the anti-roma the whole caboodle of poison and toxicities that's what will come after the new right and the reason is there'll be many reasons there will be large inequalities will open up there will be issues to do with sudden movements within countries from the countryside to the the city there will be a whole variety of disorders in the shift the transition from state socialism or communism to market capitalism which won't be dealt with and as a result of that the old route will come back and that is exactly what has happened in many countries it's happened in Poland and Hungary for example the Czech Republic Slovakia and a whole range of other not to speak of Russia because one of the things argued way back in October 1989 when the wall hadn't even come down in Berlin was that if communism ended as it was ending with a tremendous triumphalist embrace of these neoliberal market institutions and you could be absolutely certain that what what that would lead to would be a revival of the old forms of collective identity often in their more more malignant forms beginners again it's happiness by knowing means Eastern Europe if not anymore that's a very important pointing because a lot of people used to say to me that's just in Eastern Europe well Italy is not least in Europe yeah Germany's there is still the tendency though even when you look at Germany and look at the alternative they say besides Europe and you forget about area for example and if you look at France it's quite worrying I mean the the Social Democratic Socialist Party socialist is almost dead but almost all over the whole conservative the Conservative Party who now call themselves Republican in France they're not doing too great either the only thing that seems to be standing between marine lepen and the presidency is among in my in my always weak and who's not doing too great either no so and who represented a kind of centrist populism actually that's right and you know the Labour Party assume now it seems to be crumbling and maybe there will be a reorganization of the British political landscape who knows so what can you do about what can one do about this D the if you want to well what you learn let me see what you can is what you can learn from it is that the centre parties centre left and center right which are either weak or almost to funked in not most Eleuthera and are in britain hollowed out have no responses have no answers have no even understanding of why there is this widespread alienation the first step if they want to revive and i'm in this sense i want the center to revive i want the center to to embody decent pluralist values so but it can't happen unless they understand why this this widespread movement to the populations populism z' mostly of the right in Europe but in Britain actually to the left maybe a melon show in France to the till to the left as well if you go him is a populist why has this happened all over the place as it's just not how causes and if it if it doesn't have causes surely some of the causes must come from policies or or missions that occurred during the 30 years in which liberals and fairies descriptions were in charge after all for the last 30 years the Republicans up to up til Trump held to global free markets free trade unrestricted market activity and so on and most of the center-left pretty well all of the center left and center right of Europe did too did the same yes so there were liberals in that sense nonsense and yet one finds when one talks to the Liberals they're extraordinarily resistant to the idea that there's something in their policies are worse still their world view their view from B's which is actually been erroneous the X they'll say that's because there wasn't Merkel there was a problems with immigration injury because she didn't push it far enough yeah the same argument is being made with regard to the European Union if yes more European isn't isn't working too well but that's only because we haven't gone far enough do you realize that maybe this is because we've gone too far in some sense it doesn't seem no yeah so I think this is sort of almost and it would be very sad if it proved to be incurable because to say because I think if it's paradoxical because liberals very often think of themselves as exponents of empiricism we learned from experience they're refusing to learn from the experience and whatever happens nothing to do with us it's either the Russians it's which is an odd kind of kind of liberal conspiracy theory it's these evil forces which you've done if they weren't there I mean two characteristic paranoid politics which is that internally liberal politics was fine then someone started meddling with it from outside the Russians the Chinese somebody I'm not saying there wasn't meddling there may have been but it didn't produce these changes or they say what else oh because we didn't go far enough we gave in too much too we should have had more radical policies and that is exactly the reaction that you see on the part of the korbinite Labor Party we need to go further but now also in America most people if declare a candidacy food for doing for the presidency to run for the Democrats their way left-of-center which is very strange as you say empirically given the fact that you know the Democratic presidents that America's had recently for COBOL my and Clinton were centrists yes and so was Blair with disastrous errors or over Iraq and someone but nonetheless won three elections and produced renewal in cities helped debrief I think Shefford is very good example yes I did things things that can improve with better policies yes yes things did improve with better policies but nevertheless there was something in the in that centrist liberalism which generated both populism and hyper liberalism there was no there were failings in it which whether they be distributional some people didn't benefit either at all didn't get worse maybe it was they didn't huge increase of wealth but they didn't get an even or they were worse off by in America for example they maintained their existing income by working more hours are more jobs so they're really worse off or they really sink into oblivion more in America than here but it happens here too by becoming involved in illegal industries and legal or illegal drug life and this kind of thing and in America on a colossal scale in the opioid huge numbers of people were out of the labor force or dead simply dead so the there are there are deeper economic and social pathologies at work in the very process that produced the the product the prosperity under the centrist liberal period that centrist liberals are very very resistant to seeing themselves as have any complicity way any in or any responsibility for so they have to either they have to interpret it as a kind of he's a kind of atavistic outbursts of sheer irrationality or demagoguery but why weren't the demagogues successful in the time of eisenhower or Clinton or what was it about the political climate that meant that made the word demagogues then the worst that could explain the were these extremist organizations why were they successful then why they most successful now and similarly in Europe the right wing was almost there there was always the National Front the were always tripped off fascist some countries were never did not survive actually but they were at the fringes of politics now remember in Germany for the first time since 1945 you have neo-nazi elements in the alternative for Germany party in power in the right not just the regional party the first time and the actual postural constitution of Germany then western Germany was constructed to prevent this I think there was a five or six percent barrier for apply percent well now it's 12 or 13 percent I often wonder what these liberals will say when I say when because I believe it will be when I don't know when five years when exactly ten years but when the FDA enters government in Germany not just into power but when it enters it call it just as for example now in Sweden is a long struggle to keep it out of although it's interesting if you look at polls that people have done 60% of the people 60% of the people who voted the alternative for Germany party don't actually share many of the values over difficulty they vote for them to put pressure on the other party so that's kind of a hopeful sign as though maybe I mean in France which we discussed earlier I mean I was very glad obviously that marine lepen was defeated by McCrone but when it happened at the time I did write in the new states and I wonder how substantial McCraw is going to be I even said maybe rather nationally he might make Holland look rather substantial in retrospect I mean and in a way that was over optimistic he's collapsed more completely and more quickly than I thought he would yeah I mean still there and if there was another election now he would probably because everyone including me if I was ready to vote for him instead of lepen but that's a very sort of it's a very unstable situation in which you have a weak centrist as the only barrier yes the only princess although to the to the advance of the far-right as the other thing is that there was this innocence good fortune that little append campaign was very bad I mean one of those things that have sort of saved parts of the world from the worst excesses of populism in power is that most of the Western populace have been incompetent I mean imagine if Trump had not been Trump that's to say a narcissistic undisciplined figure but someone like open-door salvini imagine if he'd really been as a tough steely disciplined politician he could have won not by a tiny Menard not even by a popular majority won by a landslide yeah so so in a sense where you've had disciplined politicians in smart politicians I'm using that not as a term of a positive term necessary I just mean clever discipline like salvini like by Orban they don't they're not only when they stay in power and they shift gee this is the danger I've written on this the danger when populism turns into a liberal democracy it doesn't doesn't turn into often there are links with fascism in all these countries actually historically but doesn't turn into classical fashioned fascism if you mean something like straight dictatorship I mean one good feature there aren't many of straight dictatorship is that it can be decapitated in a war or evolution get rid of the dictator that something else happens but if more difficult when you have a deeply embedded a liberal democracy that's to say a democratic system which has been shaped if you like and formed so that it continuously real elects a single I mean all the newspapers are owned by friends of the the top oligarch all that dictator all of the institutions that the judicial institutions have been stripped of their independence as in Poland Hungary and so on but also could happen in Italy and another Western European countries so that the really the whole of you don't get people are not persecuted in the sense of being take it I mean gay people may be attacked Roma baby attacked there may be widespread anti-semitism as there is in all these countries but they're not taken away in the middle of the night what normally happens is if you're a dissident journalists your contract just this isn't extended you've gotten you might be able to continue to broadcast in a way you couldn't underclass ago I am from a tiny studio but no one will hear you so it's actually a more effective system and horribly horrible and it's much more pernicious so if you come back to the issue of truth if someone says something you don't agree with you no longer have to put them in a concentration camp you know he's restricted to CNN or whatever just March I know and your based and watches Fox News so they're they're the sort of society marginalized I mean they are marginalized and and you without the necessity for methodical terror yeah and you can see how then or at least imagine how how that then sort of begins to permeate through democracy or people no longer believe in certain values when Donald Trump says there with the police oh if you with a suspect meaning for him a criminal in a car you know don't put your hand on that just slam into the car then that's fine but then if you have a democracy a liberal democracy and no one really believes in the values anymore then at some point of my visa lapse it looks the the danger is that could be more stable than fascism was because fascism it lasted a long time in Portugal and France of course Portugal and Spain sorry Portugal and Spain but fascism si can be decapitate by war revolution or coup d'etat you get rid of the structure then maybe this you don't actually and it's also quite nasty normally for a lot that people probably fit too many people within the system yes but if they're kind of happy within the system well if you have rising if you have rising to be standards if you have better quality of life I mean it's interesting that the mass demonstrations that have existed against a liberal democracy in Russia the more the biggest later were on pensions hmm what he wanted to wanted to raise the pension raise a pension age very unpopular very very very unpopular huge alternate Russia enormous they're not there aren't similar demonstrations of such size and importance so how do you think this well because I think we may be different here because I actually do I'm sort of a more for Hegelian than you I think in this way I think there is I think that ultimately people will not want to put up with sort of a trumpian state or a dog a nyan state but if if you are if you don't really believe in progress do you think that it's possible that a situation like in our against Turkey or in China could actually be perpetuated a long time yes it depends on to some extent on the global environment we by that I mean partly the global market environment if we had another large-scale financial crisis with institutions going down banks with people savings going down if they weren't saved or they couldn't get access to their money if there were large-scale unemployment sudden a large-scale unemployment if you had systemic shocks like that then security initially economic security would have a tremendous advantage and if that could be offered by an authoritarian system or a semi totalitarian system it would have a greater value for example you asked well what are the what are the kind of glue which holds together thee the she system in she's Jinping system in in China I mean with older people partly some of them may be a memory or tales have been told about the Cultural Revolution you don't want that again so however L thora tearing this maybe it's not as terrible as that moreso so that's kind of one feature there other is a kind of nationalism mostly anti-japanese not the American but the the real I mean more than anything else is the extraordinary reduction poverty and the extraordinary increase in an income from the big central large numbers of people now it might have slowed down now because you can't get seven or eight percent a year forever might be four percent or less than that now and it gets too low or even stops that would be very dangerous for the regime but I can I can easily envisage a situation in which something like I mean if you're a liberal or he gain injury you say little bit she either she or a succession problem and she has to be replaced by somebody else or succession problem for Putin say gonna happen after all they're more they're mortal part of any mistakes they might make at that time there will be a reassertion of elements in the population that will want more freedoms of some kind or other I'm not convinced that it could be I mean for example if if putting worked ourselves the classical liberal argument isn't it as metal directed to us contrast Fessenden condom over food comes first morality comes second but with rising income but they make them sell and I had the emergence of a middle class people then will want the other as well I believe that that is the case that people I do not put up with I think we have no freedom of I think food comes first and smartphones come second that's that's sick you see the the Marxist theory of sort of Lee the bourgeoisie as the a universal agent or autonomous all was based on a very small historical sample the sample was early 19th century Europe with a more or less similar identical religious culture they were mostly Protestant Christians similar ethnic and other mixes similar image this more historically speaking the European borshu sees have thrown their lot normally in with right-wing authoritarianism this very little effort there was practically no bourgeois resistance to Nazism in Eastern Europe and in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula the middle class is rallied behind fascism the there is in the twentieth century actually I mean I think this idea that the the bourgeoisie is the salvation or class it's a kind of Marxian there's a little bit but historically speaking it's at least as common and actually often more common for the middle class of the Borgia to throw in their lot with authority which has happened now again in Eastern Europe the solid support for for the solid support for salad for urban and and then dashes recede in Poland and in Italy for salvini it's very it's predominantly bourgeois I don't mean to say that as a huge Communist Party but the real basis of the supported and the same is true to some extent even of Trump but now that we've reached that level historically yeah don't you think of people at some stage in Saudi Arabia however which they are or China now or wherever it may be say for example I'm gay I don't want to be discriminated I am a woman I want to have the same rights as well it'd be different does he see that I am a free person I want to be able to express do you think that those are that I'm still clinging to a neural illusion yes I do I mean partly because I mean the subtlest form as well as the most far-reaching form of authoritarianism is the Chinese and they specifically don't attack case who just want to be gay or women I mean on the contrary in terms of women's emancipation China has been I mean there is there aren't any at the very top the liberal would say I would say but that's like in you know saying countries and I called and or Britain and so on first you don't want to be attacked and then you're quite happy when they can if your life as a gay person but then there comes a stage but then they guess then it comes there are images where you say actually now I want to get married as well and then so now I want to have kids that maybe even that will happen but the via but but if that were to happen not necessarily doing freedom of speech values regime would kirby do I think you're missing the Hobbesian character of the Chinese regime which i think is of the XI regime which is sort of semi totalitarian because but not fully so I mean it's a child here in Russia with something like wanted every part of society is penetrated with the aim of transforming every part of society China the the observations failed stays everywhere but the goal is its used to stop threats so one of the reasons that religious conversion I mean the main reason religious conversion especially to Christianity is considered a threat is that it represents almost an external Authority to which people can then then appeal so there's relentless attempts to incorporate the new Christian churches that have popped up all over the place some people I'm not a student of and I don't know if anybody who really knows actually but some people I've heard say there could be a scenario quite realistic twenty or thirty four years from now it's the biggest Christian country in the world because that's already happened in South Korea it's more Christina's Confucian or Buddhist there are more Christian it could happen but the Chinese regime seems to be responding pragmatically said well if we can incorporate if we can allow this to happen if it does happen or something like that within the institutions that we control fine fine but you still have the fundamental ideation or less ideological clash between let's say Christian universality and the Equality of people well I've never almost any difficulty in Russians or isms over about a thousand years the beliefs that on boys once more and results in an eventual demand for liberal freedoms is a kind of is very widely held nowadays especially among liberals they all hold to it but it is it's it it it's sort of evidential base it's very narrow and thin it's essentially part of Western Europe Western Europe Protestant Europe mostly for a few decades the start of the 19th century that's it and more broadly we don't know yet actually what will happen in India as it gets rich as it will do we have we don't know yet what will be the upshot of the XI experiment in China I'm afraid I'm more wine when I was got I'm more afraid I'm I'm more optimistic than you in the you I think you you seems to hold a few that the title Robert Kagan spoke to jungle grows back why he basically says what you're saying I'm not saying that you agree with his political issues which I don't either but your few seems to be you know if you look at so the success of liberalism that's a relatively short period in human history and it's an illusion that to believe you can hope for it but an illusion to believe that it will continue its Appetit I mean it's a contingent can form of life and there's no reason to think that it will become universal or that it is the fate of wealthy bourgeois societies is repeatedly not I mean after all back in the 1960s there were people like Daniel Bell in America saying that as Russia gets rich it will become a social democracy and then when the Soviet Union then collapsed they didn't become rich and social or it did not happen it collapsed instead and when it collapsed peel all over the West all over the West it might not have been full-scale just like was a Fukuyama but I think fujiyama's been I've attacked him a lot but he's been in one sense unfairly escaped cordobas everyone believed what he believed nearly everywhere I know because I was one of the few that didn't nearly everyone believed that that post-soviet Russia would turn into maybe not Sweden or Canada but into some kind of I was certain it wouldn't and why wouldn't it reversed along a history of the country and also the impact of communism will actually mean much worse than most people said it was it couldn't it was impossible it wasn't inevitable that it would produce Putin because you had to have various mistakes that were made in the West and so on but it was not going to produce it was not going to turn into Sweden or California or Canada and none of these things were gonna happen what was gonna happen was some kind of hybrid some new type of hybrid of authoritarianism nationalism an element saw I wouldn't say liberalism but freedom I mean we tend to forget that although it's in many ways an authoritarian tough and unpredictable and even dangerous authoritarian regime that under Putin there's been the longest period of relative affluence and relative freedom in Russian history ever that's one of the reasons it's still quite popular Senate is a lot better than what came before yes and also it is interesting to see the and encouraging to see the take up of liberal values outside of Western Europe but I'm afraid we don't have time to continue this discussion I think we can agree that we can hope for the spread of democracy even though it may not happen John great thank you very much doing this interview thank you

Channel: James Pearson

Views: 14,748

Rating: 4.7868853 out of 5

Keywords: John Gray, Henk de Berg, authoritarianism, populism

Id: 7hC5nXXJrV8

Length: 51min 30sec (3090 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2019