TALKING POLITICS

David talks to the writer Anne Applebaum about her highly personal new book, which charts the last twenty years of broken friendships and democratic failure. We start in Poland with the story of what happened to the high hopes for Polish democracy, including what we've learned from this week's presidential election. But we also take in Trump and Brexit, Hungary and Spain. What explains the prevalence of

conspiracy theories in contemporary politics? Why are so many conservatives drawn to the politics of despair? Is history really circular? And is democracy doomed?

Talking Points:

Yesterday, Poland’s incumbent president Andrzej Duda narrowly won re-election.

• Anne thinks that this shows divisive politics can succeed.
• A central issue was LGBT rights: Duda said that LGBT was an ideology worse than communism.
• The ruling party now has 3 more years to continue undermining the press and the judiciary and putting pressure on anyone the party sees as a threat.

The new illiberal way of thinking is not a totalizing ideology.

• These are medium-sized lies, conspiracy theories.
• You can use conspiracy theories to undermine people’s trust in political institutions.
• Should we differentiate between conspiracy theories and opportunistic lying?

When elections become about ‘who is really Polish,’ whoever wins gains a sense of legitimacy in excluding and discriminating against the ‘others.’

• Can these arguments stand when the results are this close?
• The Polish government has tools to harass its opponents. It’s a vengeful state.
• The opposition now will probably fragment—this is what happened in Hungary.

How did Brexit bring together figures like Johnson, Scruton, and Cummings?

• Politicians, journalists, and propagandists can manipulate feelings of nostalgia into a political campaign and ride it into power.
• Did nostalgia have to be anti-European Union? In some ways, the EU is a bulwark against certain features of modernity.
• But to a certain breed of nostalgic British conservative, the EU would always be foreign. To them, the idea of negotiating, or co-deciding was fundamentally unacceptable.

In places with a shorter modern democratic history like Greece and Spain, democracy has proved surprisingly robust. 

• The degree to which these forces win or lose is dependent on the local context.
• History shows that democracies do fail; if you neglect rotting institutions they can bring you down.
• Both complacency and cynicism can threaten democracy.

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Anne’s new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends
• Anne’s writing for The Atlantic
• WaPo’s Trump lie tracker

Further Learning: 

• A review of Anne's book in The Guardian, ‘How my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit’
• More on Poland’s election

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David talks with Helen to get her take on the history of ideas - both what's there and what's missing. Why start with Hobbes? What can we learn from the Federalist Papers? Where's Nietzsche? Plus we talk about whether understanding where political ideas come from is

liberating or limiting and we ask how many of them were just rationalisations for power.

Talking Points: 

Should we start the story of modern politics with Hobbes?

• Hobbes poses a stark question: what is the worst thing that can happen in politics? Civil war or tyranny?
• Is Hobbes’ answer utopian?
• What are the consequences of the breakdown of political authority—and how do they compare to the consequences of empowering the state to do terrible things? 

Who has the authority to decide is a fundamental question in politics.

• But there are lots of ways of thinking about politics that avoid this question.
• If you accept the notion that political authority is essential, what form should that authority take and how can it be made as bearable as possible for as many people as possible?

Constant says that the worst thing that can happen isn’t civil war; it’s the tyranny of the state.

• To him, the French Revolution showed that when people who hold the coercive power of the state also hold certain beliefs, the damage can be much worse.
• Constant wants to say that the beliefs people have in the modern world are a constraint on political possibilities.
• What does the pluralism of beliefs mean for politics? 
• Constant is also more direct about the importance of debt and money.

From the French revolution onwards, nationalism became the dominant idea by which the authority of states was justified to those over whom it exercised power.

• Sieyès equated the state with its people.

The idea of federalism as enshrined in the US constitution is also important: Hobbes did not think sovereignty could be divided.

• How do you reconcile constitutional ideals with the horrors they justified?

Nietzsche forces a reckoning with the religion question.

• This blows up the distinction between pre-modern and modern.
• He presents a genealogy not just of morality, but civilization, ideas of justice, religion.
• For Nietzsche, Christianity is the manifestation of the will to power of the powerless.
• Nietzsche tells us how we became the way we are—it didn’t have to go that way.
• In exposing contingency, he forces us to engage with political questions we don’t really want to think about.

What do ideas explain about human motivation in politics, and to what extent are they rationalizations of other motives?

• Helen thinks that the history of ideas can make political action seem too straightforward. 
• How should we think about the relationship between ideas and material constraints (or opportunities)?
• Studying history more generally leads to at least some degree of cynicism about the relationship between ideas and power.

Mentioned in this Episode: 

• Talking Politics: the History of Ideas
• The Federalist Papers
• The Genealogy of Morality
• Our episode on Weber’s ‘Politics as a Vocation’

Further Learning: 

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David talks to the writer James Meek about what the Covid crisis has revealed about how we understand healthcare and how we think about the organisations tasked with delivering it. A conversation about hospitals and community care, about Trump's America and Johnson's Britain, and about WHO and NHS. James's writing on these themes is available on the LRB website https://www.lrb.co.uk/

Amy Maxmen on Ebola, Covid and the WHO

https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2020/243-ebola-covid-and-the-who

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We have passed the deadline for any extension to the Brexit trade negotiations - now it's 31 December or bust. We catch up with three of our resident experts to explore what this means, what the chances are of getting a deal and where the sticking points might be. Plus we asses the impact of the Covid crisis on the fate of Brexit and its implications for what might happen later this year. With Anand Menon,

Catherine Barnard and Helen Thompson.

Talking Points: 

The formal legal position is that it’s not possible to seek an extension of the Brexit transition period.

• Perhaps the most likely thing is that—if there is a trade deal before the end of the year—it has a longer transition period built into the front of it.

A second COVID spike in the autumn could make no deal more likely.

• Are there things in the law that politics can’t fix?
• The COVID crisis has made the gulf between the two sides over the issue of state aid bigger than it already was, which reduces the space for fudging. 
• You also have to deal with the Northern Ireland protocol.

The UK doesn’t have a constitutional regime that protects things like workers rights and environmental standards in the way that treaty law effectively does in the EU.

• It’s hard to imagine that any UK government would agree constitutional rules about these matters as part of a trade agreement with the EU or any individual state.
• At the heart of Brexit lies a claim to reassert the more traditional UK constitution against the constitutional constraints that EU membership generated.

The Johnson government is not prepared to accept the EU’s argument about it’s economic sphere of influence.

• This is a question for the EU as much as it is for the UK.
• Both sides are starting from competing premises; would more time be enough to sort this out? 
• This begs a larger question about the EU’s relationship to its immediate neighborhood.

The German constitutional court decision was a blow to the ECB and ECJ.

• This gives the green light to those disaffected in Hungary and Poland.
• Do EU divisions make it more or less likely that they will fallout over Brexit? 
• Macron’s position seems harder than it was towards the end of last year. There is no evidence he wants to move on the question of state aid.
• It seems unlikely that all 27 member states will have the same attitude towards a sovereign UK. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Britain can play them off each other.

Couching the debate as deal vs. no deal instead of good deal vs. bad deal may give the Johnson government some wiggle room.

• Even if the UK winds up making significant concessions on trade, for example.

Mentioned in this Episode: 

• Talking with Adam Tooze about the German constitutional court ruling
• The UK in a Changing Europe
• The Merkel interview from June 

Further Learning:

• George Peretz on the Northern Irish Protocol
• More on state aid as a stumbling block
• What is the level playing field? 

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In this extra episode David talks to Thant Myint-U about the fraught recent history of Burma (Myanmar) and asks what it can teach us about twenty-first century politics. Why did the West have so many illusions about Aung San Suu Kyi? Can democracy really rescue the country? What model of development might work in the age of Covid and climate change? A wide-ranging conversation about the forces shaping our world.

Thant's website: https://www.thantmyintu.com/

Thant's book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/9781786497871

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We talk with the writer and political commentator Fintan O'Toole about how British politics can and should deal with its imperial past in the age of Brexit. From battles over statues to fights over nationalism we explore whether history has become the new democratic divide. Why does Churchill loom so large over our politics? Can Labour reclaim the mantle of patriotism? Will the Union survive the history wars? Plus we ask whether there has been a generational shift in attitudes to race and identity. With Helen Thompson.

Talking Points: 

Debates over statues and monuments are really more about the present than the past.

• They don’t necessarily lead you to a real engagement with either your history or your contemporary identity.
• Britain has a long history of questioning how the past is thought about in the public sphere. 

Is it possible to have a serious political argument about Churchill’s legacy anymore?

• In the age of Johnson, is everything a proxy? 
• Churchill can’t be separated from the Second World War in British historical memory.
• The Churchill question goes deep into the Union question. If you take away the experience of the two world wars, it’s not clear what keeps the Union together.

How do you articulate a sense of British patriotism when the state is in decline and the history it’s wrapped up in is often disgraceful? 

• For example, you could celebrate Britain’s move to outlaw the slave trade—but almost every historian would point out that this is shot through with hypocrisy.
• There’s a profound problem around the history of Britishness. 

Over the last 10 years, two different consensuses have broken down, and these interact with each other quite lethally. 

• First there’s consent to Britain’s membership in the EU; this broke down more in England and in Wales.
• Second is consent to the Anglo-Scottish union breaking down in Scotland.
• And the fact that the referendum produced a Leave vote meant that the Northern Ireland question came back into play.

Nationalisms always want to purify themselves into victimhood.

• What this does is occlude the complexity of the history of the nation itself.
• Nationalism involves telling a story about the past that often, though not always, involves trying to break away from some larger political authority, often an empire.
• Part of the present moment’s attitude towards British history is not new: the sense that British history was delegitimated by Empire has been there before.

Mentioned in this Episode: 

• The FT reviews Andrew Adonis’ biography on Ernest Bevin

Further Learning: 

• Fintan’s book, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain
• Fintan on Boris Johnson
• More on ‘The Lost Cause’
• Fintan’s recent piece on Trump in the New York Review of Books
• 
  

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

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David and Helen talk with historian Sarah Churchwell about the origins, uses and abuses of the idea of American fascism. Where does American fascism come from? Does it follow a European model or is it something exceptional? What role do white supremacy and anti-Semitism play in its development? How close has it got to power? Plus we ask the big question for now: Does it make sense to call Trump a fascist?

Talking Points: 

Trump’s decision to hold a rally in Tulsa on 19 June is an act of clear provocation to African Americans, especially at this moment. 

• 19 June 1865 was the day the last slaves were emancipated, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
• The symbolic deferral, the fact that white people were actively denying black people full rights and citizenship, is what Juneteenth came to represent. 
• Tulsa is where the worst race riot in American history occurred in 1921. The white population of Tulsa descended on a thriving black community.
• The Trump campaign was forced to move the rally a day. It will happen on 20 June.

Is fascism the right word for what has happened—and is happening in America? 

• The second Klan rose between 1915 and 1922.
• The commentariat at the time pointed to Mussolini and fascism to explain the Klan’s resurgence.
• Hitler looked at the US and took aspects, including the legal institutionalisation of white supremacy, especially in the South, as an inspiration. 
• But there is something quite specific about European fascism in the 1920s that has to do with the fallout of the First World War.

Fascism is ultra-nationalism. It has to be different in every country: it’s highly situational, highly historicized. 

• It can be hard to pin down because each iteration takes its own form.
• Is it historically accurate to call the present moment fascist? Is it useful?
• Is calling Trump a fascist too comforting? Does it keep us from seeing the reasons why he won?
• Is it useful to think about American nativist, conspiratorial, racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic gorups as being recognizably fascist going back in time? 

Mentioned in this Episode: 

• Sarah and TP American Histories on the 15th and the 19th amendment
• Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
• Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
• Jonathan Shanin on Tom Cotton’s op ed

Further Learning: 

• Sarah on TP: America First? 
• Sarah on the dark history of America First
• Sarah’s book, Behold America

We talk to Adom Getachew, Jasson Perez and Gary Gerstle about the politics of protest and the politics of policing in America. What does 'Defund the Police' mean in practice? Is the current crisis likely to empower or curtail the surveillance state? How are the current protests different from ones we've seen in the past? And where Minneapolis leads, will the world follow? Plus we talk about the implications of the protests for the November elections.

Talking Points:

The ‘defund the police’ movement has gained a lot of ground in the last few weeks.

• This movement wants to defund and disband the police and invest resources in things that get at the roots of harm and violence in communities. 
• Minneapolis already had a successful campaign to divest. Local organizations knew how to relate to a spontaneous rebellion and use that energy to push the agenda. 
• Other cities will have to figure out how to do this in their organizing communities. 
• Alternatives to policing exist but they are chronically underfunded.

We associate the last 30 years with state shrinkage, neoliberalism, and disinvestment from public goods, especially education, but there has been an ongoing increase in police spending.

• The pandemic—and a growing sense that we don’t have basic public necessities—has led people to question the normalcy of increasing police spending.
• Growing expenditure has not really helped the communities where violence persists. Police have failed on their own terms.
• Cities are also paying out a lot on police misconduct cases.

There are two things going on: historically recognizable violence, but also the risk that this movement empowers the move toward technological forms of violence. 

• Big data police tech presents itself as the solution to racist policing and police brutality.
• Demands to defund the police must be coupled with restrictions around private policing and surveillance. 

The American federal system is set up to stymie change, so moments like this are rare but important.

• It starts from the outside—from protests—and then the elite begin to rethink their role in the regime.

Are there any useful historical analogies?

• Gary thinks the labour uprisings of the 1930s, which pressured FDR to make a leftward turn, more closely parallel what’s happening now than 1968. 
• The scale and depth of this—and the level of public support—are unprecedented.
• The uprisings of 1968 generated a particular elite response. The movement for black lives is responding to the world that comes out of 1968 and the 50 year bipartisan consensus on policing that emerged from that moment.

Trump is an incumbent and this happened on his watch. That’s different from the 1968/Nixon story.

• What will the Democrats do? And how far will they go to meet the demands?
• What is the vector through which protest politics gets channeled to become a mechanism for generating policy? 
• In the absence of organized labour politics, there are no clear mediating institutions. 
• The pandemic presents a risk: if there is another spike, Trump will blame protesters. 

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Eyes on the Prize (documentary)
• David’s LRB review of Rahm Emanuel’s book, The Nation City
• The Politics of...

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In an extra episode, we're back with last week's guest Jonathan Shainin, Head of Opinion at the Guardian, so he can talk us through the big blow-up at the NYT. What has it taught us about about the new battlegrounds in newspaper opinion? Where does power now lie in newspaper offices? And where does Jonathan draw the line between what can and can't be published? In our next episode, voices on the ground in the US.

Further Reading:

The Tom Cotton Op-Ed from the New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html

Michelle Goldberg in the NYT

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/tom-cotton-op-ed-new-york-times.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Tom Cotton Op-Ed under review:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/business/new-york-times-op-ed-cotton.html

The creation of the NYT "op-ed" page, which was launched in 1970

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1001&context=cmj_facpub

The history of the "objectivity norm" in American journalism

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/146488490100200201

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David talks to comedian and host of the Political Party podcast Matt Forde about his lockdown experiences and about his life with the Labour party: before, during and after the Corbyn years. Plus we discuss the ways in which political allegiances are (and aren't) like supporting a football team.

https://www.mattforde.com/

https://planetradio.co.uk/absolute-radio/presenters/matt-forde/

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