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Welcome to the new books network.
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Welcome to Democracy Dialogues, a podcast from Cornell University's Brooks School of Public Policy's center for Democracy. Co hosted by the Bolotnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, this podcast brings cutting edge research on democracy to a broad audience, including practitioners, researchers, and citizens interested in democracy. In each episode, we explore new books, research and reports and asking what they reveal about the challenges that democracies are facing today and about the opportunities for democracies to deepen, evolve, and better serve citizens. I'm Maya Tudor, and today I have the great pleasure of being joined by a colleague, Pepper Culpepper, who is professor of Politics and Public Policy at the Blotnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. Today we're talking about Billionaire Backlash, his new book co authored with Tai Koo Lee, professor of Government at Harvard University. Most of the time, the biggest companies in the world simply get what they want and. And no one notices much. The issues are complicated, the stakes are distant, and politics around business kind of hums along in the background. But every once in a while, something breaks through. A story, a whisper, a scandal, and suddenly everyone is paying attention. People are angry, politicians are scrambling, and things that once seemed politically impossible just happen. What's going on in those moments? Why does public opinion matter sometimes, but not all the time? And what does that tell us about how democracy really works? Pepper's new book, Billionaire Backlash, is all about those moments. Welcome to Democracy Dialogues, Pepper.
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A
Well, thanks for having me on, Maya.
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B
So, Pepper, let's start with a story. It's in fact the story that you start the book with. In 1906, a journalist, Upton Sinclair, a muckraker I think you call him, publishes a book called the Jungle, and suddenly Americans are completely horrified by what's going on in the Chicago meatpacking industry. So can you take us inside that moment? Why is it important for the story you tell in the book?
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A
Yes, and I would say that it wasn't me who called him a muckraker. It was Theodore Roosevelt who invented the name of the muckrakers to talk about the set of journalists to which he belong who were revealing scandals at the time. And Roosevelt's description wasn't entirely flattering, but it stuck as a way to describe people who shine a light on things that are going on that people want to know about, but sometimes don't come out into the public. So what happened with Upton Sinclair's publication of the Jungle, a book that was rejected multiple times before it was finally accepted because its Description of rats poisoned, rats being ground up and thrown into the sausages of American diners and carcasses being dragged across the floor where they mixed with the phlegm of the workers who had spat on their way because many of them had respiratory problems. And then those same carcasses wound up on the American dinner table. This vivid description of what was going on in the meatpacking industry sat on the top of a large set of attempts to change the regulation of American food. Roughly 200 bills had been defeated between 1880 and 1900 about trying to make American food more hygienic, to impose regulations on what were essentially very big meat companies. They were called the Beef Trust, but of course, they rejected those because they had political power, but people knew about them. For example, in the Spanish American War, many troops had been getting sick because they open these cans full of rancid food that had been chemically covered up, and then they eat them and then they get sick. And so this information had filtered back, and Americans had this sort of tacit knowledge that there was something wrong with their food industry. And the Europeans knew it. They wouldn't allow American food in. This is sort of something that you see happening again now with Europeans not wanting to import chlorinated chickens, for example, because of the way chickens are raised in the United States. So there's this background knowledge, but it wasn't really at the forefront of anyone's political consideration. Upton Sinclair's book comes out. It's an immediate bestseller. It sells out within six months. Sales of beef have had within the United States. And suddenly politicians are paying attention to the very esoteric topic of meatpacking regulation. And that's the beginning of what is now the Food and Drug Administration. And we start with this story because grabbing attention like that and getting dramatic policy change that has seemed impossible for years is what corporate scandals do. And the publication of the Jungle, even though it was a work of fiction, it was a work of fiction based on observation. It basically revealed what a lot of people thought was going on, concentrated public attention on it, and therefore drew politicians away from being listening to the lobbying money of big corporations and doing what the public wanted. Now, it doesn't mean that the beef companies lost all subsequent power. They came back, they lobbied again and again to sort of weaken regulations, but a regulatory structure was put into place. And that sort of is one of the first struts of the American regulatory state.
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B
So I remember reading the Jungle actually in high school and being horrified by it. So, you know, it had its impact Generations later. One of the major themes that's running throughout your work, actually, well before this book, is the theme of quiet politics around. And we know that it's often. Not always, obviously, but it's often in the public interest to have some regulation around big businesses. But often people just don't pay enough attention to what's at stake. Why is that?
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A
People have complicated lives. Maya, you and I are both political scientists, and so we spend all our time thinking about politics, as do many political scientists and some political junkies. But most people don't do that. They've got lives to carry on with, and they have political concerns. Often problems of economic regulation are not at the top of those list of political concerns. They may say, you know, I can't believe what these AI companies are going to do to us. But, you know, that's not as important as maybe the tax rates, maybe inflation, maybe what they think about immigration. And so these are kind of background concerns that people have, but they tend to be drowned out by the concerns of everyday life. And so in that environment, which, as you say in earlier work, I called quiet politics, that's where business lobbying thrives. Because even if people have a sort of opinion that's quiescent out in the public in favor of more regulation, that doesn't get spoken to politicians who are sitting around a table trying to draw a law, where the lawyers or the lobbying firms who work for those companies are saying, you know what? This doesn't really take account of how things work in actual companies. And if you make this law, it might be that our company won't make as much. We might have to close a factory in your district and you might lose jobs. It might be troublesome for you at the next election. So there's any number of reasons that politicians have a reason to listen to what's going on there, and the quiescent public is not making its views known. And so what does the politician lose by listening to the moneyed interests?
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B
So you used just now in your description of the moment before the Jungle is published, that their public is, you said, tacitly aware. You use in the book the term latent public opinion. And most of the time you're saying the public is sort of dimly aware of, that there might be something going on which is not quite right, but that politics really changes at a moment of scandal, which is really what the publication of the Jungle represents. It changes something. So why is it that a scandal flips the switch and moves it from quiet politics to this place of kind of Noisy, mobilized politics. What is it about scandal? I mean, the COVID of the book has the scandal in bright red, right? So I thought that was really interesting. So you're obviously drawing attention to it. So tell me a little bit about what work the scandal does to kind of really change things.
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The scandal reveals, if you like, what's going on in, in a public arena and allows attention to be concentrated on it. And we use in the final chapter of the book the analogy of an earthquake. And so if I can just go back to latent opinion. Latent opinion is the underlying forces where people are getting more and more concerned about some issues. But these issues are staying quiet, if you like, because there's nothing that concentrates that attention. There's a little tension between the plates that are rubbing together in plate tectonics, but the pressure is building up, but it's not exploding. And the moment of explosion is a corporate scandal. What a corporate scandal is, is information is revealed that was previously hidden and there's widespread moral outrage around that moment. And that moment makes people think about things are in fact, even worse than we thought they were. And that moment therefore concentrates what was previously just going on in the background. We would talk about this at a dinner party, and then we'd move on to a more interesting topic than economic regulation. But suddenly these concerns we have about privacy, they become manifest. And we really want something done about tech companies and how they're treating our privacy. So the scandal is the moment where you get this public eruption and suddenly the politicians I was talking about who were sitting quietly around the table with the lobbying interest and saying, okay, we'll do what you want, they realized there's great public attention and anger around this topic. And we had better respond because we're concerned about our reelection prospects. And so the scandal is in red in front of the book because it makes vivid what is what people have been previously quietly concerned about.
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B
Okay, so I want to talk about the chapter which is, I think it's Europe versus Facebook that you. I think that's chapter four. And in it you describe the earthquake moment is. Is Edward Snowden. And so you, you say there's kind of a bs, amusingly titled BS period. Right. So that's before Snowden. And in the BS period, you say tech regulators have tech companies rather have just enormous lobbying power. I think you that Google had more lobbyists than Europe.
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The European Commission than the European Commission has staff regulators.
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B
Right. So again, walk us through this kind of more contemporary story. What happens in that moment? What is the Contemporary equivalent in this scandal to the jungle's publication in 1906.
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Well, so what you had going on in Europe in this period, 2012, is consideration of what's now called the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation. And that law was anathema to the big tech companies.
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B
So just for people who don't know what the GDPR is, can you just say in a sentence what it does?
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So the GDPR is a European law that now is considered the kind of gold standard of demanding privacy regulation. For example, those of you who've been to Europe, who don't live here and who get a banner flashing up saying, do you accept cookies? That's because the GDPR gives you, as a consumer, right to your own data. And so you've got to approve this every time. Some people find it annoying, but it's creating property rights over data. And that's what they were trying to do with the gdpr, to regulate data such that companies couldn't just use whatever they wanted and do whatever they wanted with that data. But no one had heard of the GDPR except, you know, specialists in Brussels in 2012 as they were lobbying about it. And so it was getting gutted, as happens with so many laws, by the lobbyist from Google, from Facebook, who said, you know, you're going to kill innovation. You can't possibly do this. You're going to drag Europe back to the digital dark ages. And that was going on in what we talked about earlier as a sort of a realm of quiet politics. No one cares. A new pope is getting elected. So people are paying attention to the Pope getting elected. They're not paying attention to a question about privacy regulation in Brussels. I mean, what could possibly be more boring than that? But then you get the revelation. Snowden dumps all of this. Snowden, who is a contractor for the American nsa, the National Security Agency, reveals that all of the big tech companies have been cooperating with the nsa, with its British equivalent, gchq. And they've been taking metadata from people and sort of tracking what they're doing online. And suddenly tech, which has had a free ride up until now, because big tech prior to 2012, they were just the next big thing. They were so exciting. And everyone couldn't believe what these phones could do for us, what the Internet could do for us, the connections we could get through social media. And there was no downside. It appeared they got your data, but who cared? It's free. But free, it turns out, means a lot of data is being taken. And it was being provided to governments. And suddenly you realized you were being spied on. And of course, it later turned out that Angela Merkel's phone was being bugged by the Obama administration. And so lots came out in the Snowden revelations. That's deeply shocking. And people may have been worried about privacy at the margins, but most people weren't really thinking about it. And this really concentrates attention on the issue. And this is back in 2012, 2013. Suddenly the European law gets much, much stronger because you've got a moment when the law is being pushed through parliament. It's about to get killed because there's so many amendments to it. But suddenly everyone switches on a dime and the policy entrepreneur who's trying to push it through the European Parliament realizes, we've got a moment here and we're going to get this law through. And that was sort of the big European movement on privacy, which happened years before the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
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B
Right. So one of my favorite parts of the book is the just amazing list of colorful characters that you chronicle. You talk about their lives and sort of how they come to become these crusaders. And my favorite character of all is a 24 year old law student, I think in Santa Clara University whose name is Max Schrems. You call him the Don Quixote of privacy regulation in the book. So tell us about Max Schremm and why does what he, you know, what he's doing, which is crusading on exactly the same issues on privacy regulations. And that doesn't really break through. So you have one, one kind of policy entrepreneur, Max Schrems, and he doesn't break through. And then Edward Snowden comes out and he really breaks through. And so this interesting earthquake moment comes about when one policy entrepreneur is successful but a prior one is not. So I just want to hear a little bit about why the difference between those two.
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A
Okay, that's interesting. So Max Schrems, as you said, he's this Austrian who's taking a semester abroad at Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley. And what happens is a Facebook lawyer comes and talks to his class, which is taught by Dorothy Glancy, who it turned out was, was on the Watergate, the committee investigating Watergate in the US Congress a while back that she's now Max Shrim's professor. So this Facebook lawyer, Ed Palmieri, comes to the class and he illustrates a totally cavalier attitude to privacy. And Max Rims realizes, wow, they really don't care about privacy. But we have privacy regulation in the European Union even before the GDPR There were privacy laws which didn't exist to the same extent in the United States. And so he asks for his data from Facebook. And it took Facebook a while to produce the data, but when they did, they produced over 1,000 pages of data which they sent to him, which had all kinds of information, including information he deleted. Confidential exchanges he'd had with a friend of his who was in the psychiatric ward of a closed hospital in Vienna. He deleted that to protect our privacy, but it was still on Facebook servers. So this moment radicalized Max Shrems and policy entrepreneurs. They get radicalized for whatever reason, but this moment sort of switched on a light with Max Shrems that has never gone out. And so Max Shrems begins immediately filing lawsuit after lawsuit against Facebook and other big tech companies. But Facebook is his real enemy. And of course, he gets a little bit of press coverage. People start covering what the data that he's found has shown. And, you know, people start asking, others start asking Facebook for their data. And pretty soon, the companies can't keep up because there's so many people asking for their data according to European law. But it's not breaking through politically. It's not having any effect politically. And so Snowden happens. And this conjunction of Snowden's action with the legal passage of the gdpr, which was being negotiated before Snowden ever came onto the scene, that pushes privacy into a more public place. And Max Shrims says, I'm going to use this moment. And so policy entrepreneurs are really the heroes of our book. Max Shrems is a big figure in the regulation of tech in Europe, and he's still out there filing these lawsuits, trying to draw attention to where the law is not living up to what people have demanded.
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B
But why does Snowden break through in a way that Schrems doesn't? Schrems is not the earthquake. Snowden is the earthquake. And so, theoretically, when you're thinking about what the book says, you know, why? What is it that allows Snowden to break through?
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So Shrems did not reveal, in the same way, a shocking set of insights about what's going on with governments and companies. What he revealed was that, you know, Facebook's got more information than you think, and, you know, people who had been concerned about privacy, they really seized on what Shrems did, but it didn't catch fire as an issue because it didn't have the capacity to shock people because it didn't tie up the government with the privacy of the big companies. And so what was really shocking and what propelled Snowden in a way that it did not propel shrems revelations, if you like, is the fact that these big companies are not liberating us, they're helping the government spy on us. So it was the conjunction of those two things that made it really catch fire, because, let's face it, we've always been worried that the government is spying on us. It's only now that we always think, well, my iPhone is also listening to this entire conversation. Right. So that is a much later concern. And it hadn't really revved up in the 2012, 2013 period. Schrems just had to keep beating people over the head about it.
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B
Okay, so it's often a kind of accumulation of policy entrepreneurs, and you don't know when that earthquake is going to come. It often comes in ways that you don't necessarily expect.
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I mean, I wouldn't call Snowden as much a policy entrepreneur as I would call him an heir of the muckrakers. So what did Snowden do? He essentially threw the information out there in the same way that Upton Sinclair did. And Shrimps really is a policy entrepreneur. He's out there taking lawsuits, trying to get rules changed. And so policy entrepreneurs are the ones often doing that, though the revelation of information is itself, as you say, catalytic. And so these people come to be important in the way rules are changed.
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B
Right. So the heroes, the policy entrepreneurs, plus the muckrakers, exist in cases where you don't get policy regulation necessarily in the public interest. And it's at the start of the book where you talk about two cases of policy entrepreneurs as regards baby formula. One is in China and one is in France. And I wondered if you could talk us through why regulation succeeds in France and not in China.
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A
Yeah. So just to briefly review the two sorts of scandals that went on in 2008 in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics. There are babies that start getting sick in China, and there's a clampdown on public coverage of it because the Chinese government does not want to look bad in the Beijing Olympics. But after that, it becomes clear that the company Sanlu has been lacing its formula with melamin, which is an industrial product used to make plastics. And melamin has a devastating effect, devastating effect on the human body. And so it can kill people through kidneys. And indeed, there was a previous episode where it killed a lot of American pets when it came through in American Pet Food, this sort of prequel of the Sun Lu scandal. So when that information comes out, there's an entrepreneur Xiao Lianhai, whose child is not killed but is affected by Melamin, he starts trying to gather the parents to mobilize them and to get information from the government. The Chinese government comes down very hard on him. Even as they pass, you know, pass is the wrong word. They take enforcement action against several members of Sunlu, including executing a couple of them, people associated with the Sunlu company. So the Chinese government acts very hard, but it doesn't act in a way that actually puts the government into question. It only goes after the company. Fast forward to 2017. There's a company called Lactalis, and there's an infection at one of its plants in Caen in France, and this infection gets out and infects babies. So you had babies actually dying and tens of thousands that get sick in China, a much smaller number get sick, and no one dies in France. But in France, you have 36 parliamentary hearings, because this is a breakdown of the actual system of food regulation in France. And food really matters in France, like it matters everywhere, right? But you have all these sort of parliamentary regulations. You have the CEO called into the docs to have to answer for what's going on with the company and how they're taking care of public concern for public health. And so at the end of the day, the story we tell is it's not only about regulatory tightening, because there is regulatory tightening in the wake of all these scandals, but it's about the public response. The public knows in France that its food has been taken care of, that its supply chains. And it's not that formula scandals have gone away, but there is public confidence. The public is confident that the government can be held to account in the case of formula scandals. The public doesn't believe that in China, they know that Chinese government will repress people like Zhao Lianhai so that they don't find out who's actually at fault in the government. And so you don't actually get the public believing that the problem is solved, because the problem is not solved, because solving the problem often means challenging the government through accountability. And so the Chinese system, which is autocratic, doesn't want that to happen and puts a strong premium on repressing that and trying to demonstrate that you're a strong state rather than that you've solved the problem so the Chinese won't drink their own milk formula.
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B
So democracy in political science speak here is a kind of scope condition, right? So it's the politics of scandal works when you have not just policy entrepreneurs, but a kind of media system. Where the muckrakers can bring it to public attention. You're saying that in China, the government is able to squash that attention, and in a paradoxical sense, shining a lot of light on it in the French sense. And the responsiveness, those many, many hearings and the. The regulation that follows in its wake boosts public confidence that the government is responsive to them.
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A
Absolutely. I mean, this is actually a case of, you know, we never celebrate when democracy works, but this is democracy working. Right. And it's not necessarily that the media is totally repressed in China. Sort of stories were squelched prior to the Olympics, but the story did come out. It did get wide coverage in China. All the Chinese have heard about it. The real squelching comes when an activist decides someone needs to be held to account. And that is a red line for the Chinese government that they're not willing to let them go through. So it's the squelching of the policy entrepreneur that really makes it hard for the Chinese public to believe in their system.
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B
Let's talk about a case within a democracy where it doesn't work. And you spent a chapter on ExxonMobil, and so why, you know, the corporate scandal breaks out, that ExxonMobil essentially has very good models of climate change. They understand exactly what is happening through
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from the late 1970s.
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B
From the late 1970s. Yes. That's important, important qualifier. And, you know, VW also is a scandal, the VW diesel admission scandal that you talk about. And there VW is really held to account. But in ExxonMobil, what happens, like, why is it in that case that you have policy entrepreneurs, you sort of have this muckraking moment, and yet you don't really get the same, at least in the same way, regulatory change?
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A
Well, the reason is because Exxon is based in the United States, and United States voters are extremely polarized over the issue of climate change. And so being polarized over the issue of climate change affects how they respond when this scandal breaks, because this scandal doesn't break until 2015. So they find out about the scandal that. So Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times both break stories that since the late 1970s, Exxon has had these very good models of climate change, and yet they spend the next two decades largely lobbying against, you know, climate change provisions on the basis that there's scientific uncertainty about that, which is true. There is scientific uncertainty. We all know there are uncertainty intervals about things, but no one questions the trend in climate change. And Exxon's got a very good model of exactly how fast it's happening. And indeed, they say back in the late 1970s, a memo to the heads of the company says essentially we've got to do something in the next decade before we get to a critical stage. We've long gone past that stage now. So that's happened in the past. It's revealed in 2015. But what's also happened between 1990 and 2015 is the American public has polarized between Republicans and Democrats in their views on climate change. Those views were indistinguishable at the beginning of the 1990s. By 2015, when the news breaks, it's the most polarized issue in American public opinion. And therefore when Democrats read about it, they are up in arms. I can't believe Exxon has been lying to us this whole time. And Republicans say this is just the demonization of companies. Who cares? Exxon's allowed to make money. And so you don't get the same sense of outrage shared across the political spectrum. One of the things that we haven't talked about yet is the reason we focus on corporate scandals is that political scandals always run into this partisanship problem.
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B
Right.
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A
The left sees a problem one way, the right sees it another way. And so therefore you don't have scandals that work the way the Watergate scandal worked or the Profumo scandal in the UK worked, where they really shake governments because they hit both the citizens of both the left and the right similarly. That's hard now in politics with the, with the polarization that we have in many countries. Corporate scandals generally retain this ability to shock across the spectrum unless they have a partisan dimension. Well, Exxon and climate change does have a partisan dimension, at least in the United States. We did not find that when we did experimental work looking at how people in the UK in France and Germany respond to it. It's only something that happened in the United States.
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B
Okay, so stepping back, to get these windows of opportunity for change, you need essentially a political system like a democracy that is response largely responsive and offers up these sort of scrutiny of politicians and allows those that scrutiny to bubble up to public consciousness capable of being responsible, capable. You need policy entrepreneurs that are working the issue and then you need these explosive earthquakes, these muck raking moments where it explodes into the public consciousness and politicians then are willing to sort of disregard, at least for a short moment of time, the sort of strong and influential business interests. So overall, the argument is that democracies can be responsive in these particular circumstances, but that a lot of the time on the politics of business, they're actually not that responsive. So do you find that reassuring or do you find that troubling?
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A
So I've been studying the politics of business for 30 years and I find it just to be the way the world is. However, we think about, my co author and I, Taeku Lee, we think about this in the final chapter. You know, we're not pushing for corporate scandals. We think corporate scandals are generally a bad thing. They're generally revealing negative information. But how can we get this positive regulatory zeal? In other words, how can we unleash a little more latent opinion more regularly into politics? And that's how we think about. We've really understood a lot from our data about where the bulk of latent opinion is. And we think that there's a possibility to capitalize on it. But it depends on ultimately political systems and political parties appealing to the right sort of resentment and not the wrong sorts of resentments. And so it's a very contingent issue. You're absolutely right to lay out all sorts of scope conditions as to why it is that you've got to have this burst and you've got to have it cutting across party lines. And you've got to have a policy entrepreneur who's willing to do all the organizing and bearing of collective action costs that we're not going to do because we're too lazy. Right? We're letting other people do it. Well, those people do it. And so they make things actually happen. And they're why we get results. And often we don't get results. And that's why many people are dissatisfied with democracies. And we think there is a sort of demand out there in latent opinion. And we've done some additional work which we talked about in a separate article on what that opinion looks like. So we think the possibility of what we call a good populist latent opinion is a very good thing for democracy. But again, we're not saying that everything's just full of roses. I think that it's contingent.
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B
Right? All right, just a few more questions, Pepper, and we'll come to a close. This is a book that's called Billionaire Backlash. But much of your story, much of the stories are actually not about backlashes against billionaires per se, but about corporations. And when those corporations are effectively regulated in the public interest. So are corporations and billionaires the same thing in your argument?
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A
Corporations and large corporations and billionaires are basically the same thing in public opinion and not in our argument. We've done some empirical work on this, which we published in an article in the Journal of Democracy recently entitled When Populism Can Be Good. And essentially those two things are interchangeable. Our argument is very much about large corporations, but when people think about large corporations, they have a lot of negative feeling, but they have trouble associating things with big organizations. Even a company with as bad a reputation as Facebook, it's hard to hold views about the company, but it's very easy to hold views about Mark Zuckerberg, which is a face that we've seen before and which we associate with his actions in politics and the actions of his company. And so billionaires provide personification to the problems of large corporations. And I should say that our work suggests that people do distinguish in a very big way between big corporations and small business. So the anti big corporation feeling is a sense that these large corporations are getting more and more concentrated in their control of markets in one sector after another. And they dictate the terms of our lives. And they basically capture a market. They drive out competitors, then they drive up prices or drive down services, which Cory Doctorow has called insidification in a more elegant way. And so that problem is endemic to a lot of the rich democracies, and people are really angry about it. And billionaires are the public face that gets a lot of that umbrage.
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B
So let me turn to something that is splashing its way across the pages of newspapers right now, and that is the proposed wealth tax against billionaires that has just made its way to the California ballot. Right? So California is home to one in four US Billionaires. California itself, or on its own, would be the fourth largest economy in the world. And this is a book whether this is a proposal which taxes not income, but wealth of all billionaires residing in California at a one time tax of 5%, this is a very, very direct instantiation of billionaire backlash. Right? It's taking money from billionaires and using it directly to fund essentially the health care cuts that were led by the big beautiful bill that Donald Trump passed. So what does your book called Billionaire Backlash tell us about the California wealth tax and whether it's likely to succeed?
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A
I think a judgment about the tax proposal in California needs to be couched in not is this good public policy, because a specific tax on billionaires that is aimed precisely at solving a health care problem is a political proposal that is one could doubtless design a better tax, but it speaks directly to the economic unfairness problem and it shifts attention to this unfairness problem. And I think thinking about the worth of Billionaire taxes. You have to think about what sort of sentiment that's going to lead to in politics. And so in our opinion, going after a billionaire tax is a good way to do politics because it's drawing out the best of populism, trying to be responsive to this, this sort of economic unfairness sentiment that is really undermining the way democracy works, not just in the United States, but in lots of countries. We might get billionaires being scapegoated unfairly. They got big shoulders and they can take it. And so you see Sergey Brin getting really upset and moving himself to Nevada half the time so that he doesn't have to deal with his billionaire tax. Really, I mean, what are you worried about? And not an extra yacht. I think that we need to see this in the broader context of there's a serious sentiment that democracy is broken and it's not all the fault of billionaires, but billionaires do represent the riggedness of the system and the extreme unfairness of it. And so I think that you should evaluate billionaire taxes and the like in that view.
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B
The good populism, just to recap, is the populism that capitalizes on this sense of economic unfairness, but doesn't channel that into targeting particularly kind of whole groups of people.
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A
It does target whole groups of people. They're called billionaires.
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B
They're called billionaires. Right. But it also, I believe you say in the last chapter is a, it doesn't reduce state capacity. Right. You talk a little bit about it doesn't that that anger is not used to sort of undermine the very project of the state, is that right?
- [37:33]
A
Right. So in the last chapter, we talk about good populist strategies and we sort of induct from what we've seen these VAR entrepreneurs doing. And we know that populism and both bad populists and good populists, they are likely to lean on majoritarian institutions or on majoritarian devices to overcome blockages in the system. And so, for example, referenda are an extremely effective way, like in this billionaire tax, to concentrate attention on a single issue, to push through something that would never get through the California legislature, where Google has a hammerlock on what's going to happen in the California legislature through the means of quiet politics that we talked about before. And so we think good populism involves using majoritarian tactics when they're needed to break through the kind of control of the parties. This is always something that's been worried about in democratic theory from so called plebiscitarianism that you're going over parties and undermining intermediary organizations. Organizations. Parties in every democracy are completely broken. I mean, look at the United Kingdom and what's going on with the party system. Look at France and what's going on with the party system. Look at Germany, what's going on with the party system. We don't need to protect parties, we need to rebuild parties. And the way to rebuild parties is to put real pressure on them, to remind them what people are interested in. So that's sort of one tack of the important strategy. But then another part, as you talk about, is we can't turn fire on well functioning government. And so we do believe that there's a role for independent agencies, because independent agencies help enforce some of the things that these majoritarian tactics can get through. Because you need expertise. You and I both teach in a school of government, and so we believe in the value of expertise. The problem with expertise is that it has not been tied so much to the interest of citizens. It's become its own thing. And we've reified markets, we've reified certain concepts of that look great in our classes but don't necessarily speak to people. And that's a lot of what the populist uprising is about. And that's the sort of last populist strategy we endorse in terms of government needs to be justifying things a lot more in terms of values to citizens. And that's where when the central bank talks about the importance of price stability, people understand why that matters to them. But you've got to make the case that this is because citizens want price stability and they're really affected by inflation, not just their real purchasing power, their nominal purchasing power. They care about it. And so we talk about how you can employ these various strategies associated often in a negative way with populism, to implement a good populist agenda. And if I can just quote Ginny Mangebridge and Steve Macedo, populism is democracy's way of saying to elites, listen harder.
- [40:21]
B
Well, it's a nice way to dig into my last question, which is is about democracy. This is a podcast about the state of democracy in the world. And the state of the democracy in the world is not good. Freedom house's report of 2026 just came out. It says the world as a whole is about as free as before the Berlin Wall fell. And it makes a lot of people committed to democracy feel hopeless about what they can do. So my last question to you is for our listeners who feel somewhat hopeless about this dismal state of democracy, what is one thing you would suggest that they do to protect their democracy?
- [41:05]
A
The first thing I would say is I listened to a great interview last night with Adam Przeworsky, who was talking about do we really have a crisis of democratic backsliding or do we have lots of conflict in democracies? We definitely have a sort of threat in the United States that looks like real and present danger for democracy. There's no doubt about that. But is it more generalized? One could question, and I think I share Przeworski's skepticism, and it's worth thinking about that. But in terms of your question, our book is fundamentally hopeful in the sense that we look at how some success cases have emerged, and what we see is a growing sentiment where latent opinion is concerned about the role that these large corporations have. And in one country after another, we see it exploding into a real change, up to and including the getting rid of a president in South Korea, which we talk about in the book. So this force is powerful and it's important, but it's insufficient. And the heroes of our book, the policy entrepreneurs, this, this book is a call to arms to them. And so I get calls often from people who read the book or who hear about the book, and they say, give us a strategy for what we should do about AI regulation, because basically they need to be ready whatever your, your, your topic. And we'll take AI regulation as an example. There's huge dissatisfaction with the fact that governments are not regulating AI, especially the American government. And when something goes wrong in AI, there's going to be a big push for it, but only if there's a policy entrepreneur who can seize on it and who can sort of pay the price for doing the collective mobilizing that we need done. And fundamentally, those people are out there. We've seen them, and there are lots more people like them. And our hopeful message is there's a big sentiment out there that is going to be pushing through in politics a lot over the next decade. We say if the last 15 years has been about the politics of anti immigrant, anti immigration, the next 10 years is going to be about anti billionaire. But if that's just a sort of expression that comes out and people get upset and nothing happens because there are no policy entrepreneurs, we don't get better. We don't think democracy can solve itself. We think individuals have to play a role. The Ralph Naders in the world. You need to come out and do your thing, because that's when democracy is going to fix itself.
- [43:31]
B
So think about becoming a policy entrepreneur and know that you may not be
- [43:35]
A
quit the job at Goldman Sachs and think about becoming a policy entrepreneur. That's exactly right.
- [43:39]
B
Right. Well, Pepper, thank you so much for joining us on Democracy Dialogue.
- [43:43]
A
It's been a delight. Thanks, Maya.
- [43:45]
B
And that's all for today's episode of Democracy Dialogues from Cornell University's Brooks center on Global Democracy. We hope you enjoyed the conversation and continue to join us in thinking about the challenges and possibilities for democracy today. You can find our episodes on our YouTube channel, NBN website, social media or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks to our guests today and thanks to you, our audience, for listening. I'm Rachel Beatty, Rido, and we'll be back soon with another dialogue on democracy. Until then, stay engaged, stay informed and stay committed to democratic dialogue.
- [44:24]
A
It.