Loading summary
Transcript18 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:06]
B
Welcome to the People Power Politics Podcast, brought to you by cedar, the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the People Power Politics Podcast. Today we're talking about one of the most important topics of our time, a fascinating new paper on delivering for democracy, why results matter. And I'm particularly privileged today to be speaking to Francis Fukuyama, who will need no introduction for many of you, but is the Olivier Nominelli Senior Fellow and Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. In a recent Journal of Democracy article, Francis, you've been talking about the importance of delivering for democracy, the importance of why results matter. And I think it's a really important article about reminding governments and civil society groups and citizens themselves about the importance of kind of keeping the social contract going, sustaining support for democracy through delivery. But tell us, what motivated you to want to make that particular argument at this particular time? What led to this particular piece in the Journal of Democracy?
- [01:23]
A
Sure. Well, there's a couple of different things. So if you look at the rise of populist nationalists like Donald Trump and, you know, the various populace in Europe, I think a lot of their rise is due to the general impression that a lot of voters have that existing liberal democracies actually can't get anything done. We have a great example of this in California. The state has been trying to build a high speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco for years. And I think it's just not going to happen. And the reason it's not going to happen is that there's really too much of a procedural burden that's placed on every action. And I think that one of the reasons that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are popular is that they say we can get things done. You know, Trump was a builder. He loved slashing through all the permitting requirements. Elon Musk did the same thing. He's trying to do that now with the U.S. government. I think they're going about it in a terrible way, but it responds to this belief that there's something about modern democracies that, that really fails to actually deliver. So that was the broader context, you know, and I've been working on infrastructure as a problem for democracy for the last few years. So I'm very conscious of, you know, the inability of modern democracies to deliver in that sense. The article was motivated in the short run by this piece, Carruthers and Hartman, where they were arguing kind of the opposite, that in their view, the failure to deliver really didn't explain the Democratic backsliding. And, you know, I just thought that this was the wrong message to be delivering that actually. Well, there are a couple of problems. There's a methodological one where I don't, you know, they just cherry pick some cases where there wasn't, you know, delivery didn't prevent backsliding. Doesn't actually mean that being able to accomplish things isn't important for, you know, for democratic stability. But also, I just think that, you know, if democracies continue to believe just in, you know, strict proceduralism and they don't worry about, about the concrete results that they're delivering for people, they're going to be in trouble. And that's really the contest with China right now. I mean, China really builds things. That's the one thing that everybody understands. They do well. They put up a Covid hospital in one weekend. And their whole Belt and Road initiative is about their ability to build things in developing countries. And if you look at the United States and other, you know, Western societies, they're having a lot of trouble competing in that domain. So those were some of the basic reasons that we wrote that article.
- [04:04]
B
So one of the things I was really interested in asking you, having read the article, is which kinds of delivery really matter. You went straight there, I think, with the US Example and the China example, to big infrastructure projects, and we could see the value of them. They're high profile, they're big. They're one of the things that people can physically point to. But there's also a history of literature, as you know, on the importance of social mobility, class mobility, on the importance of inequality, on the importance of people feeling that their children would do better than them and other kinds of services. Do you have a sense of what kind of delivery matters the most?
- [04:40]
A
Well, I think all of those things matter. I mean, my particular emphasis on infrastructure is just one of many goods that can be delivered. Obviously, economic growth is very high up on the list. I think Biden's presiding over an economy suffered inflation for the first time in more than a generation, you know, was one of the reasons that he lost the election. And so I think that actually growth, jobs, all of these sorts of things are also important. When you get to a question like social mobility and, you know, equality there, it gets a little bit more complicated because many of the measures that liberal democracies have put in place to decrease levels of inequality have also been, you know, at times obstacles to economic, economic growth. And so there is a little bit of a trade off there, but certainly the ability to include the whole of the population in, you know, the benefits of growth, I think has been understood for, for many, many years as being, you know, one of the reasons why we have government in the first place. And I think that's kind of the thing that people need, you know, backers of democracy need to keep this in mind, that we like democracy in part because, you know, it respects the dignity of individuals and it, you know, behaves in an orderly and structured way. But the reason you have government is you want government to do things, you want it to defend the community, you want it to produce prosperity, security. And there are many democracies that are failing to do that. Latin America, for example. I think the biggest problem that countries are having is the security problem driven by drugs, by narco trafficking, by corruption. And I think that's really been the Achilles heel of many democratic societies.
- [06:35]
B
Now it strikes me that one of the kind of hidden assumptions in what we're talking about now is the idea that what citizens matter and think and care about really matters when it comes to the survival of democracy. And that's intuitively a kind of obvious point on the one hand, but then I guess on the other hand, we also see countries where we've had military coups. We also see countries where there's executive aggrandizement despite a lack of sort of public support. So is it the case that actually public support matters more in some cases than others, or do you think it's sort of equally important across the board? And if you were to sort of think a bit through, you know, what weight would you put on kind of public support for democracy as being a critical factor in the survival of that democracy? And I guess what I'm thinking here is also about what mechanism does that work, work through. So are we imagining a mechanism whereby if there's much greater public support for democracy, say Trump doesn't get elected, but then also if Trump does something more people go to the streets, Is it that kind of feedback loop or is it something else about the sort of popular support for democracy? Which is why delivering on things like infrastructure is really important for the survival of democratic systems in the long term.
- [07:48]
A
I think public support is important for all regimes, including non democratic ones. I mean, even in China, you know, at the end of zero Covid, there was so much opposition to being locked up the way that Xi Jinping wanted that, you know, even his regime had to, you know, grapple with reality and relax those Covid controls. But certainly in A democracy, you know, the whole thing is about public support. That's not the issue. The issue really is what matters to the public. And here I think that there's an important divide between ordinary voters and academics, more, you know, educated people. The latter group tends to focus on procedures and, you know, law and things of that sort, whereas ordinary voters, you know, care much less about this. And you saw this again in the American election last year, where the argument that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy, which many Democrats, beginning with Kamala Harris, were trying to make, just didn't resonate with a lot of voters. You know, what they cared about was chaos at the southern border. They cared about inflation. They cared about, you know, the wars that Biden was presiding over. That just seemed to me, you know, it seemed to them to indicate a kind of weak government, and they really didn't. You know, if you say to them, well, what about the rule of law? You know, wasn't January 6th important? They'll say, well, yeah, I mean, it was important, but look at what we got instead. So I think that that's really the key. It's, of course, public support is critical for any government what wins elections, and I think what really secures democratic power in the end is not an appeal to procedure. It's really an appeal to, I can change these results and outcomes for you in a concrete way.
- [09:35]
B
Now, that leads me to another thing that I was thinking after, you know, having a look through the paper, which is, is it the case that democracy is not delivering, or is it also the case that authoritarian systems are simply better at making their argument? Yes, it's true that you might get a hospital quicker in China than you can get the major infrastructure project, transport infrastructure project, where you are in the States. But it's also true that, on average, authoritarian regimes are more corrupt than their democratic counterparts. They're more prone to civil conflict than their democratic counterparts. But some of that narrative often gets lost. And it strikes me that we often end up with a kind of reverse version of the cherry picking that you were talking about in the article you're responding to, where people get very focused on China cases like Rwanda and say, look, look at the poverty reduction under China. Look at the recovery after the genocide in Rwanda. And these are, of course, very important, genuine cases where we have seen really important economic successes. I think China, for example, is responsible for most of the poverty reduction in the world over the last 30, 40 years. But it's also true that those cases are often the exceptions rather than the rule. And that the average performance of authoritarian states is often much more disappointing because of inefficiencies, of waste of political monopolies, of high levels of corruption, which actually leads to worse levels of service delivery. So is part of the problem here not just what democracies are doing and how they deliver, but also that the authoritarians seem to be better at selling what they're doing as successful and hiding the things that they're doing that aren't successful successful. And Democrats seem to have much weaker arguments and much less effective mechanisms for persuading people about the benefits of what democracy is delivering when it performs better.
- [11:27]
A
Well, look, there's no question that there's a lot of authoritarian failures and authoritarian failures to actually deliver concrete results. So that's definitely not the argument. And it's true that one of the reasons that authoritarian leaders want to control the media and, you know, the general conversation is that they, it makes it much easier for them to hide their own failures. And they can spin, you know, failure into, you know, what they claim is success much more easily than in a democracy where you do have, you know, media competition and openness and the like. So I think that that's, that, that's definitely true. But, you know, the, the argument still remains that however you spin this in media or social media, people actually can tell, you know, whether their economy is doing well, whether things look like they're getting done, whether there's security in the streets. And I think no amount of spinning is really going to hide the fact that, you know, your social situation is, is deteriorating. But you're right, you know, authoritarians have certain advantages in, you know, controlling, controlling that narrative.
- [12:38]
B
Do you think the Trump presidency could be really critical in that respect? In the sense that as a high profile fixer of problems, if it goes very badly wrong, if we see an economic slump as a result of the tariff war, if that hits people's pockets very hard, that that will send a signal around the world that, yeah, you can get things done very quickly by removing democratic checks and balances, but that also means very bad things can happen very quickly and there'll be a sort of correction around the world in favor of sort of more technocratic rule bound politics. Is there a sort of sense in which this particular moment could be quite tell for what publics want over the next five or six years? I mean, we were talking a little bit before we started recording about the potential impact of Trump on other elections around the world in places like Canada, where it seems to have swayed Canadians behind a party that they were quickly abandoning before Trump came to power. But a lot of that is more about the kind of rivalry with Trump and the joking about taking over Canada and the 51st state. I'm wondering whether there could be a more profound kind of lesson learning that if this perhaps most high profile kind of populist experiment fails, there could be a kind of reversion to a preference for other forms of more sober politics. Or do you think that now the populist kind of cat is out of the bag and democracies are not performing well enough? This is the beginning. This is the thin end of the wedge. And we're likely to see a significant increase in not necessarily Trump like characters, but characters who are promising quicker, rapid infrastructure and service delivery fixes around the world over the next five, 10 years.
- [14:19]
A
I think that what happens over the coming months and years with the Trump administration is going to be absolutely critical to global democracy just because of the size and power and example of the United States. And I think that I and other people that really do believe in liberal democracy are, you know, in a sense, hoping and expecting that Trump's biggest policies are going to lead to a direct failure, particularly his tariff policies, which violate everything we understand about the role of international trade and its relationship to prosperity and so forth. And I think that you could easily imagine a world in which the United States actually gets both inflation and much higher unemployment, slower growth, you know, by the end of the four years of Trump, and that this sends a really big message to societies all around the world. Actually kind of expect that to happen because so many of his policies are so self defeating. It's, in a way, the fearful scenario is where he actually pulls back and doesn't go for the maximalist kinds of results in terms of tariffs and immigration and deportations and the like, but actually begins to act a little bit more like a conventional Republican. And that, you know, was the experience of the first term and why he could get reelected because people said, oh, look, it's not that bad. He's just like a normal Republican. If he, he actually did that, then I think you'd have this very unclear lesson for the rest of the world that, okay, you had this loudmouth that promised a lot, he didn't deliver, but, you know, in the end we all survived and, you know, we're doing fine, but we'll have to see. I think that actually the more problematic, you know, bad outcome result is more likely just given his instincts and the way that he's been felt, you know, personally unleashed in the second term.
- [16:11]
B
Now that brings us on, I guess, to sort of the second part of conversation where you've given us this warning. You've pointed out the fact that citizens are increasingly aware of the ability of certain political systems to deliver quicker and are more frustrated perhaps than ever before with the slowness, the sluggishness of democratic processes. That raises the question of what is it that democracies do? Of course, it's too easy to say deliver better, provide more. Some of the things that you were talking about are to an extent, structural limitations of democracy. You need to build consensus. It's harder to get more people to agree. You can't simply violate people's rights or push through projects that might have problems to them, whether it's environmental problems or local communities objecting and so on. So do you have a kind of roadmap for, particularly when it comes to those service delivery issues, what we need to be thinking about, is it actually about kind of bringing people together across political lines or is there actually a more radical rethinking of political systems that you think needs to be done in order to facilitate more rapid response and more effective service delivery?
- [17:21]
A
No, it's absolutely the former. I just think that there's a whole series of reforms that could be enacted by a future alternative to Donald Trump that's waiting to be, you know, implemented. So there's a very good book written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published this year called Abundance. So Ezra Klein is a progressive, he lived in California and you know, he just details the way in which progressives have made it impossible to actually enact their own agenda. So back in the 1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam and the Oakland Bay Bridge were all built in a period of three or four years, right? And America, as far as I know, was a liberal democracy back then, just as it is today. You couldn't possibly do anything like that today because, you know, the number of permitting requirements and, and procedural barriers to doing anything have just multiplied really beyond reason. So of course you need buy in, you need vetting, you need public participation. All of those things are part of modern government. But you don't need 50 town hall meetings before you can construct a, you know, a multi family dwelling in San Francisco. I mean, this is literally something that's happened in, in the state of California. We have a law that was passed in 1971 that allows all 40 million residents of California to sue any project, public or private, anonymously, with no statute of limitations. And so everything got sued. And before this law was passed, it was Much easier to actually build, you know, much denser housing. We have this severe housing crisis in the state of California because nobody can build anything. And this wasn't the case, you know, a generation or two ago. So I think that you absolutely do not need to go to a radical solution. You certainly don't need to go, do you know, this Trumpian solution where you just appoint a king and the king just makes all of the decisions with no consultation and no vetting? You know, that's the Chinese style and we don't want to be China. But, you know, what you do want to do is to modify your institution so that you don't have this, you know, what's come to be called sludge that actually prevents, you know, efficient decision making. And that's the reform agenda that I think is really what's going to beat Trump. You know, an opposition politician that can say, yes, we do need to accomplish things, we do need to build things again, and this is my plan for doing it. And we can do it, you know, within the bounds of existing liberal democratic norms and institutions.
- [20:12]
B
Do you think that one of the things that's happened in the last few years is that there's been a bit too much complacency in established democracies that the kinds of things that were happening in other countries wouldn't happen to them? I mean, it strikes me, you know, there's two things that really strike me about countries like the US And I would add the UK in there. You know, one is a lack of willingness to really think about how you might do things that would safeguard and strengthen democracy. So, you know, we know that some countries like Germany, I think Norway, you know, have done, you know, reviewed their constitutions, reviewed their legal systems to ask questions about where are the weaknesses. And one of the things that countries have done as a result of that is constitutionalizing certain provisions for how judges should be treated that were previously not in the constitution to increase the threshold to overturn them. Basically future proofing against right wing populist leaders coming in who might want to do away with those kinds of checks and balances. Countries like the UK US have done much less of that kind of thinking. And of course, one of the things that we then find out is that some of the things we thought were protections turned out to be more informal practices and formal rules, and the system is less strong and robust than we expected it to be. But it also strikes me that, you know, the ways in which, for example, Biden and the Democrats contested their, you know, spent their last term in office and contested the elections. The way that UK politicians are now responding to the threat posed by reform, which had a big breakthrough in the local elections recently, all kind of also suggest that they haven't quite got up to speed on quite how big the authoritarian risk is and how much they therefore need to come together with other democratic forces to basically resist that. And do you see that? Do you think that that's one of the big challenges that we face today? And if so, how is it feasible to have that level of complacency in a world where we now have so much authoritarianism?
- [22:07]
A
Well, certainly there has been complacency, and it begins with political scientists like me. You know, we used to have this concept of a consolidated democracy, and there are all these criteria for when you could say a democracy was consolidated. And I think that's just B.S. i mean, I think we have to throw that term out because any country can go backwards. And we're witnessing that right now in the United States. I do think that there is an institutional difference, though. I mean, part of the reason that the United States has not addressed any of these fundamental weaknesses in its institutions is that, you know, basically we've been saddled with a Constitution that makes it extremely difficult to reform ourselves. And, you know, the British system is. Is actually much easier. All you need is a majority in Parliament, and you can, you know, really change any law you want. In our case, you know, you need. You need a super majority in House and Senate and then super majorities in, you know, in a large number of states in order to enact a constitutional amendment. I think there are many features of the present Constitution that a lot of Americans would like to get rid of, beginning with, let's say, campaign finance spending, because you have Supreme Court that declared that spending money in politics is a protected First Amendment right. And therefore, you know, Elon Musk can spend $300 million to help elect Donald Trump. I mean, I think it's just completely outrageous. But until you get a different court or, you know, better yet, an actual change in the Constitution, we're stuck with that. So I don't know that it's completely complacency. The other thing is that the US Is so polarized. You know, there was a book written by Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer. I think it was published before the last. Well, before the last election. Right. It, in fact, it could have been published when Trump was still president, just laying out a whole series of lessons from the first Trump administration about things you would want to change. For example, the laws on self enrichment of a president or the practice of unlimited pardon power. These are both things that Trump has just shamelessly abused. You know, he created a meme coin so that he could make money off of crypto currencies even as he's taking off the regulatory restrictions on cryptocurrencies. But, you know, it didn't happen. And it didn't happen not because Democrats didn't want it to happen, but because of the, you know, the slim majorities that they held. They couldn't get that kind of action through Congress. And in fact, we got this problem with the filibuster that you actually need a super majority to pass any kind of order ordinary legislation. So, you know, it's a combination of complacency, but also institutional rules that make it very difficult to fix problems that we, we are facing.
- [24:58]
B
Thanks. And that dove tells very nicely actually of a conversation we recently had on the podcast with Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblad, which was explicitly about the US Constitution and the extent to which perhaps some constitutions need to be easier to change, to update them and to enable us to address some of these issues. So anyone who's particularly interested in going further on that might want to go and check out that podcast, which will be up on the website soon. Final question then, in terms of, you know, moving forwards, is there also a sense or a risk that we encourage people to believe too much in the ability of any political system to deliver constant economic change and improvement? I don't say this to be pessimistic or to suggest that people who are struggling should accept struggling, but it is of course true that for a country like China or a country like Rwanda, who were building in some cases from a low base, achieving 10, 12% economic growth every year is something that's feasible, whereas for an established economy, being able to grow at those levels is generally seen to be much less feasible. And that the comparison between the world's most successful authoritarian states and the world's most well known democratic states on economic performance is always kind of likely to see the democratic states perform less well because it's harder to achieve those really high levels of economic growth. I mean, is there, you know, coming from the uk, where we appear to be in a situation where there is really limited funding available to the government, and when the government tries to raise funds to invest in services, it then seems to have knock on consequences that damage the country's economic prospects, Is there also a sort of need on the behalf of citizens at a certain point to say what is it reasonable to expect these political systems to deliver to us right now? And I wonder to an extent whether we're also moving into an era where it is harder for democratic governments to deliver. Because we had a situation before when especially say in the 1990s, democratic governments appeared to be economically in the ascendancy. There was the moment of the defeat of the Soviet Union. All of a sudden we're in a very different world where many of the biggest, fastest growing economies are authoritarian. India, China, et cetera. Is it just the case that also we need to have greater realism about what democracy can deliver and the ability of authoritarian states to achieve higher levels of economic growth because of where those economies are coming from? Or do you think that's unhelpful defeatism and actually we should just be holding democracies to a much higher stand than we are?
- [27:40]
A
Well, I think that it's the case that once you reach kind of upper middle income status, it's harder to get further gains. And the number of countries that have succeeded in doing that is really pretty limited. But authoritarianism isn't going to help you with that. If you look at China's economy right now, they are, you know, I would say, poised to go through a Japan like period where they may face the next 20 years of, you know, slugging out 1, 2% growth per year. That's going to be very, very substantially lower than what they've experienced up till now. And I don't think being authoritarian is necessarily going to help them because, you know, they can make decisions quickly, but they can also make bad decisions quickly. And I think, you know, they're suffering now from a lot of, you know, over investment in real estate and infrastructure from that they've inherited from the past. I do think that democracies have one problem that it's very hard to address, which is, you know, I think that as citizens get better educated and wealthier, they do have a higher sense of entitlement. And therefore, you know, if you ask where all of these procedures come from, you know, why is it that any individual can sue any project in California? Well, you know, Californians feel, you know, God damn it, it's my right to be able to stop the government from doing things that I don't like. And, and that one is a little bit harder to roll back. I think that oftentimes it really takes a national emergency of some sort before people are willing to give up some of that feeling of entitlement. But you also don't wish for a national disaster either. And indeed. You know, we've had a couple. We had September 11, we had the financial crisis in 2008 and we had Covid. And you know, these were all big external shocks. Financial crisis wasn't so external. It was built into the system. But you know, it still didn't really affect American politics to the extent that people were willing to say, okay, we really need to pull together and have greater consensus on, you know, things that need to be done to protect us in the future. And that might be, you know, a one way ratchet. And if it is, I think we're, you know, we're going to have some problems in the future.
- [29:55]
B
Well, on that worrying note, thank you so much, Professor Fukuyama. It's been a fascinating conversation. I know our listeners will have really enjoyed hearing this and it will have provided a lot of food for thought for Democrats around the world. Thank you so much. Just to remind you everyone, if you want to go and read the full piece, it's Delivering for Democracy why Results Matter in the Journal of Democracy out now. Thank you for listening to the People Power Politics podcast brought to you by cedar, the center for Election, Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. To learn more about our center and the exciting work that we do on these issues around the world, please follow us on Twitter eadarbham and visit our website using the link in the podcast description.