Loading summary
Transcript42 lines
- [00:00]
A
You actually have a big turn to identity politics under conditions of globalization, in part because the room for contestation in the economy actually reduced. And so if you have to build political coalitions, right, you have to actually fight on something else. And if it happens to my identity politics, it'll be a lot more kind of non negotiable.
- [00:26]
B
And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. My guest today is one of my favorite thinkers. Pratap Panometer is the Lawrence S. Rockefeller Visiting professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. He also has founded and was Vice Chancellor of one of the most important neoliberal arts colleges in India called Ashoka University, and founded one of the most influential think tanks in the country, the center for Policy Research. In the past I've had Pratap on to talk about developments in India and we do cover some of what is going on there with Narendra Modi. But Pratap by training is a political theorist who really thinks about the basic challenges of liberal democracy and of other regime forms in very incisive ways. And so I talked to him about a new project he has in which he argues that we're in a global moment of legitimation crisis, that we need to understand the particular reasons why liberalism and the democratic project in the west are in such crisis today. But we have to put it in the context of trying to understand why it is that the theo democratic project of Iran, the attempt to wed together democracy and theocracy in an Islamic state, is failing, why it is that according to him, China is undergoing a deep internal crisis of legitimacy, why it is that there are no live alternatives to liberal democracy in that sense either. So this is one of the more challenging conversations I'd recently had on the podcast, but one from which I have learned a tremendous amount, not just about the condition of the United States of Western Europe, but really about how to think about this particular historical moment in the broader context of intellectual history. Now, after recording this really interesting conversation about big issues that are going to stay relevant for many years and decades, I asked Pratap to come back on the podcast to talk about an issue that is very much top of the conflict between India and Pakistan. The threat of an all out war that hung in the air for the last days and the recent ceasefire, which hopefully will hold. But it's probably a little bit too early to tell. Pratap helps us make sense of why this longstanding conflict is flaring up right now. What that has to do with the internal politics of Pakistan and the internal politics of India in ways that certainly taught me a lot about the region. Now, we decided to make all of today's conversation accessible to all of our listeners. So there's no paywall today. But if you want to make sure that you get access to all of our weekly and bi weekly now conversations ad free. And if you want to support our podcast, go to jasamunk.substack.com and become a paid subscriber. Thank you for listening. So obviously there has been a very serious flare up of a long standing conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir in the last days. As we're recording, there is now a ceasefire. We very much hope that will hold that it is not certain. And of course, both India and Pakistan are nuclear nations, so the ferocity of the conflict between them is very concerning. Give us a little bit of the background here. What's at issue in particular over Kashmir, and why is it that this conflict that has gone through periods of being a hot conflict and for periods of being a cold conflict over the last decades has now flared back up in this dangerous manner?
- [04:31]
A
Thanks, Yasha. No, I mean, it is an absolutely unprecedented moment in India Pakistan relations. And I think one cannot kind of overestimate the kind of gravity of, in a sense, what has actually happened and what could happen in the future. But I think it is important to, I think, begin with making this point, which is in this conflict, the issue is actually not Kashmir. I mean, Kashmir is in a sense, the pretext. And I'll explain why. The issue has actually been more kind of Pakistan's identity as a state. Kashmir is kind of Muslim, India's kind of only Muslim majority state. Pakistan not only claimed that in 1948, but actually in some senses began armed conflict right at the birth of the two nations, in some senses. And of course, India and Pakistan have gone to war over Kashmir kind of several times. But what has changed, I think, and that we have to kind of take, in a sense, the larger frame is that you have to remember that for Pakistan's identity, three elements are very important. Right. The first is the institutional centrality of the army. And I think unless we understand that we are not talking about Pakistan, we are talking about the fact that in Pakistan, the army has actually been the central institution and the army will continue to do things that make sure that it actually has legitimacy inside Pakistan. It's not a coincidence that this crisis has flared up at a moment where the army's legitimacy inside Pakistan was at its lowest. Right. And so in some senses, it's actually the political economy of the army that in part, drives actually using the Kashmir issue as a pretext. The second thing that holds Pakistan together in some ways is a kind of anti India ideology. Pakistan is internally struggling, as you know, there's an even greater, much more dangerous, powerful insurgency on its western front in Baluchistan, right, With incredibly high casualties for the Pakistan Army. And so for the Pakistan project, in a sense, the anti India story has always kind of remained the center, central glue. I mean, it's actually quite remarkable that even 70 or five years after independence, Pakistan's not been able to, in a sense, meld its provinces, Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan, into as robust a kind of national identity. And I think these two are actually the kind of. The large kind of framing context in which then the use of Kashmir actually becomes important. India and Pakistan have, in a sense, so to speak, settled Kashmir several times after the 1971 war. There was a Shimla agreement. Both sides agreed to, in a sense, a line of control. But after the 1971 war, Pakistan decided that the instrument it was going to use to politicize Kashmir was not legal claims at the United nations, was not political, diplomatic claims, not even conventional war. It was actually going to use subconventional means like terrorism. And this was also the period that actually coincided with a much more radical Islamic turn in the Pakistan army, which of course, was then fully aided by Pakistan positioning itself as a frontline state in the war in Afghanistan against Russia, the United States, in some senses, you know, fueling this Islamist jihadist complex because they thought that infrastructure was going to be very useful in the fight against Russia. But that infrastructure has been built up and has almost acquired a kind of autonomous life of its own and centrality for the Pakistan Army. Right. So I think Kashmir is, in a sense, not the real issue here. The real issue is Pakistan's identity and the political economy of Pakistan. Tell us a little bit about the
- [08:42]
B
changes that have happened in India, because obviously, as Pakistan is struggling with its identity, India has been struggling with its identity a little bit as well. We talk about that a bit in the rest of the conversation. But Narendra Modi is trying to turn a nation that has always been majority Hindu into a Hindu nation in which its Hindu ness is in some ways part of a definition. And one of the changes that that's led to is a kind of announced change in the status of Kashmir. How are you seeing that conflict? And how do you see more broadly the future of Muslims within India? There's, I believe, over 200 million Muslims in India the figure may be even higher than that. And I think one of the big questions is whether if India becomes a Hindu nation, that group stays loyal to the idea of India as a nation or starts to feel marginalized and excluded in ways that might make it feel like it's not part of a state, with potentially very dangerous consequences within India and outside of India.
- [09:45]
A
So, you know, one of the kind of most interesting consequences of this moment is the following. So Pakistan's Kashmir strategy has in part been premised for a long time on this absolutely false assumption that what you could do is actually incite Indian Muslims against the Indian state, produce communal polarization within India in some senses. Right. And one of the most remarkable features of this incident, again not surprising given India's history, is actually on this particular issue, Indian Muslims are 100% with the Indian state. I mean, even the most ardent Muslim critics of this government, Saddam Oscar, for example, who's most influential Muslim leader and nobody has ever accused him of mincing words or holding back. They are absolutely clear that Pakistan's actions are a liability to Indian Muslims. Right? They're a liability to Indian Muslims in part because they actually jeopard, they could potentially jeopardize their well being and in part because Indian Muslims have consistently said we have voted with our feet and stayed with India no matter what. At least under current political circumstances. Even with a Hindu nationalist India as it currently exists, they think they have a better chance of fighting a battle for their well being in India than they actually do in Pakistan. It's one of the reasons why, for example, you know, Al Qaeda, isis, right? I mean you think of kind of all these Muslim radical movements have had so little success in India because that sense that there was a democratic outlet in safeguard was there. Now you're absolutely right. If that democratic safeguard were to collapse, right then of course all bets would be, in a sense all bets would be off. But India isn't quite there yet. And the one silver lining that has come out of this crisis, which we hope that the government will build on, is that it actually paradoxically kind of, I think united India in some sense is contrary to what Pakistan expected. Now what has changed with the Modi government and I think it's important to understand this, that India's strategy for dealing with Pakistan post 1971, post the Mumbai attacks, you remember the kind of astonishing attack, 2611 in Mumbai, two days of kind of killing of civilians. Taj Hotel in Mumbai. Up till now, India's response to Pakistan's terrorism has been that India needs to exercise some kind of strategic patience in restraint. Right. Both are nuclear powers, right? Yes. Terrorism deserves an answer. At least India has been in rights to take action. But India was always kind of cognizant of the fact that there are risks associated with a disproportionate response to terrorism. Right. Now what has changed with the Modi government is actually that doctrine. Right. The Modi government's view has been that actually that strategic patience and restraint only emboldens Pakistan. That unless you actually inflict some costs on Pakistan. Right. You're never going to in a sense, be able to deal with the problem of terrorism.
- [13:13]
B
And just for some context here. Right. One of the reasons why that is a difficult thing to calibrate is that on the one side, obviously Pakistan is a nuclear power and you want to avoid full out confrontation. But on the other hand, there is a very strong suspicion and some significant evidence that these terrorist groups are in certain ways sponsored by the Pakistani state. These are not groups that have no relation to the Pakistani state. Right.
- [13:39]
A
I mean, in fact, that evidence is overwhelming and it's visible. I mean, this is not sort of clandestine knowledge. You actually look at who are the figures the Pakistani state celebrates. This is well recognized by the international community. Pakistan has been under all kinds of financial sanctions throughout its history. And India has tried, I mean, India offered after 26 11, after a range of previous attacks to do joint probes for Pakistan to hand over terrorists. Frankly, India's had hit a brick wall on that. And I think for a structural reason, because terrorism has become in a sense, central instrument for the Pakistani state. I don't think anybody can kind of in a sense deny this. Even the Pakistani state doesn't quite deny it in some ways explicitly. So the only question was kind of what is India's response? And as I said, the Modi government's view was that that strategic restraint was only emboldening Pakistan and you needed to impose costs. And it has to be said that for the Modi government, imposing those costs on Pakistan, they thought also might bring them domestic political benefit. So in some senses, the Modi government has consistently raised the expectation domestically that if there is a terrorist incident, there will be some kind of appropriate military response. So after an incident in Balakot almost three years ago, India carried out airstrikes, for example, against terrorist camps. Right. So that's one massive change in doctrine. Right. Which is that terrorism itself is an act of war. We will not make the distinction between subconventional warfare and regular warfare. What is surprising this time compared to previous responses is how extensive the Indian response was. It was careful not to target civilian areas. I mean, given the range of targets that India has targeted, at least as far as one can tell, civilian casualties aren't that many. In fact, India has been quite restrained. But the number of targets, air bases in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Sial Court, Karachi, I mean, a number of cities. And there are some unconfirmed reports, this is a matter of speculation. The New York Times is putting this out, that actually India also managed even to target Pakistan's nuclear facilities. Right. Pakistan's response was also to use drones extensively. It also launched missile attacks, and except one, most of them seem to have been thwarted. So what was distinctive about this moment was not just that India has changed its doctrine, but it was willing to deploy missiles on a very wide scale. That, frankly, I think has taken everyone by surprise.
- [16:33]
B
And so obviously now we're entering the realm of speculation. But what do you think is going to be the future of this conflict in the short run and in the long run? Is this ceasefire that has recently been announced going to hold or are we likely to see a return to hostilities in the short run? And what do you think is a prospect for managing this conflict over the course of the coming decades?
- [16:57]
A
So I think there's two things. In the short run, I think the ceasefire would probably hold in the short run, meaning next six months or so, something like that. Right. In part because Pakistan also needed an IMF loan. And I think one of the conditions we gathered the United States put for kind of approving that role was in some senses Pakistan at least adhering to the ceasefire. But there are two structural factors that make me very pessimistic that the ceasefire will hold. One, as I said, because this instrument has been actually very central to the Pakistani's military's kind of operations in India. And this infrastructure is immense. It's hard to see of a state kind of letting this infrastructure in some senses go very easily. Second, one of the paradoxical consequences of India's actions is that India has now basically declared that any act of terrorism will provoke a response. So now you think of the incentive structure here, right, which is if you actually wanted to produce conflict in the subcontinent, some kind of low grade terrorist activity is actually a kind of low cost option in some ways. And I suspect there will be groups that will be terrible tempted to test that out. The second reason, and I think this is, I think, important, and again, something that has changed is in this conflict, China has played an very important role. 80% of Pakistani arms come from China. In fact, one of the most interesting features of this conflict has been how almost all the great powers have seen this as a kind of testing ground for different weapon systems. How has the rafale done? How is the Chinese JC jet aircraft done? It is actually quite, I mean, it's quite incredible how much this conflict was a playing ground of, in a sense, these competing technologies. Right. And insofar as China has cultivated now Pakistan as a kind of all weather dependable ally. Right. The case could be made that, you know, if China wanted to hold India down. Right. This is actually a pretty low cost option it can let Pakistan exercise. It might not want this conflict to go out of hand. Right. But I think, contrary to what many people thought, that China could use this conflict as a kind of occasion to deepen its reproach more with India. One of I think India's worries is that China has actually made it very clear that it is going to, in some senses at least not prevent, if not be an active enabler of this kind of subconventional terrorism option.
- [19:51]
B
Pratap Mehta, thank you so much for helping us make sense of this conflict and for the rest of this conversation,
- [19:57]
A
thank you so much.
- [20:07]
B
Well, it's always a pleasure to speak to you. We had dinner somewhat recently and you told me about some of the things you're thinking about, and I thought we need to get you back on the podcast to talk about those things. Your argument is that there is a kind of global crisis of legitimacy which affects liberal democracy and the liberal project, but also the alternatives to it in very interesting ways. And I look forward to diving into the different parts of it,
- [20:38]
A
perhaps to
- [20:38]
B
start off with, why is it that the liberal project is in such a crisis of legitimacy in 2025?
- [20:46]
A
I mean, gosh, that's a really big question. And I think, you know, I think most of the kind of bases have been covered by many of your other speakers. Much better. I think there's a couple of things, I mean, just to kind of maybe take the conversation forward. Right. Which is the liberal democratic project, or the project of any political regime for that matter. Right. Is in a sense embedded in three other institutional formations. One is the economy, the second is the state. And the third is in a sense the kind of global context of geopolitics. And one way of perhaps thinking about the crisis of liberal democracy is not to begin with the internal crisis of liberal democracy. Is this a crisis of liberal ideas? Is this a crisis of liberalism? It is to actually begin with those three Formations. And ask the question, is there something about those formations at this historical juncture that all political regimes are actually finding it difficult to manage? Right. So the economy is in a sense, the obvious one. Right. Where as you know, political legitimacy in part depends on creating a viable social contract around the economy. Those social contracts are more successful, that present the economy as a non zero sum game and can produce the right kinds of class compromises. I mean, historically, between the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. First in the 19th century, post World War II, initially for a brief period between labor and capital. Right. And interesting, that's about maybe the only 20, 25 year period in global history where wage growth and productivity growth were kind of aligned. Then they got misaligned in favor of labor briefly, and then there was a backlash. And it's actually astonishing across the world, whether it's in China, whether it's in the United States, wage growth has not kept up with productivity growth. Right. I mean, there's something about that social contract that seems to a lot of people to be a little bit off. Right. Are the class interests that our current economic situation is producing? The tension between the college educated and the working class. Right. Both in class terms and status terms. Is there something about our economic model that is making this tension a lot more non zero sum? Right. And the honest answer is I think there are no easy answers to this question. And I think you see both the left and the right kind of struggling. I think the center's view on this was roughly the following, which is, I think we were kind of more Machiavellian in our approach about the economy, which is don't be fatalistic about it. At every economic juncture there is some inconvenience you have to deal with. And once you deal with it, another inconvenience crops up. And you somehow hope that the state can kind of manage this dance enough to produce a kind of collective confidence about the future. This is not just kind of fatalistic business cycles. It requires kind of deft policy management. The remarkable thing is that actually the left, right, center, everybody's struggling to come up with what that mix is. And so you have these extraordinary ironies, right where the left now embraces the bond market as the savior of democracy. And the right kind of Scott Besnett is saying we stand for Main street against Wall Street. I mean, at one level it's easy to laugh at this, but another level it is, I think, indicative of just how complicated the management of innocence of modern economies. China is actually having a version of its own struggle as you know? Right. I mean, the Chinese economy arguably is struggling even more deeply. The contradiction between the model that brought it immense success, the investment led model, and its inability to in a sense, pivot to a much larger welfare state. So you could say that, look, the crisis is not so much a kind of crisis of liberal democracy per se. The crisis is in party kind of crisis of, you might say, kind of social imagination that can deal with the economic side. Right.
- [24:52]
B
Why is it while we're on the economy and I want to hear about the other institutions in which a crisis is embedded as well, why is it that this crisis is driven by economic factors in places that are so different from each other? Right. So it seems that there is a problem with economic legitimacy, both in countries that have experienced a lot of economic stagnation for the last 20 or 30 years, like Italy or big parts of Europe, and in countries that actually have had quite robust growth over the last 30 years, like the United States. You see it both in developed economies like in Western Europe and North America, and in countries that are still really catching up to the productivity frontier and therefore transforming the lives of many of our citizens, like India or China. And you see it even within those places, both in countries like India, where GDP per capita still remains comparatively low, in places like China, where GDP per capita has really jumped up over the course of the last years, but you now have real problems with youth unemployment, et cetera. It feels to me like the way in which the economy has developed in these different places is so heterogeneous that it's surprising that in none of those contexts it's proven possible to build a social contract that works on the basis of those very different states of economy.
- [26:22]
A
No, I mean, that's a wonderful question. I'm not an economist, but a kind of political reading it in some ways. So I think one preliminary remark about the economy, I think one of the big challenges we are facing politically when we think about the economy is how do we actually represent the state of the economy. One of the things we've discovered in the last few years, there's this kind of discrepancy between the way in which we technically represent the economy. Right. So even the last elections headline GDP number looks fine. Inflation doesn't look too bad. Actually, the unemployment numbers in historical perspective, in actually many democracies are not that bad compared to the 70s. So I think one of the interesting things we are struggling with is this kind of discrepancy between what are kind of aggregate social scientific representation that the economy looks like and the way it in a sense feels to different constituent groups, because there are parts of the economy that are actually doing well. And I think it's proving harder for the political establishment in some senses to actually tell these consistent stories. I think the second thing I think I have to say, and just one example of this in some ways, right, where. Which is both a kind of example of this representation story, but also a kind of fundamental contradiction that's emerging. So, you know, when you hear critiques of neoliberalism in the west, right, and many of those critiques of neoliberalism are actually, well, taken in terms of, in some cases in advanced economies, what it did to state capacities, the way it eviscerated a kind of common discourse around the economy. And yet, look, there is no getting away from the fact that the period from 1989 to 2009, the kind of peak of neoliberalism, is one of the most astonishing periods in world history in terms of the drop in global poverty. It's also one of the most astonishing periods in world history in terms of building state capacities in the global south, including India and China. Right. And so when we read these kind of critiques of neoliberalism here, you know, there's almost like there's no global context for it. Right.
- [28:35]
B
In fact, and one of the striking things, you know, looking back at, you know, the political changes that I've seen over my own lifetime is that when I was a student, you know, the WTO was extremely controversial. I started university about a year after those famous protests against the WTO in Seattle. And the argument against it was that this would hugely benefit the rich countries, make them much more affluent, and lock countries like China into a permanent state of poverty. And today, when you look at criticisms of a wto, they're very different. It's that allowing China to enter the WTO resulted in steel workers in Michigan, who by global standards are extremely rich, losing their jobs and moving all of that wealth, all of those resources to countries like China that supposedly were going to be the victims of the wto. So even the attack line has actually shifted.
- [29:37]
A
No, no, absolutely. And it's actually the Global south that's actually more likely to now maintain the sort of so called kind of liberal international order in some sense, or at least benefited a great deal, I think, from it. But I think one of the things it actually brings out, and I think it's implicit in your command, is this fundamental contradiction where if the locus of legitimation is the nation state form and the internal Distribution of power, goods and resources within that form. It is going to be profoundly intention in some senses with global redistribution. I think Vice President J.D. vance actually, I think was, was much more kind of candid about this that the problem is not that China has not got liberal, the problem is that China is actually getting rich, right? I mean, in some ways, both in geopolitical terms it poses a challenge, but it also poses the challenge of there has been a kind of fundamental contradiction between many of the interests of the workers in the global south and in the global North. I mean, it's remarkable actually in a country like India, which has such anti imperial instincts, the left in the north is actually an object of much greater suspicion than the right has been on this. You know, in a sense on this issue. So at one level, when the principle of legitimation is entirely domestic, then of course the obvious question, which is in a sense who are the winners and losers domestically? And the political question then becomes is who? What is it about the political mechanisms and the form in which liberal democracy is practiced that prevented those states from either compensating or preparing the losers from this kind of globalization for in some senses, better prospects. Now, there are two views on it, right? One view basically says look, it's globalization that's a problem. It poses such a hard constraint on policy, right? And that states do not have the kind of policy agency on their domestic welfare policies to be able to actually in a sense engage in this ballistic act. In fact, this argument goes one step further. I mean, there is this interesting argument in political science that says you actually have a big turn to identity politics under conditions of globalization, in part because the. The room for contestation in the economy actually reduced. And so if you have to build political coalitions, you have to actually fight on something else. And if it happens to my identity politics, it'll be a lot more kind of non negotiable. That's one theory that kind of globalization produces a kind of hard constraint, right? The other is actually not a kind of globalization story. It's much more a kind of domestic corruption story in some way ways that actually what has happened is that the constraint of globalized, the apparent constraint of globalization has actually been used in some ways by elites to actually not do the kind of domestic reform that is required. And so one very clear example in the United States, I mean, education inequality has always been massive in the United States in, I mean, partly because education is financed by local taxes. And so this one big instrument that actually creates better equality of opportunity, right? It's an interesting question. Whether globalization, does it actually prevent you from creating a more robust education system, healthcare and housing, the two big things that are the sources of discontent in global politics in pretty much every northern country we visit, whether it's London or whether it's New York. Again, it's not obvious that actually globalization was the hard constraint, but in some senses, the invocation of globalization as that hard constraint has actually allowed a kind of domestic political economy, some would say of cronyism, some would say, if you want to be a little bit more charitable, a mistaken view of how the state should actually regulate these sectors. I mean, again, American healthcare reform has nothing to do with globalization or very little to do with globalization. Right. So I think part of what you're seeing in politics is this kind of contest between, in a sense, these two narratives. And in a way, the one uses the other not to kind of move in the domain in which can act in where they can actually address some of these.
- [34:16]
B
Yeah. And in some ways, it seems to me that the problems of healthcare and housing are perhaps problems that crop up at a stage of economic development irrespective of globalization. Right. They are problems of wealthy societies because it is because we are a wealthy society, but people live so long and that therefore healthcare cost goes up. It's because we are a wealthy society that the cost of labor is much higher than the. The cost of stuff or resources. And so healthcare costs go up because they're so labor intensive, as do education costs and childcare costs and other kinds of things. And then, of course, you can think that there's a deep failure of dealing with that in the right way. And the American healthcare system is deeply imperfect in all kinds of ways. But that underlying problem actually is just caused by the fact that America is much richer today than it was 50 years ago. And the same for the Britain and so on and so forth. And of course, with housing, it's similar. One of the problems of housing is about competition for good housing because people have a lot of money. The other problem is that a wealthier society finds it much harder to build, gives much more power to constituencies that want to preserve the property values, that want to stop outsiders from moving into the communities through zoning laws and all kinds of other things. It certainly isn't somehow, you know, the trade with China, which makes it harder to expand housing in California and, you know, New England, of course.
- [35:44]
A
One more thing, kind of just building on that and kind of the most obvious point, right. Which is, look, I mean, all surveys show that there is Deep anxiety about immigration in advanced democracies. And the anxiety has very many different levels. I mean, I think in a more nuanced discussion we kind of parsed it out, which is, look, every state has a right to regulate its membership. It's very hard to deny that proposition. I mean, for good or for little, the nation state form and bounded membership is a kind of condition of legitimacy in the modern world. That's the political form we have, right? And there are concerns about illegal immigrants. There's a second concern about kind of cultural immigration, assimilation of new migrants in some way ways. And again, I think this fundamental tension which is can a globalized world survive conceptions of the nation state form which do not allow for more open membership and a kind of different reimagining of what their identities might be in the future? And look, some of the concern is very genuine and clear. I mean, I do think liberals, people like us, I think sometimes a little too blase about the effects of immigration, particularly the distributive effects, who gets affected, and particularly when it's being done in context where many of the other people who are struggling are actually not being politically paid attention to. So there is a genuine political problem there, and I think there's a gender genuine economic problem there. But again, the fundamental tension between having a principle of political legitimation that is actually bounded, invested in a historical narrative of its identity and a economic system that actually requires mobility. And at some point that asymmetry war is going to come home to roost in some ways. And remember 10 years ago there was kind of this big call that the best thing you can do for global poverty is actually allow the migration of low skilled workers in some ways. And I think there's still some power to that argument, but you can clearly see its limits if it is practiced within the frameworks of the current kind of nation state forms.
- [38:05]
B
That's very interesting. So we've mostly talked about the economy, what about versus other ways in which liberalism and liberal democracy is embedded in this broader institutional context? And why is it that they have been contributing to a crisis of legitimacy?
- [38:19]
A
So there's the economy, right? The second is, let's call this kind of complex, for simplicity's case, the nation state. We've talked a little bit about the nation in some ways. And I think there are two particular issues which. So one, look, liberalism has always struggled and its most authoritarian moments have always been on the issue of membership. I mean, at one level you could argue, look, the United States was not even a full democracy till the 1960s, largely on this question of who gets to be a full member of, in a sense, this society, right? I mean, there isn't a simple theoretical answer to this question. Often we have, in a sense, fudged our way. Way practically in kind of answering this question. The second is, in some sense is related, which is modern nation states actually require a kind of story about their past. Why are they the community of fate that they are? What actually ties the fate of that people together? In a sense, Nationalism is the largest form of identity politics in some ways, and liberalism's most authoritarian moment. The stress almost always comes from nationalism. Nationalism is the one other ideology in the face of which you can immobilize every other consideration of justice, right? In the name of national security, you can abridge individual rights. So you have to recast authoritarianism as a kind of nationalist project in some sense, senses, right? These are not just people who disagree with you. These are enemies of the people, right? In some ways, you have to kind of create a contest over the production of knowledge and how we represent our own past. Is it the 1619 Project? Is the 1776 Project now? We can have an academic debate about that. I mean, you could critique both. But actually, this is about creating a form of historical memory and identity. This is not about, in a sense, the facts of history, right? And that project, by its very nature, if you think it's a kind of collective project, right. Does require, at some level, the kind of immobilization of, in a sense, critical reasoning. At one level, I mean, you can have identity politics, you can have reason. You can't have both, as, you know, in some ways, right? The limits to that. And the third, I think, kind of building on that identity story. I think this fundamental tension underlying modernity. I mean, you've discussed this with Fukuyama profoundly, which is, you know, one of the kind of romances of liberalism, if you think of it in its kind of most utopian aspiration, is this extraordinary freedom to kind of define yourselves, right? Nobody can name whom I I am, who give me my identity. I can choose to be what I want to be, right? And I think at. And this is a profound emancipatory impulse in some ways, right? It takes us away from any notion of necessary identities, right? But that is kind of running headlong into a different conception of identity, which also has a kind of impulse in modernity, which is a kind of objectivist conception of identity. Think of, for example, the debate over gender and sexuality, right? I mean, there were two impulses impulses in some senses. One, a kind of impulse to radical self definition. You know, we can be whatever gender we want, whatever, you know, sexual identity we take. The other says, no, no, there are actually kind of objective facts about you in some senses that benchmark your identity. And at one level, if you take them, take both of these impulses in their best forms. Right. I mean, not the kind of caricature political forms. There is actually a deep tension between them and the radical self definition one is certainly very unsettling. Right. To the ways in which our social institutions and social mores have been institutionalized. Right. I mean, and it's not an accident that the question of gender and sexuality is the one that's causing the most psychological identity, even though it might not be, you know, economically consequential in, in, in, in respects. So at one level, what you are having, what in a sense you're getting is kind of, you know, the most romantic impulse in liberalism actually people finding unsettling and, and at that point they're willing to say, well, we actually don't want this much freedom. If what freedom means is these radical forms of self definition.
- [43:00]
B
That's very interesting. And I think a few things tie together here, right? I mean, I go back to this moment in the 1990s when the big evangelists of the Internet were saying that what this new technology would bring is an easy way to connect with people who now are too far away and with whom communication is now too costly for us to genuinely be in conversation with them, and who therefore predicted that this would lead to an age of tolerance and mutual communication and people who seem to have different identities getting much closer to each other. And it does strike me that one of the fundamental things about the last 30 years is that in fact abolishing the cost of communication has had the opposite result. That when you are able to communicate with anybody in the world, you can encounter anybody in the world in their point of view and their proclamations about their own identity and their own worth on social media. What you actually want to do is to seek out the people who are the most like you as possible. And that may be in part because of the dislocations of globalization. I think it may be because of just the new means of communication in the form of social media, because of a bunch of different kinds of things. And that is the kind of background to this debate about liberalism and self determination. And I think there's kind of two ways of, or three ways, let's say, of reading that one is that In a way that is inspired by what the Frankfurt School said about the Enlightenment. Perhaps the basis of liberalism are self undermining. That's a kind of conservative critique that some people have made. That when we came from societies where there's very strong social background norms, where there's very strong expectations for how you should live your life, very strong norms, including gender norms, but also all kinds of other norms about how one should act in the world. The liberatory cause of liberalism was very strongly felt we needed to be set free from the constraints that societies had traditionally put upon us in those ways. Nowadays, people might feel that those constraints have been pushed back to such an extent, have become so relevant to how much of the world works, that we have less of a need to be liberated from them. And people who emphasize the need to be freed from them, a sort of misunderstanding, what the actual problem of the day is, they're really just encouraging license rather than liberty, to use one old way of putting this. Now a second way of conceiving of this moment would say that, no, what's happened here is a kind of misunderstanding what liberalism actually consists of. It would say that perhaps in part because of thought of liberals themselves, we have overemphasized the ways in which liberalism is individualistic and in which liberalism does exhort people to self create in that kind of way. And here the story would go well, a strain of liberalism that really does prize autonomy over everything else has become too strong in our culture. And part of the response is to return to a form of liberalism in which you recognize that the very basic liberties that this tradition gives us are precisely motivated by our understanding of the importance and need of social connection. Why is the freedom to worship so fundamental to liberalism? Why is the freedom to assemble so fundamental to liberalism? Because we understand that people are embedded in religious communities that are very important, because we understand that they may feel the need to get together and assemble with people who are part of some group or community that is really important to them. And so liberalism from its start really wasn't that kind of individualistic ideology, Even though perhaps the strain within it that sometimes makes a mistake of or emphasizing this has been overly prominent. I had a couple of other kind of ways of laying that out in mind. But what do you think? Is the crisis of liberalism one of reshaping its emphasis in the right ways and responding to this moment in a way that speaks to it, and those are things that can happen from within the liberal tradition itself? Or do you think that there is a more fundamental misalignment between the liberatory instinct of liberalism actually being in a sense parasitic on pre existing social norms and customs that have now run that course.
- [48:09]
A
So I have a slightly different take. I mean all those are kind of valid concerns. And I think one of my worries, I think is as you know, I mean the debate over liberalism has been continuing since the 19th century and even in the last 30 years. I mean, there's a standard series of critiques and a standard series of replies that, you know, yes, liberalism does actually have its own version of kind of community. You know, it also has its version of the good. I mean we can go over those philosophically. Bits. I think what's going on at this moment, I think it's something slightly different and I think in a sense characterize this, which is, I think you're exactly right, which is liberalism emancipated us from certain kinds of social restraints. Right. But the premise of that emancipation was that those social restraints would be replaced by some kind of self restraint. Right. You know, liberalism is fundamentally an act of immense trust in other human beings. I mean it's, and, and, and one of the reasons illiberalism breaks my heart whenever there's an act of censorship, whenever there's a kind of, you know, interference with somebody's autonomy, is that it's also kind of break in our trust in other human beings. But, but, but, but that the act of trust was kind of premised on the sense that, look, as human beings we don't want coercive restraints imposed from the outside, but we do want the formation of selves that can actually exercise good judgment. And I think it was very characteristic of 19th century liberalism. I think when people say it was moderate, I think it was not moderate in its ideas. I think it was just moderate in the sense that it did recognize that there needed to be a particular sense of the self. Right. When we say respect other people, respect is not just an idea. Right. In a sense it requires shaping your sense of inner restraint about how you speak to people. And I think part of, I think what we need to kind of think about is not the critique of those philosophical ideas, but is there something about the institutional form bonds we inhabit where this kind of moral psychology in a sense becomes just harder to hold on to. So there could be a kind of more old fashioned critique of this current moment which says, look, people are always motivated by the desire for fame. You put an information system under a system of profit, regulation, motivation for profit, and you will actually in a sense start bringing out the worst of people. It's not so much a kind of refutation of the idea of liberalism, it's actually asking a deeper question, which is where does the sense of good judgment and self restraint that liberalism is always required, Always required? I don't think there was a single liberal who did not think that. And in fact they would argue it's required even more precisely because you don't have social concern constraints, right? Where does in a sense that come from and does this kind of information order make it harder? So just to give one small example, I mean, in a way, you know, the evisceration of the distinction between the public and private, right, Was incredibly important for liberalism. Not just because the private was a sphere that was protected from external interference, not just because the private was a sphere where you actually explored your individuality, but also because the private was a sphere which allowed you to make mistakes without them having great public ramifications. So you might say things that are offensive occasionally to your friends, they remain, you got rebuked for them. But it wasn't an identity defining mistake that would happen once you've put it out on social media. And because once you put it out, it actually in a sense becomes your identity whether you want it or not. Not. Right? So I think the question in some senses really is kind of, where do this sense of kind of good judgment and self restraint that liberalism has always relied on come from? And I don't think the answer to that can be actually going back to older forms of external restraints. I mean, that shift has sailed and probably for good reason. The second thing I'll say about liberalism, and this is maybe a slightly more controversial point, is that, you know, in its history, in a way, even the most liberal societies have not just often betrayed liberalism, but there have been these like, taboos, some areas where liberalism in a sense has been restricted, right? I mean, so think of free speech debates, right? At one level, this is an era that's extraordinary in the explosion of free speech. Even censorship means, means to call attention to the speech, not actually do away with it, right? I mean, it's a form of mobilizing community power to get attention rather than actually censor, right? But what's going on with our censorship debates, right? And again, we can have an abstract discussion on kind of First Amendment absolutist right to speech, but in the history of free speech, there's no doubt that there were communities, including the most liberal communities, that always made some exceptions, right? So sometimes talking about race might be taboo, sometimes talking about particular Country, I mean, sometimes actually criticizing the nation in some ways. What has, I think happened at this moment is it's now difficult to in a sense, make those exceptions for one or two taboos or one or two communities without actually counter mobilizing the other. I mean, think of the free speech debate, right? So I mean, in a way, you know, I mean, I think what, what in a sense happened recently in the last two years in multicultural societies. Every. The phobia against every religion, right? So Hindus feel there's Hindu phobia, Muslims feel there's Islamophobia. There's in a sense anti Semitism. And the community contest has become in part over. Right. How do you mobilize your community power so that your exception can also be recognized? Right. And I think liberalism had kind of gotten away with it when there were, you might, one or two dominant communities, one or two kind of taboos or conventions, right? And so now it's very easy to accuse liberal of hypocrisy. It is very easy to say, none of you actually believe in the First Amendment. There's always this one example we can find of every person. And I don't mean the things that are genuinely prohibited by the First Amendment, like child pornography or something like that, but actually even criticism of particular communities. I think in part, in some senses, I would argue that the challenges that liberalism actually has to live up to its convictions even more in a multicultural society and is actually finding it harder because the weight of those group identities still kind of comes in the way. So I get offended when speech is directed against my community. I seek some kind of carve out or exception for that. Except you can't do it in a world where actually everybody's competing in some senses for that exception. So it's at one level the democratization of taboos that's the problem in some ways, rather than actually the philosophical idea of liberalism.
- [55:44]
B
That's very interesting and I think it strikes me as absolutely right. In the free speech debate, there was a set of asymmetrical taboos, particularly in the last years. And that then leads to each community saying, well, hang on a second, if we're not allowed to say X or Y about this topic or about that community, why on earth should I tolerate people saying these horrible things about my community? And then there's two responses to that, one of which is to try to fight for your community having the same carve outs and exceptions, to say, well, if you can't say this about African Americans or that about trans people or this about you know, Christians or that about Jews. Well, then we also want to have the same protections and, you know, recognize some form of blasphemy law or some form of special status, or as a victim of my community. And anybody who in any way criticizes it becomes, you know, cast out of polite society. Or you go in the other direction and actually say, well, that's why we do need to have more robust free speech norms, including on topics that are going to make a lot of people are uncomfortable. And I, of course, think that the coherent response is that you can see how tempting it is to each political actor, whether they're on the left or the right, whether they're part of this group or that group, to deviate from it. I also thought it was very interesting what you're saying earlier, that in a sense, liberalism relies on the private public distinction and that the real impact of technology has been to make the private impossible. This is something that I'm very struck by when I speak to my students, that one of the most meaningful experiences to me at university was having those rollicking debates with people at 2am in somebody's rooms. And it's not like we were being churlish. We were really trying to work out what we thought about the world. But I'm sure we said all kinds of stupid and offensive things in the process of doing that. And it didn't occur to anybody that that might be in the newspaper the next day because nobody was interested in us. And so for me, that didn't really exist. Now, my students, who I speak to today, are very worried that anything they might say in the dining hall to a friend or in class for that matter, might then be used as material for a TikTok of some classmate who attack them, and that might cast them out of that community. And so those topics obviously intersect, because that is a question about being protected precisely from the mob of your peers when you're trying to exercise your free speech, not even necessarily in advocating for some controversial cause, but just in developing your own mind. I'm aware that we've been talking a lot about liberalism, but I think one of the things that's striking in what you've been thinking about recently is that for all of the deep crisis of legitimacy of liberalism, we see a similar parallel crisis of legitimacy in different ideological forms around the world. So before we delve into that, I guess the first question to ask is, what are those other forms? What are the principal rivals to liberalism or liberal democracy in the world today? And how should we think about our relationship to liberalism.
- [59:10]
A
So as we kind of discussed, I mean, there's different ways you can think of the kind of landscape of alternatives. Traditionally, it has been capitalism versus communism in economic terms with a kind of political correlate to has also been sometimes authoritarianism versus democracy in different forms. I have kind of been struck by, and, you know, this is just a heuristic way of organizing sort of political theory in the 20th century, but also, I think, legitimizing frameworks in political century, which in the 20th century and 21st, which is there are different parts of the world where, for good or for ill, some point in the early 20th century, a certain set of questions came to dominate their politics. And out of those questions came some certain legitimizing frameworks within which those societies think about political legitimacy. So the one obvious example is, in a sense, the party state as a political form, particularly in China. Of course, it comes out of Marxism, first perfected in Russia. But there's a very, very distinctive Chinese development of the party state as a political form. And it has a very well developed political theory. What does it mean to be a vanguard party? What is the party mediating between the present and the future? In some ways, right? It's a media. Right. It has its own theory of representation. And, you know, for kind of years, Chinese political theorists have been kind of worried about how do you actually make the party, in a sense, more representative. It has its own theory of political action, you know, and some of it has actually resulted in horrendous human destruction. But it was a form of politics, Right? It's a political form that has kind of endured. And a lot of the debates, let's say, within China in some senses, still happen within the horizon of that political form. Right. In some ways there's a second project. You know, lots of countries, Iran, Pakistan, again, lots of internal variations. But this was this project where, on the one hand, there was a kind of deep recognition that in the modern world you need forms of political articulation that derive their legitimacy from the people. On the other hand, they also need to be under the sovereignty of God. Right. And Maududi, for example, one of the kind of most influential Islamic political theorists of the 20th century calling this term theo democracy. Right? I mean, in the sense of China had kind of party democracy, this is like theo democracy in some ways. And you had not just political movements, but constitutional experiments. Pakistan, Iran is probably the closest that comes to theo democracy, Right? The. That not only got institutionalized, but actually are still profoundly shaping politics there. I mean, it's you know, just like for Americans sometimes it's hard to think outside of the horizon of 1776. You know, there is this constitutional form in a sense, these reasons of the world struggle with that. But Africa, I mean, again, it's a continent and with incredible variation, but I think that mid century African project of, you know, what form of political organization would prevent the color line from being an axis of injustice, not just in global politics, but domestically. Right. And I think if you just take three of these projects, I mean, Latin America is of course more complicated in some sense, I think, much more closely tied to American and European in a sense, intellectual histories and questions. I think now if you take these kinds of foundational questions, questions, they have done two or three things, right. One, as I said, they've been providing the horizon within which a lot of debates in these countries go on. They actually resulted in regime forms for good or for ill. And we are at this interesting moment. But at one level you think even these projects, perhaps even more than liberal democracy, I'd argue, are at a kind of internal exhaustion point, internal exhaustion point point which is they are now in a sense encountering internal problems, conceptual problems that they actually cannot resolve without some significant element of that project being given up. So the party state cannot become a revolutionary project again. I mean, you don't want to go back to the cultural revolution that's kind of tried and dusted. Right. So how does the party state in some senses become representative Islamic, modern Islamic constitutionalism? Right. I mean, in some senses that tension in a sense between the theological part and the democratic part has never really been resolved in politics satisfactorily. And it's not an accident that all of almost all of these foundation questions, regime types, are having to perhaps resort to even more repression than they did for, you know, for a 20, 30 year period post Cold War in some ways, and you know, particularly if you think of the turn from Deng Xiaoping's China to Xi Jinping's China in some ways. Right. They are also having to again, increasingly resort in a sense not just to nationalism as a legitimizing ideology, deepen in some senses the friend enemy distinction, even using corruption as a way of legitimizing more authoritarianism. Right. So these are all different signs, you know, in some senses of a kind of internal crisis, even in the kind of these legitimizing projects. Now this doesn't mean that they're all going to kind of disappear tomorrow or collapse. I mean, one of the things we've learned is how you know how much there's a kind of party to be. Independence and weight of history. Theodore Kochpole was exactly right, which is revolutions don't happen without states imploding from the top. States can hold on to these forms for a very long time, but I think the sense of kind of internal crisis is quite palpable.
- [65:28]
B
So let's go through some of those cases that's really interesting. I mean, when you think about the internal crisis, for example, of a kind of post colonial attempt at African state making, that is relatively straightforward. Those countries by and large have struggled to forge a cohesive national identity. They're still very beset by rivalries between different tribes. They have not been very affected at building a lot of state capacity, and they have by and large failed to lead a lot of economic development. And so those remain some of the most poorest parts of the world. And Africa, sadly remains the continent of the world with the most civic conflicts, armed conflicts, wars and so on. So it's easy to see why you're saying that is at a moment of internal crisis. I think it's also relatively easy to see that when it comes to something like the Islamic Republic of Iran, that feels a little bit like some of the communist societies in Central Europe in the early 1970s. The regime might be able to hold on for a very long time or it might fall tomorrow. But genuine belief seems to have gone. It seems to have gone in a lot of the population, which is actually secularizing at a remarkable clip. And it even seems to be gone within many members of the regime itself, who seem more motivated, for example, by the material gains you can make from being a member of the Revolutionary Guards than by that founding ideology. It feels like power rather than ideological appeal is now holding that system together. And we'll see how long it does that. What about the case of China, which obviously does have some significant economic challenges, as we're alluding to earlier. High youth unemployment, GDP per capita. It still remains a lot lower than that of Germany or the United States, and for that matter a lot lower than Japan or South Korea. But a society that has solved a lot of problems that those other societies we've talked about have not. That has a very current sense of national identity, which is helped by the fact that there's a huge Han majority within the country, of course, that is able to have very effective control, control over the full extent of the territory of China. Something that has eluded many historic dynasties in China, not just in the period of a Republic in the 20th century. First half of the 20th century, but also towards big stretches of a Qing dynasty and many dynasties before that. It has obviously led very rapid economic development. And all of that is enough to now make policymakers in Washington, D.C. very, very worried that for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, and perhaps for the first time since earlier than that, they have a genuine peer rival. So I can see how one can make the case for skepticism, but one can also make the case for bullishness. So what's your case for why we should think of that model as having reached a genuine moment of internal crisis?
- [68:46]
A
So I think one has to kind of distinguish between a sense, two levels. And I should say, I mean, it be obvious to your listeners I'm not an expert in Chinese politics in some ways, right? So I think this was in a. So the two levels of the following, right, which is, look, there is absolutely no question that the Chinese political experiment has been one of the most astonishing in human history. And what China has accomplished in the last 30, 40 years is, I mean, it's just staggering on all the dimensions you actually mention. And in a sense, even its kind of ability to produce human welfare, at least if you kind of measure it by, in a sense, removal, poverty, it's in some sense is an enormously successful state. And really it is acquiring its rightful place in some senses in geopolitics in ways that people you would probably have not thought possible half a century ago. So it's empirically, in that sense, quite a successful model, right? I think the interesting question about China, in a sense, and that's the limited sense of legitimacy, crisis, kind of conceptually. I mean, it's like it could be that America does economically okay, the American state form endures, and yet liberalism comes to crisis. It's that more the kind of analogy where I guess you could say two things, right? One is whether the party hold on power actually will require more repression and surveillance than looked to be the case 10, 15 years ago. Kind of the Deng, post Deng era, in a sense, a kind of, you know, there was. There was a sense about China of kind of moment of greater openness, intellectual openness, I think, I think, I think in a sense, confidence to kind of innocence internally actually allow for the kind of greater dissemination of ideas in some. In, you know, in some ways, right? And at least the one sense one's getting at from outside, that that is kind of reversed. And again, there's a parallel. I mean, we don't want to single out China. The parallel is, if you think in a Sense, there's a backsliding on the liberal part of liberal democracy. You might say there is a backsliding of whatever the kind of liberal version of that party state model is. And in a way, the left right distinction, in a sense, was a distinction that was kind of internal to that model. So that would be one kind of indicate, right, that if what one's interested in a sense is, is in a sense the expansion of freedom, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll all look like liberal democracies of the West. But freedom in the sense that we were talking about a kind of deep presumptive trust in individuals, individual autonomy, there seems to be a backsliding on that. And I think that's one sense in which I think there is crisis. I think the second is in a sense, what is in a sense going to be the basis of the party's legitimacy. Right. So there was the kind of. There was the revolutionary legacy, and I think it did manage to genuinely create. I mean, there were genuine believers. This was not just a project. It wouldn't have been so successful if it were just a kind of project of, in a sense, command and control. There was a kind of instrumental legitimacy. Look, this is a political form that is delivering the courts, even if one of the prices of that, the price of that model is a certain degree of surveillance and repression and so forth. Right. And so one question is, in a sense whether that version of legitimacy is now eroding. Now it could be replaced by something else. I mean, it could be that Mr. Trump is actually a huge gift to China, that the Chinese state now says, look, we are not just the vanguard state taking China from the kind of present to the future. It is actually amazing how much a kind of anti America coalition is now actually invested in the success of China in some ways. So it could in some senses pivot to some kind of argument that is, I think, instrumental. But I think one of the interesting things about Chinese political thought and, and I think this is one has to kind of give credit where credit is due, is that it is a party that has always been, at least in Chinese political thinkers have always been worried about how does one characterize the representativeness of the party? In some senses, yes, it can produce all of these instrumental goods, but legitimacy is, in a sense, something about. Is something more than that. It is really, in a sense, a presumptive claim to be able to speak in some senses, for the people, Chinese nation, and even Mao. I mean, you know, again, absolute human catastrophe produces in kind of the cultural Revolution, the great leap forward. But one of the impulses in a sense behind that was this idea that the party needs to return to its kind of revolutionary roots. In some senses it is not to be seen as just another bunch of elites too distant from it. I think a lot of the discussion around Confucian democracy in China, interesting. There's arguably not too much confusion about it if you think about it, but it is still very worried in a sense about this particular question of what would make the party more legitimately representative and came to speak on behalf of the people. I mean, so, you know, theorists like Wang Hui, for example, and I think the Chinese thinkers are also very right in pointing that there is a parallel discussion in the west about the crisis of legitimacy. Does the two party system actually represent the people? It's a form of electoral authorization, but does it actually represent the people? Right. And so there is a private discussion in China, in some senses, does this kind of current party form, and you could argue that in its kind of current setup, in some senses at least with this investment in the leadership principle, which, as you know, President Xi also kind of relaxed the norms around succession that we thought China was beginning to in institut. So openness, succession, greater emphasis on personal loyalty, whether this in some sense is fundamentally in tension with the party's own self conception as a kind of legitimating system. And at some point does that contradiction actually come out into the open?
- [75:37]
B
The other thing about China, of course, is that whatever one may think about the extent to which it is in crisis internally, it doesn't claim, I think, to have any particular model like function externally. Whereas the Soviet Union was a universalist regime that did believe that it had a kind of blueprint for how other countries would emulate it. I think the Chinese political elite recognizes that the political form they have is both too contingent historically and too culturally specific to be exported in the same ways. It is a strange mixture between a 3,000 year Confucian history, a history of competitive state examinations that catapult you into the top rows of the state and the bureaucracy and society and the economy between a Marxist Leninist revolutionary party that has over time moderated and become in many respects quite small c conservative. One of the striking things I found talking to people in China who know China well about Trump is that they don't see Trump in nearly as positive terms as you might imagine. You might think that from the Chinese perspective, they would look at Trump and say, he's blowing up America's leadership of the world. Good for us. But in fact, they're made very nervous by the extent of instability that Trump means for the global system, because their tendency is, I think, to be quite smoothy conservative in that kind of way. And so you take all of these different elements together and it's just completely unclear what it would mean for political leaders in Nigeria or in Zimbabwe or in India to decide we want to be more like China. There's just no blueprint to implement. So even insofar as the system for thrive, so it doesn't go into some kind of internal crisis, it's not obvious that it can serve as a beacon for anywhere outside of that part of the world. Which was in a way different during the Cultural Revolution, where internally, of course, what was happening was much, much, much, much, much, much worse than today. But there was really young people in Paris, when you watch Godace La Chinoise, for example, in 1968, thinking Mao is shining the way to what we should do here in France. But that doesn't really exist today. In the same way, there's one big country that we haven't spoken about, which is ironic because it's a country that you're from and you know very, very well, and that is India. I mean, I suppose 20 or 30 years ago, the way that I would have tried to slot India into this conversation was to say that India was at the forefront of making democracy, and to some extent liberal democracy work, you know, in a poorer part of the world, in a part that is less economically developed. And so it's sort of at the forefront of a liberal democratic experiment. In fact, in many ways, it's the shining jewel in the liberal democratic experiment. Because even a country that, when it reached independence in the late 1940s, many people believed couldn't possibly sustain that system of government, turned out to be thoroughly democratic and actually to, for example, respect the rights of religious minorities much more than might have imagined at the time. Today, it's a little bit less clear that this is how one should slot India into the conversation, because Narendra Modi has been trying to take the secular understanding of the country at its founding and turn it into a much more self consciously Hindu nation. A nation that is not only Hindu, but by cultural tradition and by the fact that a great majority of its citizens are Hindu, but that is Hindu in the political sense of having and recognizing a kind of primacy of Hindu religion and perhaps political thought in the country. So where does India fit? I mean, is it sort of. Should we recognize Modi as attempting a fourth answer to this kind of question, is it starting to actually propose a model of its own which may again not be of much interest beyond the Hindu world, but which genuinely is an alternative to those other forms of government? Is it just an example of authoritarian populism or other kind of derive other kinds of impurifications of democracy that you're seeing in the United States and in Western Europe and other places as well? Is it going to go back to being part of a liberal project? How do we place India into this conversation?
- [80:20]
A
No, that's a great question. So I think one way of kind of making the conversation comparative is to think of, in a sense the two strands of modernity that the Indian democratic project has had to grapple with. The first was absolutely. I mean, you know, I think India's kind of remarkable story in the history of global democracy and also extraordinarily innovative in the way in which it kind of created improvised institutions to keep the democratic project going. Right. And a liberal constitution that was extraordinarily forward looking and which basically said, look, the political sphere must be unburdened from the weight of, in a sense, identity, history and religion, not because those are not important, but because people should be free to explore them the way they want. In some ways that's in a sense, one sense, strand of modernity. But you know, there's this kind of other strand of modernity that I think India has had a harder time with, wrestled with. And that again goes back to, I mean, I know this is like speaking like a broken record, but the nationalism question. And in some ways what Narendra Modi has I think in a sense tapped into is a kind of conversation that has been going on in the subcontinent since 1857, which is really what's the appropriate form of power sharing between Hindus and Muslims right now. India's partition in 1947 was a interesting move. Modus vivendi answer to that question which basically said, look, South Asian Muslims, if they want, can have a homeland in South Asia that's the state of Pakistan. This would be some modernizing Islamic state and India could continue in some senses in the path of a kind of secular democracy. I think we are at a very dangerous moment in the subcontinent as a whole. And I actually do think it is going to be be a subcontinental question where what the bjp, in a sense, its core project is to say, let us complete the logic of 1947. Let us not in a sense accept that modus vivendi that was produced where our neighbors can be Islamic states. We are a Secular state, which by the way, is more Muslims than our neighbors. Right. In some ways. And the, the model, in a sense they're drawing on, the model is very much a kind of European model, 1920s, 1930s model of in a sense, kind of cultural nationalism. Right. I mean, one of the kind of theorists they draw inspiration from, Binoy Kumar Sarkar, who's one of the most acute readers, in a sense of innocence fascism. But this alignment of ethnicity and territory is something that's absolutely central to the, the BJP's project, which is why it is actually a modernizing force. And in order to pursue that project, one of the interesting things it is doing is it's not just targeting Muslims who need to be marginalized from this cultural project as a kind of completion of the logic of 1947. It is actually also reconfiguring Hinduism very profoundly by actually saying Hinduism in some sense is not a religion. It's not really, in a sense, about different sex, forms of transcendence philosophy, all the things that gives Hinduism its incredible kind of vibrance. It is actually an ethnicity, pure and simple. And that ethnic group needs to be self conscious of itself as an ethnic group, irrespective of what, whatever else their beliefs might be. So it's actually the first great modern colonization of Hinduism. It's something no other political force has been able to do, actually in some ways. And to the extent that this impulse to align ethnicity with territory always produces great violence, I think the BJP is posing that risk, in a sense, for South Africa, Asia. So it's not a kind of repudiation, in a sense, of the liberal project in some ways. Because I think right now in India, there is no alternative. I mean, there is no alternative in the sense that I think even Mr. Modi likes being legitimized through elections. It is important for him that this be a kind of popular project. But there is a kind of underlying diagnosis of what has kept India back. And that diagnosis says we actually did not complete the logic of modernity in creating this, a particular form of nation state. I mean, now Mr. Modi says, no, we are a civilization state. But actually what he means by a civilization state is something more like an ethnic state. Because if it were a genuinely civilizational state, he would buy Jawaharlal Nehru's vision, which is India, as a palimpsest on which every civilization has left its mark. I mean, the astonishing thing about the 1947 generation, you know, the question of India's identity, it's every civilization in some ways. Right. So to that extent it, yes, that nationalism poses an immense threat to liberalism. Right. But it's actually not a threat. That's unprecedented in the history of liberalism. In some senses, our founding generation's view was, let's learn the right lessons from European history, not repeat the mistakes that led to, in a sense, a kind of obsession with the relationship between ethnicity and territory. The BJP is in a sense taking us back to that project.
- [86:10]
B
That's very interesting. I'm tempted to ask you more about India, but I feel like I want to bring in the ghost where it's been hovering in my mind in this conversation, and that's our friend and colleague Francis Fukuyama. One way of casting what we've been talking about is of course in conversation with his brilliant, much misunderstood essay and book on the end of history. And I wonder to what extent we align on our interpretation of where we at with it. I wrote an article a number of years ago in which I argued that Fukuyama was ultimately right that there is no life ideological alternative to liberal democracy in the late 20th, now the 21st century, that we're no longer at the moment we were at in the mid 20th century when fascism and communism really were life alternatives to democracy. You know, being able to command the loyalty of millions of people and so on. Today, when you look around on my list, was somewhat similar to yours. Yes, this idea of fear democracy has a certain appeal in parts of the Middle east, but it doesn't appeal beyond the Middle East. And it seems to be running aground even in the Islamic Republic of Iran. That, yes, China is, as I like to joke, a country that works pretty well in practice, but it is a mess in theory in such a way that it makes it very hard to emulate that political system outside of China. And so there is a global crisis, in your words, of political legitimation, because those countries don't provide a general alternative to democracy. Now, the one part on which Frank perhaps was overly bullish was the ability of liberal democracy itself to be able to avoid an internal crisis of legitimation. And so the way in which we're in a strikingly different situation from what we might have anticipated 30 or 40 years ago is not that some great obvious competitor to liberalism has arisen. It is that liberalism itself has turned out to be much more internally weakened and divided and embattled than we might have anticipated back then. To what extent, sort of, do you feel like that is a way to put in different language some of what you've been saying and to what extent Would you point out disagreements with that thesis?
- [88:56]
A
No. I mean, so I actually agree with you. And I think for Kema's book was kind of, I think, misunderstood, which is, if one would kind of put it inside slightly more philosophical terms, Right. I mean, I think some baseline values, even the worst critics of liberalism actually, in a sense, have to take on board, right. Some form of popular legitimation. I mean, every republic in the modern world is a people's republic. And I mean, you can argue about kind of how performative is and so forth, but it's not. It's not meaningless. I think, as an acknowledgement that there can't be any kind of source of authority that is not in some senses and with it some kind of claim or promise of political equality in some respects. And one doesn't kind of see an alternative to that. In fact, many of these projects that are struggling their own internal distinctions, as I said, between the left and right within those projects actually want to, in a sense, take some of this language and internalize it and kind of marry it in some senses to that existing project. And to be honest, I mean, you know, I lay my cards on the table. I mean, I think. I think liberalism's greatest virtue. It's hard to imagine kind of a different philosophy, any other philosophy that actually reconciles a basic baseline acknowledgement of moral and political equality with a degree of individual freedom. I mean, any political philosophy that does that, right. We'll have to look more like liberalism in some ways, I think, where I think, and I don't disagree, but maybe slightly different characterization, I think, is in a sense, I think, the democratic part of the story. And what I mean by that is following, which is, so as societies, we have to do things together. And one of the promises of democracy, again the romantic side of democracy, is it's a kind of exercise in collective agency. Right now, one of the, I think, internal challenges of liberalism is, and again, philosophically, the constitutive conditions of liberalism and the constitutive conditions of democracy considerably over overlap. I mean, I've always found the notion of illiberal democracy a little bit of an oxymoron. I mean, freedom of association, you need it both for democracy and for liberalism. Freedom of expression, you need for both. So the constitutive conditions are actually pretty, I think, overlap in some ways. But I think there is this kind of expectation, I think, among citizens, demands that democracy in a sense represents a form of. Of collective agency. It's the people doing things together. And one of the characteristics of populist authoritarians, whether it's Trump, Modi Orban, is to basically say, look, the very set of institutions and values that liberals told you are actually going to preserve your agency have now become fetters on that agency. So we have our own version of, okay, there's a crisis of democracy. But actually, critics of democracy have been saying there was a crisis in the prior 20 years where the very things we like about liberal democracy, checks and balances, dispersion of power, a discourse on individual rights, these things have somehow become, become obstacles to the collective agency of the people expressing itself in things they can actually do. And so these autocrats are actually also speaking in the name of democracy. I mean, they, and, and, and quite sincerely in some ways. But their diagnosis of what that democracy is and what is required, what the crisis of democracy is. Look, the form in which we had democracy, two parties, all of this stuff is actually just preventing us from doing things. And what's the point of having a democracy if we can't actually exercise our collective agency? And in a sense, I think we sort of underestimated, in a sense, the attraction of that agency dimension. Even nationalism as a democratic force works on that agency dimension. It says, look through this vicarious identification, you extend the reach of your agency in some ways. And I think our assumption that we understood how to design institutions that can express this agency, I think those assumptions have been caught out a little bit. I think we were a little too simple minded about those.
- [93:41]
B
That's very persuasive to me. I mean, one very simple way of talking about the tension between democracy and liberalism. Whether or not we ultimately believe that the idea of a liberal democracy is coherent or not, is simply to say that if those are the two fundamental values of our political system, if we both want to have some meaningful way in which the preferences of the majority get translated into public policy and into the laws that structure our commonal life. And we want, want to preserve the basic liberal rights of individuals to be their own masters, to decide for themselves what principles and what decisions should guide their life, including when that might entail doing unpopular things like worshiping some God that may be different from that of a majority. Then we need to consistently persuade a majority of the population to vote for politicians and movements and political parties that aren't inimical to those liberties. And what seems to have happened over the last decades is a breakdown of the ability of those moderate politicians and movements to persuade voters to do that. And part of the reason for that is that a lot of voters would say well, you're the ones who actually broke with the social compact to begin with because you were not translating what we wanted into public policy. And that way back to the topic that you mentioned earlier as being one of the central ones was migration. One of the problems is that for a number of decades, publics to some extent in the United States, in a much clearer way in Western Europe, have been telling politicians we want less migration, want more control of our borders, et cetera. And they felt persistently that the political heat wasn't translating that preference into public policy. And that's behind a lot of the willingness of those voters to now vote for politicians who are going to say, well, look, we're going to put that in place and we don't really care about that other stuff that feels less important right now because you're so upset that we've broken this part of the bargain.
- [95:50]
A
So, I mean, I think the three kind of just points to supplement that quickly. I mean, I think as a kind of three elephants in the room, right? One is a kind of contingent one, which is at least if you look at the case of American democracy, war has always been a backdrop that actually creates a sense of distrust in elites in the state. I mean, the Vietnam War produced a crisis we forget in kind of early 70s, I think the liberal establishment after the Iraq war, I mean, in a sense it just did not have any place to stand nor on in terms of saying we are actually for the sight of truth producing institutions. And frankly, in its own psychological and very contradictory ways, kind of the Gaza, which is actually polarized in some senses. So you have kind of everybody's unhappy in some senses, right? In a way, no matter what your substantive views on Israel or Palestine might be, right? And I think particularly in American democracy, I think we sometimes actually, I think avoid talking about this big sort of elephant in the room, which is every crisis of trust or many crises of trust in American democracies have actually in a sense happened under the shadow of major wars that either created distrust or domestic polarization. And that's something I think neither political party has dealt with very well. I think the second, which I think something you alluded to I think at the beginning of the conversation or somewhere in the middle, which is, I mean, I know this is not the most intellectual articulation of it, but there is a sense of kind of inchoate anxiety about what the future world will look like. I mean, it's interesting that apart from immigration, one of the things that seems to have provoked a backlash is actually Climate change, strangely enough. I mean, now there's a lot of polling showing that actually now, whether it's climate change or whether it's actually over regulating the environment in local contexts, right? In some senses, in different ways. And I think there is a sense that, look, given the changes in technology, given the changes in environment, we are at a cusp of a world whose contours we barely understand. I mean, honestly, it's, it's what does. It'll dissolve all kinds of things. And I think those moments of anxiety, in some ways, if you couple that with the point about the information order you made, actually does make us one a little bit more susceptible to something that can claim to restore some kind of simplicity in some senses to this. Because you almost have to think of this moment in kind of psychological terms in, in those ways that it's not just a technical solution. There is a kind of underlying sense that the future is not going to be better. I mean, amongst other than some techno solution optimists, a sense of anxiety about the future. And without a future horizon to work towards in which we can exercise a collective agency, we actually in some senses dissipate into these side wars or name calling or agonal conflicts. I think Frank was right in that extent that even liberal democracy requires a touch of a utopian aspiration to move towards, even if it doesn't get there and is in a sense kind of conscious of those means. And the third, I think, which is the most obvious and boring one, which goes back to where we started in this conversation, conversation, which is something in a sense about the current model of capitalism. I mean, again, I happen to think there is no alternative to markets in capitalism and they mobilize our productive powers and information powers that are kind of unprecedented. But there is something about the regulatory form that has taken which has allowed it to distort the political process. Because one of the bargains we made, right, which is you can have as much wealth as you want so long as you don't rob me of my political agency. I mean, liberalism was meant to be premised on this art of separation, right? And what you're seeing again in Modi's India, in Trump's America, is an absolute collapse of that social contract. And that boring old question, can you have this degree of wealth concentration without it producing massive distrust in the political
- [100:28]
B
process is a huge question mark. I agree. I need to ask you one last question, which is very simple and straightforward. One, how are we going to be thinking about this crisis of global legitimacy in 10 or 20 or 50 years. Does it feel like perhaps. One way of putting it is that perhaps crisis of legitimacy are the default mode of human governance? I know European history relatively well. I've recently been reading a lot about Chinese history. For most of the history of mankind, most regime forms could have probably accurately been described as being in a moment of crisis of legitimacy, with rare exceptions when there's a little sprint of good economic news or you've just won a big military victory, or there's a new king or emperor that has climbed the throne and people are sort of having high hopes for him, but for the most part, probably you drop your metaphorical pin in some German land in 1570 or in China in 1890, and what you're going to find is a crisis of legitimacy. So is that actually, do we have to think of an extraordinary moment of post war liberal ascendance and the special moment in the economic bargain between capital and labor you alluded to later, and then the post Cold War moment of the United States having this global preeminence as an aberration and we're sort of reentering the historical norm, or should we be sanguine that chastened and reformed liberalism, or after all, some other regime form is going to arise and prove capable of solving this problem of global legitimacy in a more lasting way.
- [102:32]
A
So, two quick thoughts on that. One, of course, I think one of the optimistic things about human beings is our reflexivity and the fact if many people start feeling that there is a crisis, it opens up the space for perhaps a different kind of politics and imagination. I mean, maybe we needed this shock, as it were, and it's certainly not too late. I mean, I don't think this is a situation where it's just over determined in some senses that this is just a kind of down, you know, in a sense a downward spiral. Right. As you know, crisis can be kind of averted actually by the contingent world of politics. We wouldn't be having this conversation if we did not believe in the possibility of politics in some ways. Right? I mean, one of the problems with political science is, you know, we can't code contingent variables, so we don't take them very seriously. Having said that, I think. I think there are. There are two things I think that are more worrying, which is so, you know, yes, most of human history in default mode is in legitimation crisis. But until the 18th century, most of the human history also in default mode doesn't actually expect much by way of progress. I mean, it's incremental. It's in some and states don't do the kinds of things they do. And our footprint on the planet and each other in some senses is actually limited. I think these crises are coming at a moment where a couple of other major crises. I mean, I happen to think climate change is an issue. I mean it's been kind of increasingly scrubbed off the public agenda, but the idea that humanity collectively in some ways is having a kind of footprint on the planet that might actually risk making it inhabitable. I think a technological revolution whose contours we actually don't understand. And third, and finally, I mean one of the dangerous things about this moment is the return of competitive geopolitics. I mean the nicest thing about that end of history story was not just that, you know, Frank might be wrong, we don't become all liberal democracies. But the nicer thing was the world is not a zero sum game and geopolitics does not have to be a contest over primacy. But if it becomes a context over primacy under conditions where your domestic legitimacy is eroding, right, it actually puts the world in a very dangerous position. So I think in a sense the crisis of legitimacy where let's say we were all convinced about global interdependence and those norms held, the nuclear norms held, we might take slightly more in a different vein than if you combine it with this incredible resurgence of a kind of race for primacy. And I happen to think that a race for privacy will at some point be a very precarious and hazardous one. You need a non zero sum view of the world, I think, for these legitimacy crisis not to spill over into something more catastrophic.
- [105:54]
B
Kota Panamita, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.
- [105:58]
A
Thank you so much. As always,
- [106:01]
B
thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you if you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [106:28]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License.
- [106:33]
B
Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.