How to Survive in Politically Volatile Times

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Opinions – "How to Survive in Politically Volatile Times"

Introduction

In the April 7, 2025 episode of The Opinions, hosted by The New York Times Opinion section, columnist David French engages in a profound discussion with Rory Stewart, a prominent British politician and former member of the Conservative Party. Titled "How to Survive in Politically Volatile Times," the episode delves into the tumultuous shifts within conservatism, the rise of populism, and the personal and societal challenges faced by those striving to uphold democratic values in increasingly polarized environments.

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1. The Shifting Landscape of Conservatism in the UK

David French opens the conversation by addressing the transformation of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom. He seeks insight from Rory Stewart on when and how Stewart perceived the party’s evolution into something unrecognizable.

• Rory Stewart on Ideological Changes:
  • "[...] Deeply, we can now see the ways in which what happened in the 2000s as part of the story, the financial crisis, the rise of social media, the catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan." ([02:22])

Stewart reflects that the changes within the Conservative Party were not abrupt but evolved under the surface, influenced by significant global and national events. The Brexit referendum in 2016 served as a critical turning point, exposing deep societal divisions and mirroring the extreme polarization seen in the United States.

• Impact of Brexit:
  • "We were suddenly beginning to feel a little bit more like the United States, this sense of extreme polarization, almost civil war, which in the US Context had been around longer." ([03:34])

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2. Recognizing Early Indicators of Political Realignment

French probes whether Stewart identified earlier signs indicating the Conservative Party's drift towards populism and away from traditional conservatism.

• Stewart on Parliamentary Shifts:
  • "Fellow members of Parliament were voting to leave the European Union without understanding what any of the detailed implications of Brexit were." ([04:35])

Stewart notes a move away from rational, technocratic decision-making towards actions driven solely by voter sentiment, disregarding the complexities involved.

• Boris Johnson’s Leadership as a Symptom:
  • "I imagined that whatever else the British would do, they would not vote for Boris Johnson." ([05:00])
  • "The whole swing of public opinion in his direction was devastating for me." ([05:00])

Stewart discusses his surprise and disappointment at the electorate’s support for Boris Johnson, whom he viewed as unsuitable for the role of Prime Minister, highlighting a profound disconnect between his expectations and voter behavior.

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3. The Personal Cost of Standing Against Populism

The conversation delves into the personal repercussions Stewart has faced due to his stance against the populist shift within his party.

• Social Media Attacks and Public Denigration:
  • "I'm perceived as a traitor, an elitist, completely out of touch." ([07:47])
  • "I'm responsible for destroying national identity." ([07:47])

Stewart recounts the barrage of attacks from right-wing media and figures, which brand him with unfounded accusations ranging from elitism to threats against national identity.

• Physical and Personal Attacks:
  • "I have an IQ of 110." ([07:47])
  • "I get attacked as a man, questioning my fundamental identity." ([10:24])

The hostility extends beyond political critiques to personal insults undermining his intelligence and masculinity, reflecting a broader trend of ad hominem attacks prevalent in current political discourse.

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4. Resilience and Maintaining Hope Amidst Hostility

French challenges Stewart on how he manages to stay motivated and encourage others to remain engaged despite facing significant social and personal backlash.

• Stewart on the Existential Nature of His Fight:
  • "I saw it as existential [...] I thought that Boris Johnson posed a kind of catastrophic impact on the British economy, but also standards in public life." ([11:04])

Stewart frames his resistance against populism as a fight for the survival of democratic and constitutional standards, emphasizing the high stakes involved.

• Acknowledging the Personal Toll:
  • "It's not easy. There have been moments where I have been tempted to give up." ([12:05])

He candidly shares the emotional and psychological challenges of resisting the tide of populism, including moments of doubt and the desire to retreat from hostile environments.

• Encouraging Moral Engagement:
  • "Put morality at the heart of our role as citizens." ([15:49])
  • "Never allowing your moral intuitions to be silenced." ([15:49])

Stewart advocates for grounding political engagement in moral principles, asserting that upholding values like truth, equality, and justice is essential for sustaining democracy against populist threats.

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5. The Role of Morality in Political Engagement

A significant portion of the discussion is devoted to the intersection of morality and politics, with Stewart emphasizing the foundational role that ethical principles play in combating populism.

• Defining the Moral Underpinnings of Democracy:
  • "The idea of truth is central to our ability to think, relate to each other, form relationships." ([15:49])
  • "Ideas of equality and justice... what duties do we have to each other." ([15:49])

Stewart argues that democracy is sustained not just by policies and communication but by a shared commitment to moral values that foster genuine human connections and responsibilities.

• Practical Implications of Moral Foundations:
  • "It translates into how you speak to other people, what you're prepared to accept and not accept." ([15:49])
  • "Whether you boycott, join demonstrations, write, vote, stand for office." ([15:49])

He links moral convictions to various forms of civic participation, suggesting that ethical considerations guide actions ranging from personal interactions to collective political movements.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with Stewart and French reflecting on the pervasive influence of populism and the necessity of moral steadfastness in political engagement. Stewart underscores the importance of maintaining ethical integrity and resisting the erosion of democratic principles despite personal and societal challenges.

• Stewart’s Final Thoughts:
  • "You cannot allow the degradation and the coarsening of our democratic and moral life." ([15:49])
  • "You cannot allow this orange buffoon to become the symbol of your nation." ([15:49])

In his closing remarks, Stewart encapsulates the urgency of defending democratic values against the degrading forces of populism, urging listeners to uphold their moral imperatives as a bulwark against political volatility.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Rory Stewart on Brexit’s Polarizing Impact:

  • "[...] we were suddenly beginning to feel a little bit more like the United States, this sense of extreme polarization, almost civil war." ([03:34])

• Stewart on the Personal Devastation of Political Shifts:

  • "It was devastating for me, obviously, personally." ([05:00])

• On Facing Ad Hominem Attacks:

  • "I'm perceived as a traitor, an elitist, completely out of touch." ([07:47])

• Emphasizing Moral Engagement:

  • "Put morality at the heart of our role as citizens." ([15:49])

• Defending Democratic Values:

  • "You cannot allow the degradation and the coarsening of our democratic and moral life." ([15:49])

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Final Remarks

This episode of The Opinions offers a compelling exploration of the challenges faced by centrist and moderate voices in today's polarized political climate. Through Rory Stewart’s experiences, listeners gain insight into the personal and ideological struggles inherent in resisting populist movements and maintaining democratic integrity. The discussion serves as both a cautionary tale and a call to action, emphasizing the critical role of moral conviction in navigating and surviving politically volatile times.

Transcript

[Rory Stewart]

I use New York Times cooking at least three to four times a week.

[Eric Kim]

I love sheet pan bibimbap. It said 35 minutes, it was 35 minutes.

[David French]

The cucumber salad with soy, ginger and garlic. Oh, my God, that is just to die for.

[Eric Kim]

This turkey chili has over 17,000 five star ratings. So easy, so delicious.

[David French]

The instructions are so clear, so simple, and it just works. Hey, it's Eric Kim from New York Times Cooking.

[Eric Kim]

Come cook with us. Go to nytcooking.com this is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

[David French]

I'm David French, a columnist for the New York Times. A lot of us are feeling politically homeless right now. The Democrats are flailing, trying to figure out how to stand up against Donald Trump. And there are people like me. I left the Republican Party in 2016 after Trump's rise. Looking at the political landscape, I wonder, where do we fit in? Our friends in the United Kingdom are going through their own destabilizing political moment. I wanted to see how they're realigning, to see what we can learn from them. That's why I wanted to talk to Rory Stewart. He's the co host of a podcast called the Rest is Politics and the author of the book how not to Be a Politician. For a long time, he was deeply embedded within the Tory party. A traditional British conservative, he was a member of the British government, a minister. Rory campaigned against Brexit, and Boris Johnson eventually expelled him from the party. I wanted to talk to Rory about how those of us who care about democracy keep hope alive in the midst of a populist onslaught. It's a conversation that's political, certainly, but it also gets personal about how each of us can engage and persevere when engagement carries a cost. Rory, thank you so much for joining me.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, thank you so much for having me.

[David French]

Let's just start with the basics. I want to go back and talk about the arc of conservatism in the uk when did you realize your party was changing, that it was becoming something unrecognizable to you?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, it actually happened surprisingly suddenly. And of course, the changes will have been happening under the surface. Deeply. We can now see the ways in which what happened in the 2000s as part of the story, the financial crisis, the rise of social media, the catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan. But on the surface, at least, British politics continued surprisingly normally. It felt like ideology had finished. We were in the center ground. And very rapidly, we found ourselves in 2016 with the Brexit referendum, where people voted for Brexit, for Britain to leave the European Union after more than 40 years. And this suddenly revealed these cleavages in British society, which were extreme. Suddenly we had opinion polls suggesting that a majority of people would not consider one of their children marrying somebody who'd voted in the other direction. So we were suddenly beginning to feel a little bit more like the United States, this sense of extreme polarization, almost civil war, which in the US Context had been around longer.

[David French]

And is there a moment where, in hindsight, in your experience, you look back and you realize, oh, this was a leading indicator, or this was even something in my social circles, that in hindsight, I realized that this was a sign that I perhaps wasn't in sync with my own movement. I'll give you an example from my experience to help illustrate the question. I was at a Conservative gathering when Donald Trump in 2015 mocked John McCain's military service and said he preferred people who hadn't been captured. When I heard that, I had an instinctive anger at that. That, how dare you. But then, as I heard it in the audience, the audience burst into laughter and appl. That was my first sign. Wait, what's going on? Is there a moment like that or moments like that where you look back and you say the signs were building and I wasn't able to really see them? Or was it really as sudden as the vote outcome, as Brexit?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I mean, it felt sudden, but looking back, I think there were moments. I think one of them was when dealing with fellow members of Parliament. I began to realize that they were voting to leave the European Union without understanding what any of the detailed implications of Brexit were. We had moved, well, well beyond a rational calculation into a world in which they were sensing, increasingly that their voters wanted out and it was no longer relevant for them to try to understand the detailed technocratic implications. Voters want out. I'm voting out. I'm not even going to waste my time listening to Rory about the technicalities of what the disadvantages that might be. Final example, I guess, which was probably the most devastating of all was I ran to be prime minister against Boris Johnson, and I imagined that whatever else the British would do, they would not vote for Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson, this kind of extraordinary, buffoonish character who was essentially a television celebrity and a joke. And my whole view of Britain as a Conservative was, in the end, the British people are pretty sensible. They're pretty thoughtful, pretty moderate. They might put up with this guy becoming mayor of London as a joke, but they're definitely not going to vote for him as being Prime Minister. He's not suitable. He's not a serious person. And then I suddenly saw the whole swing of public opinion in his direction. And of course, that was devastating for me. It was devastating for me, obviously, personally, because he beat me to be Prime Minister. I didn't become Prime Minister. But secondly, devastating for me as a party because I thought, how on earth can this party possibly go with this person? But most importantly of all, devastating for me as a citizen of Britain and as a Democrat, to think, how on earth did my nation, how on earth did my voting system end up with somebody who's so manifestly unsuitable?

[David French]

You used the word devastating, which I think is. It's a word that tracks with me in a number of ways in all, all of the arenas that you just mentioned. But there's one that I also think is very much in play in the United States, and I want to ask you if it's in play in Britain as well, that it's also devastating in the personal realm in this sense, that the movement of the Republican Party, from the Reagan more libertarian inflected ideology towards this very angry populism, it wasn't as if the Republican Party just switched out its voters, the vast bulk of the people who were for Reagan conservatism then ended up being for Donald Trump populism, and then enforced that with rigorous social sanction against dissent, just vigorous social sanction to where if you had disagreements, you were a traitor. And it had an immense social pressure that was accompanying it. So that you began to see people pulling into populism just to preserve their social connections, their community, for lack of a better term. Was that a phenomenon in Britain as well?

[Rory Stewart]

Absolutely, and it continues to be a phenomenon. So I am perceived as a tracer. And that's been a very kind of central part, particularly of the social media discourse. But it's more than that too. I mean, you end up with a range of right wing media ranging from podcasts to television stations, who will then characterize me as representing everything that is wrong with the global elite. That there are two boxes which people operate in. There are the people, and these are the voters for Donald Trump or the voters for Boris Johnson. And they represent real people. And then there's another category which is the global elite, the establishment. And as soon as I move across, I become all those things. I become a traitor, I become an elitist, I become completely out of touch. I'm unable to, in inverted commas, read the room. And then other things. I support illegal immigrants raping British girls. Right, Right. I endorse whatever dystopian features of our society exist. I'm responsible for. I'm responsible for destroying national identity. And then, of course, because politics has become a sort of new type of sport, new things emerge. So I'm corrupt, I'm degenerate, I am physically weak. So there's a lot of stuff about how many press ups can I do? So I got in a big argument with J.D. vance. So Vance said that I think I have an IQ of 130, and actually I have an IQ of 110. Right. So for Vance, the attack was, Rory is stupid, but for a lot of his followers, they then say, and I bet JD Vance can do more press ups than you can, and you're a girl, you're not a proper man. And all of this then follows from, as you say, moving across from being on the side of conservatives to now being apparently no longer recognized as a conservative.

[David French]

As you were talking, I was kind of chuckling to myself, not because anything that you said was funny at all, it was all dreadful, but it was also identical to my own experience up to and including the absolute denigration of you as a man. I mean, you're a person who. You served in the British Army, a member of the Black Watch Battalion, correct?

[Rory Stewart]

That's right, yeah, yeah.

[David French]

Black Watch Battalion, one of the most storied military units in Western military history. And yet they're questioning your fundamental identity as a man. This is something that's happening across the pond in an identical manner. So there are a number of people who've been pushed outside of the communities we once belonged to. And you got right back in the fray. You got right back in the argument. Talk about your own personal response for a minute. What did you do to say my role, If I'm going to defend the center, this is how I'm going to take a stand?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I saw it as existential, which is a kind of, I guess, a pompous way of saying that I thought that Boris Johnson posed a kind of catastrophic impact on the British economy, but also standards in public life, our constitution, but sort of more generally that he was going to destroy everything that I cared about, everything that made me proud. So I had no alternative other than to make this my cause, talk about this debate, this point out what was wrong with it, try to make an argument for something that seemed to me natural, which was the old order, and how did I do it? I did it in different ways. I wrote a book. I have the podcast in the UK called the Rest Is Politics. But of course, that carries with it the fact that I am now an enormous hate figure. And I now get attacked by J.D. vance, and I get attacked, obviously, as you can imagine, by all the UK equivalents.

[David French]

I think one of the interesting elements of this is I think often the attacks against you are not necessarily designed to silence you, because you're not going to be silenced. You've demonstrated that abundantly over the course of the years. I think they're designed to deter, in many ways, to deter others, to say, look at what we do to people who disagree. Look at how we can destroy, at least in certain segments of the population, destroy their public reputation. How is it that you have been able to motivate people to get off of the sidelines in the face of that kind of social pressure, in the case of that kind of social punishment?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I think the first thing is to be honest about the fact that it's not easy. And there definitely have been moments where I have been tempted to give up. And it's certainly true that I'm psychologically healthier and I sleep better when I'm not looking at my Twitter feedback. So I wouldn't want to suggest that somehow I am some sort of immune moral campaigner. It carries a huge cost. And nor would I want to suggest that I'm doing this always for the right reasons. I mean, obviously I like to tell myself I'm doing this for high moral goals, but there's also an element of me that just doesn't like being bullied, enjoys arguing and fighting with people, and somehow tries to convince myself that I don't want to vacate the space to these people. But as my friends point out, that's a little irrational. I mean, this idea that I'm somehow part of a group defending the space for more liberal center right views on Twitter is absurd. It's a cesspit of hate. And I'm not changing anyone's mind. I'm not persuading anybody. So how do I encourage people to keep going? I can't really. I mean, I notice many of my friends are leaving. Many of my friends have stopped doing it because they don't think there's anything productive in it. But I suppose I would say to them that it's very remarkable that despite the fact that theoretically my reputation should be entirely trashed, oddly, that the modern world is so odd that your reputation somehow isn't Quite affected in the way that you'd expect. In fact, the number of listeners to my podcast grows all the time. The number of people reading my books grows all the time. So there's some sort of. I mean, I think we've entered very sadly, an era of complete shamelessness. And just as on the. Amongst my enemies, people like Donald Trump and J.D. vance do things which I would have thought would discredit them forever, and yet they continue to have immense popularity and support. The same, of course, is also true of their adversaries.

[David French]

So I constantly am getting email messages. I had an event I spoke at last night where people came up to me and were wanting me to sort of say, what's the message for me? What is it that a voter, that a citizen who doesn't have a platform? What is it that we can do? What is the message for people like us? And it's one of the hardest questions that I get, quite honestly. There's not an easy, pat answer. Words like stand or speak sometimes feel kind of grandiose and also vague. And I wonder how you respond to that question.

[Rory Stewart]

I think you're right, it's not an easy question. But I think it's important to put morality at the heart of our role as citizens. That, yes, of course, politics is about policy, and of course it's about communication, but most importantly of all, it's about your character. And what we're fighting at the moment with populism around the world is a fundamental challenge to the underpinnings, the moral underpinnings of democracy. Democracy sounds like a kind of big, vague word, but underneath it are very, very precious ideas. The idea of truth. The truth is central, absolutely central to our ability to think, relate to each other, form relationships, ideas of equality. What is it that makes us human? What is it that we are? What is it that we have in common? What duties do we have to each other which leads us the idea of justice? And I think these things sound like big words. But thinking, reflecting in your own life about why those things matter, why morality matters, why how you treat minorities matter, how you treat other countries matter, how you treat allies, how you treat relationships, how you stand up for values matter then translates into everything else. It translates into how you speak to other people, what you're prepared to accept and not accept, whether you boycott, whether you join demonstrations, whether you write, how you vote, whether you stand for office. But above all, I think the question of never allowing your moral intuitions to be silenced, to understand that you have to find a way of living out those values and that you cannot simply retreat. You can't allow the degradation and the coarsening of our democratic and moral life and that the United States in particular is one of the great miracles the world it has sustained since the revolution, ideals which are very precious not just to Americans, but to humanity. And you cannot allow this orange buffoon to become the symbol of your nation.

[David French]

Thank you so much for joining me.

[Rory Stewart]

Thank you, David.

[Eric Kim]

If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sofia Alvarez Boyd, Vishaka Durba, Phoebe Lett, Christina Samulewski and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saborough and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sohota. The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary, Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samulewski and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.