Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Hello, everyone. Welcome to this Chatham House webinar on the topic of Populism in a COVID-Affected World. My name as Angelos Chryssogelos and I am an Associate Fellow of the Europe Programme at Chatham House, and I’m very happy to host today, this panel discussion, featuring three extremely interesting and prominent voices on questions of democracy. We already knew that Western democracies had a major problem before the pandemic struck. We knew that there were some sort of malaise or crisis in democracy. A lot of people associated that with populism, a very fashionable term nowadays, and then the pandemic struck. So, basically, now we find ourselves with two major problems in our hands, and of course the question is, what do those – how do those problems interrelate and how can we expect the pandemic to change the dynamics of democracy in the world today?
I will move – proceed to introducing our panellists today. We’re very happy to have joining us today, first of all, Professor Nadia Urbinati, who is the Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University, and she specialises in democratic theory, theory of representation and anti-democratic ideologies. She has a book out last year with Harvard University Press, called Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy, and she’s one of the most important voices in this debate about democracy, so we’re very happy to have her with us here.
We’re also joined by Yasmeen Serhan, who is a London-based Staff Writer at The Atlantic. She covers a wide range of issues, but she has written also on populism, nationalism, and global protest movements. She has also reported on Brexit, European politics, and transatlantic affairs. So, it’s safe to say that she’s specialised on things that have lots of problems. So, that probably makes her pretty well-placed to discuss COVID with us as well. And finally, we’re joined by Erin Jenne, who is a Professor at the International Relations Department of CEU, the Central European University in Budapest. She has a broad range of interests, but those also include nationalism, populism, and especially how they interact with questions of foreign policy and world politics. So, we also have the ability to think about this from an international perspective, which is particularly important for Chatham House and our audience as well.
Just to let you know before we proceed, that the event will be held on the record. I will be very happy to be receiving questions from you. You should be using the ‘Q&A’ function to do this. You can also be upvoting questions that you – made by others, but you would like to see them answered. We will proceed to the Q&A after we hear from our panellists. I would like to ask each of our panellists to speak for no more than eight minutes, for no other reason because I’m sure that we will be receiving lots of interesting questions and it would be great to actually to have a bit of a conversation, once you throw out your original ideas. I propose that we start with how the programme has been laid out. So, if it’s okay, I will start with Professor Urbinati first. It will be great to hear your initial thoughts about democracy, populism, where the situation was before COVID, and has COVID changed substantially the discussion about the future and the prospects of democracy.
Nadia Urbinati
[Pause] Can you hear me?
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Yeah, we can hear you now.
Nadia Urbinati
Excellent. So, I start working on populism many years ago de facto – first [inaudible – 07:33] was 1996. So, for me – which is connected to the Italian case. I am an Italian from origin, and Italy, in those days, was moving toward a post-party democracy, by reason of corruptions and the persecution by the Magistrates, an entire political class and many political parties disappear in few hours or months. From that moment on, I saw the emergence of – we saw the emergence of one populist movement after another one, without the political stabilising, the political system again. So, in some sense, I just start thinking about connecting populism as a strategy for power, and the structure of power in constitutional democracies now, in correlation with the decline of political parties as we knew today. As we knew then, beginning with the World War Two, after World War Two, a reaction against the totalitarian regimes and the great economic crisis, in order to stabilise society to pluralise the sovereign, and to make people participate through the parties and the many associations connected to the parties.
Now, this situation changed and as soon as the situation changed, we saw emerging other forms of movements. Movements, rather than parties, very connected to leaders, personalised leaders, very mobile and not structured internally. The growth finally of digital parties and the media made this process easier. So, in my view, populism is what a democratic constitution, a constitutional democracy, can become, if political parties stop being organisations of participation. Thus, it is probably the destiny of many democracies today, certainly of Italian democracy, but not only, because as we saw, in the United States also, and the very good book by Ian Shapiro showed recently, the transformation of parties there due to primaries, and to the movementisation of parties, made those parties themselves, particularly one of the two, very exposed to populist conquest, so-called. So, this is my main issue, and I realise it’s in relation to democracy, not as a non-democratic, or a dictatorial, or an authoritarian. This is a form that democracy can take, representative democracy, of course, electoral democracy, of course.
Now, we have discovered now some theories, or some observers they wrote recently, that perhaps the COVID represents a challenge to populism for two reasons. First, because many governments who were – which were under attack against populists, show to be able to manage this COVID situation, which didn’t need to transform the democracy into a populist kind, but it was capable. A good centre-left regime like, for instance, in Italy, capable of managing with this system, so this is one argument.
The second argument is that, well, COVID showed the potential for the competent, and the experts, and the Scientists, capable of giving good suggestions, giving good inputs for politic – for Politicians to follow. Thus, this is bad news for populism because populism generally is until – anti-intellectually, so fake news a creation, and so on and so forth. So, good news that. Well, I doubt, and this is my final tip that I close. I doubt that unfortunately, this can be the case.
First, because the crisis of COVID is very far from being solved, and perhaps, after the crisis of COVID as a medical issue, we will have another crisis of COVID as economic and social issues connected to unemployment, connected to the disbanding of several industry or even, you know, sectors of productions, that put people on the street, without any kind of sustained support.
Second, because science or the medical science, which is not a mathematical science, very open to, you know, to trials and errors, and open also, to the possibility of making mistakes, as they did, they made many mistakes in their proposals or suppositions. Thus, they and since many of them were on the TV from morning to night saying one day A, the second day A+, the third day B, they gave the impression to many, populist or not, that even science needs to learn.
In this case, the COVID is a learning process for everybody, so science didn’t acquire any kind of supreme authority. Thus, the populists can say, you see, look, I mean, even science makes mistakes, so long live our you know, non-expert people, capable of making decisions as much, as competence as the competent. So, in some sense, we’re to be very cautious, very careful, when we make conclusions, in connections with the COVID. The COVID is in the making, is not yet solved. The COVID will bring us a lot of problems, economic and social. The COVID did not make competence more stable in politics. So, I stop from here now. Thank you.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Right, well, thank you very, kind of, yeah, punchy would be the right word, straight to the point and very, very good. And it’s also quite interesting to see how the relationship between science and politics has really been laid bare in this pandemic. The debate about face masks, for example, is quite interesting, and quite disconcerting, if you think that the whole thing started because at the beginning of the pandemic, we were told that masks are not essential and, you know, that’s probably – it was done at the time out of consideration for supplies, but this has not helped the situation later on.
We’ll have more opportunities to talk about that later, but it’s a very, very interesting dimension of the problem. Yasmeen, if that’s okay, we’re going to move on to hear your thoughts. You had a recent piece out recently, in The Atlantic, I think, discussing about the – I think you focussed particularly on the US and Brazil, and the relationship of how populists there, probably the two most emblematic populist leaders right now, who have had their fair share of issues with COVID. Yeah, on the basis of this, any – your thoughts about populism and will COVID kill off populi – it hasn’t killed off Bolsonaro but, you know, what’s the relationship of populism as a whole?
Yasmeen Serhan
Yeah, and first off, thank you so much for having me and to everyone for tuning in. Yeah, the headline of my piece is, The Pandemic Isn’t a Death Knell for Populism, so I agree very much with Nadia and a lot of the excellent points that she made. But, yeah, I mean, this question of, you know, how will this pandemic undermine populist leadership has been something that I’ve certainly been interested in, kind of since the start of this crisis, and there’s a reason for that. It’s, you know, because the pandemic really feels like it’s something of a perfect foil for populists, in a lot of the ways that Nadia mentioned. I mean, you know, this – a pandemic has certainly, for better or worse and rightly or wrongly, has brought experts and global institutions to the fore.
These are two of populists favoured proverbial punching-bags. It has side-lined a lot of populists’ favourite wedge issues, such as the European Union, immigration, I mean, for our viewers in Britain, you know, up until a couple of weeks ago, I don’t think any of us had heard about Brexit for quite some time, it was quite nice, but now we’re back. And also, I think, crucially, Nadia alluded to this point, is that it created a ‘rally round the flag’ effect, that I think we saw, particularly in a lot of countries that aren’t led by populists, a lot of establishment darlings, the likes of Angela Merkel in Germany, Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, I mean, these were leaders who handled the crisis very well, but who were really bolstered, you know, by this crisis, kind of demonstrating that, look, you know, in times where, you know, people kind of turn to their nation for protection, it really is the established figures that you can trust. So, in all these ways, you know, it really does – it would seem, and kind of us understanding, why folks would assume that populism would, you know, would be in trouble. But I share Nadia’s doubts about this, and I’ll get to that, kind of, later.
But as you mentioned in my piece, I kind of want to focus on two, I think, really prime examples of some of the worst-affected countries, that happen to be led by populist leaders. The first, of course, is where I’m from, the United States, which stands as the world leader, both in coronavirus cases, I think, by my last check, we’re up to 6.5 million, and coronavirus deaths, nearing 200,000, which is really just, you know, an incalculable number.
President Trump, throughout this crisis, has largely been very dismissive of the virus, even revealing to journalist Bob Woodward in February that he had init – intentionally downplayed the severity of the crisis, contradicting his public statements that, you know, this is not that much, you know, worse than a flu. He’s actively sought to undercut health experts, such as Anthony Fauci, and global institutions like the World Health Organization, from which the US has or will withdraw its funding. He’s assigned blame for the crisis to his political opponents, so then, kind of, incorporating the ‘us versus them’, sort of, populist mentality that we all know of, particularly Democratic Mayors and Governors have, kind of, been taking the brunt of that.
And Brazil offers another example of this, and the country’s, I think now, the world’s third most, or has the world’s third highest case rate behind India, and the second highest death count. And this, of course, is – this country is, of course, led by President Jair Bolsonaro, who I think can safely say is the Chief Coronavirus Sceptic. He was, you know, likened the virus to a little flu, I think was the wording he used, and he could often be seen leading anti-lockdown protests, without masks. Even after contracting the disease he, kind of, continued to downplay the severity of it, even promoted, thus far, unproven theory – or the unproven virtues of hydroxychloroquine, which is a malaria drug that President Trump has also favoured, and like President Trump, he has also, sort of, you know, sought to undercut health experts. I think Brazil has been through three Health Ministers, throughout this entire crisis. The first one quit, I think, or the first one was ousted, I think, for disputing Bolsonaro’s characterisation of the virus and the second quit.
So, you know, I think, I highlight these two countries because I think they’re both rather demonstrative of all the ways in which populist leadership can really be shown to fail to rise to the challenge, at a time, you know, when it really is potentially costing, you know, 100s of 1,000s of lives. It’s worth noting, of course, and I’m sure my fellow panellists will get to this, that, you know, not all populists responded to this crisis in identical ways, and – but, you know, I think despite all of this, I kind of get back to the sort of, the point of my piece and the point that I’d like to agree with Naida on is that I don’t think that this pandemic is necessarily bad for populism as a whole, and there’s a few key reasons for that. I think the first and perhaps most fundamental point, is that populism has been with us well before 2016, when we all started talking about it, you know, this dates back to the 19th Century, I think, with the People’s Party in the US, I think that’s where the term derives, you know, it’s part and parcel of democratic politics, and I think it’s going to take a lot more than a pandemic to get rid of it.
But more fundamentally, I think, in a lot of ways, this crisis could actually end up boosting populists, you know, as Nadia mentioned, I mean, we’re, kind of, already undergoing a massive recession, there will – you know, even after we deal with the health implications, even if, you know, we get a vaccine and start dealing with all that, there’s going to be mass unemployment, poverty, all sorts of issues that populists will undoubtedly seek to take advantage of. And in some ways, I do think that this crisis has kind of allowed populists to do what they do best. I mean, the whole thing, as Nadia discussed as well and I’m sure we’ll get to this, populist leaders, you know, deriding elites and institutions, I mean these are things they love to do already, and the pandemic, kind of, gave them another reason to do so, sort of, casting off anyone with whom they disagree with as to blame, in the case of Trump this is Democratic Mayors and Governors, you know, creating their own facts and realities on the ground, you know, Trump claiming last month, for example, that the pandemic is under control in the US. I mean, the populists are effectively, kind of, following or at least these, you know, these two examples of populists, are kind of following the playbook that they know best, and this crisis seems to have given them the opportunity to do that. So, in short, I’ll kind of wrap up all my remarks there by saying that, you know, I think, I wouldn’t be surprised if populists tapped into the frustration that this crisis will undoubtedly unleash, and we shouldn’t expect that, you know, that they won’t try to take advantage of the economic and institutional damage that this crisis leaves behind.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Great. Alright, well thank you so much. Again, very, very, kind of, relevant and to the point comments. Moving onto Erin, we seem to be having some kind of a consensus emerging here, consensus of two at least, I don’t know if it’s going to be a consensus of 66%, about that populism will continue being with us after the pandemic. You also live in Hungary, so you happen to live in a country that has experienced its fair share of populism for a decade now. But I believe it’s also a country that has taken quite a bit of a different approach to the cases that the other two speakers already spoke about. So, what are your thoughts on this, and about emerging relationship between populism and COVID, particularly in cases where, you know, populists are not some fickle people who take over power and they just don’t seem to be able to handle it well, but in the case of Hungary, we have examples of populists who are very, very good at entrenching themselves in power for a very, very long time.
Erin Kristin Jenne
Okay, well, that was an interesting not quite softball, more like a hardball, for me to start with. Hello everyone. I’m grateful to Chatham House for inviting me to speak about populism. As an aside, I’m actually doing a project now, a little paper, on the connection between COVID and nationalism. So, one can imagine that every single field of academic study is now being, sort of, struggling with the potential impacts of COVID on whatever happens to be their discipline.
Yeah, so, Hungary is an interesting case, you know, and I think I’m going to answer this by way of saying that I really concur with Nadia’s argument about populism being movement-based. I think that we run the risk sometimes, in the current, kind of, divisive, you know, polarised politics of, kind of, placing everything in the hands of the incumbent leaders, right? I mean, obviously they’re important, if you really want to understand public policy responses. But I think that the movement aspect of populism should not be – to not go unnoticed, right, ‘cause this idea that we get rid of these particular leaders or we somehow, kind of, constrain them, force them to behave in ways that are more scientifically or epidemiologically valid, this isn’t going to fix the problem, right, because there’s a whole other dimension to populism, right? And so, my argument, and again, I’ll go back to Hungary which is, in a lot of ways, is a deviant case with respect to populism, that I’ll, kind of, address later how that is, maybe in the Q&A.
So, my argument is that COVID is going to be a populism accelerant, right? You know, obviously, we don’t know what the future’s likely to be, but I think that we’ve already seen some of these effects, kind of, quite shocking effects. And it relates to a lot of these issues that, yes, me and Nadia already have given voice to, which is that it’s a crisis, it’s a massive crisis, it’s a mass-casualty incident that’s slow-moving, right? So, it’s hard to understand, it’s a pandemic, it’s, you know, what, you know, Trump has called an invisible enemy, right? It’s something that is just hard for people to put – wrap their minds around, even if they have actually quite a deep knowledge of science or are able to understand the studies themselves.
So, crises, what do they do? They give rise to social unrest, grievances, it just accelerates institutional mistrust, to the extent that they feel any kind of loss at all, right? There’s this impulse to scapegoat, right, which we’ve already seen, and you know, this is something that’s happened in past pandemics, right? And all of this is fuelled even more by the new technological or media ecosystem, right, which is algorithm-based, and it creates lateral information silos that grease the wheels of political populism, right? And so, if we think about what populism is, right, this, you know, Cas Mudde, Kirk Hawkins, kind of, ideational, sort of approach, the Manichean struggle between the good people on the one hand, and the evil and/or corrupt elites or establishment on the other, and it’s an injunction to create a system in which the people rule, right? The people understood differently and in different political contexts.
And the link with COVID, I think is that, you know, populists, people who are of that frame of mind already, are in the habit of distrusting institutions, right? Distrusting Scientists, distrusting academic, distrusting the media, distrusting government, even when they’re led by one of their own, right? It creates this kind of weird schizophrenic, kind of, predisposition among the population. And their just instinct is to go for this, as the two other participants have already mentioned, this kind of anti-establishment, just folks wisdom, you know, including, you know, folk remedies, right, that come from, you know, different medicinal, you know, treatments, unverified, you know, medical remedies like hydrochloroquine [means hydroxychloroquine], you know, you had Lukashenko talking about how, you know, you need just a stiff shot of vodka, right, that’s going to fix the problem, right? So, I think that ideational aspect of populism is foundational to understanding why we’re likely to see more of it rather than less, as Nadia and Yasmeen have said, right? And also excluding solutions that go against the perceived will of the people, right? So, Trump has said “A lot of people are going to die.” Johnson said, “I must level with the British public, many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.” It’s an acknowledgement that the people, their perceived interest, which in this case, was keeping the economy going, right, keeping the theatre going, is worth the deaths that might result, right, and that’s at the foundation of the thinking. If you look at enough of these guys, you know, talk – listen to talkRADIO, it’s all over, right? It’s what everyone says. So, I don’t know how much time I have left, but I do want to…
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
You still have a couple of minutes.
Erin Kristin Jenne
Couple of minutes.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
So, yeah, you’re okay.
Erin Kristin Jenne
Okay. So, just a couple of other quick points, right? Hmmm, conspiracy theories, right, come out of this whole toxic soup, probably more than ever before, but we also have to – you know, one has to only look back at, you know, the Black Plague, the most obvious and radical pandemic that’s hit, you know, human civilisation that – as far as we know. During that period between 1348 and 1351, Jews were accused of poisoning Christian wells with the plague, and this then led to pogroms throughout the Holy Roman Empire against Jews, who were suspiciously somehow able to escape the worst effects of the plague, right? How could that possibly be? It must be because they’d poisoned the wells, right? It must be because they’re going after Christians, right? And you have the same kinds of just unbelievable conspiracy theories about how Bill Gates is, you know, plan – the ‘plandemic’ thing that was sweeping social media that eventually YouTube and Twitter had to, you know, actually remove from the social network about, you know, how these vaccines are a way for, you know, Bill Gates to microchip every single person and ultimately, the entire planet, because of course, Bill Gates is working together with international institutions, and there’s this whole big plan that they’re going to use to ultimately enslave and maybe even depopulate the world population. There were even attacks on, you know, 5G technologies because these guys are so convinced of these arguments, and if you look at the surveys, there’s a considerable amount of each of these national populations that now say that they are not going to take a vaccine, even if it becomes available. So, this is something that is going to be with us for quite some time, and I think I’ve used all of my time, so I’ll just stop there.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Alright, thank you so much. A pretty comprehensive overview of a social and political space that just seems to have endless ways to produce all kinds of thinkings about – all kinds of weird thoughts about the pandemic. I’m going to start now. We will proceed to a Q&A from our audience very, very soon. Just to remind you that you can submit your questions using the ‘Q&A’ function. This is how you should do it, don’t try the ‘Chat’ or raising hands or anything else that Zoom provides, please use the ‘Q&A’ function. I will use my – I will use, or abuse, rather, my power as Chair just to offer – just to for a - do a short additional round of questions, based on what the panellists have said. So, if each one of you could offer two or three minutes of additional thoughts and then we can proceed to Q&A with the audience.
Starting with Nadia, I really liked your idea of populism as democracy without parties. So, I wonder what does that tell us about – what does it tell us about populism post-COVID? There’s also the question of media, social media, which was touched upon by the other panellists as well. I personally think there’s a bit of an emphasis on looking at the pandemic now, and populists going, like, “Oh look, you know, they’re falling in the opinion polls, they’re not doing so well in government,” there’s this emphasis of populists as parties, as traditional parties and how they’re dealing with the pandemic. Do you think we’re going to be seeing, as democracy moves beyond parties, do you think we will be seeing different expressions of populism, not just as classical parties, in other forms, can we speculate about that or are we still just going to be seeing them primarily in the partisan arenas as political parties?
Nadia Urbinati
Okay, so when I say party, I don’t mean simply, you know, political groups. I mean political groups that constitute the fabric of the pluralistic representative democracy. Parties – no parties ever says, “I am the people and I’m talking to the people.” So, the party has some entrenched limitation, in relation to the people, in the sense of pluralism, it’s instead of that, we don’t have a regime with one party. This is not party regime, it’s simply a dictatorial regime. Parties imply plurality, and thus, they imply the breaking of the people in some different interest. This is what the populists don’t like much.
For this reason, their movements, even when they grow, they leave the populist, even then they grow within a party, they transform this party. They make the party very similar to the movement, capable of embracing many, you only find the people, they have this kind of homogeneity – not homogeneity, it’s the wrong word, inclusive, to create a kind of people, capable of imposing this majority against the minority. So, parties are covering the majority side, they are, you know, cacophonic, pluralistic voices, outside of the people who are – which is more one. So, I think in this sense, both the fact that we are more and more facing a kind of, what Bernard Manin called a kind of audience democracy, audience democracy, a democracy based on the clique. A democracy in which we change our opinion every five second, in relation to questions coming from the leader or the system. So, we are there giving judgements, and this makes us no longer connected to a party, but certainly, part of this large body called ‘the public’.
In this situation, it is very easy to practice a politics of personality, a politics of celebrity, a politics of clique. In some sense, thus, our institutional, meaning the kind of party, technological, meaning internet, they make this democracy today very exposed to the transformation of party politics into populistic politics. And the pandemia, I think, I very much agree with Erin, in this sense, the pandemia exulted some important element, distrust in institutions, distrust in leaders. I saw a question from the key – the key – the Q&A, a question asking me about Italy, asking me, well, you are the government after all, the populists and produce a good. No, that government was not based on a populist and it was a government, a coalition in which one kind – one party moderated the populist character of the other movement, and it produced what we know is a very good, in my view, a good government, at least in relation to the pandemia. But the populists outside, meaning the contested Tory populists, a la Salvini and The League, they are assaulting, every day they assault, in the past and now, this government as a kind of establishment, using the pandemia in order to create a dictatorial system of the mask.
So, they are becoming the mask-anarcho-libertarians. So, in the name of ‘free from mask’, they propose themselves as the true leaders of liberalism, and the others, all the libertarianism, and the parties in government, they are those who are based in institutions, establishment, authoritarian and so on and so forth. So, in some sense, the pandemia made – gave another chance to populism, to transform again, once again, into a kind of anti-establishment, by using the language of neoliberalism. This is the case with Bolsonaro, the case with Salvini, with all the movements that we are seeing growing up everywhere in Europe, declaring that the pandemia is fake news because it’s the creation, construction of the pharmaceutical corporations, or that the mask is an imposition by authoritarian regimes, and so on and so forth. So Bolsonaro, Trump, Salvini, and all these movements, they are indeed anti-institutionalising kind of approach to democracy and to participation.
So, I think we should guard, and we should observe this phenomena going on. It’s different movements, populist movements, are different because the topic is different. Remember that populists are chameleotic, very capable of using all the arguments they have to look for opi – for consent, they have to look for support by the public, thus, every argument is good for them. And today the COVID is particularly good today, because it makes clear that you need institutions ruling and it makes clear that you need strong institutions. So, they are embracing an anti-institutionalisation kind of approach, when they are in opposition, or a neoliberal approach when they are in government. So, this is, in my view, it’s very revealing of transformations inside of the populist rhetoric.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Okay, alright, excellent, again, a brilliant, I would say, tour de force of all these issues and how they relate with democracy, thank you so much. We have received one question and I was normally going to do the rounds, according to how our speakers spoke, but Yasmeen, you’ll allow me to go back to Erin now, just because we received a question that’s a bit – quite close to what Erin mentioned before. So, Thea Yansten is asking, “How do you think that fake news, such as the belief that 5G causes COVID start and then become viral? Are they deliberately spread and pushed by individuals or groups with specific interests? Why does some fake news spread more than others?” Various questions here, but I think I would just rephrase myself, why the need for those kinds of – you know, we live in a world where we have so much information and so much expertise in our hands, you wouldn’t normally expect people to be relying or needing those kinds of fake news or conspiracy theories, right? So, any guesses why those things start? It seems to me sometimes it’s weird, they really seem to be starting from the fringes, other times they’re being expounded by the politics, by the powers, by official power, it’s a bit different, right? So, any thoughts on that?
Erin Kristin Jenne
I might be butchering this term, which I think has been recently introduced, ‘doom-scrolling’? The act of going through your feed to…
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Oh yeah, yeah.
Erin Kristin Jenne
…learn more about this horrible thing that you’re experiencing? I think that…
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Guilty as charged. Guilty as charged.
Erin Kristin Jenne
Uh-huh, yeah, all of us, right? So, the sad fact is that I think a lot of this is – a lot of this problem is psychological, and it’s a reaction to the events that are happening today that are making just enormous disruptions in our personal – in our lives, in our communities, in our states, in our societies. There’s more and more of a need, a demand to try to understand what just does not seem understandable, again going back to this invisible enemy metaphor, this is not just a Trump thing, this is something that you hear from a lot of leaders, and particularly populists. Because this is actually what their followers think, right? They don’t understand it. They don’t understand how it could be that this thing that’s just a flu could cause this kind of disruption. And so, that’s why you hear, you know, even my family members, not calling anybody out, but, you know, they say things like “Let’s just let it happen,” right? “Let this wash over the country,” this is something that Trump reportedly said early in the pandemic, right? So, you know, and this notion that everything has to be locked down, that your whole life has to just disappear, it’s just repellent for a lot of people who are already predisposed, as I said earlier, and this gets back to what Nadia said in particular, there’s a group of people, and I think that group is going, who have always been super anti-government, I come from the West Coast of America, this is some of the most anti-government people on the planet, right? And that’s where a lot of, you know, these, you know COVID, these conspiracies, all of this stuff, it’s percolating out from below, probably not without the assistance of, you know, Russia, and various other interested parties, people who get paid to sort of create these conspiracy theories, and they spread.
So, just the final note on that, which I kind of found unbelievable. There’s a guy named Ammon Bundy who, if you’re not really on the – really immersed in American, kind of, right-wing culture you wouldn’t necessarily know, but he was, you know, kind of a Mormon fundamentalist out West who got into a kind of a shootout with Federal agents over the question of whether or not they had the absolute right to graze their cattle on Federal lands, without paying the fees. Federal government disagreed. They had basically impounded their cattle, and they went to liberate their cattle, right, and in the end, there was a shootout, people died, this guy went to prison. I don’t think it was for very long, but he became, in the meantime, a kind of a cause celebre on the right, right, who was featured on Fox News. He reappeared in this kind of homemade video about how Jay Inslee, who is the Democratic Governor of Washington, right, who’s now become, kind of this, you know, sort of populist anti-hero, right, is using the pandemic as an excuse, right, to get all of this information on everybody through their phones. And they want to also, you know, lockdown, they want to basically take away your children, right, and I got this link to this YouTube video third hand, right? So, and just to leave you with the final scary thought, there’s some statistic that goes around that fake news travels roughly six times as fast as real news, right? There’s something that just like, it’s designed to – these conspiracies that are designed to just, like, massage our reptile brain, right, and create panic and fear and this then, is shared, you know, 100,000 times or more. So, obviously, you know, a vey recent, balanced, you know, journalistically guided perspective is not going to make nearly that kind of impact.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Yeah, I agree, pretty scary thought, but you are right, I mean, there is something about that kind of stuff that seems to – I mean, on the other hand this seems positively designed to become viral, right? So, you know, there’s probably a relationship between how the internet works and how the outlandishness of some of the things that are being put out there.
Turning to Yasmeen now, and I will actually throw two questions at you because interesting other questions that I wanted to ask you already, and – but we are happy that receive them from the audience as well. So, Holly Ellyat, if I read this correctly, asks “If Trump is not re-elected in November, could this have a knock-on effect on other populist movements, will we see a weakening of other populist Politicians around the world?” And perhaps before you answer that, though, the question that I wanted to, and Simona de Lazaro, who’s also from our audience, asked, “Why are populist leaders so averse to scientific advice?” And since you know the American and Brazilian case in conjunction, comparatively so well, that’s actually a genuine question I have. I mean if, okay, you’re a populist leader, fine, but you’re also a Politician, presumably you want to get this right, right? I mean, don’t you want to have a policy success by proving to be competent? So, any thoughts about why they haven’t been managed to do that, as Simona is asking, and just follow the advice, you know, ultimately, we just shift responsibility to them and then, on top of that, if then move on also, as we slowly move our discussion also more forward-looking, what are your thoughts about the American election and what does that might mean for populism, moving forward?
Yasmeen Serhan
Yeah, Simona, that’s a great question. I wish I knew the answer, but I’ll take a, kind of, stab at why I think that’s the case. I mean, I think, as has kind of been raised in this conversation already, one of the features that we know about, kind of, typical populists, is that they sort of pit themselves, or they pit – the real people, their, kind of, defined real people versus the elites, versus the establishment. And sometimes I think it’s quite easy to, sort of, take folks like Anthony Fauci in the US, folks like Chris Whitty here in Britain, these experts that, you know, have come – who are obviously were not elected but, you know, are, you know, who come with their own set of expertise, their own set of understanding, not to dictate policy but to inform the Politicians, so they can make the political decisions, and I think there’s a misconception that, you know, my colleague, Tom McTague, had a great piece on this, which I think is called The Coronavirus Is More Than Just a Health Crisis, which I would encourage folks interested in this to read. And the basic crux of it is that, you know, at the end of the day, decisions around a pandemic do take – these are political decisions that, in theory, should be guided by the science. But obviously, you know, populists like all Politicians are concerned about a lot of things. They’re concerned about the economy; they’re concerned about their re-election.
If the advice that’s being given to them seems to, kind of, run counter to that, it would seem, at least in the case of, you know, say, maybe Trump or Bolsonaro, they don’t want to, you know, upset people who think the lockdown is too much, that it’s hindering their ability to get to work, to feed their families, they don’t want to – you know, they want to, kind of, maintain their base and if that means going against some of that, you know, scientific expertise, then that’s what they’ll do. And it already seems to me that, you know, some populist leaders seem to be, kind of, staking – putting their stall out for the, sort of, anti-lockdown argument. We’ve seen this with Bolsonaro, we’ve seen this with Trump, and my guess would be that they’re banking that, you know, down the line when, you know, we’re hopefully at the end of this crisis, that when they look back and we have the economic downturn that we had, that they’ll be like, “Look, see, I was against this.” Will people then, at that time be like, “But, look, you know, here’s how many deaths we potentially averted”? I have no idea. I don’t even know how you’d make that argument, ‘cause obviously it’s all, you know, kind of hypothetical. But I suspect that that’s the reason that, you know, the scientific advice constricts them in a way that they may not like, even if, you know, it’s intended to obviously help guide them in a way that can hopefully get them out of this crisis, seeming as though they did a good job. So that’s the first question, I hope Simona that I answered that somewhat clearly.
And then, the other question, I think from Holly, on Trump’s re-election, it’s actually an issue that I really want to explore in a piece ahead of the vote, but yeah, I’m fascinated by this idea of, like, to what extent President Trump, over his last four years, has empowered populist and nationalist leaders, I think you could kind of put him in both camps, and to what extent his re-election would affect them. The truth is, I – I mean, it’s a complicated thing because, you know, this isn’t to say that people, say, in Italy who vote for Matteo Salvini are going to be changed because Trump is no longer in power. I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think, you know, and particularly for nationalist leaders like this is a current – you know, it’s about their country, all the issues that they tend to be fighting on tend to be quite internal.
I don’t necessarily think that Trump losing in November would hinder those people, though I do think, you know, Trump has obviously, you know, been quite close to a lot of likeminded leaders, you know, Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, obviously a lot of these leaders are quite bolstered by having a friend in the White House. So, no doubt I think likeminded leaders to Trump would obviously be quite cheered to have him for four more years. Does that necessarily mean that we’re going to see, you know, a fall of populism across the board, just because Trump isn’t – if he were not to be re-elected? I don’t think so, no, but I’d be curious to know what my fellow panellists think, ‘cause I could be wrong.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Alright, well, thank you, again, really interesting points that, I think, Yasmeen’s point also points to the fact that sometimes conventional political logic does not apply to populists as such, right? I mean, as Nadia also mentioned as, you know, leaders of movements, or leaders of followers, however you want to call it, sometimes satisfying them or satisfying what they think that their followers expect them to perform on stage, on the political stage, as it were, probably trumps what we would normally consider conventional understandings, you know, stick to the scientific advice and try to manage something as the pandemic as competently as possible.
Since Chatham House is also a policy institute, I think Chatham House, I think they would agree that they’re not here only to pose questions, but they’re primarily here to provide answers. So, I would for the last ten minutes of our conversation, I think we’ve covered quite comprehensively the problems that exist. I’m prompted here also by a question by another member of our audience, Ann Smith, who’s asking about political parties and how political parties act as – or should act as generators of policy ideas, but they don’t seem to be able to do so nowadays, with declining numbers. And she’s asking, “What’s an alternative to political parties that isn’t just populist movements, or at least one or the other?” I think that’s a question primarily directed to Nadia, but Nadia can answer this or expand on something else that she likes, but I would like for our last round to take stock of what was just said, and perhaps try to reflect a bit on how are we moving forward?
Clearly, the pandemic did not kill off populism, right? So, we are still left, even after the pandemic, with a problem like populism and a crisis of democracy. What does the crisis of the pandemic teach us about how we can improve our democracy? How do we convince people who do not believe that you should be wearing masks, for example? How do you convince people that, you know, sometimes science may not have all the answers, but until it does provide an answer, we should at least be able to engage with it in a constructive way, and so on. I mean, what can we say about it? So, Nadia, if you want to take the answer, the question about can we think of a different democratic future that is not either old, boring, tired, political parties and populism on the one hand, can we think of something in-between, perhaps?
Nadia Urbinati
Okay, democracy, constitutional or representative, went through many changes, and it is never stabilised in one model. If you – if we remember the history of 20th Century, in order to achieve the stabilisation of party pluralism, it took a long time. It took, first of all, the passage from liberal to even a fascist [inaudible – 53:58] regimes, because of the repulsion against factions, or against the partisanship, against pluralism, in the name of the unity of the people’s interest. So now, we are witnessing another transition, believe it or not, I think even when there are parties that seem to be stable, they change all the time, and over time, and they go through very radical changes. So, they’re no longer party that organises, they organise the electorate, they organise the citizens. They, at the most, select – operates for the selections of candidates and they manage the institutions. So, they are kind of into the institutions, and outside the institutions. We are in a condition of either individualistic lack of power, impotence, an individual alone counts as zero in this mass democracy. And second – or, secondly, we can organise interest groups, and thus, if they are successful, they will tend to conquer those few candidates, in order to make decisions in their own behalf.
So, there are very many changes, not all of them very appealing, in my view. So, the question is that it is a challenge, the stabilisation of democracy that is no longer based on ideological parties, no longer based on – and I don’t know what to do with that, certainly. But we know for sure, think about the German case, where you have institution and – or the – when you have constitutionalisation of parties, parties are more stable. All parties are more connected to the political system, than in a country like Italy or like Spain, or like France, in this case. But we cannot say. So, the question is, how can we manage, govern, this interregnum, as an expression is by Gramsci, interregnum, between one order and another one. But this isn’t the motion. We are in the transition, and I don’t know whether we are going to stabilise populism. If populism is the new stabilisation, well, fine. I mean, we are going to create a new form of democracy, fine.
The questions is that populists in power they refuse to stabilise, not because they are good or bad, because they then know very well, they’re going to change otherwise. So, a tramp that makes all the time the argument to find the establismentalism, even when in power, he knows very well, like all the populists, that as soon as they stop, they become ordinary leaders like a major – ordinary majorities. So, unless they don’t accept this, they will remain as they are, anti-establishment inside of the establishment, making a permanent electoral system – propaganda, electoral propaganda while they are in power, as if they were in a permanent propaganda, and this is the paradox they cannot stabilise completely, they cannot destabilise completely.
So, I don’t know what to do with that, and where to go, starting from here. But certainly, we are facing a moment of transformation of our democracy, and thus, a transition to other forms of democracy. Another chapter would be, but this is not the time, the relationship between national state democracy and the global and international, this is another piece of topic that it’s going to impact very much how our regimes works inside of our nation states. But this is not the time to do it. Anyway, I’m not capable of predicting future, and I’m not capable of giving solution. I’m not a Physician, not a Doctor of democracy. But, certainly, we have to understand this moment of interregnum, transition.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Thank you, Nadia. I never implied that you were a Doctor, ‘cause as we have seen over the past six months, Doctors who have claimed themselves that they have all the answers.
Nadia Urbinati
Exactly, exactly so. So, no, no. No way.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
And probably hasn’t worked well for science as well. We have four minutes. We have been instructed that we should end this on the clock, so, Yasmeen and Erin if – I’m sorry for just giving you, like, very, very – I’m going to have to rush you for two minutes each. Just a final reflection on any ideas. Yasmeen, you’re in the media as well, any idea how we get people onboard with some stuff that shouldn’t really be part of ideological discourse, right? I mean, you know, try to keep yourself safe and healthy, that shouldn’t take too much effort. Any idea how we can get people on board?
Yasmeen Serhan
Oh gosh. I mean, I guess the, kind of, the only, kind of, last thought I have, which was related to a question that Erin answered about, you know, ‘cause something that’s really been interesting to me, and will probably deserve a webinar in and of itself, is how, you know, conspiracy theories, the likes of QAnon which, for the uninitiated, I would encourage to read my colleague Adrienne LaFrance’s cover story from a couple of months back, I think, on what the belief system is. But, you know, that is a very US-centred conspiracy theory that is suddenly, you know, making the rounds in Europe, has been the subject of a couple of protests in recent weeks.
It’s very interesting to see how, even concepts like that, kind of, become international, how it allows people to impart their beliefs on a baseline theory like that, and I think fundamentally, and I think this is a point that Erin got at really well, is that, you know, I think people are just looking for easy answers, ways to, sort of, you know, when you’re in amidst a crisis where no-one, admittedly even the Scientists say, “Look, we just don’t know enough yet,” you know, that’s quite scary. I can understand why people go toward those things for comfort, especially if you have, you know, the President of the United States retweeting it, you know, it’s a difficult thing. So yeah, I mean, that’s, kind of, something that I think, kind of, going forward might be interesting to think about, you know, how – what is – yeah, I don’t want to take up Erin’s time, but yeah, that’s something I’m interested in.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Okay, sure. Alright, then finally, Erin, all your acquaintances that live in Washington State, how do you convince them?
Erin Kristin Jenne
Oh my gosh.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Yeah, only two minutes, please, only two minutes.
Erin Kristin Jenne
Oh my God. Okay, it’s hopeless. I’ve so many thoughts on all of these questions, but I guess if I could just extend what Nadia was saying, I think I have a similarly pessimistic view, we’re in a transition period. Someone on Twitter said once, “So this is what it feels like to live in a critical juncture,” right? And, in some ways, we just have to go through this. It’s just almost inevitable, and who knows what’s going to come out on the other end. In the meantime, I think the only thing that you can do is focus on performance legitimacy. So, basically, providing people with the actual funds to live, you know, to have a living wage, to have an ability to take care of your kids, to not have to worry about what happens if I go into the hospital, are my fees going to be covered or not? And then, some basic, sort of, government controls, frankly, on social media, which is way past due, right? And this gets to the final point that I wanted to make going back to your very first question about Hungary, in a way, Orbán is on the other side of things, right? He’s gone full authoritarian and at this point, right, because there’s nobody else to blame for the situation that Hungary is in other than him. At this point, you have to repress this, right? So, there are serious fines that are levied against anyone who actually, you know, circulates any conspiracy theory online, right? They crack down on people, right? So that’s how they’re handling it. They’re trying to handle it that way, and by providing people enough to live, which frankly, isn’t enough, but fortunately for him, there’s not really much of a political competition.
Dr Angelos Chryssogelos
Right, excellent. That’s also very interesting contrast with other populists. I think all of us would agree that we would take another hour perhaps, easily, to discuss all those things. Unfortunately, we don’t have that. I would like to thank our panellists, would like to thank our audience for their questions, and I think we also should thank Chatham House for providing us the opportunity. I’m sure there’s going to be lots of opportunities in the future to discuss this topic again. So, everyone watching us, take care, and of course stay safe and stay healthy, and, again, many thanks to our panellists as well. Bye.
Erin Kristin Jenne
Bye, guys.
Yasmeen Serhan
Bye, thank you.
