In March 1949, Dr. Quincy Wright (1890-1970) of the University of Chicago presented a paper for the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) entitled “Philosophical Enquiry Into Current Ideological Conflicts; The Meaning of Democracy“.
Dr. Wright states, “Like all social and political terms which serve at the same time as slogans for movements and as symbols for conceptions, the word democracy has in fact varied in meaning according to time, place, and circumstances. This variability is, in fact, a condition of most forms of popular discourse. They are continually acquiring new meanings as can be seen by studying any historical dictionary.” He continues by citing examples of this variability. “Democracy…” he writes, “has always suggested a wide popular participation in the support, conduct and benefits of government, but the conception has taken colour from the conditions and opinions which advocates of democracy have at particular times and places found in opposition to their aims. Thus, in a struggle against an unpopular rule of a monarch or oligarchy, democracy has referred to government by the many, rather than the few; in a struggle against social privilege, class or race discrimination, and economic inequality, democracy has referred to equality in social position and economic welfare; in a struggle against government monopoly of economic initiative, public opinion and political association, democracy has referred to freedom of enterprise, communication, opinion and association; in a struggle against corrupt and arbitrary manipulations of opinion, democracy has referred to procedures for regulating elections and party action in order to assure freedom of opinion, wide participation and fair representation; in a struggle against excesses of majorities and oppression of minorities, democracy has referred to the rule of law and protection of fundamental human rights; in a struggle for freedom of dependent or oppressed peoples, democracy has referred to home rule, self government, and self determination of distinctive groups; in a struggle for influence of suppressed groups or classes, democracy has referred to consent of the governed, non-discrimination and procedures for consultation among all interested groups in policy formation.”
Humanity is a plurality made-up of many different individuals forming highly interconnected communities of mutual interest and co-operation (families, political groups, cities, countries, and so forth) and it is the individuals within the groups rather than the group ‘in general’ who, ultimately, exert power. “Democracy is [therefore] a compromise designed to balance interests among members of a community.” (Han Zhen, Democracy as a Way to Social Compromise, 2006). As our society has grown from small villages of (at most) few hundred people to a vast interconnected global economy of six billion, the complexity of the compromise along with the incredibly varied interests of group members has introduced profound challenges to democracy itself. These challenges (often left unaddressed) leave our society in a near-permanent state of visible conflict (albeit with varying intensity) across all dimensions of struggle (akin to those outlined by Wright, above).
Against this backdrop of social, economic and political conflict, what is the future of democracy?
In these exclusive interviews we speak to Jüri Ratas (Prime Minister of Estonia), Guy Verhofstadt (Former Prime Minister, Belgium & EU Chief Brexit Negotiator), Vicente Fox Quesada (Former President of Mexico), Noam Chomsky (Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who – with over 150 books published – is regarded as ‘one of the most critically engaged public intellectuals alive today’), Alastair Campbell (Communicator, Writer and Strategist), Glenn Greenwald (Multi Award Winning Journalist, Constitutional Lawyer and Author), Lawrence “Larry” Lessig (Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School), Professor Yanis Varoufakis (Economist and Former Minister of Finance of Greece), Professor A. C. Grayling (philosopher, thinker, author and educator; Master of the New College of the Humanities), Matthew d’Ancona (Journalist & Broadcaster), Dr. Brian Klaas (Author & Expert on Democracy, Authoritarianism & Foreign Policy and Congressman Ted Lieu (Representing California’s 33rd District),Robert Peston (Journalist, Broadcaster & Author), Michael Lewis (Author & Journalist) and General Michael Hayden (Former Director of the CIA & NSA). We discuss the state and future of democracy around the world, together with the role that government, corporations and the media play in shaping our lives. We also look at the global war on terror, globalisation, populism, and the forces changing our world.
[bios]Prime Minister Jüri Ratas, leader of the Estonian Centre Party, is the head of the Government of the Republic of Estonia since 23 November 2016.
Jüri Ratas was born on 2 July 1978. He has finished Nõmme Secondary School in Tallinn, graduated from Tallinn University of Technology in the area of Business Management and obtained his Master´s degree in Economic Sciences from the University of Technology. He also holds a Bachelor´s degree in Law from the School of Law at the University of Tartu.
Jüri Ratas has broad work experience in different areas. His first positions were Analyst of the Building Research Institute and Market Researcher of ANR Amer Nielsen Eesti OÜ, then he was appointed to the Chairman of the Management Board of the car service Värvilised OÜ (1999-2002) and worked as Sales Representative of the insurance company Sampo Eesti Kindlustus (1999-2000).
Jüri Ratas has also contributed to the development of Estonian basketball, in 2001-2002 as the Head of Youth Basketball of the Estonian Basketball Association and from 2012 to 2016 in the position of the President of the Estonian Basketball Association.
His service in Tallinn administration started in 2002 when he was elected the Economic Adviser to the Tallinn City Office (2002-2003). During 2003-2004 and in 2005 Jüri Ratas served as the Deputy Mayor of Tallinn and from 2005 to 2007 as the Mayor of Tallinn. He has been elected to Tallinn City Council in 2005, 2009 and 2013. In 2007-2016 Jüri Ratas held the position of the Vice-President of the 11th, 12th and 13th Estonian Parliament.
Guy Verhofstadt was Prime Minister of Belgium from 1999 to 2008. In 2009, he was elected in the European Parliament where he became group leader of the Liberals and Democrats. In 2014, Verhofstadt was reelected, took on his second term as liberal group leader and two years later he was appointed Brexit negotiator for the European Parliament.
Vicente Fox was President of Mexico from 2000 to 2006.
Fox’s priorities as President were improving the Mexican economy, mainly through better trade relations with the United States, banking reforms and tackling crime and corruption; increased bilateral cooperation with the United States on drug trafficking and illegal immigration; and strengthening the rights of Mexico’s indigenous peoples.
Vicente Fox began his career in business. Having earned a degree in business administration from the Ibero-American University in Mexico City and from the Harvard Business School, Fox worked for the Mexican unit of the Coca-Cola Company, serving as the company’s CEO in Mexico from 1975-79. Convinced that Mexico needed new leadership as the country’s economy struggled in the 1980’s, Fox turned to politics and joined the National Action Party (PAN) in 1987.
In 1988 Fox was elected to the national Chamber of Deputies, representing the Third Federal District in León, Guanajuato and, in 1995, became the governor of Guanajuato, in which role he promoted government efficiency and transparency. He was one of the first state governors of Mexico to give a clear, public and timely account of the finances of Guanajuato, and he pushed for the consolidation of small firms, promoted the sale of goods manufactured in Guanajuato overseas and created a unique system in which micro-credits with no overdue portfolio were granted. Under Fox, the state became the fifth most important Mexican state economy.
In 2000 Fox ran for president on a platform that focused on ending government corruption and improving the economy. At the polls he easily defeated PRI candidate Francisco Labastida Ochoa, and on Dec. 1, 2000, he succeeded Ernesto Zedillo as president of Mexico. It was the first time in Mexico’s history that an incumbent government peacefully surrendered power to an elected member of the opposition.
Fox focused his early efforts on improving trade relations with the United States, calming civil unrest in such areas as Chiapas, and reducing corruption, crime, and drug trafficking. In 2001 his administration introduced constitutional reforms that strengthened the rights of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. Although the measures were ratified by the necessary number of Mexican states, seven other states—including Chiapas, where more than half the indigenous population lives—rejected them. Advocates for indigenous rights objected to amendments that required indigenous peoples to act in accordance with the constitution and that reduced their autonomy in some spheres. Leaders of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas—who had made constitutional reform a condition of their return to peace talks—also opposed the new law.
In economic affairs, Fox’s proposals, particularly his plans to increase taxes as part of sweeping reforms to stabilize the Mexican economy and banking system, met fierce resistance in the Mexican legislature, where the PAN lacked a majority.
In 2006 Fox left office, succeeded by Felipe Calderón of the PAN.
Since leaving the presidency, Vicente Fox has been involved in public speaking across the world.
He has also been very active with the Vicente Fox Center of Studies, Library and Museum (Centro Fox), Mexico’s first presidential library. The Centro Fox seeks to reduce corruption, increase transparency, improve immigration policy and encourage a sense of commitment and solidarity among the Mexican population for the underprivileged and for those who have not enjoyed the benefits of development. Among its many programs, Centro Fox supports the development of leaders dedicated to serving their communities in Mexico and Latin America.
Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928. He received his early education at Oak Lane Country Day School and Central High School, Philadelphia. He continued his education at the University of Pennsylvania where he studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. In 1955, he received his Ph. D. from the University of Pennsylvania, however, most of the research leading to this degree was done at Harvard between 1951 and 1955. Since receiving his Ph. D., Chomsky has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he now holds the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics. Respected and honoured numerous times in the academic arena, he has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of London and the University of Chicago, as well as having been invited to lecture all over the world. In 1967, he delivered the Beckman Lectures at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1969, he presented the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford and Sherman Memorial Lectures at the University of London.
Alastair Campbell is a writer, communicator and strategist best known for his role as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spokesman, press secretary and director of communications and strategy. Still active in politics and campaigns in Britain and overseas, he now splits his time between writing, speaking, charities and consultancy.
He has written eleven books in the past eight years, including six volumes of diaries, three novels, a personal memoir on depression and the pursuit of happiness, and most recently Winners and How They Succeed, a Number 1 best-selling analysis of what it takes to win in politics, business and sport.
He has for many years been chairman of fund-raising of Bloodwise, Britain’s main blood cancer charity, but in recent years has become increasingly involved with mental health charities and causes. A former ‘Mind Champion of the Year’, he is an ambassador for the Time to Change campaign to raise awareness about mental illness, ambassador for Alcohol Concern, patron of Maytree, the country’s only charity for the suicidal, and of Kidstime, which supports the children of mentally ill parents. He co-founded the all-party campaign, Equality4MentalHealth, which was credited in Parliament by Chancellor George Osborne with securing an extra £600million for mental health services in the 2005 spending review.
He writes a monthly interview for GQ magazine, and has covered figures as varied as Jose Mourinho and Nicola Sturgeon, Kevin Spacey and Mario Balotelli. Passionate about sport, he was written about different sports for The Times, the Irish Times and Esquire magazine. He was communications adviser to the British and Irish Lions rugby tour of New Zealand in 2005. He has raised funds for Burnley FC, a team he has supported since the age of four. His charity projects have involved him playing football with both Diego Maradona and Pele, and appearing in a one off version of the popular TV programme, The Apprentice.
In his time in Downing Street he was involved in all the major policy issues and international crises. He has said that in ten years in the media, and a decade in politics, he saw his respect for the media fall and his respect for politics rise. He was called to the Leveson Inquiry into press standards twice, first for his insights into modern journalism, second to give his views on the changed relationship between politics and media. He is a sought after speaker at events around the world, specialising in strategic communications, leadership, team building and crisis management. Since publishing Winners, he has been asked to support a number of leading sports organisations.
Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books on politics and law. His most recent book, No Place to Hide, is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. Prior to his collaboration with Pierre Omidyar, Glenn’s column was featured at The Guardian and Salon. He was the debut winner, along with Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning. For his 2013 NSA reporting, he received the George Polk award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation watchdog journalism award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. Along with Laura Poitras, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School.
Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago.
He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. Lessig serves on the Board of the AXA Research Fund, and on the advisory boards of Creative Commons and the Sunlight Foundation.
He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, and has received numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, Fastcase 50 Award and being named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries.
Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.
Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist who was a member of the Parliament of Greece between January and September 2015. He represented the ruling Syriza party and held the position of Minister of Finance for seven months. He voted against the terms of the third bailout package for Greece. In February 2016, Varoufakis launched the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25).
Varoufakis is a participant in the current debates on the global and European crisis, the author of The Global Minotaur and several academic texts on economics and game theory, Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens and a private consultant for Valve Corporation. He is a dual Greek-Australian citizen and describes himself as a ‘libertarian Marxist‘: “In truth, Karl Marx was responsible for framing my perspective of the world we live in, from my childhood to this day. It is not something that I volunteer to talk about in ‘polite society’ much these days because the very mention of the M-word switches audiences off.”
Anthony Grayling MA, DPhil (Oxon) FRSL, FRSA is Master of the New College of the Humanities, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Until 2011 he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are “The Good Book“, “Ideas That Matter“, “Liberty in the Age of Terror” and “To Set Prometheus Free“. For several years he wrote the “Last Word” column for the Guardian newspaper and a column for the Times. He is a frequent contributor to the Literary Review, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Times Literary Supplement, Index on Censorship and New Statesman, and is an equally frequent broadcaster on BBC Radios 4, 3 and the World Service. He writes the “Thinking Read” column for the Barnes and Noble Review in New York, is the Editor of Online Review London, and a Contributing Editor of Prospect magazine.
In addition he sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society. He is a past chairman of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China, and is a representative to the UN Human Rights Council for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He is a Vice President of the British Humanist Association, the Patron of the United Kingdom Armed Forces Humanist Association, a patron of Dignity in Dying, and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.
Anthony Grayling was a Fellow of the World Economic Forum for several years, and a member of its C-100 group on relations between the West and the Islamic world. He has served as a Trustee of the London Library and a board member of the Society of Authors. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2003 he was a Man Booker Prize judge, in 2010 was a judge of the Art Fund prize, and in 2011 the Wellcome Book Prize. He was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
He supports a number of charities including Plan UK, Greenpeace, Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International and Freedom from Torture. He is also a sponsor of Rogbonko School in Sierra Leone. His latest books are “The God Argument” (March 2013), “Friendship” (September 2013) and “The Challenge of Things” (March 2015). Anthony Grayling’s new book “The Age of Genius” was published in March 2016.
Matthew d’Ancona is a British journalist and broadcaster. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian and was previously editor of the Spectator. He also contributes regularly to the BBC’s Today programme.
Matthew was the Sunday Telegraph’s political columnist for 19 years. He also writes for the Evening Standard, the New York Times and GQ. Matthew is a visiting research fellow at Queen Mary University of London and author of several books including In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition.
He is a Trustee of the Science Museum Group, chair of the think-tank Bright Blue and was elected a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in 1989.
Dr. Brian Klaas is an expert on democracy, authoritarianism, American politics, US foreign policy, political violence, and elections. Klaas is the author of “The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy” (November 2017); “The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West is Aiding & Abetting the Decline of Democracy,” and “How to Rig an Election” (co-authored with Professor Nic Cheeseman; coming Spring 2018).
Klaas is a Fellow in Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics. Klaas has advised governments, US political campaigns, NATO, the European Union, multi-billion dollar investors, international NGOs, and international politicians. He is also an opinion columnist at The Washington Post, with a biweekly column dedicated to issues related to democracy and authoritarianism.
Dr. Klaas has extensive experience working in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and United States politics. Prior clients include the premier conflict management NGO in the world, International Crisis Group, the respected international election monitoring organization, The Carter Center, and large private firms. He has conducted field research, interviewing prime ministers, presidents, ministers, rebels, coup plotters, dissidents, and torture victims in an array of countries, including Madagascar, Thailand, Tunisia, Belarus, Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, and Latvia.
Klaas writes a regular column in DemocracyPost, based at The Washington Post and for The Hill. His writing has also recently been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, Newsweek, The Telegraph, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Foreign Policy, Christian Science Monitor, Quartz, Libération (France), L’Express (France), The Globe & Mail (Canada) and many other publications. Klaas is a regular commentator on a wide array of international media outlets too, including MSNBC, CNN, BBC News, Sky News, NPR News, CNBC, Bloomberg TV, BBC World Service, France 24, CBC News (Canada), Radio France Internationale, Al-Jazeera, ARD News (Germany), and many others.
Prior to becoming an academic, Dr. Klaas worked on US campaigns — including serving as the Policy Director / Deputy Campaign Manager for Mark Dayton’s successful bid for Governor of Minnesota.
Klaas, an American, speaks French and is proficient in Arabic in addition to his native English. He received his DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford (New College), an MPhil in Comparative Government from the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s), and a Bachelor of Arts (Summa Cum Laude; Phi Beta Kappa) from Carleton College.
In 2014, Ted W. Lieu was elected to California’s 33rd Congressional District, succeeding retiring 40-year incumbent Henry Waxman. In the 114th Congress, Ted was elected president of the Democratic Freshman class by his colleagues. Today he serves on the House Judiciary Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He is also an Assistant Whip for the Democratic Caucus.
Ted is a former active duty officer in the US Air Force and currently serves as a Colonel in the Reserves. In Congress, Ted has established himself as a leader on protecting the environment; Social Security and Medicare; civil liberties; and veterans. He has been an outspoken proponent for tackling climate change. The first bill Ted wrote and introduced after coming to Congress was the Climate Solutions Act, which aims to make California’s ground-breaking renewable energy goals and climate emissions reduction targets a national model.
As one of only four computer science majors currently serving in Congress, and as a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Information Technology, Ted is frequently sought out for his insight on technology and innovation matters including cybersecurity, cloud computing and innovation as well as the sharing and creative economy.
Ted has been a leader in Congress against ethnic and racial profiling, and discrimination against the LGBT community. He serves as Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus task force on armed services and veterans, Co-Chair of the LGBT Equality Caucus, and Co-Chair of the Cloud Computing Caucus.
In just his first year in Congress, Ted successfully passed three laws. He successfully fought for $35 million in funding to the West Los Angeles VA for essential seismic retrofits; reauthorized the Advisory Committee in Homeless Veterans; and restored the Quarterly Financial Report, one of our nation’s principal economic indicators used by both businesses and the public sector. Prior to serving in Congress, Ted was elected to the California State Senate in 2011 and the State Assembly in 2005. Ted’s legislative accomplishments include authoring landmark legislation regulating the subprime mortgage industry; a first-in-the-nation ban on gay conversion therapy for children; and a first-in-the-nation ban on the use of tanning beds for minors.
Ted fought for California state tax reform that saved small businesses from millions in retroactive taxes, and tax incentives for film and TV production. Ted also co-authored California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act and co-authored the law banning state pension funds from investing in Iran’s nuclear and energy industries.
Ted started his elected service as a Member of the Torrance City Council in 2002. Prior to serving on the Council, Ted was a Torrance Environmental Quality Commissioner.
Looking for a better life and opportunity, Ted and his family immigrated to the United States when he was three years old. His parents went to flea markets and sold gifts and jewelry to make ends meet. Ted’s family went from being poor and not speaking English well to opening up a gift store where Ted and his brother would help out in the family business. After many years of perseverance his parents were eventually able to expand to six stores. With the support of hard-working parents and a country that provided limitless opportunity, Ted would go on to attend Stanford for his undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Political Science, and then Georgetown University, where he received his law degree magna cum laude after serving as Editor-in-Chief of the law review. Ted also received four American Jurisprudence Awards.
Recognizing the great opportunities America had given to his family, Ted wanted to serve his country to preserve the American Dream. He joined the United States Air Force, where he served in the JAG corps. After serving on active duty for four years, Ted wanted to continue to serve his country and joined the Reserves. Ted has received numerous medals for his outstanding military service, including the Air Force Humanitarian Service Medal and multiple Meritorious Service Medals. After serving active duty, Ted joined the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson as a litigator. In 2003, Ted joined the legal office at UBS Financial Services.
Robert Peston is ITV’s political editor, presenter of the politics show Peston on Sunday and founder of the education charity, Speakers for Schools (www.speakers4schools.org). He has written four books, How Do We Fix This Mess?, Who Runs Britain?, Brown’s Britain and WTF.
Robert Peston’s new book WTF he draws on his years of experience as a political, economics and business journalist to show us what has gone bad and gives us a manifesto to put at least some of it right.
Framed by two letters to his father (who died earlier this year) WTF is Robert Peston’s highly personal account of what those who have ruled us for years got so badly wrong, and what we need to do to mend the terrible fractures in our society.
With characteristic passion and clarity he looks at what must happen to prevent democracy being subverted by technocratic geniuses with the ability to manipulate social media, how and whether it is possible to make a success of leaving the EU, what the lessons should be of the appalling Grenfell Tower tragedy, whether robots can be stopped from taking our work, what can be done to staunch the widening gap between rich and poor, and how to raise living standards for all.
WTF is a trenchant, often entertaining account of the recent past. It is also a call to action, giving hope to all of us who believe that taking back control is not only vital, but possible.
For a decade until the end of 2015, he was at the BBC, as economics editor and business editor. Previously he was City editor at the Sunday Telegraph, political editor and financial editor at the FT, a columnist for the New Statesman, and at the Independent in various roles. Peston has won more than 30 awards for his journalism, including Journalist of the Year from the Royal Television Society. His blog is itv.com/robertpeston, on Facebook he is facebook.com/pestonITV and he is @peston on Twitter.
Michael Lewis has published many New York Times bestselling books on various subjects. His most recent works are The Fifth Risk,The Undoing Project,Flash Boys , and The Big Short. The Blind Side, published in 2006, tells the story of Michael Oher, a poor, illiterate African-American kid living on the streets of Memphis whose life is transformed after he is adopted by white Evangelical Christians. Before that he wrote Moneyball, a book ostensibly about baseball but also about the way markets value people. Both of his books about sports became movies, nominated for Academy Awards, as did his book about the 2008 financial crisis, The Big Short. His other works include Boomerang,The New New Thing, about Silicon Valley during the Internet boom; Coach, about the transformative powers of his own high school baseball coach; Losers, about the 1996 Presidential campaign; and Liar’s Poker, a Wall Street story based in part on his own experience working as a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers.
Mr. Lewis is a columnist for Bloomberg View and a contributing writer to Audible. His articles have also appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Gourmet, Slate, Sports Illustrated, Foreign Affairs, and Poetry Magazine. He has served as editor and columnist for the British weekly The Spectator and as senior editor and campaign correspondent for The New Republic. He has filmed and narrated short pieces for ABC-TV’s “Nightline;” created and presented a four part documentary on the social consequences of the internet for the British Broadcasting Corporation; and recorded stories for the American public radio show, This American Life.
Mr. Lewis grew up in New Orleans and remains deeply interested and involved in the city. He holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from Princeton and a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children: Quinn, Dixie and Walker. In 2009 he published Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, about his attempts to raise them.
General Michael Hayden is a retired four-star general who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency when the course of world events was changing at a rapid rate. As head of the country’s premier intelligence agencies, he was on the frontline of global change, the war on terrorism and the growing cyber challenge. He understands the dangers, risks, and potential rewards of the political, economic, and security situations facing us. General Hayden dissects political situations in hot spots around the world, analyzing the tumultuous global environment and what it all means for Americans and America’s interests. He speaks on the delicate balance between liberty and security in intelligence work, as well the potential benefits and dangers associated with the cyber domain. As the former head of two multi-billion dollar enterprises, he can also address the challenges of managing complex organizations in times of stress and risk, and the need to develop effective internal and external communications.
In addition to leading CIA and NSA, General Hayden was the country’s first principal deputy director of national intelligence and the highest-ranking military intelligence officer in the country. In all of these jobs, he worked to put a human face on American intelligence, explaining to the American people the role of espionage in protecting both American security and American liberty. Hayden also served as commander of the Air Intelligence Agency and Director of the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center and served in senior staff positions at the Pentagon, at U.S. European Command, at the National Security Council, and the U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria. He was also the deputy chief of staff for the United Nations Command and U.S. Forces in South Korea.
Hayden has been a frequent expert and commentator on major news outlets and in top publications, valued for his expertise on intelligence matters like cyber security, government surveillance, geopolitics, and more. He was featured in the HBO documentary Manhunt, which looked at espionage through the eyes of the insiders who led the secret war against Osama bin Laden, and in Showtime’s The Spymasters, a detailed look at the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Hayden is currently a principal at the Chertoff Group and a distinguished visiting professor at the George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government. He is on the board of directors of Motorola Solutions and serves on a variety of other boards and consultancies. In 2013, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) awarded Hayden the 29th annual William Oliver Baker Award. General Hayden is also the first recipient of the Helms Award presented by the CIA Officers’ Memorial Foundation. In 2014 he was the inaugural Humanitas visiting professor in intelligence studies at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. His recent memoir, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, has been a New York Times best-seller and was recently selected as one of the 100 most notable books of 2016.[/bios]
Q: What is democracy?
[Professor Lawrence Lessig] The most important feature of a representative democracy is that it gives its people the sense that they’re represented equally, and can participate equally in the economy. American democracy is not a representative democracy.
The institution of congress has become a failed institution within the American republic, and that weakness makes it impossible for America to address some of its most pressing problems.
A functional representative democracy is something we need to aspire to, we’ve never really had it in America, and we ought to give it a try.
[Guy Verhofstadt] There is no simple answer to this question. In my view democracy is about the people having a say in who governs them, and how they are governed. But democracy comes in many forms. For me, the most effective forms of democracy are liberal democracies, where the people elect people to represent their interests. These liberal democratic tenets are a core part of the European Union, and other national parliaments.
Personally, I would like to see a more democratic European Union, where we have an elected President, chosen by the directly elected European representatives. We need to make it a Government by the people, for the people. In order to achieve this, we need to strengthen the European Parliament as they are the elected representatives of the people. One example of how this would work is that the European Parliament should have control of the whole EU budget, so that the citizens control the European budget. This would strengthen democracy.
It is crucial that we defend our democracy against authoritarian style governance, which we see around the world. Democracy creates more cohesive societies because people are being listened to. They are not simply told what to do. This is important in order to create the sort of world we want to live in.
[Dr. Brian Klaas] The notion of what constitutes a democracy is highly contested – basically everybody defines it differently. For me, the final benchmark of what constitutes a democracy is that citizens have a meaningful say in the decisions that affect their lives and who the people who make those decisions are. So, it’s about representation, it’s about responsiveness and it’s about having actual recourse against the government to hold it accountable when it does something that the people don’t like.
I think there are features of democracy that are universal, like elections. But one of the things that I think is a huge mistake is that there are too many people who tend to believe falsely that elections are sufficient for democracy. I’m very much not of that camp, I think it’s much greater than that.
Democracy inevitably creates discontent. Part of the entire apparatus of the system is built on compromise, and one of the reasons that people are really unhappy with democracy now is because there’s a striking re-polarisation in a huge number of liberal democracies in the west. People don’t have the same realities anymore, they don’t agree on what problems exist and which ones don’t. And as a result of that, virtually everyone is upset because people look at the same exact events and it’s not about compromise, it’s about questioning whether the event is real, whether it is a problem and whether there is any sort of common ground which can be held because people are starting to think of disagreeable parties as enemies effectively.
I think that there’s a lot of discourse that needs to be had with the public, about how democracies are give and take, and only in that world can citizens actually get closer to some sort of ideal that is a common good, what most people want to see in a society.
Q: To what extent are our societies free and democratic?
[Glenn Greenwald] The extent to which our society is free and democratic is all relative, the question is- relative to what?
There are clearly a lot of ways in which the range of acceptable ideas within society is narrowed, and the political choices we have are seriously constrained. In a lot of senses we have the appearance of freedom and democracy, and much less so a reality. You can have societies in which people can go to a ballot box once every 3-5 years and pick who their leaders are going to be, but that doesn’t mean you have freedom or democracy in any meaningful sense; and that’s generally how I would describe most western countries.
Q: How broken is our world?
[Robert Peston]: In the west and across the world, there are certainly bigger uncertainties and risks than we’ve seen for two or three decades.
Firstly, millions of people with lower incomes across the rich west are becoming disillusioned with the way the world is run, and are rejecting what one would call the ‘establishment.’ Secondly, we have risks associated with a new generation of demagogues in the undemocratic nations from Russia to North Korea, and even (because of the economic issues) China.
The growth in the global economy has recently picked-up to levels which we haven’t seen before the crash. If you go back to the period around the crash, and subsequent years, there was a very long period across the rich west with much lower growth, and we’re still living with the impact of that. There has been real stagnation of mid to lower incomes, whilst those on top have been doing very nicely indeed. Billions of people on mid to lower income have seen very little (if any) improvement to their quality of life year after year, and have borne the brunt of flatlining economies and worsening wealth inequality; and this has undermined the confidence people have in the way our economies are managed and the leaders of those economies.
Q: What are your views on liberalism?
[Vicente Fox] Liberals are highly democratic, highly diverse and highly attuned to the issues of today and tomorrow. I love liberals, though I don’t love crazy liberals at the extreme. The best combination is conservative approaches to running the economy; making sure the economy is stable and secure, but I love the vanguard, open and diverse thinking that liberalism brings.
Q: What kind of democracy does our world need?
[Yanis Varoufakis] To have genuine democracy, we need to democratise the spheres in which power is exercised.
For the past 200 years or so, there has been a migration of power from the political to the economic sphere, and later to the financial sphere. As this migration proceeded, the political sphere became increasingly democratised. The European Union is the perfect example, just look at Spain, Greece or Portugal which had fascist dictatorships until the 1970s, and now are fully democratic, with functioning democratic constitutions, elections that are almost taken for granted and yet- the decisions that matter are shifted to a realm which is completely democracy free, where there are no checks and balances whatsoever, and no accountability. This de-politicisation of power is an ongoing process.
To have an authentic democracy you need to have a political sphere that is subject to constant assessment and re-assessment by the citizens, but you also need to have economic relationships that are subject to the same. For example, when you make a Google search- this is an economic relationship; why? Because Google makes money from you doing that!
We need the control of power to extend to the economic and financial realm. This means we will have different property rights and social relations at the level of production.
Q: Are referendums an essential part of democracy?
[Guy Verhofstadt] Democracy comes in many forms. A liberal democracy is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. In the EU we have a representative democracy which means that the people elect representatives to represent them, and if the individual does not represent them well then the voters can vote them out of their post after the parliament period. Liberal democracies protect individual liberty and property by the rule of law.
So, the answer is no. Living in a democracy does not mean that the public should vote on everything. That would be a direct democracy which is inefficient and does not always lead to a good outcome because it is hard for people to be fully informed about every issue. How would anyone have the time to gather all the information they need to make every decision needed whilst working and living their life? There simply would not be enough time.
A good example is the EU referendum in the UK last year. Many people have said that they did not feel properly informed about the issues involved, and that the decision should not have been given to the public. It is not up to me to judge whether the decision should have been made by the British public or not. That was a decision for the government of the United Kingdom. However, now we are embarking on a very complicated set of negotiations which will change the United Kingdom’s relationship with their closest neighbours, and views have been expressed by members of the British public that they should never have been made to vote on such a complicated issue, which has so many profound implications.
Q: What has accounted for the current retreat of democratic institutions?
[Dr. Brian Klaas] There are two distinct types of democratic retreat, firstly there’s a retreat in the West and secondly there’s a retreat in the rest of the world. Underlying both are huge economic, demographic and cultural components.
In the United States, people are unhappy with democracy given that it used to be the case that median voters had their standard of living double every 25 years like clockwork- and that effectively ended in the 1980s. We’ve seen a slow in equality across almost all Western countries, stagnant wages and a growing disconnect between what people hoped to see in politics and what they ended up taking home, in economic pay or advancements or the sort of produce of the social contract which involves working hard and being a good citizen and having a good life where you’re taken care of.
There’s a cultural and social backlash to demographic change where people are really unhappy. A certain type of people are really unhappy with changing demographics through immigration and also the globalising aspect of society throughout the west.
And so, there’s this backlash moment where people who are unhappy are attacking the system.
The establishment did a very poor job over the last 20-25 years in taking those concerns seriously, which caused people to lash out and put their trust in people and parties that are destructive, but at least voiced their concerns.
Western policies contribute in democracy decline globally by setting really low standards for democracy, and also by providing support to authoritarian regimes. Today, we are also seeing the retreat of liberal forces on the global stage to the benefit of China and Russia.
The world map is fundamentally shaped by four forces, the US, the EU, Russia and China. Those are the only powers that have enough reach to actually make a difference. The US is turning inward under Trump, the EU is grappling with Brexit and its own problems in Eastern Europe. As a result, China is resurgent, and Russia is really aggressive. I see this trend accelerating because increasingly there’s going to be more scope for authoritarian superpowers to shape global events and that’s terrible news for opposition movements and democratic reformers just about everywhere.
Q: What has caused our democratic crisis?
[Professor Lawrence Lessig] There are three critical ways in which America has allowed its democracy to no longer be a representative democracy, and these have to change if we ever want to get anywhere close to a functioning democracy.
The core idea of our [American] representative democracy is that we should have a congress that is dependent on the people alone (as Madison described in ‘The Federalist Papers’). This idea has been corrupted by a system of campaign finance that requires members of congress to spend 30-70% of their time, raising money from the tiniest fraction of the ‘1%’ to fund their campaigns.
The absurd way we gerrymander districts in the House of Representatives also means that 89 million Americans have no effective representation, because they happen to be the minority in a district that is safely controlled by a majority party.
The radically different rules for getting access to the ballot makes it more difficult for some, and easier for others. This suppresses and prevents some people from participating equally.
Q: How is our democratic crisis impacting security?
[Guy Verhofstadt] All over the world we face increasing threats to our security, such as global terrorism, and many nations have experienced horrific events, such as the attacks in Paris, Brussels and London.
Populists say that by closing our borders we are safer. This response preys on peoples fear and seems like a simple solution. However, they are lying. Closing our borders will not make us safer. Just look at Khalid Masood, who was the attacker in the recent Westminster attacks, he was born in the United Kingdom. Closing borders would not have prevented that attack, or protect people.
The only way to protect Europe is to build strong and united defence. At the moment there are dozens of bilateral and regional military cooperation, but we need a European capacity in intelligence to fight terrorism and a European defence community to protect our borders. Europol should be able to do more and conduct real investigations. Create a European border and coastguard. Create a single European asylum and legal migration policy. Create a European army. These things would make Europe safer. Listening to populists and ‘quick fix’ solutions, will not.
With the election of Donald Trump, and his dislike of NATO, Europe needs to become independently capable of ensuring its own security, since we can no longer fully rely on the United States. We need to work together to stand stronger in the world. Build European capacities to tackle the problems instead of closing ourselves off and hoping that they go away.
Q: Do people understand how much of government happens behind the scenes?
[Michael Lewis]: People rarely realise how much of government happens behind the scenes until it’s gone or too late. Apart from the space program, NASA and the military, government departments rarely market themselves; it’s kinda’ opposite to Donald Trump who is unbelievably gifted at bragging about all sorts of things he’s not responsible for. Government on the other hand, is responsible for all sorts of things it can’t brag about- for example- there’s a part of the Department of Agriculture which is basically responsible for preventing rural America from looking like rural China or India. The head of this department will show up to a place with a cheque for- say- a million dollars to build a firehouse or something, but the local dignitaries will ask them to hide it! People are hostile to the idea of interacting with government, and there’s this strange inverse relationship of gratitude. People in rural America are wildly protected from government, much more so than urban America, yet they are far more receptive to Trump’s message than anyone else.
You see this play out when people think about the relationship between government and industry.
In American politics, the degree of regulatory capture that an industry enjoys is a function of a difference between the regular salary in the industry and that of the regulators. The financial industry has spent decades buying the regulators! The regulators and politicians themselves are consciously aware of the fact that when they finish being regulators, their next job will be to go work on Wall Street for 10x the salary. This has created a toxic regulatory environment and failed the people spectacularly.
It’s possible that the Trump lover in rural America is prepared to dismantle government (by voting for Trump) because they think that those people will go take from Wall Street, but in reality – the vast majority of government is pretty disconnected from Wall Street and corporate life.
Q: What is the role of government in managing our society’s tail risks?
[Michael Lewis]: It’s amazing how much tail-risk and remote-risk ends up being managed by government. Some of the most dramatic examples come from the nuclear industry where government departments ensure our weapons don’t explode when they shouldn’t, and make sure that vast swathes of the nation aren’t destroyed by nuclear pollution. Other examples include departments that constantly live with (and plan for) the likelihood of pandemics wiping out crops and people. More day to day risks are things like the opioid epidemic, and severe malnutrition for the bottom part of our economic pyramid.
These are the huge, diverse risks handled by departments as diverse as energy to weather. You may wonder why these risks end-up in government; and in truth it’s because it doesn’t pay to manage these risks because the benefits are very hard to capture, and extremely spread out. A lot of these problems are also very long term or require a lot of scientific progress; for example, fighting climate change.
The government is there to fill some of the bigger holes in the management of risks that face our society and our civilisation, and there are more risks than people could possibly imagine.
It is because there is little public understanding of these roles of government and because the consequences are unlikely or distant in the future that they are often forgotten. If the Department of Agriculture shut-down its scientific research budget, economic growth 30 years from now would be severely undermined.
So much of our current progress is because of investments made by the government generations ago; for example, the internet.
I grew up in a world where I was instinctively grateful for the people who had come before me; my parents, my grandparents, for the sacrifices they had made so my life could be better. We’re heading towards a world where young people are instinctively hostile to the generations that came before them because those generations screwed up so badly.
Q: How is our democratic crisis impacting the poorest, most marginalised and most at-need in our world?
[Guy Verhofstadt] I think one of the key problems we face when trying to help the poorest and most at need in our world is that the European Union is not acting quick enough or efficiently enough. One example is the refugee crisis. We should seek a genuine European solution, with a European border and coast guard to protect our external borders and border guards that make the distinction between real refugees and economic migrants. We need a common asylum policy in Europe with one set of rules for the whole union.
In terms of the problems being created for the poorest, most marginalised and at need as a result of our democratic crisis and the rise in nationalist and populist politics in Europe, it has created an atmosphere where hate crime has increased, for example after the Brexit vote in the UK, and where more isolationist and nationalistic rhetoric of ‘looking after our own first’, has led to conversations about cutting foreign aid spending are increasing. While life is difficult for many people in Europe, we have a moral duty to help those in more need, and we have the capability to do it.
We must always protect the most vulnerable and the most at need to our world, especially when we are able to do so.
Q: What are your views on the move to emotive politics?
[Robert Peston]: It’s concerning that we’ve moved away from an era of increasing tolerance and mutual understanding to an era where people are defining themselves again in respect of their differences. We are living in a time of rising hate, and this is both worrying and sad.
Social media has played an important role; we’re at a time where people can use algorithms to scrape data about all of us, targeting messages to us based on our preferences and what they know about us. It’s bad enough this happens in the commercial world, but it’s also happening in the political world- often in a way that regulators simply cannot see. The playing field in politics has become much less transparent, and much less level.
Q: What are your views on a shift to identity politics?
[Robert Peston]: The politics of the left and right aren’t dead, but it’s now overlaid with issues of national identity, regional identity and even more nuanced divisions around those who want to be close to the EU or as far away as possible. Across the West, we’ve seen a rise of nationalism- undermining the integrity of states (as we’ve seen in the UK and Spain).
Issues of identity tend to become sharper where people have a sense that the status-quo isn’t working for them; and undoubtedly, over the recent period of stagnation, particularly for those on lower incomes, the system has failed millions and they are looking for ways out of their predicament. This is dangerous; in an effort to find a greater sense of personal determination, people are turning to nationalist politics – but the truth is that global cooperation, not nationalism is what we need to solve our problems.
Q: What is the impact of authoritarian regimes?
[Dr. Brian Klaas] Authoritarian regimes catastrophic.
The end of history narrative that came after the cold fools us into thinking we’re marching towards liberal democracy, and that’s complacent. If you look through human history, democracy is the aberration, it is not the norm. It is the thing that is very difficult to build, and very unnatural.
For us to go on autopilot and assume that liberal values, liberal political systems will prevail is naïve.
It’s great to talk about agency of oppressed people and them having control over their own lives (which I believe in, obviously) but the deck is stacked in all these countries… it’s just hard to imagine opposition movements toppling dictators without outside help, without international pressure or international support stranding the authoritarians from doing their worst abuses.
My worry is that if the globe slips deeper into authoritarianism and the democratic gains of the post cold war world are erased, we’re going to have not only a return to proxy violence, but also much more state collapse- and given there’s an interconnected world, that’s something that everybody should care about.
State collapses cause refugee flows that spill over from conflict, international trade problems and of course economic decline. The world cannot afford to have all sorts of hot spots spiralling out of control, and I’m afraid that we’re marching with our eyes shut into the world. And people are not paying attention to it.
The ‘America First’ crowd really get things wrong when they say ‘put America first’. It doesn’t matter that people want to live in a world where America can literally do everything alone, that world is gone. The prosperity of any given country in the developed western world is contingent on the prosperity of a lot of other countries, and that means solving global challenges together – the trends are bleak 70 countries saw a decline in democracy last year.
Q: How can we encourage authoritarian regimes to give-up power?
[Dr. Brian Klaas] Authoritarian despots have two strong incentives to stay in power. One is the allure of wealth, which is generated by their presiding over corrupt governments… if they’re in power they will become rich and that’s a very strong incentive.
The stick to that carrot is that losing power is extremely dangerous. So, in my research I’ve shown that a sizeable percentage of African leaders who lose power are jailed and killed, and that focuses the mind a bit. As a result, one of the things I advocate for is flexibility in the international system to try and force these people out of power through double bargaining occasionally. And this doesn’t mean looking the other way when it comes to mass atrocities and war crimes because I don’t think you can ever forgive those… but it does mean that in the cases where people are bad but not atrocious, it might be worth considering deals that would remove them from power but allow them to avoid being killed; giving them safe passage to an exile country.
Some nations are doomed to 4-5 decades of rule under an authoritarian leader, are thus are knocked off track for a very long time and a huge number of people suffer as a result. Putting somebody in exile… sort of holding your nose and agreeing to that rather than continuing 10 or 20 more years of destructive policies? I think it’s worth considering. Let me be clear. When possible, authoritarian leaders should be held accountable and prosecuted for the crimes they commit while in office. But there are some occasions when- to avoid state collapse- or a civil war- or a bloody coup, it can be worth considering having that flexibility in part of the discussion at least.
Q: How can developed western democracies fight back against emerging authoritarian leaders and regimes?
[Dr. Brian Klaas] The good news about the United States is that the democratic constraints that serve as the avenues for the democratic accountability of Trump are still intact.
The things that I’ve seen in the rest of the world are why I’m ringing the warning bell. In many countries the democratically elected leader enacted laws or policies such that the democratic avenues to hold them accountable didn’t exist anymore. Once that happens it’s really, really hard to get back to democracy. I don’t think that Trump is going to turn America into a dictatorship, but I do think he could erode democratic institutions and democratic norms to a serious degree. Those can be destroyed in a matter of months or years, but they would take decades to rebuild
Q: What has been the relationship of capitalism to democracy?
[Yanis Varoufakis] The democracies we now have are fully the result of the capitalist revolution, but there is a prey-predator relationship between capitalism and democracy.
In exactly the same way that a predator needs the prey, but at the same time decimates it. By decimating it, the population of prey decimates itself until eventually it starts growing again in numbers. The remaining predator population cannibalises them again, and the dog-eat-dog relationship between capitalism and democracy continues.
Capitalism loathes democracy and at the same time cannot survive without it. You have the financialisation of the economy combined with de-politicisation of monetary policy with so-called central bank independence, and constant attempts to confine democracy to a level where it doesn’t matter. When that happens? Capitalism destabilises and falls into a trap, and we see a surge of democratic activity….
Q: What are your views on the concentration of wealth and power in society?
[Professor Lawrence Lessig] The concentration of wealth, and a political system responsive to that wealth, has produced a democracy that doesn’t give the American people what they would want if they were fairly represented.
It’s also in the interest of companies to shrink the footprint of politics in their industries, and that’s a significant obstacle for governments and democracies to then solve the problems faced by society.
This broken version of democracy increases the levels of frustration and anger within the American people, which we see manifesting in the levels of support for people like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Q: What does it mean to live in a post-truth world?
[Matthew d’Ancona]: I should start off by defining post-truth– the Oxford dictionary definition (from 2016 when they made it the word of the year) is pretty good as a basis from which to proceed, ‘circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinions and appeals to emotion and personal beliefs’.
This is a world in which emotion trumps fact, and visceral feelings trump the old enlightenment process of validation and evidence evaluation, and the consequences are limitless.
The notion of post-truth went ‘mainstream’ because of Brexit, and Trump’s election- but we have been seeing a wider proliferation for some time conspiracy theories and pseudo-science. Once it becomes the case that truth is a currency rather than a fact, you can choose your reality from a buffet; life becomes absolved of its normal rules, and anything is possible; you find yourself in a very different epistemological situation.
The most common retort against post-truth is the question of whether, ‘this just a new name for an old phenomenon’ – Lying is as old as existence, as old as human communication. We have seen mendacity at work in politics since time began, since history began, and of course that’s true, and lying will long survive the post-truth era… but the point about post-truth as opposed to lying, is that post-truth is about us rather than them.
It’s not about lying, it’s about the way that we consume lies and it’s about our reception of lies and the value we assign to truth. And the troubling aspect of the post-truth era is that reality is no longer defined specifically through the old-fashioned prism of truth. It’s much more a case of emotional resonance than factual verification.
Now that’s a very simplistic way of putting a very complex reality, but it captures the heart of the problem. The question you ask now is not ‘is this true?’, but ‘does this feel true?’. And on that basis, anything is possible.
Brexit in particular was about defining identity, expressing grievance rather than a constitutional preference.
Similarly, Trump’s election was an extraordinary moment in the history of Western politics- you had in Clinton someone who had through her name an astonishing resume, a very precise grasp in policy, and a plan against a buffoon who is a bigot, a sexist, a former bankrupt, who really is better perceived I think as a show-business figure… a reality TV star rather than actually a financier. And according to the old rulebook it should have been a shoe in for Hilary, but it was no such thing. And the question you then have to ask is what did Trump do? And I think that what he did was he showed a talent for rage – a brutal empathy that he used to hoover up people’s grievances and point them in the direction of notional enemies (quite unjustly I might add). He would, as it were, swerve the turrets of the rhetorical machine gun towards immigrants, towards Muslims, towards women. You name it, really. What Trump was particularly good at was attributing blame. And that meant that he always had an enemy to blame- and of course that’s a very powerful tool when you are running as popular a campaign as he did, and indeed as president he is constantly trying to identify the person who is to blame for other people’s misfortunes.
The populist is not trying to create a policy palette from which to choose and to make life better. They’re trying to demonstrate that it’s a consequence of the following people, groups, categories, citizen or non-citizen, that they are going to this particular experience.
Trump’s main enemy actually since he became president has been the media… he is a media president who has cast himself as a spokesman of the social media era, at war with the old liberal establishment, the mainstream media. And he’s really the first politician I think, who has recognised social media professionally. And that’s a very important part of the whole story.
Q: How are the media contributing to rise of populism and right-wing politics?
[Alastair Campbell] During my time at Number 10, I used to publish this thing called ‘Mailwatch,’ which was- in essence- a rebuttal to the constant stream of lies this paper put out. People thought I was a bit mad to do this, and in the end Tony Blair said it perhaps wasn’t the way we should be going, so I stopped.
Whenever you listen to a review of the papers on the BBC, you’ll always hear them say ‘the left-leaning Daily Mail,’ the ‘Labour supporting Daily Mail,’ they’ll never tell the truth and say, ‘the far-right Daily Mail!’
It’s important to also note that our politicians are simply not calling-out the media enough. To be fair to Trump, even though he is the pinnacle of fake-news and post-truth politics, he at least had the guts to call out the media.
I have a very clear stance on publications like the Daily Mail. I don’t have it in the house, I never talk to them, I talk about it publically being a lie-machine as often as I can. Unless the whole of politics does it however, it can become accepted as the voice of England- and that’s dangerous.
[Prof. A. C. Grayling] We have seen the enormous growth of news, opinion and fake-news through digital media. Nowadays, it’s not necessary to purchase a newspaper, magazine or television channel to get access to information or- indeed- ‘information.’
The newspapers and other mainstream news media- but particularly the tabloids such as the Daily Mail, Daily Express and FOX News have fallen-in to the post-fact world. We’ve seen a dissemination of ideas from social-science, economics and psychology of the Daniel Kahneman kind… The great majority of people will make decisions based on gut-instinct and first impressions without checking their facts. The first thing most people hear will anchor their opinions and position in regards a situation. If you can shout an untruth or half-truth loudly enough, lots of people will accept it, won’t check-up on it, and won’t wait around to hear if it is retracted later on.
The BBC faced this very problem during the campaign leading-up to the June 23 referendum. The BBC was being played… they were receiving press releases very late at night containing outrageous statements which they reported- they had to. When they went to fact-check or challenge these statements some hours later, far fewer people heard the retraction than the original report. You may recall the phenomenon of the ‘spin doctor,’ these individuals took facts- actual information- and spun it to put the face they wanted in front of consumers. Spin doctoring is over, because facts are over. Now you can put out an outrageous lie and you can retract it a couple of hours later, knowing it will have already done the work you wanted it to do. This is what happened with the leave-campaign for BREXIT and with the Trump campaign. The only silver lining is that people have very quickly realised they are being tricked…
Q: What is the role of the media [social media] in our political outcomes?
[Guy Verhofstadt] Social media is an extremely good way of spreading your message and reaching out to people, and is also very good for increasing political participation. However, alongside the good points there are some challenges with it.
Fake news is one of the main problems. Fake news is not a new phenomenon, but it has become more widespread with the advent, and increase in the use of social media. Many people now use social media platforms to get their news, and it is sometimes difficult to tell what is fake news and what is real. This became particularly evident during the final months of the 2016 Presidential election. This is a key issue that we need to tackle.
We should not censor information, but as open, pro-EU politicians we must spread our message. We are, of course, already doing this and creating debate which politicians can participate in. There are new pro-European centrist movements which have sprung up across Europe which do not peddle lies, or owe their success to Russian-sponsored propaganda bots or social media trolls. We must continue to spread our message as far as we can.
Q: What are your views on Donald Trump’s relationship with social media?
[Ted Lieu]: I don’t have a problem with the President or any elected official using social media.
The problem with Donald Trump is not his use of social media, it’s Donald Trump the person.
His tweets are a reflection of what he’s thinking, and some of that is horrifying to a lot of people. It’s not as if Twitter or Facebook are coming up with this content themselves, it’s coming from the mind of the President of the United States. And a lot of it is bigoted, it’s racist, it’s dark. It is also false. What social media is showing us is a window into President Trump’s mind, and for many people it is very shocking.
Q: What are your views on Donald Trump’s relationship with facts?
[Ted Lieu]: It’s very clear to the majority of American people that the President lies on a routine basis, and that’s been very disturbing. It has lowered the grandeur of the office of the President. I am less proud of that office, because he’s in it. And I hope he changes.
I remember thinking Donald Trump was capable of being a better president. I remember watching his address to congress earlier this year- it was a good address, and a good speech. And I remember afterwards, walking out of the house floor, and I told my democratic colleagues, ‘I think he just made our jobs harder next November in terms of the elections, but I feel better as an American’. I want to see him revert back to that. I want him to make us proud, I don’t want to see crazy tweets from him.
I did not get elected to Congress to resist the President of the United States, I came to this role to get things done, and do good for America. I don’t want to be in this position, but until he changes, I’m going to resist him.
Q: Why are conspiracy theories facing a resurgence?
[Matthew d’Ancona]: Conspiracy theories provide a sense of order, usually a sense of malevolent order because they involve identifying some form of social dysfunction which has led to one grievance or another.
If you take the flat-Earther movement for example, what they’re doing is taking issue with a scientific establishment. If you look at the people who claim the world is run by what are called ‘globalists’ – the illuminati, this is the most extreme form of the idea that our lives are actually being controlled by a shadowy global super elite. And then you graft onto that whatever you like. In anti-Semitic narrative it would be Jewish people. In the case of the illuminati, David Ike narrative is lizards. In Alex Jones, it depends, but the very sort of consistent factor is globalism. But I think that the key thing is this idea of order. Conspiracy theories appeal to people who feel they have no control, and who feel their lives are operating on a kind of capricious, arbitrary and meaningless basis. The conspiracy theory ascribes meaning to their lives, and presents them with a confected enemy to hate.
A consistent theme through the post-truth era, is the idea of control. What is certainly true is at this particular moment of history, the forces that are at work in the world are very transparently global and implacable. They are the forces of globalisation, they are the forces of the greatest technological revolution perhaps of all time… there is unprecedented population mobility, there is climate change, there is fundamentalist terrorism, alt-right and of the Islamist variety. And these are big, huge, thunderous horses rolling through people’s lives
It makes sense that people feel they have no control, and the old-fashioned model of nation states interacting with free markets is no longer persuasive to a lot of people, and so conspiracy theories appeal because they offer an alternative means of understanding what’s going on. And crucially someone to hate, which is the very important to all populisms, and this one is no different.
This brand, 21st century brand of populism is no different in that regard.
Q: How has technology impacted our democracies?
[Gen Michael Hayden]: Technology has simultaneously democratised and coarsened dialogue. We’ve gone from a world where- for better or worse- most news was curated, to a world where almost no news is curated, and people have not yet been given the habits, tools, attitudes and precautions to curate on their own. People are habituated into giving confidence to the media based on this curation, and so our cultural norms are well-behind what technology is throwing at us.
Q: How is digital media used to subvert democracy?
[Gen Michael Hayden]: Technology has also allowed nations and organisations to weaponise our media and we do not have the attitudes and tools to be adequately skeptical, our conversation is driven into very dark corners.
Let me be clear, this is not a cyber problem, it’s an information problem – it’s a feature. The real question should be around what we have created…. And answer is this…. We’ve created a social media space where algorithms drive the business model towards multiple clicks user retention. They do this by feeding us more of what we like to see or hear, and thus they strengthen the echo chambers which we’ve already created for ourselves.
Q: How is technology shaping post-truth and conspiracy narratives?
[Matthew d’Ancona]: We have seen a colossal breakdown of trust in institutions and expertise at the same time as we’ve experienced the digital revolution.
The internet has been around for a while and the World Wide Web has been around for a while too, but it was only in 2004, when broadband became a very commonplace phenomenon and people start using it, in those days people talked about Web 2.0. In other words, the web ceased to be a means of getting access to information alone, and became a form of, an interactive technology par excellence.
2004 was also the year in which Facebook comes about, and that really transformed everything. If you want to see how much the world has changed, just get a list of things that are critical now, that weren’t around 10 year ago; WhatsApp, Uber, Twitter, the list is huge.
Platforms that are now dominating so many spheres of our existence, and in terms of how we develop epistemologically, how we develop as citizens, the algorithms that drive these platforms give us what we want and nothing else. Using these algorithms to find recommendations on Amazon for books you might like is a victimless crime (if it is a crime) but when it’s about the kind of, information that’s fed into your news feed, and the things towards which you are drawn, it creates, it drives people into echo chambers and safe spaces- and it’s totally incompatible with the old-fashioned idea at the core of pluralism which is the marketplace of ideas… the idea that you’re constantly being exposed to ideas which force you to question your prejudices.
What the web does now, or rather strictly speaking social media does, is by design, butcher us and bolster and reinforce what we already think. These platforms encourage you to spend more virtual time with people who think like you. So far from the original expectation of the web, that it would be a pluralising democratising force, it has created clusters and cyber-herds, and this is extremely dangerous for the notion of citizenship, especially in pluralist societies, because at precisely the moment in history when everyone should be talking to each other and finding common spaces in which to negotiate their differences and interact as mutually respected citizens, we’re being driven back to a kind of primitive tribalism.
The leave campaign and Trump intuited this retreat to tribalism. They knew that there was a tribal dimension to all this, that this technology could be used to encourage the politics of grievance, the politics of cluster, and it worked very well. And what’s interesting is that it’s still working, because the tests have changed. The biggest problem in politics now is the politics of allegiance rather than outcome. You define yourself not in terms of the kind of life you want to live, but the kind of person you think you are and the kind of people you want to surround yourself with. A kind of monoculturalism is creeping into politics I think, and it’s very dangerous.
It’s unbelievably dishonest, and very irresponsible.
Q: What can we do about our post-truth world?
[Matthew d’Ancona] We first have to recognise the sheer scale of the problem.
Some people on the liberal side of the house think that there’s a kind of pendulum in this, that at the moment we’re going through a cascade of emotionalism that has its roots in the crash of ‘08/09, and that that will pass, and we will revert to a kind of 21st century version of the enlightenment in which everything will be well. I just don’t believe that, I don’t believe there is a pendulum in history. I think history is successive and indeterminate rather than predictively dialectical. And I don’t agree with the idea that we should all calm down and wait for things to right themselves, because I don’t think there’s any reason to assume that they will.
We are seeing people create initiatives at an individual and community level like the cottage industry of fact-checking organisations (most of them charitable) who help to keep the media honest. Fact checking has really had a big impact upon everyday journalism in the sense that you now have groups all over the world that are monitoring in real time what’s being said and claimed, and I think that’s a wholly positive process.
I think that an incredibly important element in all this, probably my top element is digital literacy. It is absolutely essential that children are taught digital literacy from the age of 5- they need to be taught to be citizen editors as well as citizen journalists. They should be taught how to read the digital sources in the way that they are taught to read textual sources, and not to assume that what they are looking at on their phones or tablets is automatically true. As much as anything, this is a question of teaching the values of conceptual analysis, criticism and matching – with some sort of kitemarking or validation system to indicate that ‘this source is particularly reliable’.
At the moment it’s very hard to go to a site and to know what its value is. If you look at the way the search engines work, they don’t work on the basis of voracity. So if you ask the question of ‘is the holocaust true’?, you will get back a lot of holo-hoax atrocity sites. Really terrible. And this is a serious issue. We have to be very aware that if you take the case of the holocaust, the parable of the whole thing, the survivors are dying out, the physical evidence will fade, and the principle sources in terms of information will very quickly be wholly digital, not just primarily digital. Therefore it’s of the utmost importance on the specific question of the holocaust and indeed all genocides and so on. This is not something to think about in 5 year’s time, it’s a matter of pressing urgency. I urge the MP’s who are looking into this to consider levying a temporary tax on every handset that’s sold or distributed in this country, to teach and spend on digital literacy teaching. Because I think that it’s absolutely first rank political and civic problem.
Then you move into the whole question of regulating the tech giants. They are clearly not just platforms as they claim, they may not be publishers in the way that Harper Collins is a publisher, so therefore it seems to me likely that there will have to be a new jurisprudence for tech giants where there’ll be a third category invented which ascribes them some accountability for the content that they publish without assuming that they are precisely the same as a traditional publisher. And the best possible way of this happening would be for the big companies to assist national governments in drawing up this kind of legislation. There are two outcomes to this really. There’s one that is ugly and there’s one that isn’t. The ugly one is a series of battles which are fought by national governments under increasing pressure from their populations to do something about this, and you could end up, I’ve always said the worst possible outcome in this would be a ministry of truth. Some sort of state supervisory force that was tasked with defining truth and falsities. Absolutely, the politicisation of truth is the absolute worst idea of the lot. Right. But to avoid that we need the tech giants to understand that they have to come to the table and they have to recognise that the initial party they’ve had, in between the Wild West, I mean they’ve had it exactly as they want it. There’s been almost no constraints on them at all, and I think that era has passed. And it will still be possible for them to be hugely powerful forces in the world and make huge profits, but still be accountable.
In an age where emotional resonance is so important, how do you convey the truth How do you convey facts? I think the remain campaign demonstrated that facts alone are not enough. Simply bombarding people with statistics is not going to shake them out of their prejudices. There is a very interesting debate to be had, which interestingly I think is going on more intelligently in the world of branding and marketing than in the world of politics. Marketing experts are learning how to communicate facts in a way that recognises emotional as well as rational imperatives.
Obviously, you don’t want to sacrifice truth to theatricality, but you have to accept that rapid rebuttal of simply saying ‘this fact is wrong’ is not enough anymore. And I think that part of it actually, is treating citizens like adults rather than children. I think there’s been a tremendous infantilization of the citizenry in the last 20-30 years. Imagine if you will, if you look at the great rhetoric of the past, if you look at Abraham Lincoln or Kennedy or Harvey Milk or Martin Luther King, one thing they always have in common is the call for maturity, a call for people to act like adults. And that’s gone. Can you imagine a politician now trying to get the line ‘ask not what your country can do for you’ into his or her speech? It would be blue pencilled by the spin doctors in the first draft. Because it implies responsibility. And implies that citizens, a demand made on citizens as opposed to a retail offer.
Q: How does our engagement with media and politics embolden the post-truth narrative?
[Matthew d’Ancona] The amount of time people spend on a news story is frighteningly brief, the power of the headline is greater than ever.
The right encouraged people to think of themselves wholly as consumers, but really, society is essentially the market plus a little bit of government. And the left encouraged people to think of themselves entirely as beneficiaries of state-ism, that the government is there to do everything. In both respects, you have a view that instead of being fully developed citizens people are now consumers and beneficiaries, and that’s a very dangerous path. At the heart of this philosophically there is a new idea of citizenship for the digital era. This is not going to be straight-forward, because economics and culture in the digital era are not going to be what they were in the enlightenment or the ancient times, during the 1832 great reform act, or the time of the Blitz, or even the time of Thatcherism or Blairism, it’s going to be very different.
People have to remember that there is a thread that links those headlines to your life. You are not a passive recipient, you are actually part of that story.
If there is to be a politics that gets us out of the post-truth era it’s going to have to be bold enough to confront difficult realities. The problem is that the realities of the complex pluralist 21st century society are very complicated.
Q: How can we balance security and privacy in the social media era?
[Gen Michael Hayden]: People in Western democracies have the instinct to protect their privacy from governments who- traditionally- were the main threat to their privacy. That’s no longer true… Social media sites know your preferences, know where you’ve visited, know what kind of movies you like, what your interests are, what your political leanings are, who your family and friends are, and know exactly what to do in order to keep your interest. We have allowed social media sites to know far more about us than governments ever have and I get why; Google can’t put you in jail, but a government can- but they (Google) have infinitely more knowledge about you than a government ever will, and they’re using that knowledge to make money.
It’s essential we review our laws as they relate to the digital world; even with my background, I cannot possibly read all those user agreements!
Our constitution guarantees us against unreasonable search and seizure not all search and seizure, the key word is unreasonable. How reasonable something seems is a function of circumstances. What’s unreasonable on September 10th suddenly becomes reasonable on September 12th when everything changes….
The practical, day to day impact of privacy and security in your life has more to do with the decisions made by Mark Zuckerberg than American Congress.
The relationship government has to security and cryptography may surprise you. In America, after the San Bernadino attack, Tim Cook (Apple CEO) said he would not allow Apple to engineer a back-door into their phones. A lot of security guys (myself included) were on the side of Apple, and not for commercial reasons… We sided with Apple because whilst Comey was asking legitimate law enforcement questions from a genuine law enforcement need, what he was asking Apple to do would harm the global level of security for iPhones- and given the dangers posed to all of us from the cyber theatre; we just didn’t think the legitimate law enforcement needs of the FBI as related to San Bernadino outweighed the legitimate security needs of the nation.
People say, ‘oh my god, you’re giving a safe space to criminals and terrorists….’ – but let me get this right…. You’re wanting legislation against technological progress? – if we do that, all we will do is drive it offshore, and then it will be harder and harder for us to carry out what we need to for security.
Agencies need to make peace with the fact that it’s going to be harder and harder to recover the content of communications, and realise that there’s still an awful lot out there in every human being’s digital exhaust that would allow for legitimate intelligence or law enforcement activity such that you can create actionable information.
The pace with which people have been quite happy to shove all their information into the digital domain should be the exception not the norm. In 1999 I became the director of NSA and we knew what was going on, we realised that if we invested in digital- we would be building the gold standard in surveillance… and you know what? It was.
Q: How can our digital skills impact our relationship with the new media world?
[Gen Michael Hayden]: We have to make sure social media and all the issues around it are part of our educational program. We need to build into our education the cultural, social and intellectual habits we need to protect ourselves on the web, and be more discerning.
It’s a rough analogy, but I’ve lived in countries with first generation drivers and let me tell you- it’s dangerous. I was in Korea in ‘81/82, and my god….. I went back in ‘97/98 and it was a bit better… people learned… and one hopes that we will learn as we go forward without killing that which got us here in the first place, ideas and the free flow of information.
The companies who run these platforms have a role too. Twitter can (today) adapt content based on what humans are looking at versus machines, and they can do this to a degree of certainty which most of us would find acceptable. In a similar vein, sites like Rotten Tomatoes allow humans to score and rate movies. Why we cannot have these kind of technologies and human measures to score, appraise and authenticate our content and news is crazy.
We need to bring human judgement back into the process; it might introduce more latency into the digital world, but that is a trade-off worth making.
We’ve had the coarsening, cheapening and poisoning of social and political dialogue through social media sites. I’m on Twitter and I go to my Twitter account and I learn an awful lot. I think I’m discerning in terms of what I use, but I’m very concerned about what these media sites have done to the concept of truth.
We’re moving away from provable data and real information to things that are trending, and that’s scary.
We’ve only been in this digital domain for 30 years, and it will still take time for our cultures to catch-up and work their way through.
Q: Can countries integrate economically while retaining their identity?
[Guy Verhofstadt] Personally, I think that a lot of people have a European identity! In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, I have received thousands of letters and emails from UK citizens who feel as if part of their identity has been stolen from them. For them, their country integrated economically, but also in a much more profound way – they felt, and many still feel, European. They feel European because of the values we share. Therefore, this idea that your identity can only be to your country is false. People gain a sense of identity by feeling like they belong and that the people around them have similar ideas of the world they want to see.
During the UK EU Referendum, there was a lot of emotive talk about how taking back their identity and sovereignty – “taking back control”, and even “putting the ‘great’ back into Great Britain” – would improve the situation for people in the forgotten parts of the United Kingdom. This nationalistic rhetoric portrays the nation state as being best placed to deal with common challenges, but their argument fails the test of reason and ignores the nature of the trans-national threats we face. Climate change, international terrorism and the negative consequences of globalisation cannot be tackled by individual countries acting independently. If the European Union of today did not exist, we would have to create it.
There are many benefits to countries who integrate rather than split. One of the greatest delusions peddled by populist on both the left and the right is that turning inwards will empower countries. The reality is that in an interconnected world, no one European country can influence global trade rules. And make no mistake, if we abandon shaping the environment around us, others will. This is why internationalism is important. Far from diluting national influence and control, pooling sovereignty actually helps to leverage more control and influence on the world stage. A clear example of how countries who integrate and pool sovereignty has benefitted us is NATO. Populist who shout, “We want our country back” and “let’s take back control” are doing so as they give up power and influence in our globalised world.
[Glenn Greenwald] One of the most amazing and illuminating exchanges over the past couple of years was an incident in the House of Commons in the UK where George Galloway stood up and questioned Prime Minister, David Cameron about British policies in Syria, and the people with whom the UK has aligned itself. David Cameron’s response- in essence- was that he wasn’t surprised to hear that question because this particular member always found ways to ingratiate themselves with the world’s dictators.
If you look at the foreign policy of the UK, and specifically the allies of Cameron; you see these trips he makes, and the praise he heaps on people who are the worst dictators of the Arab world.
In each countries foreign policy, there is a very overt form of loving dictators whilst spewing the rhetoric of freedom. It’s more disguised and subtle at home, but it’s very much the same dynamic.
Professor Lawrence Lessig] American foreign policy is insane and self-destructive.
What’s so striking about being in America and seeing the revival of the Star Wars franchise is that most Americans don’t realise that we are the Death Star, that is our whole philosophy. American foreign policy is about building the biggest Death Star, and threatening the rest of the world into obedience.
Star Wars teaches the futility of that approach, and in the age of IEDs and bioterrorism, America must realise the futility of trying to be the ‘biggest bully.’ We need to recognise that the way one builds strength and security is to encourage respect for the values we advance by practicing the values we promote.
Americans have a long way to come to recognise the deep flaws that stain our foreign policy, but I’m hopeful we can build on them.
Q: Why are our global economies looking inwards and moving towards protectionism and isolationism?
[Yanis Varoufakis] It is in the nature of capital to globalise.
Capitalist globalisation creates new barriers for people and labour by commoditising the economy. Capitalism spreads, creating large-returns for itself that bolster inequality inside the jurisdictions where it spreads, and from where it spreads. The greater the surge of capital and of its returns, the nearer the next crisis is; and when the next crisis hits, it becomes clear to the large-majority of people that they haven’t benefitted from that surge at all- and that’s the political process of isolationism. The economy relies on isolationism to stabilise, until the next surge of capital arrives- and there we go again.
You cannot separate democratic and economic crises, and we’re seeing that in the United States right now. Americans have been told for 30 years that globalisation is good for them, but the vast majority haven’t felt it, they’re worse off today than they were 30 years ago, carrying more debt than 30 years ago, and are suffering massive dislocation and pain after the financial crisis of 07/08 in which millions had their dreams shattered. What followed that crisis was not a ‘V’ shaped recovery, but a very stagnant, flat recovery that allowed them to go back to work- but at humiliating wages, and no prospect of ever repaying their debts or their children’s.
The same disillusionment and stagnation with huge income and job inequality is also present in the United Kingdom, but there are peculiarities too. There is an interesting alliance between the aristocracy in the south of England that detests sharing power with the people, and the political realm. There is also an interesting wave of rejectionism of all things foreign. This isn’t exactly racism, although it has racist dimensions and elements. I have a degree of sympathy, without sympathising with it. When I lived in England in the late 70’s and early 80’s, I recall that the young-foreigners living there (like me) were very engaged in the local goings-on of society, in politics and so on. That was the Thatcher era, and all of us were engaged with the local struggles and political arguments. We were integrated in this sense, and although we had our own communities, we felt integrated with the community. Since London became financialised after the ‘big bang,’ and the ‘city’ rose to prominence, there has been a huge influx of non-English people coming to London to work, study and invest- pushing house prices through the roof. These individuals have no connection to the local struggles and concerns of the community… they might as well be in Australia or the planet Mars. London has become to resemble a shopping mall. You could be anywhere on Earth, and nobody cares who takes the rubbish out at night. The people behind the façade have become like the workers in a Potemkin village. Lots of work is happening behind the façade by locals and migrants, nobody looks at them, nobody cares about them. The people who consider themselves the custodians of London and the surrounding areas feel invisible and discarded. In my mind, that’s what explains UKIP. I don’t sympathise or condone racism of any sort, but it’s important to sympathise with and understand the social dislocation that creates the feeling of being a discarded soul. This could help us to understand the passion behind the ‘Brexit’ campaign.
Q: To what extent should internet access be a human right in today’s world?
[Jüri Ratas] In Estonia, access to internet as well as skills for internet use have spread so fast since 1990s that it has become a natural fact of life – people do expect to be able to connect wherever they are. And indeed, our successive governments have been working as if internet access were a human right – although legally it is not yet. It means that we have prioritised and even invested into building and upgrading telecom networks in the country, provided for internet use training and awareness programmes, etc. Current government is investing into fast-speed last mile connections again, for example.
Q: To what extent is the media influenced by corporate and government objectives?
[Noam Chomsky] There are cases where direct government and corporate interference takes place, but I don’t think that’s the major issue concerning corporate and government influence over the media. Using the United States as an example, the media are major corporations- so it’s not a question of corporate influence, they are corporations who are closely linked to government. There’s a constant flow of people from the corporate sector to government, the interactions are very close. The framework of selection of what to report, how to report it and so on is shaped overwhelmingly by the shared interests of elite sectors in the business world, government and so forth. In fact it’s not very different in the Universities, and you can see it day by day. Just take the no-fly zone in Libya. In Libya, the intervention- whether one approves of it or not- is being carried out by the three traditional imperial powers, the US, Britain and France. There is marginal participation by several other NATO countries, but the major countries are simply refusing to be involved, and many are just opposed to it. The BRICS for example, are opposed and Turkey doesn’t want to get involved and so on. Well the three, this imperial triumvirate, quite heavily in their propaganda discussed an Arab league request for a no-fly zone. The Arab league statement was rather tepid and was qualified shortly after but there was, in fact, a call for a no fly zone.
At the same time, the Arab league called for a no-fly zone over Gaza. In the United States that literally was not reported. While some small newspapers may have discussed it, there was no majors- no New York Times, Washington Post, none of the major media reported it.
In fact, in the entire Anglo-American press the only apparent story was in the Financial Times. Well, that’s a no-fly zone over Gaza.. which doesn’t fit US objectives and therefore it wasn’t news. At the same time, the no-fly zone over Libya did fit the objectives of the imperial triumvirate and so that was major news. And this is standard, it happens all the time.
One of the very striking examples which tells you something about the general intellectual culture, had to do with Wiki Leaks. The exposure that received by far the most attention in terms of headlines and euphoric commentary was that the Arabs support US policy on Iran, hostility towards Iran. That was all over the place and was quite interesting because what it was, in fact, referring to was Arab dictators. What about Arab public opinion? Well.. that was also studied and was studied by the most prestigious US polling institutions and released by prestigious institutions like Brookings. These studies are not reported! In the United States, literally not reported- I believe there was one report in England. These reports rank Egypt as the most important country in the region, and within Egypt over ninety percent of the population regard the United States as the most major threat. Eighty percent think the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons. Only a small number, maybe ten percent, regard Iran as a threat. Those figures are rather similar throughout the region. But, for policy makers that doesn’t matter- as long as the dictators support us? what else matters.
This takes us back to our first question looking at the attitude towards democracy. The attitude is that the population doesn’t matter, as long as it’s under control; and you can see that. Incidentally, this is quite an old issue. If we had serious reporting on these issues, it would not only report Arab public opinion, but would report that the policy of ignoring Arab public opinion has been around for some time. Back in the 1950’s President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called the ‘campaign of hatred‘ in the Arab world; not by governments, but by people. In the same year, the national security council released a study concluding that there is a perception among the people of the Arab world that the United States supports harsh and brutal dictatorships, blocks democracy and development, and we do so because we want to maintain control over their energy supplies. It went onto conclude that the perception (of foreign policy objectives) is more or less accurate, and as long as the dictators support us- then who cares that there’s a campaign of hatred? as long as we can control the population… That has remained a consistent policy, very dramatically so today- and as you can see by the reaction to these exposures and unreported crucial data- that’s become a generally accepted attitude among educated sectors.
[Glenn Greenwald] One of the most significant trends in the past several decades of mass media has been the fact that media outlets have become large corporations themselves, functioning with the same dynamics that every other large corporation would that may sell arms, insurance policy and investment funds.
The finer attributes of large corporations; to be as uncontroversial as possible, to affirm orthodoxy as much as you possibly can to avoid upsetting those who wield power over your business… those are rational powers to adopt if you’re running a business, as they will maximise your profits. Unfortunately, that’s the same dynamic that drives corporate media outlets. It’s not just about maximising profits, but making sure that these corporations- that have so many other interests besides their media outlets- end up not suffering for them as a result of what their journalists are producing. This has produced a very pro-orthodoxy, pro-power posture in media outlets. Maybe that’s OK when you have a company selling insurance policies, but when you’re trying to engage in journalism? Nothing could be more harmful.
[Professor Lawrence Lessig] It’s not corruption from interested-party bias that’s causing problems with media, it’s their inability to focus or present sustained, informed reporting because of the incredible competition among media. There is a race to the bottom in what the media is presenting, perpetuated by the growth in technology and supported by the US first amendment.
Let me give you an example. In August 2015, US cable news simultaneously could not stop covering Donald Trump. There was a perpetual, near-constant feed of his activities on every single news station… these same news stations were whining about the fact that everybody was spending their time covering Donald Trump. It wasn’t because corporate media was forcing them to cover Donald Trump, it was the fact that Trump was a clown! He became entertainment and entertainment drives eyeballs which- ultimately- drives competitive advantage in media.
Q: How are governments impinging our civil liberties?
[Prof. A. C. Grayling] It’s right to say that our civil liberties are being eroded by governments, ostensibly under the guises of ‘the fight against terrorism,’ ‘the fight against organised crime,’ and ‘immigration control.’ All governments, if they could get rid of the inconvenience of protecting human rights and civil liberties, will move in that direction. We’re seeing this right now with discussion around repealing the Human Rights Act. We’ve seen it over the past couple of decades with a growth of anti-terrorism laws and the loss of the right to silence.
The majority of the population are not as conscious of this as it ought to be. The vast majority of the erosion of our civil liberties has taken place without people taking notice of it, or not noticing until it’s too late.
Q: What is the role of press freedom as it relates to the justice system and wider democracy?
[Glenn Greenwald] The theory of why the free press is protected in the US constitution is one that I believe in. The founders of the United States were mostly preoccupied with the notion of how you create a centralised government without imbuing it with the kinds of authoritarian power that they had waged wars to raise themselves from. The only answer they could come up with was to create a whole bunch of checks on those kinds of power, things that would push back and be adversarial to it, and be designed to work against it.
One of the instruments for providing some limits on political power was a free-press. This did not mean people who got a degree in journalism and went to work for a media corporation, but rather anyone citizen who does journalism! Any citizen with a printing press! This was protected on the grounds that it pushed back against power. If all media was going to do was just amplify the claims of people in power, you wouldn’t need to protect the free press; for one, it wouldn’t have any value, and for another it would never be targeted with repression.
The only way that free-press can be valuable is if it serves as an adversarial force against those who wield the greatest power. That’s what journalism is all about.
Q: What is the reality of the level of capability of government and state monitoring of our communications?
[Glenn Greenwald] The capabilities that governments have to monitor communication are genuinely limitless. Whenever people ask me what the most shocking or significant revelation was from the Snowden archive, I always say the same thing. It wasn’t any specific story, but rather all these documents that describe what their [government] aspirations were as a spying agency. The thing that shocked me, even though I have been working on surveillance for a long time was that they literally had a stated goal of converting the internet into a limitless realm of monitoring and surveillance. That’s a motto that appears over and over again in these documents, they literally want a scenario where there are no communications that take place electronically between human beings that are beyond their surveillance and monitoring reach. In essence, they want to eliminate privacy in the digital age.
There are steps that can be taken to protect your communications, but by and large there are no limits on what government surveillance systems are capable of monitoring.
Q: To what extent is government monitoring of communications necessary?
[Glenn Greenwald] The crucial difference is between targeted surveillance and mass surveillance. I don’t think there is anyone in this debate who believes that it is inherently illegitimate for the state to ever target someone for surveillance. The difference is between targeting individuals where it is believed that they are engaged in some form of wrong-doing versus indiscriminately putting entire populations of hundreds of millions of people under a surveillance microscope despite any evidence of wrong-doing of any kind.
It’s because the US government and their allies are engaged in mass surveillance rather than targeted surveillance that there has been an Edward Snowden, and there has been a debate at all. If it were just them monitoring suspected members of Al Qaeda or people who are likely to engage in terrorist attacks, their would have been no whistleblowing or debate.
Q: What is the role of security and privacy in digital democracies?
[Jüri Ratas] In Estonia, we have been able to build up such a high level of digital government and society exactly because we consider cybersecurity and privacy protection to be a big part of it. For example, we already design our systems and services with privacy and security considerations in mind (privacy-by-design and security-by-design). That is why there is national digital ID, that is why citizens can check in online services how officials use their data, etc. So, as we see governments’ role to give a boost for digital societies to emerge and also lead by digital government works, in our view it is also then governments’ role to provide the right framework and solutions for security and privacy to be there. Who else could do it (for everyone), if not the governments? That is our role in our day and world.
Q: Can you balance the need for state security and privacy?
[Glenn Greenwald] It’s always difficult to find the exact perfect balance between security and privacy. It’s difficult to assess what the government needs to prove in order to target someone with the legitimate extent of surveillance- but you could certainly much more reasonably proximate what is a legitimate and reasonable balancing point, even if it’s imperfect.
The current surveillance posture of the US has no balance. They want to collect everything because they can; it’s the opposite of a balanced mind-set, and that’s what makes it so pernicious.
Q: How can digital technologies engage citizens in the process of democracy?
[Jüri Ratas] Digital tools offer great ways to bring governance closer to people and the other way around. This goes all the way to most important democratic and participation act, the voting. Estonia has offered a chance for people to vote online (for any voting) since 2005, to make democracy and having your say more accessible. In 2015 parliament elections, a third of votes came in over internet – votes we otherwise may not have received, as in busy times, less people are willing to go to physical stations to vote. So, digital solutions can help keep democratic processes alive indeed.
[Robert Peston]: Well I think we’ve got to think very hard about our education system. I worry that so many of the skills being taught under conditions of acute pressure in our schools are those that robots and artificial intelligence can do perfectly well. Education has to become much broader. It has to be about human skills, it has to be about creativity, it has to be about management, it has to be about caring. It has to be about all those things robots and AI can’t do or do well. So it also has to be about empathy, intuition. We have to rethink about how we teach in schools as much as what we teach in schools. In parts of Scandinavia they’re doing this sort of thing much better than we are at the moment in the UK, with our traditional hierarchy of teacher at the front of the classroom dispensing putative wisdom in a declamatory way.
But I reject Luddism. It would be wrong to reject technology on the basis that it’s job destroying, because ultimately that technology will be employed somewhere around the world and as a nation we will pay a price by falling behind and becoming less competitive.
We need to have a much more frank debate about the nature of work, and how we can make sure that people have the opportunities to live in a decent and fulfilling way. We have to think what we do with all that time we may find we have, as and when robots are replacing us. And we absolutely have to make sure that the owners of the robots share the rewards they make with the communities they are undermining through this technological revolution – which may require a fundamental redesign of the tax system.
We are at a very big moment in terms of our view about how you create a cohesive happy society. A universal basis income may be part of the answer, but only part. These challenges go to the heart of what we think of as the good society.
Q: How can nations improve services for citizens, and businesses through digital means?
[Jüri Ratas] Very simply and shortly – offering services digitally has to be the norm in our day and age. That is the main way how to make services accessible and convenient, how not to burden the citizens and businesses overly with red tape. In Estonia, digital services are used a lot as they save people and especially companies’ time and that means money. The fact that you can sign everything digitally and from a distance, do your taxes, set up and administer your company fully online – this makes it all easier, faster, more convenient. And these are just a few examples; we have digitised interactions with government in all policy fields and sectors for the same reason. Today, our services attract even global users as through Estonian e-Residency programme everyone in the world can have access to our digital space – it is especially lucrative for all entrepreneurs, who want to run location-free trusted business online (with little hassle and no middlemen).
Q: How can state resilience be protected in the digital world?
[Jüri Ratas] As Estonia relies on digital so much, we invest a lot into protecting our resilience against the risks. All the way from how we design our digital solutions to how we operate them, we try to take account of possible risks, devise proper ways to manage them. In addition, we have procedures and resources in place to be able to act swiftly in case incidents actually happen – so that we can find out, limit them, and restore operations fast enough.
Our defences have been battletested (the 2007 large-scale cyberattacks), and we know that we can keep ourselves secure in a digital world – but we just have to keep doing it and developing it to make sure it stays this way.
Q: How can digital democracies help to provide voice and representation of all viewpoints in a community?
[Jüri Ratas] Digital channels and tools offer many ways to be in touch more often and more widely with constituents, from social media to specially designed tools and channels like online petitions or participatory budgeting initiatives (like in city of Tartu in Estonia). So, I see that digital world greatly can enhance development in this regard.
Q: How has your nation managed the arguments against digital democracy?
[Jüri Ratas] By always directly and transparently addressing and managing the underlying risks and arguments. For example, privacy or security concerns do not mean that digitisation cannot be done – it has to be done in a way that mitigates these risks to acceptable level (some ways for it that are outlined before already). Ultimately, we see in Estonia from experience that there are many more arguments for digitisation than against – we see it from the actual benefits we have had from digitisation, that people know and appreciate, too.
Q: How could nations work better together if digital government was embraced?
[Jüri Ratas] We see the benefits the best in Europe. All countries are taking steps towards becoming more digital, which allows and actually requires us to take some steps now together as well. Otherwise we risk limiting the benefits of digitisation could bring, especially to Single Market. We need to allow data to move freely across borders (as a fifth freedom of EU), connect also governmental databases to make data flow instead of people with papers when they move to or go to do business in other countries. This way we encourage exchange, trade, integration. Or to put differently – we need to remove those digital non-integration bottlenecks that currently hindle the flows in Single Market. That is Estonian priority as the EU presidency in second half of 2017, and in our work even beyond.
Q: Has the Internet enabled our freedom of speech and democratic liberty?
[Glenn Greenwald] The Internet has been vital in rejuvenating the idea of free speech, the free press, and democratising political and media discourse. That’s long been the promise; as heralded by fans of the Internet, and I think it’s finally starting to come to fruition.
For one thing, in order to reach a large audience a decade ago- you had to work for a large media outlet such as the New York Times, NBC news or one of the big British newspapers- and you’d have to submit yourself to all of their editorial strictures and methods for doing journalism. Now? There are all kinds of people who have built very large readerships by starting a blog! That’s how I began journalism! Even now, there are people with thousands of followers they reach, even without having worked at a large media agency- that has really enabled people outside the corporate structure to have a serious influence on how we think about things.
[Professor Lawrence Lessig] The internet is simultaneously the best and worst of influences for society.
The internet gives people who are interested, much more access to information and fact checking and gives them access to many more ideas, comparisons and so forth which they would never have had access to before.
On the other-hand however, the internet encourages ‘snippet journalism,’ ‘tweet based journalism,’ it encourages the fiction-based politics that Donald Trump has demonstrated. Trump’s biggest outlet for the whole of his campaign has been twitter, and because of the architectural constraints of that platform? It’s been trivially easy for him to evade the truth without anyone being able to call him out on it.
We’re going to see a pretty important set of innovations around influence using the internet that will allow influence to be aggregated at a more intermediate level. This re-intermediation of influence is being facilitated by the internet, as sites begin to collect endorsers and supporters and give them a platform to discuss why they support or oppose a candidate. This will gradually weaken the effect of commercially driven media, and will be a powerful addition to the economy of influence in politics.
Q: What are the greatest threats that exist to our democratic freedom of expression?
[Glenn Greenwald] The existence of mass surveillance is- itself- a huge threat to the values the Internet enables. The history of communication and media technology shows that whenever something is created that threatens to change the concentration and distribution of power; that the people who wield power try to subvert it, and try to annexe it for their own use. This is exactly what Internet surveillance is doing. One of the pre-requisites to being able to speak freely and use the Internet to engage in activism is the idea that you can do so with privacy and anonymity. The idea that you can express ideas without feeling like you’re being judged for them is important.
Studies show that when human beings are being watched, they become much more conformist and their behavioural traits narrow significantly. There’s a huge tension between the open thought the Internet enables, and how mass surveillance creates self-censorship.
Q: What is the true nature of information subversion seen by governments and corporate institutions?
[Noam Chomsky] I should say that, by now, there are thousands of pages of detailed documentation on this topic. Without going too far afield, let’s look at the topics we just mentioned. Is it important for us to know that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken with the expectation that it would increase terror? was undertaken with the intention of ensuring US corporations have privileged access over Iraqi oil? and it would be a permanent US military base? I think it would have been important for the public to know that. I think it would be important for the public to know now that Arab public opinion is so hostile to western (specifically US) power- that it regards the US as a prime threat, and thinks the region would be better off if Iran had nuclear weapons. Is it important for people in the United States and Britain to know that? I would think so! We can go on with case after case. Is it important for Americans, for example, to know that if we had a healthcare system similar to other industrial societies the deficit would be erased and we wouldn’t have to go after teacher’s pensions and Medicare payments for the elderly and so forth? Yeah, I think that would be important to know. I think, in fact, that ought to be blaring headlines!
All this information can be found out if you do a research project- but it doesn’t even enter the public eye.
Q: What influence do large corporations exert in society?
[Glenn Greenwald] There is an artificial division when we talk about the government versus large corporations such as Google. Aside from the fact that they work together on all kinds of common-objectives and goals- such as the PRISM programme and so on.
In Western democracies, money plays a huge influence in political outcomes. In some ways, the government becomes a tool for those who wield the greatest economic power. It’s not as though there’s a separate thing called the Government, and this other thing called Google – but rather that they’ve become one. You have all this mass surveillance on the part of the government, but similarly Google, Facebook and a whole bunch of other corporations act the same way and carry it out.
Q: To what extent does a class-system still exist in western societies?
[Noam Chomsky] The business-classes are constantly fighting a bitter class war, and they are aware of it. If you read the business press they mourn about the hazard facing industrialists and the rising political power of the masses- and the need to fight the everlasting battle for the minds of men, and so forth… and they act on it! They are constantly carrying out major campaigns to ensure the concentration of power in the hands of the corporate sector will increase. In the last thirty years or so, there have been changes in the nature of the economy- shifting from capitalist to state-capitalist. A lot of the dynamism in an economy comes from the state; computers, the internet, the IT revolution and so on. The applications come from the private sector, but not the basic research and development. That has remained true, across the board. Over the past thirty years, there has been a significant change- a move towards “financialisation” of the economy. Financial institutions now have a far higher share of the profit in the economy than forty years ago. Another shift has been towards the outsourcing of production which, in effect, places working people throughout the world in competition- with obvious consequences. Well those changes have set in motion a vicious cycle in which wealth is more and more concentrated within an extremely small population. In the United States, the primary factor of inequality is the extreme concentration of wealth within a fraction of one percent of the population comprising CEO’s, hedge fund managers and so on. As that concentration of wealth increases, it carries with it a concentration of political power since wealth has an enormous effect on the political system- and the political power in turn leads to legislation, which enhances the concentration of wealth. Fiscal policies, deregulation, rules of corporate governance and so on. This cycle exists all through the world, but is very striking in the United States. Within the last generation, for one thing, we have seen repeated financial crises which simply didn’t occur in the fifties and sixties when new-deal regulations were still in place and the financial system was much more restricted. Increasing financial crises are not a problem for the big banks and investment firms because they can rely on the nanny state to bail them out. If we had a capitalist system, financial crises would be serious but they would be overcome simply by bankruptcy of the culprits, so Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup simply wouldn’t exist- they would have gone bankrupt a long time ago! But since we don’t have a capitalist system, they have been rescued by the taxpayer repeatedly. In fact, they are given what amounts to a government insurance policy called “too big to fail” and the credit-ranking agencies take that into account. When they determine the credit-level of Goldman Sachs, they take into account that if they partake in a lot of risky transactions, and hence make a lot of profit and the system collapses, there will be a bailout- that increases the firms credit-ranking and means that can get cheaper loans and so on. Meanwhile, for the general population of the past generation or so- for the overwhelming majority, incomes have pretty much stagnated while working hours have increased and benefits have declined leaving a very angry, frustrated and confused population that is pretty much divorced from political decisions. Decisions which are extremely in the hands of an extremely narrow concentration of power- and the media go along with it, as they are essentially part of the system. There is some sniping around the periphery, this is a free society after all- but the overwhelming thrust tends to support the system. These are very anti-democratic tendencies, and also quite dangerous.
Q: What is your view on the ‘global-war-on-terror’?
[Noam Chomsky] One problem is that it doesn’t exist. You don’t fight a war on terror by carrying out actions which you anticipate will increase terror. The invasion of Iraq, again, was undertaken with the expectation that it would increase terror- and in fact it did. That is not a war on terror. There shouldn’t be a war on terror, but rather an effort to undercut terror. The ways to do this are well-understood. Britain is a perfectly good example. Take, for example, IRA terror which was pretty serious! As long as Britain responded using violence, that increased and escalated the cycle of terror. Finally- partly through United States influence, and partly from internal pressure- they responded by paying some attention to the legitimate grievances that existed in the background of the terrorist actions. Well, that led to a decline in terror. By now, Northern Ireland- while not utopia- is certainly not how it was even fifteen years ago. That’s the way you deal with terror! Look at its roots, sources and do something about them.
[Glenn Greenwald] The War on Terror has spiralled so far out of control, so far beyond what it claims to be; from the question from what even is terrorism and who is actually doing it, to the way that there’s an enormous gap between the policies that are justifying the means versus the reality.
When I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago, I was reporting about mass surveillance in the run-up to that country’s elections and at first the government denied it engaged in mass surveillance even though documents proved it did; and of course they resorted to claims of ISIS and all these other terrorist groups that they had to keep people safe from. This is New Zealand! A country with a small population, at the very bottom of the Pacific Ocean!
The spectre of fear mongering has become so potent, that all politicians have to do is utter the words and citizenry capitulates and acquiesces to whatever they want. The War on Terror has become a justifying mantra for Western Governments to do whatever they want.
Q: Why do we have stagnation?
[Yanis Varoufakis] When you don’t have investment into innovation, and industries that actually make stuff – you lose a sense of materiality, and the whole economy becomes footloose – and turns into one giant bank. The economy loses the hands-on feel of a place where people make things, and can identify with them. This is exactly what happened when the decision was made to de-industrialise Britain.
The British bourgeoisie decided a long time ago, not to be bourgeoisie anymore.
Q: How can communities create their own alternatives to capitalist democracies?
[Yanis Varoufakis] Working class people have been trying to create their own alternatives to the status-quo for a long time. Just look at the mutual societies, the cooperative movements and so forth. They respond to a lack of opportunity by creating their own little utopias and quasi-utopias. Youngsters get together and create cooperative start-ups, communities are running abandoned minds, and there is a great deal of solidarity in our communities.
These utopic pockets face problems. There are a lack of resources, and a huge lack of networks between them – and so they don’t have the financial and human resource to scale. They may also become too successful, in which case they become cannibalised by capitalist enterprises. When mutual societies become rich, they get bombarded by offers for buy-outs. The members of the collective get bribed in order to turn into shareholders!
Local efforts are crucial, but we need to embed them in an overarching, progressive political movement otherwise they will be lost.
We need to also look at innovation in how our economy works, for example a system where you take your human capital with you – so your contribution and value are portable between organisations. Think about the stock-exchange, they impose rules on members and can arrive at spontaneous order, or can be ordered through government rules. We need to create a combination of evolutionary and political systems that empower the future economy to work for citizens.
Q: What are the consequences of government not being able to attract talent?
[Michael Lewis]: The flipside of Wall Street having too much claim on talent is the government finds an inability to attract it. There are 5 times more people over the age of 60 than under 30 in the government workforce versus private enterprise- why? There’s no upside. If you do something great, nobody celebrates with you – but if you do something bad? The whole world comes bowling after you. Why would any self-interested person do it?
Even the systems people have to use are a mess. The US Government has spent $90 billion on capitalised technology infrastructure, $70 billion of which goes on maintaining ancient legacy systems. We are seeing the slow, painful death of the public sector- it needs to rebalance and renew itself.
Q: Do we have a crisis of political leadership?
[Alastair Campbell] The other day, I went to see a play called ‘This House’ which was about the Labour Whip’s Office in 1974. It sounds like an odd-subject for a play, but it was very good. There were so many big characters back-then, not just government ministers- but even people in the background.
If Angela Merkel wasn’t in Europe at the moment, I’d be terrified. There’s nobody else with the leadership skills and values we need.
Politics has taken on so many negative connotations that people have become hostile to it. Partly that is the fault of politics, and let’s be honest- the MP’s expenses issue didn’t help… and issues like Iraq didn’t help either… but unless people choose to get involved in politics and campaign, you will inevitably have a very narrow gene pool of individuals in political leadership.
There are media who cover politics very well, but the vast majority is total sh** and extremely hostile and negative. You can’t change that easily. We had an opportunity with the Leveson Enquiry- not just to get the regulations right, but also to change culture. That never happened because Cameron ran away from it.
We teach our children that sport is good for them and that’s why our schools teach PE and encourage exercise. We teach our children that fruit and veg are good for them, and encourage them to eat more of those things. From primary school we should teach our kids, right through the school system, that politics is a really important part of their lives and that being involved in their community, and making decisions about the community matters. We teach them who the Kings and Queens were, but we never teach them about citizenship, their area, and their community and how decisions are made about their lives.
I think we should have compulsory voting for local and national elections.
As it stands, everyone thinks they should have a say but they don’t get out and vote! 2 million people sign a petition for something to happen- which never does, but that’s not engagement, that’s signing a petition!
America is an interesting example. The campaigns for the 2016 elections were the most highly polarised, highly covered and intense of our lifetimes but even then, 50% of the population didn’t vote! These are the same people who will put their hands up and argue they don’t get a say!
[Guy Verhofstadt] The political leadership that we need at the moment must come from liberal democratic parties. Politics in Europe is now between those who fight for open societies and those who want closed societies. To tackle this move towards more closed, protectionist societies, liberal democratic parties must unite and lead this battle. This task falls to us because we are internationalist, not protectionist; and we believe in fighting for societies where everyone is treated with respect and everyone is listened to, rather than the divisive “us versus them” rhetoric deployed by many populists’ parties. European leaders have to counter this rhetoric by offering an alternative vision of hope.
We can see this happening, for example in Poland and in Spain, where people are seeking out an alternative. The pro-EU marches, where thousands and thousands of people marched on the streets to show their support for the EU. These are signs that people want change, and it is our job as politicians to harness that energy and provide the alternative vision. This is what we, as liberals, are doing.
Q: How has Donald Trump impacted the stability and perception of the United States?
[Ted Lieu]: Donald Trump has made America weaker.
I believe his rhetoric has caused an increase in hate crimes; I believe you can trace the increasing number of hate crimes to speeches he has made and to videos he has retweeted that enable or even incite hatred against other human beings based either on religion or race or immigrant status.
Donald Trump made America weaker abroad by appointing a secretary of state who has decimated the state department, not filled multiple open positions, cratered the morale of state department employees.
He has weakened America by hating what was not a perfect, but a manageable healthcare system, and sabotaged it. People’s healthcare premiums are going to rise because he is intentionally trying to make the affordable care act fail. That is not something that any US Official should try to do, and certainly not the President of the United States. He should be governing America for all Americans.
Q: What can we do to resist Trump?
[Ted Lieu]: People don’t understand how much power they have.
I remember being really sad from election night until the evening of January 20th. Then I remember waking up on January 21st and seeing those amazing Women’s Marches across America. And I thought, wow, that is the country that I know. And that changed everything. And when I saw that, I thought first of all that in 2 years the make-up congress is going to change. But I also concluded that the overall majority of Americans are not buying what the president is selling. And that holds true today. Right now, his approval rating is just 34%, that is near a historical low.
Polls are showing that most Americans do not agree with his policies of what he’s saying. And this is even before the news broke today of Michael Flynn’s guilty plea to co-operating with the special council.
If you look at the recent elections in Virginia, Maryland, Georgia and Washington State that happened a few weeks ago, you saw a surge in younger voters. You saw a surge in voters of colour, and you saw a lot of people getting elected that were younger, women and that were minorities. That is a good sign.
I do believe in a law of physics that I’m quite fond of that I believe also applies in politics; for every action there is an equal opposite reaction. I think you’re now seeing the reaction to Donald Trump.
I think that Abraham Lincoln also got it right when he said public sentiment is everything. Without it, nothing can succeed, and with it, nothing can fail. So even though republicans control the White House and all of congress, you still had Sean Spicer resign, Michael Flynn resign, Jeff Sessions recuse himself, Steve Bannon resign, the list goes on and on. That happened because of public pressure; it was because of people across America speaking out. That continues to happen, and I think it’s good for people to know their own power, just showing up at rallies and marches, sends a very strong signal. Or writing letters to the editor, talking to your neighbours and co-workers. All that is extremely helpful.
Q: What are your views on globalisation and a shift of economic power to China and India?
[Noam Chomsky] First of all, we should be a little careful when discussing a “shift of economic power”. It is certainly true that China and India have had very significant growth rates, but these are very poor countries. Take a look at their GDP per capita for example. According to World Bank figures (which are grossly underestimated) China has maybe five percent of the GDP per capita of the United States, India maybe two percent. These figures ought to be doubled or tripled, but even so they are a small fraction of western power. China has grown spectacularly and there’s been quite significant impact on reducing poverty and so on. Nevertheless China remains, as of now, an assembly plant. If you take a look at the trade deficit of the United States with China (which is much discussed) and calculate it accurately, in terms of value-added, it turns out the trade deficit with China is over-estimated by about twenty five to thirty percent. The trade deficit with Japan, Taiwan and South Korea is underestimated by the same figure. The reason is, within the dynamic East Asian production system- the high technology parts and components come from the periphery- from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China assembles. Over time, this will change as China moves up the technology ladder, but that’s how it is now. It’s even more the case in India- which has hundreds of millions of people who are completely excluded from the system. Peasant suicides are increasing at roughly the same rate as the creation of billionaires. A couple of hundred million people have gained, and many more have not- and their situation has been getting worse. There are also enormous ecological problems which are not counted as costs, though they should be. What’s going on there is pretty spectacular.
There is much talk of China’s holding of US debt and what that implies and so on. Japan’s holding of US debt is approximately the same, that does not give Japan power over the United States. There’s a lot of misleading commentary about these topics.
Q: What do you think the world will look like 25 years from now?
[Noam Chomsky] Well, there are a number of things taking place. The United States after the second World War was overwhelmingly dominant, its power has been declining since and is declining right now. In part, this decline has to do with the increasing growth in Asian production- we shouldn’t exaggerate but it’s certainly a part of it. Another factor is the internal attack on the health of American society- the corporate onslaught that has taken place over the past generation has severely weakened American society. There is an attack on the educational system which will have severe long-term effects on economy- there is a general attack on the workforce- the vicious cycle I described is fine for a very small sector of the population, but is harmful for everyone else. The infrastructure is in very poor shape.
Anyone who travels from Europe or even Asia to the United States often think they are coming to a third-world country! This is increasing. It is not a problem for the small-sector of wealth and power that off-shore’s production and engages in financial manipulations- for them it doesn’t really matter if the country declines. It is declining, and it is under attack internally. The United States does have a financial crisis- deficit and debt problem- that is due to two things. One, the enormously bloated military budget which is approximately the same as the rest of the world combined and secondly, a highly dysfunctional privatised unregulated healthcare system. Those two elements are being protected and that, along with the vicious cycle that I mentioned, is leading to severe internal problems which will continue the decline. In addition, the environmental problem is very serious. If the United States does not take the lead, the rest of the world is not going to do very much. If the United States undermine efforts deal with environmental problems- as is now happening- that is going to be even more serious and that’s exactly what we see in front of us for the institutional reasons that I mentioned. Thirty years from now, that will be much more significant.
There is also, unfortunately, an increasing threat of nuclear war and even nuclear terror. That’s why I mentioned before US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan- part of that policy increases the risk that fissile materials will fall into the hands of radical Islamists. I should say that radical Islam has been strongly supported by the United States and Britain for a long time as a barrier to secular nationalism. The US has also supported the nuclear programmes of Pakistan, India and Israel- the three non-signers of the non-proliferation-treaty. All of that is a very combustible mix.
There are also going to be increasing conflicts over resources. Resources are being pressed to the limit and with increasing growth, there will be competition- which will lead to severe resource conflict and maybe wars of some kind. They may not be military wars, but some kind of conflict. For example- if we look at the major world energy resources in the Middle-East, more are now going East than West! The United States so far is tolerating this- they want Saudi oil to go to China to undercut China’s initiatives in Iran- that’s part of US geopolitical strategy but that will cause conflict and is true of other resources- Iron, Copper, Lithium and so -on. This is a growing and serious problem- and gives a pretty gloomy prediction of the future unless something significant changes.
[Professor Lawrence Lessig] We need to think systemically, and think about whether the system of representation that we’ve allowed to evolve gives democracy a chance.
Rather than stirring-up endless energy to fight for one side, or another, of a partisan battle, we need to step back and work with people from the other side and build a political system that works.
Across the world, democracy is facing a challenge. We have to find a way to make it possible for democracy to work in a way that builds confidence in the way it can enable governance and participation.
Q: How can we fight populism?
[Alastair Campbell] People say ‘we’ as though there’s a unified group, but that ‘we’ consists of individuals acting as individuals and communities. The reality is that you can do something, I can do something and we can all do different things to fight back against populism and the right-wing becoming normalised.
The Daily Mail are running a disgusting campaign against foreign aid, it’s borderline fascist. Anyone who buys the Daily Mail should stop. The we point is difficult, there are things that we should do- and something in the political, commercial or civil world will give.
We’ve made such huge progress against racism, sexism, homophobia and around inequality- and these are all things that parts of the right-wing want to reverse.
You have to keep fighting for what you believe in, you have to keep making the case for what you believe in and not allow these views and situations to become normalised in life.
[Prof. A. C. Grayling] There are many fronts on which battles must be fought.
The perennial battle is that if we are serious about having a well-functioning representative democracy, we have to understand how to make education work for that purpose. We have compulsory schooling up-to a certain age, but this education doesn’t create the intelligent, informed public that we need to create a well-functioning democracy. Efforts have to be redoubled and trebled to make that happen. Very deliberate, examined, civics education is an obvious necessity.
The public conversation is too-easily hijacked by the front pages of the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Sun. This is corrosive and corrupting on public understanding of complex, serious issues such as the EU referendum, migration and so on. We have to push-back on this and get people to understand there is a constant manipulation of their opinions through these publications. We need a grown-up debate, and this is not possible in the post-fact, post-spin world.
In the sections of our society where public-debate actually takes place; we have to act on our understanding of how easy it is for misinformation, misinformation and manipulation of news to work. The BBC did a very poor job in the referendum, this is a public service broadcaster who should have been extremely robust at challenging both sides of the campaign, who should have been much quicker at fact-checking and much more aggressive at challenging claims that were false. On a matter this serious, and this important, you cannot allow the running to be made by people who we know- and who themselves avow- to be tendentious.
Q: Are you hopeful for the future?
[Prof. A. C. Grayling] There’s a pendulum of action and consequence in public-affairs such that if all the worst-consequences of Brexit and Trump play out; there will be reaction in the coming generation that will bring us back to liberalism and sensible democratic procedures, consensus, and institutions.
By campaigning very hard against Brexit, and hoping that Trump is a one-term President, we are trying to hold tightly to the liberal, democratic, consensus that has operated for the past half-century. If we succeed? We can stop the pendulum swinging-away from us too far.
We have to take notice of the reasons why there has been an up-swelling of populist sentiment in the UK, USA and elsewhere. There are problems out there but- for the UK- Brexit is not the answer to them.
Take the example of immigration…. People think, ‘oh, we’re very worried about immigration…’ but those same people tend to be the ones from parts of the country with very low immigration, that’ always the case. We have to tell these people that the answer to their anxiety is not to stop immigration, but for them to be open to understand why immigration is a good thing, that immigrants are net contributors to our economy, that beliefs about being swamped by foreigners are mistaken, misplaced and ill-founded.
Things like austerity economics (introduced by George Osborne post financial-crisis) have done a great deal of harm, and increased populism. We have to find ways of addressing the difficulties the country faces without doing so much harm to the NHS, working class families and the rest; this creates toxicity which then manifests with anger and protest against those very people we should be trusting to lead us.
Q: Are you hopeful about the future of democracy?
[Brian Klaas]: For democracy to flourish you need a powerful sponsor.
In international relations, we see the EU is wintered in its foreign policy, it’s weakened by things like Brexit- and so I don’t see the EU picking up the slack of the United States. If the backlash to Trump is sufficient, there could be a courts correction where the US goes back to being a flawed but at least existent sponsor of democracy abroad.
The second thing that worries me is the historical amnesia among young people. Research shows that the number of people who believe that democracy is essential is falling each decade that we get away from the generation that fought World War 2. Today, only a third of Americans and Brits believe that democracy is absolutely essential. The figure was close to 80% among people who were alive during World War 2. I’m worried that there are a lot of people in the world who take democracy for granted, and think ‘you know what, if we got a strong man who took care of our attitudes or our point of view, that would be great’. Those voters exist in the western world and they’ve been activated by authoritarian populus. The cloak around Trump that is ‘we don’t care what happens, as long as he says we should like it, we will like it’, that core base of support that’s been just absolutely rock solid despite authoritarian behaviour, it’s not going to go away.
I think that there is serious cause for concern in this regard, and I think it will become worse if there’s not a solution to the economic drivers of populism over the long term, which I fear are going to get worse because of things like automation and no end in sight to inequality.
Democracy is one of these things where you have to have a perfect recipe for it to exist, and the post cold war decade was one of the very, very few times in world history where all those things sort of came together. Rebuilding that exist same condition is going to be hard. And even though there is a push to democratise in a lot of people’s minds, you’ve got to overcome some very strong forces who do not want to see democracy take over most places. Most notably the people who are in palaces overseeing their own countries.
There is that worry that people are not going to be focused on solving problems until there’s something apocalyptic. And it’s happened before, major global shifts have happened when there’s been apocalyptic crises, but hopefully we’re a much more interconnected world and there’s lots of our people who want to solve these problems together. It’s just a question of whether the political leadership can actually marshal the resources in a productive way.
Q: What would be your advice to the next generation?
[Jüri Ratas] In digital age, governments are just a few taps or clicks away – and it is easier than ever to be active yourself. The most important thing is not just to be a digital user, but I encourage people to become digital creators. Whether as a government official, prime minister, entrepreneur, activist – if you know how computers work and coding goes, you can be much more effective in your work by redesigning processes and shaping the country. So, do study some computing and coding whatever your field of study or later job might be.
[Robert Peston]: We need to have a much more honest debate about how we got to where we are. We need to own up to all the consequences of globalization –the good and bad. And the elite have to recognise they became enriched at huge cost to the cohesion of most developed countries. We’ve had a world where fulfilling jobs for hundreds of millions were wiped out, and people were told to take service jobs which were much less secure and much less intrinsically satisfying. The expectation of the elites was that people should and would be grateful when – in fact- many had their hopes dashed of a better life for them and their children. They aren’t hopeful, or grateful, but disillusioned and angry.
We have to be honest about the cost that globalisation has imposed on people – and we have to fix the gross disparities in incomes, wealth and productivity. We need to invest in those people who we’ve left behind.
—————————————————
In his 2009 book “Freedom For Sale“, John Kampfner discusses that by 2000, “… for the first time, democracy had acquired majority status in the world. Yet, as the writer Paul Ginsborg points out, at the very time it appeared to be dominant, liberal democracy had actually entered a profound crisis. This was not a crisis of quantity; quite the opposite. The crisis, rather, was one of quality.” Kampfner continues by citing many cases of this quality-issue including the “dubious judicial legitimacy” of the 2000 US Presidential election along with the more recent manipulation of evidence leading up to the Iraq war, the humiliations of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the systematic use of torture in secret jails around the world, and more.
“In order to succeed in this moral void…” he writes, “the new authoritarians came to a pact with their peoples. The specific rules varied between countries, but the template was similar. Repression was selective, confined to those who openly challenged the status quo. The number of people who fell into that category was actually very few… The rest of the population could enjoy freedom to travel, to live more or less as they wished and to make and spend their money. This was the difference between public freedoms and private, or privatised, freedoms…. After all, how many members of the public, going on about their daily lives, wish to challenge the structures of power? One can more easily than one realises be lulled into thinking that one is sufficiently free.”
His view of being sufficiently free brings us back to the view of democracy being a “...compromise designed to balance interests among members of a community” albeit rather than balancing interests in a true sense, democracy (as we see it) becomes a pseudo-negotiation between a ruling elite (be they political or corporate) and their peoples as to what freedoms they (the peoples) are prepared to cede in exchange for perceived comforts. This moral-equilibrium-point is further provoked into volatility by the huge inequality we see between societies with the population of one wishing for the freedoms (be they economic, social, or political) in another. In ‘western’ civilisation, consumerism has provided a unique substrate for this pact. As Kampfner points out, “…people in all countries found a way to disengage from the political process while living in comfort. Consumerism provided the ultimate anaesthetic for the brain.”
Unlike true-dictatorships, citizens in ‘the west’ have a sense of debate, control and participation in the issues affecting their lives. This sense of participation is supported by the level of information citizens receive about their democracy and the opportunities they have to interact with it through voting rights, panels, protest, and many other means. If, therefore, they feel sufficiently engaged in the democratic process- why should they even question the democracy of it!
The fact is we are encountering what can only be described as a participation-fallacy. Yes, citizens have the right to elect leaders (albeit who have sufficient capital to run for election) and vote on a wide variety of issues; but if we consider the most important issues which have had the most profound influence on western society in the past decade (including wars, bank-bailouts, climate change and more) aside from the right to show public-opinion through protest, have citizens really had the opportunity to exercise public-opinion? The answer is no- and even the most cursory glance of public opinion polls and outlets will show the widespread displeasure at many decisions which, while ostensibly “taken in citizens’ best interest“, rarely were.
This is not a problem we can solve overnight, the status-quo has become embedded and systemic in every part of our society. For our world to truly become democratic, the process has begin with education and end with culture meaning that citizens are not only more aware of the opportunities and processes of democracy, but are also culturally driven towards a culture which Dr. Wright describes as, “…a theory, policy, procedure and art, emphasising human welfare, individual freedom, popular participation and general tolerance. It can adapt itself to many conditions, but it thrives in an atmosphere of education, toleration, peace and prosperity.” The traits of “Ignorance, dogma, war and poverty..” Dr. Wright argues (traits which have almost become hallmarks of our civilisation) “are its enemies. They breed absolute and arbitrary government, uncritical and lethargic people, which are the reverse of democracy.”
“People in the long run..” stated David Eisenhower, “are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.” For that to happen, though, we must realise that we (as people) are in this together and that the notions of society and self-interest are, for the most part, incompatible. By understanding that in exchange for a few notional-comforts we (actively) give-up our own freedom and the freedoms of billions of citizens around the world, we lose any perceived moral high-ground we have and any assertion of the freedom of our society.
“There is no such thing as a little freedom…” said Walter Cronkite, “either you are all free, or you are not free.“
Delighted to see your website and your interview with Noam Chomsky about democracy.
I also try to publish articles on political issues and events especially in the Middle East and South Asia on my wewbsite: Peace and Justice Post.
Best regards
Nasir Khan
Peace and Justice Post