12/16/2022
On Democracy with Aishwary Kumar
Aishwary Kumar is Professor and Shri Shantinath Endowed Chair in Political Nonviolence at California State and Polytechnic University, Pomona, Los Angeles. Aishwary is the author of “Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy”– subject of two Entitled Opinions episodes back in 2016. He returns to the show today to speak on what he calls […]
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>> This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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[ Music ]
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>> Welcome back to the Feast of Friends and the Giant Family.
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Beyond the reach of capitalist realism, beyond the reach
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of the technological absurd, beyond the reach
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of the internet complex and the Dower Society of Spectacle,
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we practice the persecuted religion of thinking here
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in these catacombs of KZSU.
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Again, the show is called entitled opinions as in everybody's
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entitled to my opinion, as well as the opinions of my guests.
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And if you cherish this show and think it's
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in a category all its own, you have earned a title
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to your opinion as well.
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If on the other hand, you prefer to wallow in the Meyer,
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so be it.
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The pursuit of happiness takes many different forms
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in this weird nation of ours.
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And wallowing in the Meyer is one of them.
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[ Music ]
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>> Silence must be clear.
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[ Music ]
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>> And speaking of opinions, our topic today is the condition
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of democracy and nothing is more essential to democracies
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than the opinions of its plurality of citizens.
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Where power resides with the people, where public opinion
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influences policy, where the citizens vote matters,
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where government is based on the consent of the governed rather
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than the will of a ruler or a party, there we all have a right
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to our opinions, as well as a right to voice them.
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A functional democracy opens a public sphere
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for the exchange of ideas and the exchange
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of diverging opinions.
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That sphere comes into being only seldomly,
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like an island of light in the otherwise oppressive night
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of human political history.
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More often than not, the light is quickly snuffed out.
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Such is the paradox of democracy.
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It represents a universal human aspiration that assumes institutional form
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only rarely, exceptionally and briefly.
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Democracy is above all a public stage for human action,
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which consists of deeds and words.
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Action requires a performative platform on which to appear.
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It's not by chance that the Greeks invented theater
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at the very same time and in the very same place
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where they invented democracy, namely in Athens
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in the sixth century BC.
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The Greek polity was a stage for the citizens performance
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of democracy, a stage on which their deeds and words could be seen
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and heard.
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With the Greek model of democracy in mind,
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Hannah Aunt, defined political freedom as the freedom to appear
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in public alongside and before once fellow citizens as an equal.
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To strut your hour on the stage as an actor in the drama
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of self governance to express an opinion in the public sphere
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before your fellow citizens, that was the most meaningful
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of human actions for Hannah.
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To act by word or deed means always to interact with those
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with whom I share the world.
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On this stage of interaction, my opinion gets tested, contested,
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agreed with or discredited, in short, it goes through the crucible
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of plausibility and persuasion.
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Where democracies are functional, the opinions of citizens are subjected
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to the centripetal pressure of the claim of reason, the swation
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of evidence and the sanity of a common logos.
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Where the democratic stage begins to wobble,
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the centrifugal force takes over and our opinions tend
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towards hyperbole, idiosyncrasy, outlandish.
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What causes the stage to wobble is a matter of speculation
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and that is exactly what my guests and I intend to do today,
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namely to speculate about what he calls the neo-democratic
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condition.
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I, Swati Kumar, welcome to entitled opinions.
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Thank you, Robert, for having me delighted and honored
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to be back to entitled opinions.
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Back is the word, I think you were with us in 2016, if memory serves,
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and we talked at that on that occasion about your book,
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Radical Equality, Gandhi, I'm Betkar and the risk of democracy.
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And back then, you were teaching at Stanford.
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Now you are professor and Sri Shanti Nath in Dao chair in political
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non-violence, as well as you're the director of the Ahimsa Center
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for nonviolent thought and action at California State and Polytechnic
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University of Pomona down in Los Angeles.
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And you currently have a book forthcoming titled
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"Neo Democracy, Freedom and Violence After Neo-Liberulism."
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And in this new book, you speak about what you call the
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"Neo Democratic Condition."
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And why don't we start with that term?
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What exactly do you mean when you speak of "Neo Democratic Condition"?
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Thank you, Robert, for that opening question.
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Let's begin, as you were saying with the words,
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the idea of the condition, as Arrant would say, the human condition,
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is that there is nothing inevitable about where the world,
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but especially our moral and political world will end up.
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A lot of how we traverse our life together, our collective life,
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has to do with how we think about it,
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and how we therefore act on how we think about our shared world.
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The condition of neo-democracy is something that looks inevitable.
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The current moment looks sometimes often insurmountable.
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The glaring inequalities, the glaring disparities worldwide,
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the fraying of the modern social contract,
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the withdrawal of an active and hostile withdrawal of elected governments
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from the project of the common good,
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but there is nothing inevitable about it.
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And one of the things I mean when I use the word "condition"
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is to complicate the common-sensical idea, largely Euro-American idea,
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that democracy is on the verge of dying,
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that there is something almost now irreversibly certain
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about the emerging and appearing forms of tyranny in our political and social life.
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The word "condition" complicates that narrative for two specific reasons.
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And I hope that that will clarify what I mean by neo-democracy as well.
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Firstly, the idea that democracy is the sovereign form,
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perhaps the best moral and political form of government,
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is a fairly recent idea.
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We know that even the modern revolutionary traditions,
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including the French and the American traditions,
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do not actually, despite their constitutional commitments,
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do not use democracy that often it's the Republican form of government
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that is envisaged.
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So when does democracy become, as you were suggesting,
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a global and a universal aspiration?
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It becomes a global, truly global with the movements
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for decolonization in the middle of the 20th century.
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That is when vast words of the world
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become free from European colonial control,
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and they adopt quite self-consciously with a very active declaration of independence.
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Democracy to be even more precise in its institutional form,
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liberal democracy to be the most durable constitutional form of self-rule.
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That is when democracy becomes truly global.
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So the anti-colonial moment needs to be taken more seriously
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than those Dumseres who want to claim that democracy is coming to an end.
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The second moment is something that is truly exceptional
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about the American democratic experiment.
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In fact, if there is something truly exceptional about American democracy
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or as talk of all, it's a democracy in America.
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It comes fairly late and much later than talk to themselves,
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it comes in the 1960s with the idea of civil rights.
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What happens with civil rights is quite subtle philosophically speaking.
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We know about its political and social impact,
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but philosophically speaking, this is the first time
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that the classical notion of civic virtue
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is now radically replaced, if not entirely displaced,
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but certainly replaced by the primacy of civil rights.
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That is when democracy really becomes a nod to the vulnerabilities
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and the inequalities of large swaths of minority populations.
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We remember, for example,
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Arendt's critique of the notion of human rights
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in origins of totalitarianism and part of that critique rested on her belief
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that it was way to abstract and depended exactly
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on the guarantees of sovereign states to enforce those rights.
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In the end, thereby rendering them meaningless.
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Well, rendering them meaningless for those who happen to become stateless
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extreme circumstances, certainly not meaningless
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for those who were citizens of functional states.
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No, not at all.
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In fact, that was there in open, simple, huge paradox.
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How do societies that have much deeper histories of inequality,
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of systemic prejudice, one can think, and we have,
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you and I have spoken about, I'm a bit more in the end,
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and it's critique of caste as a paradigm of government.
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The idea that something more visceral is needed in order to bring
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or eradicate the condition, the universal condition of rightlessness.
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It becomes quite, quite prominently
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theoretical and philosophical in the 60s.
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And I think the notion of civil rights re-institutes or, in fact,
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re-centers the human body, in this case, the black body,
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but not just the black body, as the center of a new articulation
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of democratic self-government.
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What we now see is a certain tension between that antichilonial
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and anti-racist equation and the creation of new forms
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of political alignments and even new forms of political majorities
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in different democratic conditions.
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Well, let me go back to Hannah Addent and her theory of rights
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and to the question of states and civil rights, because it,
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it seems to me that the civil rights movement was a movement on behalf
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of, as you say, a certain portion of the American population
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that felt that the American Republic had not opened itself up to the full citizenship
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of the black members of its society.
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And that rather than performing a critique of the very concept
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of the Republic or of democracy on the contrary,
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they were affirming almost the sacrality of the scripture
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on which the American nation was based and saying that it was not being true
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to its own conception and its own founding and its own vision,
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and it was calling for its now become a cliche,
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but I think it's a very effective term, a more perfect union.
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No?
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So do you believe that democracy, in order to realize this full promise,
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requires a strong state in order to back up and guarantee the dignity and rights
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of its citizens?
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Yeah, that is an excellent point.
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And I'm glad we brought it up early in our conversation.
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I think what is important to remember, as you're saying, is that the notion
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and the claim of civil rights cannot be taught off outside of a
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constitutional context, there is something profoundly constitutional about the claim
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to civil rights.
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And this is why some of these thinkers of the human condition in the period
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after the war are deeply invested in the idea of constitutionalism.
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B. R. M. Baker himself is one of the prime architects of the world's longest
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written national constitution.
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We see that reappear again in the American quest for civil rights and
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to, you know, voting rights, for example.
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So a cluster of rights that are guaranteed by a sovereign state are essential
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to democratic self-government.
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Right.
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And without that commitment to an overarching moral and political authority,
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democracy itself, just by way of a social understanding between citizens will not
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work because, you know, there is a hope that that citizen, that modern
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citizenry is a rational body, but it is not.
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And that is where passion needs to be, or comes to be seen as something to be
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regulated.
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Right.
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So that there are a number of issues I would like to go in deeper with you on
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that, especially the assumption that there is a rational body of citizen.
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In my intro, I suggested that when you have an open public sphere where
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everyone is entitled to an opinion, not like on this show, this show is a very
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special set of opinions that need titles.
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But generally speaking, as Kant suggests in his essay, what is enlightenment, there
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is going to be this, what I call this centripetal pressure applied on the
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citizens' opinions because they are in a public sphere in a plurality,
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namely a plurality of citizens.
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And in order to maintain your opinion, it's going to be contested by someone
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with a differing opinion.
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You're going to have to reason it out.
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You're going to have to persuade.
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This is why rhetoric and republicanism and democracy have always, the great
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moments of rhetoric and political history have gone with these kinds of
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governments.
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And that therefore, the claims of reason will tend to dominate when the
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public sphere is functioning the way it's intended to function, namely, to
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take all these opinions and through the kind of contestation that will take
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place naturally.
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Reason will somehow prevail over that whole process and lead to a kind of
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center.
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The question I raise in the intro is what's happening now?
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Why those foundations are becoming wobbly?
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We don't have to talk about now.
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And where the opinions now are becoming extreme and becoming outlandish and
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becoming, sometimes absolutely insane.
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But to go back here to the question of the role of the state.
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So Hannah Haddent looked at Greek democracy and she saw what we would call
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direct democracy, civic participation where every citizen had an
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active role in determining policy and how much budget and economy.
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And so we, of course, don't live in a direct democracy.
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There are too many of us.
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We have representative democracy.
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And there's also a form republicanism where the state has a much
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stronger role in our modern democracies than it did in the Greek model.
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In fact, Hannah Haddent was not particularly fond of the Roman and then
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Neil Roman idea of a strong state that would guarantee the rights and so forth.
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So this leads to this basic question, which is what kind of democracy do we
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live in here in America and perhaps extended to Western Europe.
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Is it one that you think is sustainable?
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Is it different from the democracies of your home country, original home
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country, which India, for example, or Pakistan or whatever, other constitutional
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democracies we may identify around the world?
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And what are the particular dangers that we should be aware of,
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even though we might have this misconception that we are on the verge of
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a whole thing collapsing?
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Yeah, that's the new democratic moment is in that sense,
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new precisely because some of the challenges that the classical ideas of
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democracy come under today have never been seen before.
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And even though one can always look back and there is a tendency to look back
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immediately to the interwar period, look at interwar fascism of different kinds
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as some sort of a precedent for what, for our present, that does not fully
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explain the complexity.
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For one reason, it does not fully explain the complexity of our present partly
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because now democracy truly has to account, given account for itself,
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given that it is a genuinely global form of self government.
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Unlike the interwar period, when colonial powers were still ruling was,
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was, was, was, what's of the planet?
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Democracy is worldwide now have to somehow come out of the current moral and
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political logjam as it were.
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And some of these are a result of, of external threats.
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But others, I would think are consequences of self-lacerating wounds that these
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societies have themselves inflicted.
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It's coming from within and out of words.
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It's coming from within support.
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For the first time, we see two very specific things.
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One, that a plurality or a majority of the urban reasonable populations are willing
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to go that far where democracy loses its, its political and social meaning.
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India is a particularly clearing example of how vastly literate urban populations
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who have benefited the most strong consolidation of liberal forms of government
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and democratic government itself are willing to create new kinds of
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majority and power centers that undermine some of the fundamental principles
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of the democratic and the social contract.
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But that's taking place within the rules of democracy.
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Now, so if we talk about populism, which I think many people at least here
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in America as well as in Western Europe, where you have these
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populist governments or parties that win elections, the idea is that it's,
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it's a democracy which is creating the conditions for a majority vote for
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a populist party, which is, has anti-democratic sentiments, perhaps,
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or anti-democratic prejudices and yet when democratic process is functioning properly
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and it leads to these results.
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This is why someone like Plato thought that democracies were self-consuming
|
| 00:21:44.280 |
and self-destructive from within because the people in his,
|
| 00:21:48.760 |
presumptuous philosophical perspective, people cannot be trusted to judge correctly
|
| 00:21:56.840 |
and to vote properly and that's why he believed that it took a kind of elite group of
|
| 00:22:02.920 |
philosopher.
|
| 00:22:03.400 |
Games we don't need to rehearse the personic critique of democracy, but
|
| 00:22:06.520 |
so I guess the question for you is the biggest threat to democracy
|
| 00:22:11.160 |
within democracy itself or is it from outside of the, the democracy?
|
| 00:22:16.200 |
Yes, and I think that that is exactly the point where we need to pause
|
| 00:22:22.520 |
from or refrain from making easy comparisons between the interwar fascism and the current moment
|
| 00:22:30.280 |
because the threat to democracy now is from within and there are new configurations of power,
|
| 00:22:37.240 |
new coalitions of both majoritarian and racial voting blocks across the world that are creating
|
| 00:22:46.200 |
conditions for the compromise of some of the self-evident as it were, self-evident principles of
|
| 00:22:53.880 |
democratic life. For example, in a democracy one of the prime practical ideas is a free and
|
| 00:23:03.640 |
functioning press, but increasingly you find elected officials ahead of the state refusing to
|
| 00:23:12.680 |
take questions or press conferences and that is what is quite dramatically unique about the American
|
| 00:23:19.320 |
situation is that even the most powerful elected official in the country cannot simply refuse the
|
| 00:23:25.400 |
press. That is not something that you see in other parts and perhaps even in the most populous
|
| 00:23:33.080 |
liberal democracies of the world.
|
| 00:23:35.240 |
That actually doesn't bother me that much because I'm not, I'm anything but anti-democratic.
|
| 00:23:42.520 |
However, I think it's absurd in America that the President of the United States is receiving a foreign
|
| 00:23:50.040 |
prime minister or foreign country and they're talking about issues that are of great consequence
|
| 00:23:56.600 |
to both countries and geopolitical. They get asked a string of questions that are completely irrelevant
|
| 00:24:03.960 |
having to do with personal scandal or anything of that sort in the public form. It goes too far.
|
| 00:24:09.880 |
It makes the whole institution of answering questions in the open public sphere quite ridiculous
|
| 00:24:18.200 |
and therefore maybe a certain moderation or a certain limitation of how far the press can go when
|
| 00:24:27.480 |
when it smells blood in the water. It makes sense. Sometimes to preserve democracy,
|
| 00:24:37.880 |
you have to limit its accesses.
|
| 00:24:40.120 |
That's fundamental to democracy and I don't think this argument is anti-democratic at all.
|
| 00:24:45.160 |
In fact, a very system of constitutional checks and balances where each arm of the government
|
| 00:24:50.680 |
and so-called fourth estate create a unified space where executive authority, legislative
|
| 00:24:59.000 |
authority, judicial authority and the public opinion as it were work in a certain sort of rhythm
|
| 00:25:06.760 |
that allows for normative truth claims to hold some water. It cannot be, and in that sense,
|
| 00:25:14.280 |
we currently do have a very, a rather toxic argument in the digital town square as it were or as
|
| 00:25:21.800 |
Twitter is called, around what we would call free speech absolutism.
|
| 00:25:26.120 |
Can anything simply go because everyone has a right to speak? And this is where the question of limit,
|
| 00:25:35.400 |
democracy not as an infinite invitation to overstay your welcome but rather as a sort of limit
|
| 00:25:46.040 |
on what can be achieved within practical reasons, in which truth has a part. This brings us to
|
| 00:25:54.120 |
one of the prime concepts that emerge in the anti-colonial tradition, including in the writings of
|
| 00:26:01.080 |
Ombetka in America, in the writings of Judith Schler, herself like Hannah Renton, Ex-elect figure,
|
| 00:26:10.120 |
can we imagine a form of politics in which truth still has a place?
|
| 00:26:15.720 |
Or are we doomed as our entworances again and again? Are we doomed to a politics in which truth
|
| 00:26:23.080 |
will never have a role to play? Or that politics can sometimes be held hostage to government secrecy?
|
| 00:26:31.800 |
Well, here now we go back to her understanding of the distinction between truth and opinion,
|
| 00:26:37.560 |
and also to her favoring of Socrates over Plato, because Socrates would go into the public
|
| 00:26:47.480 |
square, and he would interrogate his fellow Athenians about how they saw the world,
|
| 00:26:54.760 |
what their opinions were, and he was in the way she puts it. She was trying to turn
|
| 00:27:03.080 |
the Athenian citizens into friends, as opposed to the usual sign of Agon that characterizes it,
|
| 00:27:12.280 |
that society. Plato sees that democratic system condemn Socrates to death, and he says these people
|
| 00:27:22.280 |
have no right to have any sort of political power, because their opinions are nothing but
|
| 00:27:27.560 |
ignorance and what we need is truth. We have to found a politics on truth rather than opinion.
|
| 00:27:37.800 |
Hana, aren't this very uneasy about this claim too, because this is also the danger of
|
| 00:27:42.760 |
totalitarianism, and it's the danger of ideology, where you have regimes that presume to be in
|
| 00:27:50.120 |
possession of a truth that is extra opinion or that it's beyond the plurality of the citizens,
|
| 00:27:58.360 |
then you often feel entitled to use any means necessary to bring about the so-called truth
|
| 00:28:09.400 |
of your vision for the state. We've seen that time and again. This is the misery and tragedy
|
| 00:28:20.760 |
so-of-yet communism and also of other forms of totalitarianism, not seeism and so forth.
|
| 00:28:29.000 |
So truth, we need, but I think you're absolutely right, a democracy cannot function without a certain
|
| 00:28:35.080 |
degree of relative truth. How do we establish what is the proper degree of truth and which still
|
| 00:28:44.840 |
has room for the plurality of opinion? There are two, of course, two more than two, but two very
|
| 00:28:54.280 |
primary dimensions of this question. One, that truth that is a commitment, that is a personal or
|
| 00:29:00.440 |
moral commitment to speaking what one believes in. There is that part of truth, and then there is
|
| 00:29:08.200 |
there is the other dimension of truth which is political truth, which is the idea that whatever is
|
| 00:29:15.720 |
in the service of collective justice, whatever establishes our inherent political and social
|
| 00:29:26.360 |
equality alone can be truthful. And part of the unraveling of the modern social contract
|
| 00:29:34.440 |
comes to hinge on this very unresolved tension. How far should personal truths be taken
|
| 00:29:41.080 |
in complete disregard of truths that are meant to secure justice?
|
| 00:29:47.000 |
In the common word. On the other hand, how far can social justice arguments be taken
|
| 00:29:57.000 |
so that they can completely swallow the space for a citizen's right to conduct according to
|
| 00:30:06.600 |
truths that he or she holds dear to herself or himself, or themselves? Right now, and this is one great
|
| 00:30:15.560 |
great mover of what we were calling the neo-democratic condition, right now the Supreme Court
|
| 00:30:23.160 |
of different liberal democracies are going and going under a certain kind of stress where
|
| 00:30:29.960 |
constitutions themselves have become arenas of strife rather than arenas of arbitration.
|
| 00:30:35.400 |
So the judicial space has been shrinking more aggressively than it has ever been. And the
|
| 00:30:43.000 |
question therefore we need to ask is when did this shift from constitutions as arbiters of our shared
|
| 00:30:50.040 |
truth from constitutions becoming spaces of extra judicial interventions can a baker refuse to bake
|
| 00:30:59.960 |
cakes for a gay couple? Can a website designer refuse to design websites for same-sex couples?
|
| 00:31:09.000 |
These are the kinds of questions in which and that is why I think the point you were making is
|
| 00:31:14.600 |
so important democracy was never a commitment to an overarching transcendental truth. Democracy was
|
| 00:31:23.000 |
a commitment to a plurality of opinions in which there was always room for a certain sort of
|
| 00:31:29.000 |
relative notions of who we were, what identity itself was, and so many of the eruptions of violence
|
| 00:31:38.680 |
that liberal democracies now see more frequently than they have at least over the time period
|
| 00:31:46.200 |
that I study is partly because that very notion of relativism has been taken so far that perhaps
|
| 00:31:54.840 |
everything seems to go, like seems to pass. And therefore what needs to think of a new form of limit
|
| 00:32:06.200 |
in the Sanskrit tradition Gandhi works with the idea of Mariana which is the idea of a disciplinary
|
| 00:32:12.360 |
limit which is not the limit I impose on the other but the one that I impose on myself. And
|
| 00:32:19.640 |
in the end the neo-democratic condition seems self-lacerating because so many of these wounds
|
| 00:32:28.040 |
are inflicted not only on the other but inflicted to the extremeities where even the self can be
|
| 00:32:36.120 |
harmed. Glass chunks of the electorate in some of these most populous democracies in the world
|
| 00:32:43.160 |
right now have stopped voting according to the very classical idea of rational idea that public
|
| 00:32:50.200 |
good, if you if governments create conditions for an equitable distribution of public goods,
|
| 00:32:57.000 |
they will be rewarded. But often voting patterns suggest exactly the opposite. Large
|
| 00:33:04.040 |
majorities have started to vote in utter disregard of what the government actually achieves by
|
| 00:33:10.360 |
way of public goods. And in that sense we need to rethink therefore of the return of as you were
|
| 00:33:16.280 |
suggesting the return of ideology to democracy. An ideology of democracy. An ideology of democracy
|
| 00:33:24.040 |
which is not external to democracy but endemic to it. Well I think there is one major problem
|
| 00:33:34.200 |
with the current condition of democracies as we experience it at least here in America which is
|
| 00:33:41.640 |
again the public sphere and what you call the online you know town square and a completely unregulated
|
| 00:33:53.480 |
stage for the free expression of opinions. And it no longer has a center of gravity. It has become
|
| 00:34:04.440 |
a cacophony of voices way too many and when that noise level reaches a certain degree of intensity
|
| 00:34:16.840 |
the only way to get heard is really to shout and to embrace the most extreme positions. And therefore
|
| 00:34:27.640 |
the very foundations source and idealism is the ideology of democracy which is a free public sphere
|
| 00:34:37.080 |
for the exchange of ideas and the exchange of opinions becomes the wound that you're talking about.
|
| 00:34:45.800 |
And I think that I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that we're in real need of a kind of
|
| 00:34:54.760 |
system of regulation or you can call it limit but you have to regulate what can actually what
|
| 00:35:04.440 |
kinds of opinions are entitled to have a venue in the political domain. I just say very briefly
|
| 00:35:21.000 |
again going back to what is enlightenment that fundamental essay only seven pages long but
|
| 00:35:25.720 |
so crucial. He was speaking about the scholars freedom to publish and this idea that you published
|
| 00:35:32.680 |
your opinions. To publish your opinions meant that you already had to have a certain kind of authority
|
| 00:35:38.040 |
to speak that you got in you went through certain filters and you had to who you are what kind of
|
| 00:35:43.960 |
credibility you bring to your opinions. It's not just any opinion it's that there is a certain kind
|
| 00:35:50.120 |
of apparatus that will filter out the you know the opinions that have any sort of credibility from
|
| 00:35:57.800 |
those that don't and this was the case I think until more or less the case until the internet
|
| 00:36:05.720 |
for frankly and this is creating a huge exactly the problem that you're identifying.
|
| 00:36:11.320 |
I don't have any answer to how we can conceive of a new ideology of democracy unless we address this
|
| 00:36:18.920 |
technological issue. Yes I'm glad you brought that up because technology opens a completely
|
| 00:36:27.480 |
new front absolutely without president in the history of our political life and a new form of technology
|
| 00:36:36.200 |
technological change as well but but let me return to that very important word that comes up
|
| 00:36:43.240 |
I call it limit and you call it regulation which is which has always been central to what
|
| 00:36:51.400 |
a constitutional democracy ought to be in practice. What it ought to be is that no matter how
|
| 00:36:58.760 |
federal we are, no matter how much autonomy the union of states gives to individual members of the
|
| 00:37:07.960 |
union there has to be a certain overarching regulative mechanism, regulative reason if you will
|
| 00:37:14.040 |
that will shape the form and the future of the union. Right now at some point in American history but
|
| 00:37:23.400 |
not just American history regulation becomes a bad word regulation becomes a bad word because it
|
| 00:37:29.880 |
comes to be associated with the infringement on individual liberties by federal government.
|
| 00:37:37.720 |
Yeah and the minute it became a bad word that's when things started wobbling. Yes and there's
|
| 00:37:43.480 |
yeah no I agree with that assessment entirely. There is a genealogy of why things begin to wobble
|
| 00:37:51.800 |
around that particular notion and it goes very deep into our democratic history and constitutional
|
| 00:37:58.040 |
history itself. I mean if we look at the history of claiming individual liberty at odds
|
| 00:38:05.880 |
with federal authority or even elected government, it goes back to the idea that it goes really
|
| 00:38:15.560 |
Jewish clear would argue to the idea of slave ownership in the American south. So every time
|
| 00:38:21.080 |
there would be an abolitionist offensive against the rights of the American plants, the southern
|
| 00:38:27.320 |
planters to own slaves, they would be the first to proclaim that their liberties were under attack.
|
| 00:38:37.560 |
And Schler has this fascinating sentence where she says there is a reason why the greatest claims of
|
| 00:38:43.240 |
American liberty come from the slave owners of the American south because they came into the closest
|
| 00:38:48.840 |
contact with those people and human bodies who had lost all rights. Right so they knew what it meant
|
| 00:38:56.360 |
to live without liberty and that history is what perhaps we need to take more seriously every time we hear
|
| 00:39:05.320 |
a critique of regulation. But I agree because the civil war we need also to remember is that civil war
|
| 00:39:13.160 |
ended with the governments empowerment to enforce regulation namely you will not own slaves. Slavery
|
| 00:39:25.080 |
will be abolished. This is not a right that we are allowing. So now there is also capitalism as a lot
|
| 00:39:33.400 |
to do with the animus against regulation because a lot of the deregulation had to do with
|
| 00:39:38.600 |
the greed of corporations to pursue profit without with impunity essentially. And
|
| 00:39:50.840 |
Maybe that is another really a fault line in modern democracies because they go with a certain form
|
| 00:39:59.000 |
of economy, a capitalist economy which gets more and more extreme in other words the economic
|
| 00:40:06.920 |
inequalities which are not the same thing as political inequality. Political inequality is civil
|
| 00:40:13.000 |
rights where you are not a route you don't really have the right to vote. Martin Luther King and
|
| 00:40:18.360 |
others did not go in order to claim first and foremost economic equality. They wanted politically
|
| 00:40:25.800 |
equality that is how on an island understands the public sphere is the sphere of equality.
|
| 00:40:34.040 |
When you have the kind of economic equalities that come with a free market economy and they get
|
| 00:40:42.200 |
exasperated as we are seeing today it puts all the more pressure on the system.
|
| 00:40:49.720 |
Yeah I think this is the moment where I should finally answer in slightly succinct fashion your
|
| 00:40:57.560 |
opening question which is what is the new democratic condition and that is in the subtitle of the book
|
| 00:41:03.160 |
which is a new relationship between political freedom and political violence aggravated by
|
| 00:41:09.720 |
global wealth inequality, inequality of access to habitable regions of the planet itself
|
| 00:41:16.760 |
aggravated above all by the neoliberal order. So the new democratic condition cannot be
|
| 00:41:23.640 |
therefore understood outside of what has appeared on our horizon after neoliberalism.
|
| 00:41:32.520 |
I know I agree entirely and I think that if we are going to shore up the foundations of democracy
|
| 00:41:37.880 |
we have to deal with neoliberalism and consider it a monster that is devouring us all.
|
| 00:41:47.080 |
Absolutely and therefore there is a need to break out of this conjunction between what seems
|
| 00:41:55.880 |
outer democratic forms of power and oligarchic forms of power unless we rip democracy apart
|
| 00:42:03.800 |
from that nexus of capital. Of absolutely unregulated capital flows we will not create a world that is
|
| 00:42:11.400 |
less unequal. Forget an equal world we will not even create a world that is less unequal. The final
|
| 00:42:17.240 |
point therefore I would like to highlight just writing on the point you were making about
|
| 00:42:23.720 |
the monstrosity of capitalism. Is that the neoliberal capitalism? Is the institutionalized form
|
| 00:42:33.080 |
of hatred against the poor that it has made normal? I think the new democratic condition is
|
| 00:42:41.640 |
untinkable without the institutionalization of a new form of hatred against the poor. Not just the
|
| 00:42:47.240 |
unequal as you were saying that the political unequal can be different from the economically
|
| 00:42:52.120 |
unequal might even be different from the socially unequal like in a caste society. But what we
|
| 00:42:57.480 |
now see is a new form of mesanthropy, a new hatred of the poor itself. By whom? By the new
|
| 00:43:07.160 |
country of capitalist? By the new kind of majority and coalitions that increasingly vote against
|
| 00:43:15.400 |
not just public interest or self-interest but public goods itself. You mean people voting for
|
| 00:43:22.760 |
parties that are anti-immigration and things of this sort in Europe. In Europe too in any
|
| 00:43:29.000 |
Italy most recently but there are other places like Dictarchy and large swaths of the world in
|
| 00:43:37.000 |
Asia where you increasingly see a reaction against capitalism. To be appropriated, the reaction
|
| 00:43:47.880 |
against neoliberalism to be appropriated by groups that actually have more oligarchic interest than
|
| 00:43:55.720 |
the people who vote for them. But don't you think that these so-called illiberal democracies as
|
| 00:44:00.760 |
urban, calls hungry or that the illiberal democracies appeal to a large portion of the population because
|
| 00:44:12.120 |
that they offer a certain resistance to neoliberalist wide open free markets and that they're
|
| 00:44:20.680 |
actually containing some of those excesses in the name of its own citizenry. I don't know if this is
|
| 00:44:29.480 |
how a lot of the people who vote for those parties think of it whether it's a reality or not. But
|
| 00:44:36.360 |
clearly neoliberalism here in America that began with Clinton, with Ronald Reagan, all this deregulation
|
| 00:44:44.360 |
with Ronald Reagan then continued by Bill Clinton has impoverished a great swath of the country and
|
| 00:44:52.760 |
you talk about the hatred of the poor but I think that many of the voters, the populist voters,
|
| 00:44:57.080 |
what they hate is their own impoverishment, economic impoverishment that is brought about by policies
|
| 00:45:02.200 |
these that are either promoted by the government or policies at the government is indifferent towards.
|
| 00:45:06.680 |
And that is your government in bed with the neoliberalist interests or is it a bulwark against it.
|
| 00:45:19.800 |
Yes, it's the monster. We've identified the monster and what kind of democratic
|
| 00:45:31.400 |
reforms are necessary in order to rein in neoliberalism itself.
|
| 00:45:36.920 |
I mean this is a question that Mark Fisher asks in his book on capitalist realism. Is there
|
| 00:45:43.000 |
any alternative? Well, we have to imagine one. We have to imagine one. I absolutely agree.
|
| 00:45:50.840 |
And the idea that democracy needs reform and can be perfected
|
| 00:45:59.400 |
is in the end an idea that puts its fate a lot of its fate in human imagination.
|
| 00:46:06.600 |
To imagine a future, people have been writing about imagining a world without us.
|
| 00:46:13.000 |
There are different ways to rethink democracy now. And one particularly, I would even say a tragic
|
| 00:46:23.400 |
part about how democracy has come to be undercut from within is that the people who often tend to
|
| 00:46:30.200 |
lose the most out have started to vote for and according to vote for governments that will not
|
| 00:46:40.440 |
do anything for it. That is what makes it almost this sort of a suicidal state.
|
| 00:46:49.400 |
There are votes of resentment rather than votes of self-interest.
|
| 00:46:52.920 |
Yes, there are votes of resentment. There are votes in many ways driven by an unexamined form of
|
| 00:46:59.800 |
grudge in which the personal truth or belief takes the form of a collective
|
| 00:47:06.360 |
hubris, not even a lie or perjury, just hubris.
|
| 00:47:11.400 |
Well, you know, we began my opening remarks about I claimed that one of the most essential things
|
| 00:47:19.160 |
in a democracy is where providing a stage where the citizens can be both seen and heard which is
|
| 00:47:27.240 |
an aurentian concept. And I think that you're pointing to many people in many different democracies
|
| 00:47:38.520 |
around the world who feel of late in the last decade or two or three that they are not being seen
|
| 00:47:46.760 |
and they're not being heard. They are rendered invisible. And these votes of grudge,
|
| 00:47:51.800 |
this politics of rusantimo is something that they're voluntarily suicidal because as Nietzsche understood,
|
| 00:48:04.280 |
resentment is a very powerful force. And I think that we have to awaken to this psychology of
|
| 00:48:13.880 |
resentment for the sake of our own democracy.
|
| 00:48:17.080 |
I agree and therefore rethink this relationship between what we were calling self-evident truths,
|
| 00:48:26.280 |
but really what we are saying is self-knowledge, the idea of who we are and what we stand for,
|
| 00:48:32.120 |
dignity and resentment because sometimes what is driven by resentment can often be
|
| 00:48:39.880 |
couched in the language of dignity. And that reconfiguration of the relationship between dignity and
|
| 00:48:46.360 |
resentment is one of the great tasks of a democratic future.
|
| 00:48:51.880 |
And just to conclude, I think the difference between the civil rights movement of the 60s and the
|
| 00:48:59.160 |
populist phenomena that we're talking about now is that one was not driven by resentment and grudge
|
| 00:49:08.760 |
because they had not yet lot. They were not, didn't have the privilege to have lost
|
| 00:49:13.720 |
this, to have been thrown off the stage where they were seen and heard. We're talking about groups
|
| 00:49:19.960 |
of people who have been traditionally in the post-war period being accustomed to being seen and
|
| 00:49:25.080 |
heard by their governments. And now all of a sudden the resentment is different from that which
|
| 00:49:32.200 |
led Martin Luther King and others into the streets in the 60s.
|
| 00:49:36.040 |
It's been a fascinating discussion, Ashwati Kumar. Thanks again for coming on to entitled opinions
|
| 00:49:42.680 |
and that we look forward to your upcoming book which is called Neo-democracy,
|
| 00:49:48.280 |
freedom and violence in- -After neoliberalism.
|
| 00:49:54.520 |
That's a great title. Freedom and violence after neoliberalism. I look forward to the after, above all.
|
| 00:50:00.120 |
Thank you, Robert, for having me.
|
| 00:50:01.720 |
Thanks, your pleasure. Bye-bye.
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| 00:50:03.240 |
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Now there's nothing left full luxury, nothing left to pay my high hidden bill.
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| 00:52:47.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:52:51.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:53:01.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:53:09.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:53:15.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:53:25.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:53:29.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:53:35.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:53:45.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:53:55.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:54:05.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:54:15.080 |
[Music]
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| 00:54:25.080 |
[Music]
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