Why is democracy prone to degeneration, and how does this affect our conventional notions of democracy itself? Do we usually depend too much on a thin formal institutional conception of democracy focused on electoral routines, and thus, neglect broader questions of class, culture, equality, and solidarity? How can we reimagine and also regenerate progressive democracy with the right balance of freedom, equality, and solidarity on the local, national, as well as supranational levels? And how can we overcome the pervasive sense of powerlessness in the face of abstract impersonal forces, forces that Charles Taylor refers to not only as opaque, but also as those signalling the loss of citizen efficacy?
Guests featured in this episode:
Charles Taylor, one of the most preeminent contemporary philosophers of our times. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal. He was Fellow of All Souls College and Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University. His remarkably vast oeuvre includes landmark monographs on Hegel, social theory, religion, language, and multiculturalism. Among his books let me mention Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989), Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (1992), or A Secular Age (2007) which have decisively shaped contemporary debates in their respective fields. His latest book, co-authored with Craig Calhoun and Dilip Gaonkar is called Degenerations of Democracy.
Glossary
What is the murder of George Floyd?
(08:51 or p.3 in the transcript)
On May 25, 2020, white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, a Black man, by kneeling on his neck for almost 10 minutes. The death, recorded by bystanders, touched off what may have been the largest protest movement in U.S. history and a nationwide reckoning on race and policing. After video of the incident was posted on Facebook, protests began almost immediately in Minneapolis and quickly spread across the nation. Demonstrators chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe” took to the streets from coast to coast, and police departments around the country responded at times with riot-control tactics. By early June, protests were so widespread that over 200 American cities had imposed curfews and half of the United States had activated the National Guard. Marches continued and spread throughout June, despite the restrictions on gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic and militarized resistance from federal and local law enforcement. More than 2,000 cities and towns in all 50 states saw some form of demonstration in the weeks after Floyd’s death, as well as major cities across the globe: source
What is the Hungarian Revolution of 1956?
(13:06 or p.4 in the transcript)
Hungarian Revolution was a popular uprising in Hungary in 1956, following a speech by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in which he attacked the period of Joseph Stalin’s rule. Encouraged by the new freedom of debate and criticism, a rising tide of unrest and discontent in Hungary broke out into active fighting in October 1956. Rebels won the first phase of the revolution, and Imre Nagy became premier, agreeing to establish a multiparty system. On November 1, 1956, he declared Hungarian neutrality and appealed to the United Nations for support, but Western powers were reluctant to risk a global confrontation. On November 4 the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to stop the revolution, and Nagy was executed for treason in 1958. Nevertheless, Stalinist-type domination and exploitation did not return, and Hungary thereafter experienced a slow evolution toward some internal autonomy: source
What is the Ukrainian refugee crisis?
(15:16 or p.4 in the transcript)
The ongoing Ukrainian refugee crisis began in February 2022 immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At present, around 8 million of Ukrainians fled the country as Russia indiscriminately targeted civilian populations with rockets and artillery strikes. By late March some four million Ukrainians had fled the fighting; this represented Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. The overwhelming majority would find safety in Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. 90% of the refugees are women and children as Ukrainian men between 18 and 60 are banned from leaving the country: source
What is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
(18:13 or p.5 in the transcript)
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), foundational document of international human rights law. It has been referred to as humanity’s Magna Carta by Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights that was responsible for the drafting of the document. After minor changes it was adopted unanimously—though with abstentions from the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian SSR, and Yugoslavia—by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948 (now celebrated annually as Human Rights Day), as a “common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” The French jurist René Cassin was originally recognized as the principal author of the UDHR. It is now well established, however, that, although no individual can claim ownership of this document, John Humphrey, a Canadian professor of law and the UN Secretariat’s Human Rights Director, authored its first draft. Also instrumental in the drafting of the UDHR were Roosevelt; Chang Peng-chun, a Chinese playwright, philosopher, and diplomat; and Charles Habib Malik, a Lebanese philosopher and diplomat: source
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SR: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna, and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. It's a great pleasure to welcome Charles Taylor, one of the most preeminent contemporary philosophers of our times. He's Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal where he spent a large part of his illustrious teaching career. He was Fellow of All Souls College and Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, where I had the privilege of being his student. His remarkable and vast oeuvre includes landmark monographs on Hegel, on social theory, religion, language, and multiculturalism. Among his books, let me just mention three, "Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity," "Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition," and "Secular Age."
All three have decisively shaped contemporary debates in their respective fields. His latest book, co-authored with Craig Calhoun and Dilip Gaonkar, makes a timely intervention in current political and philosophical engagements with the crises of democracy. Following up on the previous episode of the podcast which featured Craig Calhoun, I will ask Charles Taylor today to elaborate on some of the key arguments they have developed in their book, "Degenerations of Democracy."
Why is democracy prone to degeneration, and how does this affect our conventional notions of democracy itself? Do we usually depend too much on a thin formal institutional conception of democracy focused on electoral routines, and thus, neglect broader questions of class, culture, equality, and solidarity? How can we reimagine and also regenerate progressive democracy with the right balance of freedom, equality, and solidarity on the local level, national, as well as supranational levels? And how can we overcome the pervasive sense of powerlessness in the face of abstract impersonal forces, forces that Charles Taylor refers to, not only as opaque, but also as signaling the loss of citizen efficacy? These are the fundamental dilemmas of democratic politics today that I will discuss with Charles Taylor. Charles, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me, and it's a great pleasure to have you with me today. I know it's very close to your 90th birthday.
CT: Well, it's a pleasure to be here.
SR: In your most recent book, "Degenerations of Democracy," you tease out the implications of democratic degeneration for the philosophy of history that has shaped our political imaginaries. And let me quote you here briefly. You write, "Contrary to our naive expectations of 1989, anti-democratic tendencies remain strong and numerous with impressive recent recruits since 2010. Indeed, those who know 20th-century history may have a sense of déjà vu in this regard. In view of the great depression of the 1930s, many in Western societies had a sense of the powerlessness of representative democracies to master the crises." End of quote.
So, you caution us against a self-congratulatory liberal narrative of democratic convergence that was hegemonic from the 2nd World War until the 1990s at least. And you also cast doubt on the irreversibility of history and the idea of linear progress. Instead, you make a very strong argument that we should understand democracy as a dynamic, contradictory and a contested process that is punctuated by periods in which it approaches its ultimately unattainable telos. So, let me start by asking you, why is it important to grasp democracy in terms of historical oscillation, tensions, and its incompleteness and ambiguities?
CT: I think you have to see it in that context. And so, the first thing you have to do when you find yourself slipping away is make some kind of diagnosis of what's made you slip away. Now, I think in our present situation in Western democracies, I'm talking about the U.S., about France, about a whole lot of Western democracies, it's relatively clear what's happened. That there has been a kind of spiral whereby very widespread sense among ordinary people, non-elites not being able to get what they need from the system, of having their situation actually deteriorate. And this is the case of many workers and people in lesser centers in the whole Western world since 1945, since even 1970. The sense of powerlessness goes along with a greater and greater opacity, the system, they don't see what levers to pull in order to get what they would like.
And they're open to really very crazy appeals in the board of demagogues who say that they have the answer to this. And these demagogues, of course, are targeting minorities, are targeting outsiders, which will do absolutely nothing for the people concerned who are voting for them. So, the question is, the problem is, how do you restore efficacy, and, if you like, transparency of the system at the same time? And that's one of the very big challenges we see.
The other way of looking at the challenge is to ask why these kinds of exclusionary appeals, have the following that they have. And I think that's something where we're looking specifically at Western democracies, and there are two things that really brought that to our head. One is the greater international migration, particularly, because of refugees, has produced a situation in which the sense in a number of countries are being swamped or having too many people come in, which is something that I don't want to target morally.
I sort of understand the sense of disorientation that can arise, but the fact is that we don't have an option in the West. The level of degree of international migration is so great that it can turn otherwise very open tolerant countries in a trice into closed societies or heading in that direction. The case of Sweden today is very, very telling on this. One of the most liberal open societies interested in helping other countries in the world with a very high level of international aid was Sweden. And the fact that a lot of people have come in recently has given rise to a party which has not taken over, but it's certainly upset the system. And a bit earlier, the same could be said about Denmark.
But the second thing that I think is going on, which is really very, very hard to deal with, is a backlash against some very, very important and very, very, if you like, overdue movements that occurred from the 1960s onwards in which various kinds of hierarchical views or views of who comes first and who comes second, which existed for a long time, I mean, that men get certain jobs and not women, or White over Black, or settler over indigenous, we could go down a whole long list.
Well, there's been, since the 1960s real pushback against these modes of discrimination or hierarchy, or if you like, hierarchical inclusion, and it was overdue and it had to happen, and we have to go on with it. But it has produced backlash, which we have to get through in order to return to a situation in which we find ourselves, if you like, heading towards the telos of democracy becoming better as against becoming worse. And there are shafts of hope here that I have, I see very much because the younger generation in many Western societies, obviously, many of them see diversity as a richness, not as a threat, right?
So, if you get the backlash against the murder of George Floyd, there was something very encouraging about that. The Black Lives Matter movements, which previously had been really largely Black, understandably, after George Floyd, you saw really multiracial, a lot of White young people were involved in that too. And I'm looking at my own situation in Quebec, which is another example of that, and we find that the discriminatory legislation that we still have to fight against is much less popular among younger people than it is among the people my age. So, there is some light at the end of the tunnel, but we have to understand these two forces that are making things difficult for us. The forces of the backlash and the necessity of admitting more people because of the large number of refugees moving, which always tends to produce at a certain level, at a certain nervousness, and uncertainty, and so on.
So, the battle is by no means lost, but I think we have to understand why, the present crisis puts together a certain opacity of the system because people haven't had instruments in which to realize their goals. And these people feel their standard of living has been downgraded, very severely downgraded, and they're angry and looking for solutions. And they're easy victims or easy marks for demagogues like Trump who say, "Well, I can make, you know, life better for you again by excluding a whole lot of people or leaning on a whole lot of people." And there, he's appealing to the sense of an identity which is challenged by the attempt to rectify these inequalities.
SR: So, Charles, I'll come to the question of the backlash against inclusion in a moment, but let's talk first about the whole question of refugees and migrants, which you are mentioning. So, two things strike me about the whole phenomena of increased immigration and also flows of refugees. One, that why is someone coming from outside the borders of the country a problem? It's a problem if you define the body politic as consisting of only those who are born on a certain territory so that you have an ethno-nationalist definition of who belongs to the nation-state. If we had a definition inclusive of diversity, of a multicultural society, then I don't think immigration should be such a problem.
So, I think one of the roots of that is this extremely narrow definition of the polity in ethno-nationalist terms. And the fact that that is coupled today with turning the refugees and the migrants into scapegoats, scapegoats for the jobs which have disappeared, as you call it the great downgrade, which is the decay and regression within all established democracies in the '70s. But that seems to have more to do with the dismantling of the welfare state, don't you think, than it has to do with the number of migrants who are taking up very low-skilled jobs, in most cases, jobs which people in the societies themselves would be hardly wanting to take up?
CT: Absolutely. I mean, the remedy offered by Le Pen and Trump are totally the wrong remedy, no doubt about that. But how to tackle what you were talking about, the definition of the state in ethnonational terms, we have to see what we're up against here because, in a sense, these states – and many of them have always seen themselves in those terms – what produces a situation that nevertheless allows them to be open. And I'm thinking back to the Second World War. And I'm thinking back to my earliest experience of refugee crisis, which was after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and I was actually in Vienna at the time with an NGO trying to help the students who were that part of the population, they had come across the border. In about four or five months, we completely emptied those camps because there was this tremendous positive move so that we actually ran out of Hungarians to give people.
We actually started to pass through some people, the so-called displaced persons who've been there since 1945 because, you know, no one was interested. But how can we reproduce that kind of situation? Well, I think it's going to be a long process, but it's a process of creating certain civil society institutions. Now, you know, in Germany when in 2015 Angela Merkel said, you know, "We can manage it, wir schaffen es" and then she was forced to retreat because of all that. Nevertheless, it would've been much worse if there hadn't been certain organizations within the civil society.
So, we have to create, in civil society, these kinds of institutions to mobilize the people that aren't easily recruitable into the ethnonational mindset. Right? And, of course, the more that those kinds of institutions exist, the more refugees actually enter, the more they're beautifully and easily integrated. That gradually creates a climate of seeing the advantage both economic and cultural of integrating people. So, there's a kind of construction that we have to take on within our societies of civil society organizations that are and will be agents of real integration.
SR: So, Charles, two things occurred to me when you said you've experienced yourself in '56, the stream of Hungarian refugees coming across the border to Vienna and the welcome that they got. Do you think Ukrainian refugees are another such moment where in Poland, for example, which has extremely anti-migrant and refugee politics of the government, on the one hand, and suddenly hundreds and thousands of Ukrainian refugees crossing the border, you have especially civil society support...
CT: Yeah.
SR: ...for the refugees? So, obviously, something has shifted, but only in relation to certain groups of those crossing our borders.
CT: Yeah. It's still this kind of fear of these very, very different people. So, the same Pols that were there in the border stopping Lukashenko sending Syrians and others, are opening the gates when it comes to incredible number of Ukrainians, because they're not only close, but because they're victims of the same enemy. It's obvious that if you're a Pole, you look at a victim of Putin, you know, as a brother or sister.
SR: Very differently from victims of ISIS or Al-Qaeda. Yes, certainly. But the other thing which struck me while you were speaking was that their liberalism has a dilemma here, don't you think, that there is always a tension between the universalism of human rights...
CT: Yeah.
SR: ...and citizenship, which can only be exclusionary in the sense that it's bounded and cannot be extended to everybody. And in that tension, it's usually citizenship which wins over the universality of human rights. And the question here is, for a liberal like yourself, what could be grounds on which one could justify some kinds of exclusion to a liberal democratic polity? Because, otherwise, citizenship rights tied to the welfare state would have to be extended to all of humanity.
CT: There is such a thing as a real total overload – we by no means reach that. But we could never have a society that says, "Let anybody come who wants to come." So, you have to see the features of our cultures, our political cultures as they're developing over time, which are open to this, which are even desiring this kind of diversification and universal health and so on. And these factors are there, and, in some cases, I think in Canada and in the States, and perhaps, in Europe as well, there's a long-term hope because the valuing of diversity, the sense of it is enrichment, also the satisfaction of really doing, as it were one's duty according to the officially accepted values of our society. After all, we all subscribe to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, right?
So, all these motivations can be strengthened, and they're the ones that would allow our cultures to evolve in a direction that is more open, more ready to accept. And we've got to do this because what's moving international migration now is not going to stop, a lot of it has to do with the deterioration of the planet. If you think of the Horn of Africa, there's a terrible famine going on because of real desertification of a large part of that territory. So, we're facing a world in which the present number of refugees will look relatively insignificant in 10 or in 15 years' time.
SR: So, let me ask you about a term which plays a large role in your argument in the book. You talk about the actual dynamics of degeneration along three broad parts along which democracy has declined over the last half-century. And you talk about exclusion, sociopolitical polarization, and then you use a term which I'd like you to talk about, and that is the loss of what you term citizen efficacy. Could you say something about these intertwined processes of exclusion, polarization, and citizen efficacy, and the pernicious effects that these three have had in mutually reinforcing each other in a downward spiral to the degeneration of democracies?
CT: So, I think citizen efficacy is a really key thing we have to look at here first. With that, I mean, how efficacious citizens are in acting, but it's really, I'm talking about how they feel, right? So, you get a situation in which you see this very clearly with Trump and his following. A lot of people whose situation has been downgraded want to do something about it and they don't see what they can do. And that's because the political system evolved in a way which deprived them of levers. I mean, lever number one, obviously, would be trade unions and membership has tremendously declined in the United States. But lever number two would be a left-leaning social democratic party that would've insisted on building up the welfare state and in new forms of the welfare state and so on, and that has also very much declined.
And it's declined because of a kind of takeover of our whole political class, left and right, of very deep illusions, which neoliberalism would be the right name for. But markets can resolve everything. They can not only make for the massive and greater production of all goods, but they also somehow take care of distribution, and, of course, they don't. And the fact that the parties of the left, Democrats, or the Labour in the UK have allowed themselves to slide into that has created this sense among the people who've been victims of this, that they don't have a lever anymore, that they don't have somebody working for them.
They don't have a group, or a party, or an organization like a Trade Union that they can turn to for address of grievance. And the big problem is that instead of that kind of development producing a sense of we've got to find something like it, we've got to find a party, we've got to find an organization, it produces a real opacity, they don't quite see anymore what causes what, and, therefore, they're possible victims of the appeal of these, what we call populists, who offer at one and the same time to meet their needs and to play to their very deep fears and prejudices. Right?
They get talked into the idea that what comforts these fears and prejudices is also going to be efficacious in making their lives better, which, of course, is opposite of the truth. So, you have to have a kind of movement. I take the example of Biden, who really, I think, represents quite a high degree of positivity here because I think he certainly understands elements of the welfare state that you have to reintroduce. At the same time, he's appealed as himself the child of workers in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and someone who understood their predicament and wanted to do something about that. So, these kind of appeals, they’re a good program and an identity appeal of that kind, you know, “I have the same identity as you”, can really begin to shift the system away from its present dead-end polarization. Dead-end because polarization is going to do nothing to meet the deep needs and dissatisfactions which are driving the polarization.
And I think that Biden gives a good example of how to put together a program that really would do something with a sense that I'm not looking down at you, and despising you, you're not deplorables, an unfortunate word that Hillary used. This kind of appeal can work and can help turn the political system in a new direction, and that is the direction which we have to go. So, there's a mixture of having good programs, but that they're not sufficient. There's also a question of appealing to people whose identities are very complex, appealing to the better part, the good part of their identity as against the less good part, and as against simply preaching that, you know, you're morally wrong.
SR: But, Charles, one part of their identity is people's religious identities. And so, let me ask you to relate some of this argument to your book on the post-secular age. I think what is striking for me is, for example, if you look at some of these populist leaders, and Bolsonaro who has lost the election in Brazil...
CT: Thank God.
SR: ...with a very narrow margin, has been appealing to the citizens saying he is the man of God. And I think this is the kind of appeal, I think Trump would find it hard to make that argument. But Erdogan, for example, is also appealing in the name of religion. So, I think we are getting a lot of mobilization around religious identities fused with ethnic ones in many of the countries in which these populist leaders are successful. Now, Orbán himself probably is no Christian or a good practicing one, but he's appealing constantly to Christian values. So, could you say something about the role that religion is playing in the kind of mobilization that we are seeing these days?
CT: Yes. And I mean, Trump is not one really to appeal, but he has a lot of, you know, evangelical supporters, so it's playing in his favor as well, even though he doesn't appeal to them exactly the same direct way. So, I think that the thing about the secular age, if you like, is that religions are deeply split so that there are people who are very disturbed by the passing of the older ways of being religious, particularly those that were coded very strongly with a certain, you know, ethic or certain sexual ethic and so on. Religion isn't all on one side.
The crisis within religious communities produced by the secular age, the crisis where a whole lot of people deserted certain churches, but a whole lot of people deserted earlier ways of living their faith and were more seekers and so on. So, that produces a kind of identity crisis among those who identify very strongly with that older, tight community, clear code, endangered by the outside world, and so on. And this deep division between all these faiths in the world is one of the things that is, unfortunately, feeding conflict.
SR: Many thanks to Prof. Taylor for joining us today. And let me summarize some of the main points of our discussion. There is need for vigilance and concern about the degeneration of democracy even in Western societies that mistakenly believe that democratic progress was linear and also irreversible. What has declined steadily over half century is what Charles Taylor calls ‘a sense of citizen efficacy’. That is widely shared popular perceptions of feelings about being able to shape political and socioeconomic outcomes through democratic politics. The hegemony of neoliberal ideas, which has gained acceptance among the social democratic parties, too, has left large masses of working people without institutional forms of representation. This has also led to a sense of powerlessness in the face of societal transformations that appear to be increasingly opaque and also uncontrollable. Traditional democratic practices such as joining a trade union or simply the act of voting in elections do not seem to matter. That’s one reason why right-wing populists and demagogues have successfully tapped into and also exploited the innermost fears and prejudices of large masses who are resentful of being excluded. The real causes of many of these far-reaching structural changes, such as the decrease in jobs, the dismantling of the welfare state, deindustrialization elude the grasp of ordinary citizens. Many of them can be all too easily persuaded therefore to blame immigrants for their problems, or to blame progressive movements demanding equal rights for ethnic, racial or religious minorities as scapegoats for their own predicament. However, there are some reasons for cautious optimism in the ongoing battles against this dangerous backlash against democracy. Civil society organizations actively promote and foster inclusive integration as well as respect for diversity and pluralism that can enrich our societies. We can only ignore feelings of resentment and identity politics at our own peril. These can easily lead to a political backlash that threatens the future of democracy itself.
This was the 8th episode of season five of "Democracy in Question." Thank you very much for listening and join us again for the next episode in a fortnight's time. My guest will be Ricardo Regatieri on the recent elections in Brazil and the end of Bolsonarism. Please go back and listen to any episode that you might have missed, and, of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University, the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.