Podcast: Naked power politics challenge global democracy, says author Yascha Mounk

TRANSCRIPT: Naked power politics challenge global democracy, says author Yascha Mounk

Yascha Mounk:

Most diverse societies in the history of the world have gone deeply wrong. And the price to pay if it does go wrong is very, very high. We know what it looks like when diverse societies fall apart and it is not pretty. It is bloody. It is horrible.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello, and welcome to the GZERO World podcast. This is where you'll find extended interviews with newsmakers I talk to every week on my public television show. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today, is democracy in danger? The short answer, yes, as the world watches Ukraine bravely defend itself against Russian aggression. The number of democracies overall has been in decline for decades now, and my guest today says it isn't too late to turn that around. It's going to take a lot of work in the embracing of diversity. Yascha Mounk's long list of credits includes contributing editor at The Atlantic, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a new book called The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. Let's get right to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Yascha Mounk, thanks for joining me today.

Yascha Mounk:

My pleasure.

Ian Bremmer:

So, I want to start talking about Russia of course, it's the big topic and you're a global guy, but you have spent a lot of time commenting on this crisis. And one thing you've said that's been notable I thought, was that Putin has basically stopped even trying to pretend that he's not flouting international norms. Is this a guy that always wanted to build a Potemkin democracy? Wanted to at least pretend that they had the norms, that they had the trials and all the rest. You're saying he's not doing that anymore. What do you think caused that change? When did it happen?

Yascha Mounk:

Well, I think it's a broader change that we're seeing in Russia, but also in our countries. So, we're now in the 16th year of democratic recession, the 16th year that in a row that more countries have moved away from democracy than have moved towards it.

Ian Bremmer:

This is the Freedom House index for example, we see that every single year, fewer democracies in the world, democracy is becoming more hybrid and more authoritarian.

Yascha Mounk:

Exactly. And I think we think about this in terms of a lack of democratics of confidence, we think of that in terms of domestic threats to democracy like Donald Trump was in the United States. Many other politicians are like Viktor Orbán in Hungary. But one big thing that has happened is really authoritarian resurgence, the growth of confidence of people like Xi Jinping in China and like Vladimir Putin in Russia who are saying, "We no longer have to pretend to play by the rules of United States, by the rules of the West, by the rules of what we used to call the liberal international order. We will actually just be honest about our demands at the international stage and our lack of respect for human rights and lack of respect for any semblance of democracy domestically." And this I think is really transforming Russia in a warring way from something that always a dictatorship, was a dictatorship 10 years ago to an even more repressive regime in which naked power is even more central.

Ian Bremmer:

Because in China, of course, Xi Jinping actually believes that ultimately his system is a better system where in the case of Russia, Putin certainly doesn't have illusions of that.

Yascha Mounk:

Well, I don't know whether or not he has illusions of that. I certainly think that Putin says and believes that the West is decadent, that traditional values are undermined in the West in warring ways. And that actually the kind of strong leadership that he provides and the kind of supposed defense at least of traditional values that he provides is important. I never underestimate people's ability to be the heroes in their own stories. And I'm sure that Vladimir Putin-

Ian Bremmer:

Bin Laden was the hero of his own story. If you want to go that far, sure, I agree with that.

Yascha Mounk:

Absolutely. And I'm absolutely sure that Vladimir Putin thinks that he is serving the grandee of a Russian nation and that while he's allowing himself a little yacht here and a little bit of corruption there, this is ultimately in the interest of his people.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, part of the reason I say that though is because in the case of Russia, right, the country's in decline. It's been humiliated, he's been humiliated. Why? By the West and a big part of the reason that we see this attack is to redress those grievances.

Yascha Mounk:

Yes, absolutely. So, it is a form of revanchist politics, right? It is a way of saying, "You have humiliated us." Famously Putin thought that the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century was the dissolution of a Soviet Union. Well, this is an attempt to rebuild a new Russian Empire.

Ian Bremmer:

Why do you think he's gotten it so desperately wrong?

Yascha Mounk:

Well, that's fascinating. Isn't it? He got it wrong. A lot of Western observers got it wrong too. I think most "serious" people thought that Ukraine would fall within days and that Russian tanks would be in the streets of Kyiv within a week of the beginning of this cruel war. I think we all underestimated the courage and the capability of leadership in Ukraine. I think we also underestimated just how deeply corrosive corruption is, how deeply corrosive a kleptocratic regime is. Not just for the ability of Russia to innovate or to have billion-dollar patents or to develop it's human talent-

Ian Bremmer:

But for it military trade,.

Yascha Mounk:

... but for it's military, for its actual ability to make sure the tanks don't get stuck because they haven't been oiled properly.

Ian Bremmer:

Is it the case that the sanctions are a lot worse because Putin didn't take Kyiv quickly?

Yascha Mounk:

How do you mean?

Ian Bremmer:

Well, I mean in the sense that if he had won, if the Western observers were right as you suggested and he had just grabbed it, then you'd have a few days of response and then a new normal. And now instead Putin's getting weaker and weaker and he's losing and the Ukrainians feel stronger and as a consequence everyone's kind of piling on. Is that true?

Yascha Mounk:

That may well be true. One of the things that's interesting is that even today and for the coming years, there's a battle within the soul of European politicians and voters between... Well, what Putin is doing in Russia and in Ukraine is really terrible and we really should stand against that. We really should stand in solidarity with Ukraine. But on the other hand, wouldn't it be nice if gas and oil prices went down again? Wouldn't it be nice if we were able to go back to trading with Russia and perhaps sometimes to doing our corrupt deals with Russia? Well, the longer this war goes on, the more civilian suffering there is for more the absolute ruthless brutality of Putin is put in the headlights, the less likely it is that the cynical side of Europeans will win out. And of course at some point there's a path dependency where the sanctions are in place. Companies no longer are as bound up with a fate of Russia economically. Finally, Europe is trying in certain small ways to become more energy independent and that makes it easier to sustain ...

Ian Bremmer:

Because doesn't cost as much.

Yascha Mounk:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Becomes easier. And how do you think this is likely to play out, not just for Russia, but also for China, which is doing far better economically, which is not a country in decline at all, and yet has made this fateful decision to throw their lot in with Putin right at this moment?

Yascha Mounk:

Well, clearly China has walked a careful line where they are giving some support to Russia, but they haven't done anything which would trigger the West to seriously decouple economically. Of course, the question is whether the Chinese leadership is watching this with regard to Taiwan and whether they are seeing what Putin is doing in Ukraine as a kind of test run for whether or not they should use military means to reunify the country.

Ian Bremmer:

In which case the lesson would be no?

Yascha Mounk:

One should hope that the failure of Putin to do this in Ukraine and the serious economic consequence that Russia would have to pay is an effective form of deterrence, which makes Beijing think, "Perhaps the price for doing this in a military way is too high and perhaps the risks are bigger than we appreciated." That may not be the case. They may look at Russia and say, "Russia is a declining nation. It is ironically a decadent nation. We are much more capable and competent and the price for the West of imposing some of the sanctions in China would be much, much higher for them as well. So, we can nevertheless go ahead." But there's at least a possibility that some of the decision-makers in Beijing are looking at what's happening to Russia and the Russian elite and thinking, "We don't want the same thing too."

Ian Bremmer:

So question, you keep saying that we're decadent, you said. So, are the Russians more decadent or are the Westerners more decadent? Which one is it?

Yascha Mounk:

Well, I'm just using that because Putin thinks that we are so decadent.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, I know and we think he's more, so who is more decadent? I'm asking you.

Yascha Mounk:

Look, I think that people always are very aware of the ways in which their own societies are decadent because they're very close to it. You see all of the ways in which things are screwed up in your own society. And in every human society there's always things that are deeply screwed up. But I retain faith that on the whole, the United States and European countries are capable of innovating, have the free expression and the free inquiry. They have an economic system for imperfect in which how much money you're going to make depends on how good a product you offer at what price rather than what your political connections are. And I think all of those are very big assets. So, not cultural assets. There's nothing in principle stopping Russia or China from emulating that model and I hope they will. But as long as those political, economic differences remain, I do think that the United States and Europe and then Japan and Australia and parts of Latin America and parts of Asia are going to outcompete authoritarian countries.

Ian Bremmer:

So, why? I appreciate that you're hopeful about this and it's a good place to be and your book, The Great Experiment ultimately is also hopeful. And I'm glad for it. I'm glad for it. But as you say, we have increasingly been in this democratic recession and living in the United States, it's not just an awareness of the ways in which the system is screwed up, it's also increasingly an awareness that it's getting more screwed up every year. So, what is for you the likely turning point that makes us start to recognize that we can be a little less screwed up?

Yascha Mounk:

Well, one of the things is that this growing international competition may in fact provide a little bit more unity. I think one of the reasons why we were relatively able to deal with our strong internal divisions through the Cold War was the knowledge of the threat from autocratic countries. And I think as this sort of strange little holiday from history, which countries did enjoy, or thought they enjoyed after 1990-

Ian Bremmer:

For 30 years, absolutely.

Yascha Mounk:

... hence we may be able to find some kind of common resolve, but the challenges are real. And the challenge that I talk about in my new book, The Great Experiment is about the really historically unprecedented challenge of building deeply ethnically and religiously diverse democracies, but actually treat their citizens as equals. Most diverse societies in the history of the world have gone deeply wrong. Most democracies in the history of the world have been quite homogeneous or have treated members of minority groups as second class citizens or worse.

What we're trying to do here really is a new challenge and it could go wrong and the price to pay if it does go wrong is very, very high. We know what it looks like when diverse societies fall apart and it is not pretty. It is bloody. It is horrible. But nevertheless, I do think that we also have real strengths. So, when we look at what the United States, what Germany, what Australia look like today compared to 25 or 50 years ago, they are actually doing much, much better at building these diverse democracies than what most people predicted a few decades ago.

Ian Bremmer:

Can you say that the United States is doing a better job building its democracy today than was predicted 25 years ago?

Yascha Mounk:

Well, I'm speaking specifically about the question of ethnic and religious diversity. So, I think that there's a deep problem of our political institutions, which has to do with the rise of authoritarian populism and the presence in our politics of people like Donald Trump who are similar to people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India versus a global phenomenon. I think in the question of how do we deal with this transition of a society in which one group really was dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the past in which they enjoyed very deep advantages over every other group in which other groups were both numerically much smaller than they are now and subordinate in a way that they no longer are. I think on those counts, we really are making very big progress. So, let me just give you a few examples of that.

The first is that racism was quite open and very widespread in the past. 50, even 30 years ago, a majority of Americans openly said that they think that interracial marriage is wrong. Today, that is in the single digits. It is a small minority of Americans that still believes that. And you might think that's a social desirability bias such as people saying what they're supposed to say. But you see that in a change of behavior as well. It used to be that about one in 33 marriages were interracial. Now it is about one seventh. So, the number of mixed race kids has gone up very, very rapidly. So, prejudice is much lower than it was.

Ian Bremmer:

But political marriages are actually going down between Democrats and Republicans. 30, 40 years ago, you didn't care if your kid was a Dem and married a Republican and now you'd say, "Absolutely no way." How can we be getting it so much more tolerant in terms of behavior, not just what you say on race, while we're clearly becoming so much more divided and divisive and polarized when it comes to politics.

Yascha Mounk:

Yeah. So, those are two different developments. I absolutely agree that we are much more politically divided than we are. It's a country that's much more partisan. But that goes to one of the key thesis of the book, which is that actually when you look at Twitter, when you look at cable news, even when you look at the newspapers, it's very easy to despair about America and it's easy to despair as well about the state of race relations in this country. When you look at the actual developments on the ground, things are much better. The developments that are far away from high politics, that are far away from the upcoming midterms or from the 2024 presidential elections. One example of this is the very rapid socio-economic mobility of immigrant groups. So, there's a narrative on the right of politics and the far right of politics that immigration is bad for the country because for people coming here, especially from non-white nations are somehow supposedly inferior in terms of education, in terms of a culture, perhaps even in terms of biology.

There's a narrative from parts of the left that this country is so deeply discriminatory and racist and unjust. And of course there are very real problems we have in our society that immigrants who are coming from Latin America or from Africa really can't succeed.

Ian Bremmer:

And there is a lot of mobility there.

Yascha Mounk:

And that is simply not true. So, according to the best studies, immigrants today from Africa are doing extremely well, Nigerian Americans, Kenyan Americans actually are more than the average white American and immigrants from Latin America rise in the socio-economic ranks about as quickly as Italians and Irish did a hundred years ago.

Ian Bremmer:

And yet black wealth in the United States is just off the charts horrible compared to white wealth right now. And so, can we explain why you would be more tolerant in terms of, again, intermarriage between races, but that you would see this yawning gap in terms of wealth accumulation and economic capacity?

Yascha Mounk:

Yeah. Well, one of the things that are found in my book thinking about the history of diverse societies is both how unjust they were, United States and other countries. The particular way of a particular form this took in the United States was a hard form of domination with chattel slavery, later with Jim Crow. And so, after centuries of that kind of system of injustice, it is unsurprising-

Ian Bremmer:

That's sticky.

Yascha Mounk:

... that the descendants of that system continue to have much less wealth, for example than descendants of people who have been able to go about economic productivity and freedom for centuries, and this is certainly the deepest problem we have in the United States today. But there too, it is important to see the nuances. So, wealth takes longer. The gap in income has substantively reduced over the last decades. And black women born into the poorest quintile of the population, for example, actually have more socio-economic mobility than white women who are born in similar circumstances today. Donald Trump like to say to African American voters, "Vote for me."

Ian Bremmer:

What do you have to lose?

Yascha Mounk:

What do you have to lose? You have nothing left to lose. Well, this is not true. When you look at the median African American in the country, they have gone to college for at least a few years. They make a middle class income, they tend to live in a suburb, they tend to have health insurance from their employer. They have white collar jobs. There is a real pocket of poverty because of the long-term structural impacts of all the injustice in American history. But the modal experience of African Americans today is hopeful. And actually when you ask African Americans how they feel about the American dream, how they feel about the future of America, they are more optimistic than white Americans.

Ian Bremmer:

I'm glad you brought that point up because I always thought that that was one of Trump's most debilitating phrases. The idea that you could tell a swath of the population that it cannot get worse for you than it is right now means that the American dream literally has been absent for that group. It's basically writing them off until you come in as their savior. And of course, as we saw from what was actually the way people voted, that was one of the message that was most profoundly rejected.

Yascha Mounk:

Yeah. I think it's deeply cynical, but what's funny here is that, and you see that in a different context as well, the pessimism of the right about the success of this great experiment of our ability to build these diverse democracies has a weird mirror on the left. So, many people on the far-right on the nationalist don't want the great experiment to succeed. And they say it's doomed because all of these immigrant minority groups are not as good as you know us, et cetera. A lot of people on the left want the great experiment to succeed, but they are actually so invested in painting their own country in a predominantly negative light. But they're also saying, "We're not making any progress. Everything is going wrong." You see that in Europe with debates about immigration when different ways, the right and be left both claim that immigrants aren't integrating the right because they think that immigrants, again have sort of issues of their own or that it's their fault and the left because it's our fault. So, nobody would want to integrate. Nobody is allowed to integrate.

If you want this experiment to work, if you want us to build diverse democracy that actually work and you're more on the left as I am, you should ask yourself, "Why are we saying the same things as the people on the far-right and whose political analysis as to whom this narrative helps, actually is more accurate?" And I fear that the far right is right in its political analysis. But if everybody gives up on the future, if everybody says, "Everything is so horrible. The future is going to be so bad that we may as well give up." That is not going to help people fighting for justice, fighting to improve current conditions. It's going to help the most cynical people who want to tear us apart.

Ian Bremmer:

Give us of all of the countries out there that are democratic in nature, they don't have to be the wealthiest ones, who do you think is not experiencing a democratic deficit? A diverse country? A diverse country? And why?

Yascha Mounk:

I don't think tat there's one country that is doing perfectly.

Ian Bremmer:

Of course not. I mean Canada's doing better than the US, for example. So, I'm just wondering, when you see diversity, there's a lot of diverse countries out there. They are in very, very different paths. And the United States, it's so easy after January 6th, it's so easy after a number of increasingly failed elections to say that the United States has problems and it's the monster in the room, right? But there are a lot of other countries that you wouldn't say that about.

Yascha Mounk:

Look, there's a reason why I'm reluctant to answer this question. So, my last book, The People Vs. Democracy was about rise of populism. And I remember very vividly going around the world talking about this book in many different countries, many different contexts. And in many places people said, "Well, look, perhaps Hungary might experience this or India might experience this." After 2016, "Perhaps the United States might experience this." But us, come on. We are a sensible country. We would recognize these kinds of people as dangerous. No way that this would happen here. And time after time, a year or two later, those countries went through exactly the same processes.

Ian Bremmer:

Ottawa.

Yascha Mounk:

Exactly the same.

Ian Bremmer:

Look at what happened in Ottawa just a couple of months ago. And these are nice people.

Yascha Mounk:

Exactly.

Ian Bremmer:

Right?

Yascha Mounk:

Exactly. Exactly.

Ian Bremmer:

It's too cold to protest up there.

Yascha Mounk:

And so, I would say that every country is in danger of falling apart. Every country's in danger of seeing this authoritarian populist rise and win. Every country is in danger of failing to master these rising ethnic and religious and cultural diversity. And we've seen in history that societies that seem to be thriving for decades or centuries, which we think back on as great examples of this kind of intercultural corporation then suddenly fall apart in really violent and bloody ways. So, I think every country is in danger, but I also don't think that there's a democracy where I say, "This is beyond the pale. You've lost, no chance for the future, may as well give up." So, I think it really depends on the choices that all of us are going to make and whether we are able to formulate a hopeful, optimistic vision for what the future might look like, what we're able to agree on basic rules and basic aspirations for how we are going to live together across these boundaries and whether we make sure that our politicians don't screw it up for us.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, you'd said before that the Chinese are watching carefully what's happening in Russia and there are lessons they might take away. I'm wondering for those in democracies that are watching what's happening in Russia and Russia's falling apart right now and that are watching what's happening in China and China with a very different system is doing quite well economically and in other ways. Which is the more powerful lesson, and what kind of lessons are being taken away in democracies today?

Yascha Mounk:

Well, I think one of the lessons that we should take from the pandemic and the last few years is that we need to become more serious about solving our problems. That we are in a real ideological competition with autocratic countries that we're seeing in Russia and of North Korea and Ukraine, what it means to live under an autocratic ruler or what it means to be subject to the power of this resurgent autocracy. So, we all should want to make sure that the 21st century remains safe for democracy, that these fundamental values of individual freedom and self-determination actually win the day. But to do that, it's not enough to wax poetic about our beautiful values or to rely on the idea that somehow our system has always proven strongly in the past, so it's going to do so again.

We need to double down on what political scientists call performance legitimacy. We need to make sure that our system actually delivers for its own citizens and remains a model where people in rising nations like India, like Nigeria, like Kenya, look around the world and say, "We would rather be more Germany or the United States than like Russia or China." And that is up to us in the decisions we make here.

Ian Bremmer:

And the end of the 20th century was safe for democracy. Looking forward increasingly, you would argue, and I agree, that the 21st century increasingly is less safe for democracy. If it turns out that we fail, that the great experiment fails, why will that have been?

Yascha Mounk:

I think for two reasons. The first is that there is a basic human instinct towards groupishness. There's a basic instinct to form groups and to discriminate in favor of the members of the ingroup and against the members of the outgroup. This is particularly salient in ethnically and religiously diverse democracies where it's very easy to say, "I don't care about being American. I care about being X, Y, and Z." Now, thankfully there is a way to respond to that, which is that it depends on the social context, on the framing, on the incentives, what groups you give importance to. And I think if our societies fall apart, it's because we end up giving more importance to our ethnic belonging, to our cultural roots, or to our partisan identity than to our common interests, than to the things that we actually share as Americans here in the United States, as Germans and Germany, as Indians and India.

And so, I think if we fail, it's because a lot of the institutions that are influential in society, from politics to education to the media haven't tried hard enough to emphasize the importance of discovering and seeing those commonalities.

Ian Bremmer:

That was reason one. You said there were two.

Yascha Mounk:

Well, the second goes to partisan identity. When the founding father started the first great experiment in a way, my book's about the second great experiment, when we founded the United States, it seemed like a full-hearted project. Hindsight is 2020, we know that it turned out they were able to build a system which has lasted with flaws, but with great success as well for 250 years. That seemed unlikely at the time. When you looked around in 1776, there really weren't many countries that had succeeded in governing themselves because people formed these groups, not necessarily ethnic or religious groups, but just partisan groups of one family, one clan, one party, one faction fighting the other. We have a set of institutions to try and manage attention, but it always depends on the choices of individuals on how we frame our politics, whether we manage to stop first factions from becoming so bitter that they would rather win against the enemy than preserve the system.

And so, the two great dangers is that we fail to build diverse democracies that work, that manage to build commonality between different ethnic or religious groups. And the second is that the partisans of one political party become so obsessed with victory, vilify their partisan opponents to such an extent that they're willing to blow up the system to gain power or to remain in power.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, I want to take you out of your model for just a second because a lot of what you're talking about and a lot of what the book is about is focusing on the national paradigm, the state paradigm. It is, "We don't want groupishness in terms of I'm this ethnic or this religious identity." Want to say, "I'm American. I'm German." At a time of global challenges, the pandemic doesn't care if you're American or German, you're going to get sick. Climate change doesn't care if you're American or German, you're going to get hotter. How much is the problem that we have to stop with the groupishness of American and German?

Yascha Mounk:

Well, so I think it's a mistake to think that we can ever completely overcome groupishness. So, part of the point is that-

Ian Bremmer:

Well, I was going to go with astrology would be a much better-

Yascha Mounk:

Astrology is definitely better.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, I'm a Scorpio, what are you?

Yascha Mounk:

I'm a Gemini.

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, then it's over for you.

Yascha Mounk:

Yeah. We're ending the conversation right now.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, exactly.

Yascha Mounk:

I had this hope growing up. I was born in 1982. I grew up in Germany. I'm Jewish. So, nationalism or national identity does not come easily to me. And I thought-

Ian Bremmer:

Well, you're Gemini. So, that explains everything actually.

Yascha Mounk:

So, I thought, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if all of us become so enlightened and so cosmopolitan that we give up on national identity, that we give up on any kind of group identity?" But we're just individuals who are in communication with each other across borders and across boundaries and nationalism, that was the ideology of the 20th century, which explains many of the horrible things but happened in that century. In the 21st century, we'll be able to move beyond that. And what happened, because the best kinds of people were people who actually care about the values of liberal democracy, gave up on nationalism. It was appropriated by people like Recep Erdogan in Turkey, by people like Narendra Modi in India, by people like Donald Trump in the United States, by Vladimir Putin in the worst kinds of ways. In ways that were exclusionary towards members of their own society and were justified after an aggression against other nations.

So, I think it's always a question of how do we manage groupishness? And part of a solution to that is to build a positive vision of patriotism, which isn't ethnically exclusionary, which is based on political values, but which is also based on the living, breathing, everyday culture of a country like the United States, which is diverse, which is forward-looking, which is ever changing rather than just looking to the past or excluding some people from it. And when you're able to sustain that kind of patriotism, it helps us be able to have solidarity with each other. It helps us sustain the welfare state. It helps us take the kind of political action we need to deal with problems like climate change. So, I think if you're going to say, "To solve the problems of prejudice and to solve the problems of climate change, we just need to convince everybody to give up on all of the identities, to give up on the national identity and just become good world citizens," then unfortunately we will fail to actually effectively tackle those pressing problems.

Ian Bremmer:

Yascha Mounk, his group is American. His book is The Great Experiment. Thanks for joining on GZERO World.

Yascha Mounk:

Thank you, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World podcast. Like what you've heard, come check us out at gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.

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