Liberal democracy might already be dead

Liberal democracy might already be dead | The Gray Area

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

In this episode of The Gray Area, Vox’s Sean Elling engages in a thought-provoking conversation with British philosopher John Gray, discussing the precarious state of liberal democracy. Gray, often regarded as a leading political thinker, explores the concept of liberalism and its contemporary challenges. With references to historical and modern political theory, Gray and Elling navigate the dialog around whether liberalism, as we know it, has reached its endpoint. Through exploring philosophical roots and the evolution of political ideologies, they reflect on how current socio-political dynamics could shape the future landscape of democracy and governance.

Highlights

Sean Elling discusses John Gray’s perspective on the 'death of liberalism'. 🗣️
John Gray highlights how the ideals of liberalism have shifted significantly, especially post-1990. 🕰️
Discussions focus on the philosophical roots of liberalism, referencing Thomas Hobbes. 🤔
Gray outlines how both external and internal pressures are challenging liberal societies. 💢
The conversation suggests that liberal democracies may no longer exist in their previous forms. 🔄
Interesting parallels between historical political thought and modern challenges are drawn. 📖

Key Takeaways

Liberal democracy is under scrutiny, facing challenges from both within and outside its traditional boundaries. 🌍
John Gray argues that modern liberalism might have strayed from its foundational principles. 📜
The idea of freedom is being reinterpreted in today's societal context, potentially to its detriment. 🔄
Philosophical discussions anchor the episode, bringing in historical context with thinkers like Hobbes. 📚
There are rising socio-political tensions that may lead to significant shifts in the governance and ideology landscapes. ⚖️

Overview

In a riveting episode of The Gray Area, host Sean Elling sits down with noted philosopher John Gray to dissect the current state of liberal democracy. Titled 'Liberal democracy might already be dead,' the episode delves into whether the political and ideological frameworks we take for granted are on the brink of collapse.

Gray, a stalwart in political philosophy, brings to the fore a critical analysis of liberalism's evolution since the Enlightenment. He questions whether its foundational premises hold up in today's world, especially considering the global geopolitical shifts and rise of autocratic sentiments.

Engaging and thorough, Elling and Gray cover a lot of ground, from historical political philosophy to the potential futures of democratic systems. Listeners are left contemplating the sustainability of their governance systems amid growing societal and cultural demands for change.

Chapters

00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The introduction announces a new podcast called 'The Gray Area,' hosted by Sean, who previously taught philosophy. The show explores important ideas and current issues with various guests. Unlike typical Vox content, this podcast caters to listeners with a deep curiosity about understanding the world. Starting today, episodes will be available weekly on Vox's YouTube channel.
00:30 - 50:00: Conversation with John Gray The chapter titled 'Conversation with John Gray' is a discussion with British philosopher John Gray, focusing on his perspective on the so-called 'death of liberalism.' Gray is recognized as a leading political thinker, and the conversation delves into various philosophical topics. The discussion also touches upon Thomas Hobbes' views on human existence, quoting his famous assertion about life's solitary and harsh nature. Readers are promised an engaging discourse on these thought-provoking themes.
50:00 - 55:00: Break The chapter titled 'Break' discusses philosopher Thomas Hobbes' impactful work, The Leviathan, published in 1651. A key element of Hobbes' philosophy, regarded as foundational to modern political thought, is his challenge to the divine right of kings and religious figures to rule. Hobbes asserts that political power is derived from the consent of the governed, emphasizing that authority should be handed over to the state or any other entity only with the people's consent.
55:00 - 89:00: Return to Conversation The chapter discusses the concept of protecting individual rights, a core principle that has been pivotal since the Enlightenment era and forms the foundation of liberalism as it is known in the modern Western world. However, this foundational philosophy of liberalism and democracy is currently facing challenges both internally and externally. Despite these challenges, the chapter implies that while liberalism is under scrutiny, it is certainly not obsolete or 'dead.'
89:00 - 95:00: Final Thoughts and Conclusion The chapter titled 'Final Thoughts and Conclusion' delves into the potential end of the liberal experiment, questioning what this could signify for the political landscape ahead. Host Sean Elling engages in a thoughtful exploration of these themes, contemplating the implications of a possibly changing political paradigm.
95:00 - 101:00: Credits and Closing In this chapter, the focus is on political philosopher John Gray and his insights regarding liberal democracy. The discussion stems from a prior conversation before last year's elections, which the narrator finds themselves frequently revisiting. Gray, in his book 'The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism,' argues against the notion that the ideals of liberal democracy are a concluded chapter in history.

Liberal democracy might already be dead | The Gray Area Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 hey it's Sean i host the gray area a Vox podcast i used to teach philosophy now I have a show where a guest and I talk about the world and the ideas that we think are really important right now it's a bit different from what you may have come to expect from Vox on YouTube but we also know a lot of you are driven by a deep curiosity and a desire to understand the world which means a lot of you will probably enjoy this show too starting today episodes of The Gray Area will be on Vox's YouTube channel weekly in the episode you're about to hear I
00:30 - 01:00 talked to the British philosopher John Gray who I think is one of the best political thinkers of our time about what he calls the death of liberalism so you know light stuff but it was a fascinating conversation and I think you'll enjoy it thanks the life of man is solitary poor nasty brutish and short those are the words of the great and now infamous Thomas Hobbes the 17th century
01:00 - 01:30 English philosopher you can find them in his 1651 book The Leviathan which is often considered the founding text of modern political philosophy hobbes's big contribution was to challenge the right of kings and religious authorities to rule the foundation of political power for him was the consent of the governed and the only reason to hand over authority to the state or anyone else for that
01:30 - 02:00 matter was for the protection of the individual if that sounds familiar it's because it is that's basically the political philosophy that came to dominate the Western world from the Enlightenment on it's what we now call liberalism but we're in an era where liberalism and democracy are being contested from within and without and while I wouldn't say that liberalism is dead that doesn't quite
02:00 - 02:30 make sense i would say that it's wobbly what should we make of that is the liberal experiment coming to an end and if it is what does that mean for our political future i'm Sean Elling and this is the gray [Music]
02:30 - 03:00 [Music] area today's guest is political philosopher John Gray we spoke before last year's elections and lately I have found myself returning to that conversation over and over again in his book The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism Great challenges the idea that the liberal dream of history with a capital H is over and that liberal democracy has
03:00 - 03:30 won hobbes is at the center of his book because he thinks Hobbes's liberalism was more realistic in its ambitions and that his most important lessons about the limits of politics have been forgotten it is as you might suspect a challenging book but it is an essential read and I invited Gray onto the show to talk about what he thinks has gone wrong and more importantly where he thinks we're
03:30 - 04:00 headed john Gray welcome to the Gray Area thank you very much Jordan what's interesting about this new book is that you're not even bothering to announce the death of liberalism you know like Nichzche's Madman screaming about God in the town square you're saying liberalism has already passed and most of us don't quite know it yet is that right uh yes i think there are many um visible signs
04:00 - 04:30 that anything like a liberal order or a liberal civilization has has passed um in the last 30 years shall we say since um 1990 30 odd years there's been an enormous uh after that moment in which it seemed that liberal democracy was going to become universal or nearly universal following the collapse of communism what in fact happened was that the transition from communism to liberal
04:30 - 05:00 democracy did not occur in Russia it has not occurred in China the wars that were fought so-called wars of choice by the United States and its followers including Britain in Afghanistan Iraq Syria to some degree and and Libya were all failures none of those countries became democratic or anything near it and in fact they only damaged those countries in profound ways and damaged the United States and particularly United States and Britain
05:00 - 05:30 in various ways land um so I think if you just look at um geopolitical trends you can see that the so-called liberal west if something like that ever fully existed is in steep retreat and in western societies themselves what were taken for granted even within my lifetime and perhaps yours as fully accepted liberal freedoms of speech and inquiry expression and so forth have been curtailed uh not by a dictatorial
05:30 - 06:00 state interestingly as in the former Soviet Union or today in she's China but actually by civil institutions themselves it's been universities and um museums and uh publishers and media organizations that of charities and cultural institutions and so on of various kinds that have imposed various kinds of limits on themselves such that they police the expression of their
06:00 - 06:30 members and those who deviate from a prevailing progressive orthodoxy are in various ways canceled or excluded that's quite new but it's rather widespread now and and pervasive and although of course it's true that um there are enclaves of uh free expression um enclaves or niches like the one we're enjoying now we're not in the position that people are in in uh she's uh China or um Putin's
06:30 - 07:00 Russia we can still communicate relatively freely uh there are large areas of life including the institutions I mentioned earlier which used to be let's say governed by liberal norms uh and aren't any longer so I think it makes sense just as an empirical observation to say that uh liberal civilization that existed uh and could be described as a liberal civilization um with all its faults and flaws doesn't exist any longer of course you might say
07:00 - 07:30 liberalism as a theory continues to exist but then so does medieval political theory or any modern political theory it just doesn't describe uh the world anymore well let's not get too far ahead of ourselves here because the term liberalism is one of those big unwieldy terms that means a million different things to a million different people what do you mean by liberalism just so it's clear what we're diagnosing the the death of here the core of of liberalism as a philosophy is the idea that no one
07:30 - 08:00 has a natural right to rule and that all rulers all regimes all states serve those whom they govern so that this is a view which differs from Plato plato thought that um philosophers had the best authority to rule because they could better than other people perceive truths beyond the shadows of the imperable world um in Hobbes's day
08:00 - 08:30 some people believed many people believed that kings had divine right to rule and later on we've had beliefs according we've had philosophies which have developed according to which it's the most virtuous people who should rule and I think actually the hyper liberal or what is now sometimes called the woke movement has something of that in it which is that they imagine that they represent virtue better than and progressiveness better than others and therefore they have a right at least to um shape society according to their
08:30 - 09:00 vision but a liberal and in this sense Hobbes is a liberal and I'm still a liberal in this sense actually is one who thinks that any sovereign any ruler depends for their authority on protecting the well-being of of the ruled and in liberal theory it's normally liberal thought normally individuals and when it doesn't do that then any obligation to obey is dissolved and Hobbes says explicitly even the book is partly about Thomas Hobbes of course as you know the uh 17th century political philosopher that you wrote the
09:00 - 09:30 book Leviathan that's why it's called New Leviathan hobb said that when when the sovereign which could be a king or or or a republican assembly or a parliament or whatever but when the sovereign fails to protect the individual from uh violence for other human beings when the sovereign fails to provide security all obligations are dissolved and the uh individual can leave or kill the sovereign kill the sovereign so there is a fundamental equality between
09:30 - 10:00 the um the ruler and the ruled i think that's the core of liberalism and in that sense I say Hobbes is still a liberal and so am I but it had many many different meanings later were attached to it about rights and uh progressiveness and so on which uh I don't subscribe to and neither did Hobbes you actually call Hobbes the first and last great liberal philosopher which might surprise more than a few political philosopher types why is that why is he the first and the last great liberal philosopher for you well it
10:00 - 10:30 shouldn't surprise them if they knew a bit more than they normally do about the history of political ideas they would know that the the best 20th century scholars of Hobbes all regarded him as a liberal so Michael Oakshot the British conservative philosopher uh the Canadian Marxist philosopher CB McFersonen and Leo Strauss the American conservative philosopher they all regarded Hobbes as a liberal and so it's only philosophers who don't read history of ideas and of philosophy which is the majority I'm
10:30 - 11:00 afraid it's only those who are surprised by it so they shouldn't be but I think the sense in which he is is exactly the sense of which I just mentioned earlier which is that he he doesn't accept any the most virtuous don't have the right to rule the cleverest or the most intelligent don't have the right to rule none are appointed by God to rule states or sovereigns or human constructions or human creations which exist only so long as they serve the purposes of those o over whom they rule and so that I think is a is still alive that idea not only
11:00 - 11:30 in philosophy i think it's alive in the world there's nowhere in the world now there was in the past uh even the relatively recent past where anyone rules by prescriptive right if someone just says I have the right to rule you as u king Charles uh our king Charles did in this in the civil war in Britain in the 17th century you are you I have the divine right to rule he was executed he was executed by the parliament so that liberal idea I think is still quite
11:30 - 12:00 strong in the world but it's quite different from lots of other liberal ideas about progress and humanity and rights and so on i used to teach Hobbs and I always wondered what it was I liked so much about him because he is so dark and gloomy i mean if even if you've never read Hobbs you probably know his famous description of human life as nasty brutish and solitary and short that kind of thing and I think um what appeals to me in his thought is the
12:00 - 12:30 tragic dimension you know anarchy for him was never something we transcend it was something we stave off but it remained a permanent possibility you that awful state of nature that he worried about was always lurking just beneath civilization do you think modern liberalism went arai when it lost sight of this and maybe drifted away from Hobbes's very limited view of the purpose of the state which is just you
12:30 - 13:00 know to keep us from eating each other basically I think um liberalism over time turned into something different i mean I one has to say that although historically and I um in terms of the history of ideas hobbs is definitely a liberal most people who called themselves liberals subsequently in the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries wouldn't regard hobbs and don't regard hobbs as a liberal because although he has this feature that sovereigns or states serve the individuals who over
13:00 - 13:30 whom they rule he doesn't think that this that what the state or the sovereign can do to provide security can be limited or should be limited by rights or some other principles he doesn't think that and that's a sort of difficulty that many people find in thinking about hopes which is that um although he thinks the state has a very limited purpose it can do anything that it judges the sovereign judges that will
13:30 - 14:00 achieve that purpose so for example the state in Hobbes has no obligation to respect freedom of speech if freedom of speech harms social peace and political order uh uh it can intervene hops even says the sovereign can define the term define the words used in the Bible to kind of define what those words mean as probably when you taught him you noticed this so that we can society can avoid the religious wars that were raging had been raging in Europe in his time
14:00 - 14:30 around his time over what the Bible meant he peace determines everything so there's no right to free speech there's no right to demonstrate that none of these rights can restrain this state on the other hand and here he's different from modern liberals the state can't intervene in society can't curb um human beings in order to achieve some idea of social justice or progress or a higher type of humanity a more civilized uh or
14:30 - 15:00 superior or ethically materically superior type can't do that either can't provoke shouldn't provoke virtue it's it's indifferent to those matters so it's a very unfamiliar type of liberalism but I share your view i'm not sure it's a it's a tragic i would just say it's a reality hobbes thought it was reality that at any time order in society can break down anywhere if if certain and it can happen quite quickly in other words order is fragile in in human life the default condition of human life is not harmony i guess that's
15:00 - 15:30 where he differs from many liberals they've assumed that um basically human beings want to cooperate that's what they try and do and if they're thwarted it's by tyranny or reaction or evil demagogues or some sort of um evil force but which prevents them hobbits doesn't assume that he thinks the the default condition of humanity is conflict and that therefore uh uh one can fall into brutal and terrible and civilization forms of that conflict at any time and I
15:30 - 16:00 would say that you know the history of the 20th century exhibited that in many ways and the the main destroyers I guess of um human life and peace and u the main agencies that inflict violence then were states but in the 21st century they're not necessarily states they can be terrorist organizations or criminal gangs and so anarchy has emerged now I think in the 21st century as at least as much of a threat to human security and
16:00 - 16:30 human freedom as totalitarian and tyrannical states were in in the 20th century that's I think a relatively new development in in in recent times and it's one which I think makes Hobbes more topical if you like i mean when it was states that were committing draft crimes his argument that the state should be unfettered in its pursuit of peace was uh kind seemed weak because states weren't pursuing peace they were pursuing other goals and they were killing countless or tens of millions of
16:30 - 17:00 human beings now it's more often the case uh that uh um states are uh collapsed or are destroyed and sometimes they're destroyed as they were in Iraq and Afghanist and in um Libya for example by the attempt to bring in a better kind of state and so that I think one big error of contemporary liberalism which has actually affected policies in America and elsewhere has been the idea that nothing is worse than tyranny whereas Hobbes's uh insight his
17:00 - 17:30 relatively simple insight but it's rather profound one is that anarchy can be worse than tyranny and what's what's also true is that once you're in an anarchical condition once the state is broken down once you're in a failed state it's very difficult actually to reconstruct the state well in what sense is liberalism for you passed into the dust bend of history i mean there liberalism is still very much a thing um even if the shape of it has changed and it is very much alive if not terribly
17:30 - 18:00 well so what does it mean to say that liberalism has passed away or or died or or however you like to put it well as I've said there are still ideas i mean you can go into a library and pull a book down and it will have it will describe medieval or ancient Greek and Roman political philosophy to you in that sense these ideas are alive but in the actual world the actual human world liberal regimes or liberal societies or a liberal civilization I think is in the past so uh well let me give you an rather obvious example since um we're
18:00 - 18:30 talking partly in an American context 30 years ago I wrote that I thought that what would happen I quote myself perhaps rather vainly in my own in in this new book of mine i wrote that what I expected to happen in the United States was that as more and more freedoms and activities became covered by rights by legal rights and when some of those rights were did not reflect a moral consensus in society but there were rights to do
18:30 - 19:00 things that were morally conflicted in society like abortion i'm proabortion but that pro-choice but that's irrelevant here i thought that what would eventually happen would be that the judicial institutions up to and including the Supreme Court would be politicized they'd become objects of political capture now when I said that 30 odd years ago people like Dawin whom I knew and uh in Oxford and others were incredulous because for them it was natural it was some kind of
19:00 - 19:30 settled settled fact of life that the majority of judges had had become liberal and would stay liberal i never thought that for a moment i thought that a different dynamic would take play that the more rights discourse and the practice of rights was extended to morally disputable and conflicted areas the judicial institutions would be politicized and taken over and so that I think is a feature of um if you think of a a liberal regime or a liberal society one in which there are uh judicial institutions that are not politically
19:30 - 20:00 contested that are um that aren't part of the political arena then that's passed away that's gone and so I think also has um the area of private life of life in which what you say to friends or work colleagues or is not sort of judiciable it's not actionable that's much smaller than it it used to be certainly in in in Britain which I know well and I'm pretty sure it is in America too in that what used to be a private conversation could be cited against you because deviates it's from some progressive norm so uh the defining
20:00 - 20:30 features of liberalism not as a philosophy that exists in libraries but as a um a practicing set of institutions and norms has at least become weaker and I would say it's more pretty well gone now and I don't expect it to come back [Music] we'll be back with more of my conversation with John Gray after a
20:30 - 21:00 quick break [Music] [Music] as you know Nietze thought that liberalism was rooted in these Christian
21:00 - 21:30 ideas about human equality and the value of the human person but modern liberals rejected the religious roots of these values while still attempting to preserve them on secular grounds and that was a move he thought was destined to fail and you seem to think that Hobbesian liberalism was intended to be a kind of political atheism but it eventually shapeshifted into something like a political religion only it didn't recognize it didn't recognize itself as
21:30 - 22:00 such is that sort of the core problem here or one of them one of the core problems I mean I think I talk at some length in the book when I discussed the way in John Stewart Miller who I thought I think for many liberals is still a a canonical liberal or even the econical liberal but he explicitly undeniably and overtly adopted the view that from Agus comp from the French positive thinker who was an anti-liber actually but anyway he adopted from compt uh the idea
22:00 - 22:30 of a religion of humanity which he said should replace all the existing religions that would be better than any of the existing religions he explicitly took that from cotton and cited and and said that and wrote that in several places so I think it was probably in mill at least in Britain that the that liberalism became itself a kind of religion but of course there are still many respects in which it secularized monotheistic um assumptions or values or
22:30 - 23:00 or premises so I I I think it it is undoubtedly the case historically that um liberalism was a set of footnotes to um particularly the liberalism that later emerged as a as a kind of religion in its own right to uh uh montheism to Christian and Jewish monotheism and as a competitor to it and um uh basically liberals conventional liberals 90% of liberals are adamantly resistant to this view they they they they adamantly
23:00 - 23:30 insist that um their views at no point depend on anything in in theism but they would say it's a kind of genetic fallacy to think that just because something may have come from theism it depends on that but it's actually I think quite difficult you know it's it has become more difficult for me to identify what I am and it's not just because the fault lines around me are so scrambled I think on some level it's because and maybe I'm projecting a little bit onto Hobbes i
23:30 - 24:00 have a a pretty tragic view of political life and because of that I have a fairly modest understanding of the goal of politics which is to navigate this tension between order and chaos with the understanding that nothing is permanent everything is contingent and history has no ultimate direction and I mean in so many ways that this was the political lesson of the 20th century and after a handful of decades of liberal
24:00 - 24:30 triumphalism which is barely a blink in historical time by the way people seem to have forgotten this and and this is probably where you and I are maybe most aligned but you don't think the belief in progress is a complete delusion right i mean the world has indeed gotten much much better it's just that that progress isn't fixed and it's dangerous to believe otherwise well I don't know it's um I say I mean what I say in the book is that um progress meant in those who believed in it it didn't mean that things would get better for a while and
24:30 - 25:00 then get worse i guess it meant two things both of which are false um one is that progress was cumulative in the sense that what was achieved in one generation could be carried on in the next generation that's what mearism was millerism as a philosophy isn't just the idea that the belief which is some societies or some parts of the of history some are better than others i think everybody would accept that whatever their values are actually but
25:00 - 25:30 it was the belief that the human lot could be cumulatively improved that's to say that certain achievements could be embedded and they would remain fixed you could have some retrogression you could go from stair seven on the escalator of progress back to stair three but then it would the staircase would start moving again uh and you would get back to seven and then you could get to eight or nine so you might make um two steps back but
25:30 - 26:00 you would then make two or three steps forward that was meism and I think that's clearly false you might be tempted to think that it was true if you thought of only the last 300 years but if you look at the larger um there was no apocalyptic revelation 300 years ago so apocalyptic change in human events human beings remain what they were before that in ancient Greece and ancient China and um and elsewhere and then medieval times they remain basically I think um still what they were in their natures and appetites and so on and uh so media in that sense is
26:00 - 26:30 false well one thing that seems obvious enough at this moment is that liberal societies are experiencing a lot of internal disruption i mean may maybe the only thing that really unites the far right and the far left is their contempt for the society that produced them and you say something in the book that I think cuts right to the core of this and I just want to read it to you and and
26:30 - 27:00 and ask you what you mean by that you say in its current and final phase the liberal west is possessed by an idea of freedom what does it mean to be possessed by an idea of freedom uh well the the sense in which I use it in the book is the sense in which it was used in um by late 19th century intellectuals in Tsarist Russia were possessed by an idea of freedom which is that an idea of freedom comes to be um prevalent that means
27:00 - 27:30 not the reduction of coercion by other human beings or by the state not a set of procedures which enables people to live together not a set of norms of tolerance or peaceful coexistence or even a mutual indifference which enable people to to live together in some rough and ready way freedom means self-creation freedom means creating yourself as the person you want to be and that I buy I think is not definitely
27:30 - 28:00 not in Hobbes it's not even in lock or other liberals but it is in Mill it is in the chapter of um Mills essay on liberty where he talks about individuality where he says that anyone who inherits their way of living or their what we would now call their identity from the society from conventions from traditions from history lacks individuality individuality means being the author of your own life changing it fashioning it as if it was a work of art so that it fits some
28:00 - 28:30 something unique and authentic about yourself and I think that is what the west is possessed by because the reason it's a an impossible ideal to realize is that if you want to can author your life in a certain way and have a certain identity it doesn't mean much or anything unless that identity is somehow accepted by others as well otherwise it's just a as it were a fiction of yours or a dream and that's I think one of the things that's provoked deep
28:30 - 29:00 conflict in western society because there is the the underlying idea of a strong version of autonomy as as self-creation has become not part of the far right or the far left um it's not that which has produced the present conflict it's not the far right the far left it's become part of liberal thinking and practice itself and that I guess goes back to Mill and to romantic theorists and philosophers who Mil read it's an element in the liberal tradition that wasn't very strong or perhaps
29:00 - 29:30 present at all there but it's very very strong now so I guess that's what it mean by being possessed by an idea of freedom that unless you can be what you want to be and unless you can actually somehow have that validated by others you're not free well that's not really possible and I think the traditional more traditional liberal idea of toleration which is that um you don't have to be fully validated by other people and they don't have to be fully validated by you they can simply you can rub along as the different miscellaneous
29:30 - 30:00 personalities and contingent human beings like you are that seems to me a more achievable ideal but it's not one that satisfies many people today not many liberals anyway yeah i mean I think that the pursuit of individual freedom is good that the desire to free ourselves from our inherent identities is good and necessary but we do seem to run into a ditch if we pursue it too far because the pursuit as I think you're
30:00 - 30:30 saying the pursuit of self-defin doesn't end with the self because no one can be wholly self-defined so it becomes a political contest for recognition and I don't think liberal politics are equipped to handle that very well or for very long well I agree with that and especially if it becomes a matter of rights because then of course you have a perpetual um conflict between rival the rights of rival groups basically if these identities especially if they're framed in ways which are antagonistic or
30:30 - 31:00 polarized it's a recipe for unending uh conflict i'm not sure you see I wouldn't even go as far as you do in saying that is wanting to free oneself from traditional uh is necessarily good i think some people want it so they can go ahead and live like that in a what used to be called a liberal society if they want to but others might be quite happy to just jog along with whatever they've inherited uh and be left I think people should have the choice is what I was saying i don't mean imposing that no no not imposing but you think it's I don't think it's even better i don't think one
31:00 - 31:30 is better than the other i think they're just preferences actually and so I would never say as Mill does Mill constantly says people who accept the definition of them with their inherited identities are um he doesn't use the word inferior but he says he implies all the way throughout that that are inferior uh he suggests that um they're not themselves they're just they convention by wrote they're puppetike creatures and so I wouldn't say any of that there may be those I mean who want to to construct themselves turn themselves into works of art if you like
31:30 - 32:00 they can go ahead and try but quite a lot of people at least in the past didn't want to do that and I think there are still quite a lot of people who don't want to do that now and they should have as much freedom and as much respect it's an important point I would say as these others I mean the key point I guess of the book is that the problems of liberal society or the fact that it's passed away as I claim isn't something that's happened as many conservatives or leftists or others say because liberalism is being
32:00 - 32:30 sidelined by Marxism or postmodernism or some other philosophy or that it's the problems of liberalism or the or the the of liberal societies come from within liberal societies come from within liberal societies themselves and they are all problems if you like that liberalism has uh proved the problems it's generated the contradictions it's generated have proved to be ones that it's not very good at resolving and this
32:30 - 33:00 contemporary obsession with self-exression and and self-creation um and status and that sort of thing do you see that as symptomatic of some deep failure of liberal politics that this was bound to happen because liberal politics did not and cannot satisfy this kind of need no I mean that's a kind of Hegelian view or um a Fukiamyama-like view which says that um what people want is recognition and that liberal societies haven't been able to etc etc i
33:00 - 33:30 I think that the main challenges to liberal societies now actually are quite different which is that the economic model of liberal society which was adopted in uh after the collapse of communism after the cold war has left large parts of society behind not just minorities there have been working communities workingass communities in in Britain and American parts of Europe which have just been more or less abandoned and Um but also
33:30 - 34:00 large parts of what used to be called the middle classes are have not seen their incomes or their st their standards of being improved much or at all in the last 30 years while the societies as a whole have gotten consist considerably better so I think the economic model actually of of western liberal societies the dominant one after the cold war during the cold war we tend to forget now though it's within my lifetime we tend to forget that after the second world war there was a model of social democracy which in which the
34:00 - 34:30 state intervened in many different ways to smooth out the the hard edges of market capitalism and constrain it uh I think the abandonment of that model after the end of the Cold War has led to deep-seated contradictions but maybe they're not what you're referring to they are certainly in part i mean this is I'm glad you said that cuz one of the things that irks me about a lot of right-wing types who like to rail against identity politics or wokeism a term I I really hate to use
34:30 - 35:00 because it has been stretched to the point of meaninglessness in our discourse at least there is this whole materialist history to be told about the failures of liberal capitalism and those failures have produced a lot of our political pathologies and a lot of people on the right don't want to hear about that and I think that's a huge mistake i agree with you and in fact I say in the book it's a very simple point but very hard for many liberals right-wing liberals in particular to to understand i say that what these people
35:00 - 35:30 call populism is the political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies which they don't understand or deny that's what populism is they talk about populism as if it was a sort of demonic thing that arose from nowhere that uh it was a few demagogues that whipped it up out of practically nothing but the reason I'm not saying there aren't demagogues but the reason the demagogues were successful in uh 2016 and later and not in 1950 or 60 or
35:30 - 36:00 70s uh in Europe and America is that there were periods certainly in Europe and to some extent even in America of social democracy in which there was a more extensive state the Eisenhower state the Rooseveltian state even before that in in America which limited the impact of market capitalism on human wellbeing and provided some protection for its casualties if you scrap that which was done to a considerable extent um after the end of the cold war then
36:00 - 36:30 over time you create large sections of the population uh which are are suffering and dislocate or have simply have no place in the productive process and you've got to expect some sort of kickback so that's what liberals call populism they call populism the political movements around them that they have caused which they don't understand that's what populism is basically but you could never get that across to them actually I've I've tried to do this and they they say "But it's the demagogues it's Trump it's Boris
36:30 - 37:00 Johnson it's uh Nigel Farage it's it's all these wicked people if you could only shut these wicked people up everything would be fine." Or some of them say it's the Russians they did you know they So what they're doing is um they're denying or or maybe just not understanding maybe they're just stupid uh they're just not understanding why these movements have arisen when they did i guess the problem for me and this is why I'm still basically a liberal is that I I don't think any of the conservative alternatives are preferable
37:00 - 37:30 for a thousand different reasons and I'm not a fan of any imaginable version of authoritarianism so I don't really have anywhere else to go ideologically liberalism it is uh it's up to you but um it depends how far you think the degeneration of liberal society has gone and how far it can remain livable i mean one of the things in Europe now is that the uh far right in um many European countries not in Britain yet but um in uh France and uh Germany and is now a
37:30 - 38:00 very substantial political block in other words there isn't a flawed liberal society around us uncontested which can carry on pretty well whatever happens there are powerful movements not exactly like in the 30s but there are powerful far-right movements and in some countries also far-left movements which are challenging it so the liberal position might be a kind of luxury of history that is now passing away
38:00 - 38:30 we'll be back with more of my conversation with John Gray after one more quick break [Music]
38:30 - 39:00 [Music] i sometimes wonder how long America can continue to exist with the level of fragmentation and internal confusion that we have and the same is true of much of Europe how easy is it for you to imagine a political future where America and Europe cease to exist in any recognizable form well Europe doesn't
39:00 - 39:30 exist in any recognizable form there isn't a European superstate and there isn't going to be what there are are a variety of nation states with internal problems of various kinds and I think that will that will basically continue they might shift into becoming a kind of I mean what's been happening in the last few years is that they're shifting into becoming almost a hard right block not that the far right has taken over though some people might say it did in Hungary and did in Poland for a while but that it's the far right which is shaping policy on lots of issues but it won't
39:30 - 40:00 become a superstate as to America I don't expect the American state to fragment in the way that by secession i mean I know some Americans talk about that and Texans and Californians and others i don't actually expect that i would more expect a kind of um semi-stable semianarchy uh in which there are lots of regions of American society and of cities and so on which are semi- anarchical that's also true in places
40:00 - 40:30 like Mexico is it not and um parts of Latin America and that that could go on for quite a long time the big change I guess will be if I'm right it will be in the capacity of America to project its power globally i think that is steeply declining and I think that will within Europe will be actually seen to be greatly diminished because although America still has an enormous amount US an enormous amount of hard firepower more than any anywhere else actually China's catching up but also its capacity to use that hard firepower
40:30 - 41:00 intelligently has not been very great you actually say something pretty interesting if that's the right word about America in the book which is that it's become Schmidian in the sense that we believed rather foolishly that the law could protect liberal values from political contestation but the law has become indistinguishable from politics and Trump just pushed us right past the threshold and now we're in in my
41:00 - 41:30 estimation just a full-blown legitimacy crisis where it doesn't even matter who wins the next election just something like 30% of the country do you agree with that by the way that is what I think but do you agree with that do I agree with what uh that that America's in a legitimation crisis oh yes i I've written this many times i it doesn't matter who wins the next election something like 30% of the country will consider it illegitimate that's that liberal politics John that That's something much closer to to war really well it's what Schmidt thought politics
41:30 - 42:00 was friends and enemies and I think the achievement of liberalism in the various or liberals it was to replace the war by something else or at least attenuate the war i mean uh this was true by the way even in my time let me give you an autobiographical example during the right period when I was an act of that I remained uh on terms of close friendship with leading members both theoretical members and even politicians in the Labour party uh so we we could meet we could have dinner we could talk with each other we could share ideas didn't agree didn't didn't share goals thought
42:00 - 42:30 that this great that experiment could come to grief in various different ways as I then came to think and so on for slightly different reasons um but that's actually in America I would say it's rare I would think is it not Sean for people to um to interact in that way how many Trumpists have friendly relations with Washington Post liberals not many I think no I'd say that's and that's becoming increasingly so and that's unfortunate because that's the triumph of the Schmidian model it's the triumph
42:30 - 43:00 of friend enemy relation and once you've gotten to friend enemy relations I think you're in deep trouble at least from a liberal standpoint it's very hard to get back from that situation because both sides want to win and that means it's a sort of downward spiral very hard to I don't say impossible you know something could happen that we haven't thought of but uh it's very difficult to get out so I agree completely with you and it's one of the things I constantly say which is that in one sense it's very important
43:00 - 43:30 who wins the American election next year because if it's Trump the the changes will be huge and quick I believe but in another sense it doesn't matter at all because whoever wins will not be accepted as you say by maybe a quarter or a third of American society American voters so the legitimization crisis will just get worse whoever wins and that's a very profound fact of the world because the world still depends on a kind of shadow of Pax Americana it still depends on that or has depended on that and as
43:30 - 44:00 that is comprehensively removed I mean if Trump pulls American forces out of Europe which uh if he winds up NATO if he pulls out of the the Gulf where there is now the the new Middle Eastern war that would be a very profound change yeah I think the unfortunate truth is that liberalism doesn't really have a solution to a legitimacy crisis no I would say I agree with you entirely which is why it's so difficult to speculate i mean what I don't expect is any new order emerging from this whether
44:00 - 44:30 of the right or the left but just of continued disintegration uh not into civil war in America i'm not an American sometimes since I've been there though I spent a long time in America in the 70s and 80s and 90s so I knew it better then uh than I do now but I don't expect fullscale civil war but I can imagine a fairly long period decades you know maybe generations of civil warfare when different identity groups different political ideologies different parts of
44:30 - 45:00 America states of American states and municipalities just go their own way with lots of the conflict that that involves but with a kind of area a backdrop which I think will still exist of um high technology an oligarchy which preserves its own position one way or another and the rest of the society is um doing as best it can i mean large parts of it abandoned that's what I sort of expect a kind of hybrid like that
45:00 - 45:30 could go on for an awfully long time i don't think America faces the internal pressures that say Russia does because Russia has powerful ethnic divisions within minorities and the state apparatus in Russia although more ruthless more violent domestically is much more corroded and much more corrupt so I think there is a real possibility that Russia could actually break up whereas I don't I don't actually you may be more optimistic or less hyperbolic if you like than I am i don't see that as as likely in America i think just
45:30 - 46:00 continuing decay is a much more uh likely prospect yeah I would I would agree with that i I have no idea what's going to happen i take some solace in the fact that at least in America we we've survived much much worse in our past and you know we may just lumber along in this interregnum for a very very long time it may be a very long interregnum it might be and look there maybe we need a new order um my fear has always been the road from the present
46:00 - 46:30 order to the next one is historically a rather bumpy one and one probably none of us want to take and I'd prefer to fix the world we have before we tear it down but I I don't know again I'm I'm not in the prophecy business so I don't know what's going to happen i mean I've been talking about this idea of politics as tragedy too for the last few years and what some liberals and others say is they say well we we want to get to a
46:30 - 47:00 world where tragedy is diminished or u very few of them say now where there is no tragedy though some of them say we want to get to a world some of them have said in which the only tragedies are failed love affairs or familial disputes and so on um we'll never get to a world like that I'm sure but what I think the danger of trying to eliminate tragedy is that uh in politics is that in order to survive in any political system and to gain the power and retain the power and exercise the power you would need to get
47:00 - 47:30 to a society in which tragedy is um supposedly diminished or mitigated or or abolished you have to enter into tragic choices which replicate the tragedy you're trying to um to get rid of trying to transcend so for example one of the things that happens in all revolutions certainly in all the European Russian Chinese revolutions and so on is that once the old regime fails if it's really knocked down and fails then the the revolutionary contestants fight among themselves and the one that prevails is
47:30 - 48:00 the one that's the most ruthless so that in um Soviet Union which early Soviet Russia which I know the best the anarchists were the first to be suppressed then the social revolutionaries because they were less well organized they were less ruthless so what actually produces the authoritarianism is the struggle by the revolutionary groups against each other and that always happens and that sort of illustrates my deeper point which is that in order to get to a supposedly post-traic world you have all kinds of
48:00 - 48:30 ruthless tragic decisions have had to be made about shooting anarchists on mass uh assassinating uh murdering and putting in camps and so on various dissident and once you've done that you're back into the world where you you've never left it actually of of tragic choices so I would much prefer a politics which is which accepted that tragedy was primordial and um omnipresent and would always be but use this I mean this is why I've tried had a kind of aams razor approach to tragedy
48:30 - 49:00 which is the aim should be to minimize tragedies beyond what was strictly necessary and don't go around multiply them by trying to create new regimes all over the place tragedy in politics isn't imperfectability we have no idea of perfection it isn't that progress is always reversible and ephemereral it's something deeper than that it's that there are recurring situations in politics and always will be in which whatever we do has uh deep and and enduring losses attached to it and I think that's and that will always be the
49:00 - 49:30 case uh uh so I think that's what I would prefer it's very I think in order to get a view of the world like that you do actually have to go back before Christianity to um uh maybe to the book of Job but but also to ancient Greek tragedy uh where there's no ultimate redemption at all actually in some of the which recurs a bit in Shakespeare later on in a Christian in a Christian civilization but you have to go all the way back to the Greek tragic dramatist
49:30 - 50:00 to get that sense that human beings are not autonomy in the sense of being ever able to shape the choices they have to make tragedies are unchosen choices choices that human beings don't want to make and would prefer not to make but have to make once again the book is called The New Leviathans: Thoughts after liberalism john Gray always a pleasure thank you for coming in today great pleasure on my part as well let's have another conversation in a couple of years shall we let's do it
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