Welcome to all. Thank you for coming. Thank you so much for coming to this event at the Oxford Martin School.
In recent years, self-styled strongmen have risen to power in Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia, Budapest, Ankara, Riyadh and Washington.
These leaders are nationalists and social conservatives with little to no tolerance for minorities, dissent or the interests of foreigners.
At home, they encourage a cult of personality and claim to stand up for ordinary people against globalist elites abroad.
They posture as the embodiments of their nations.
And they are not just operating in authoritarian political systems, but have begun to emerge in the heartlands of liberal democracy.
Your words, Gideon, how and why did this new style of strongman leadership arrive?
How likely is it to lead to global war or economic collapse?
Most pressingly are liberal societies beset by internal turmoil and their own strongman dynamics capable of checking and reversing this trend.
To discuss this important theme, I couldn't be more thrilled today than to welcome a wonderful panel of speakers.
Let me start with Gideon Rachman, who's the chief foreign affairs columnist of the Financial Times and author of The Excellent Age of the Strongmen,
a copy of which Here It Is, which links today's event, its title and many of its key questions.
Prior to joining the F.T., Gideon worked for The Economist for 15 years.
In 2016, he won the oral prize for political journalism.
His other books include Zero Sum World and Eastern Asians,
War and Peace in the Asian Century Around Which Run Them Better hosted a fascinating discussion at the China Centre in 2016 next to Gideon.
Margaret Macmillan is the former warden of St Anthony's College Oxford and an emeritus
professor of history at the University of Toronto and the University of Oxford.
Her claim books include Paris 1919 Six Months That Changed the World The Use and Abuses of History.
The War that Ended Peace and war. How conflict shaped us.
Margaret gave the CBC's Marci lectures in 2015,
the Reith lectures of the BBC in 2018 and has received many honours, including most recently, the Order of Merit.
Finally, Lord Pattern of Barnes is the Chancellor of the University of Oxford since 2003 and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College.
He was governor of Hong Kong between 1992 and 1997 and European Commissioner for External Relations between 1992 and 1997.
His publications include, most recently The Hong Kong Diaries, which just came out a few months ago.
Not quite the diplomat. Home Truths about world affairs and east and west.
We are honoured to have you. Just a few decisions about today's event.
We will speak. The panel will discuss the subject for about 45 minutes before opening up to the discussion.
To our audience, both here and virtually. The talk is being recorded and will be live streamed and will be made available online after the fact.
So please bear in mind that when you're asking a question also more practically,
there will be a drinks reception next door when we're done with the event.
Gideon, let me start with you and the thesis of your book.
When does The Age of the Strong Man start according to you?
And more generally, are populism and authoritarianism related phenomena, or are they two trends which happen to coincide at this historical moment?
Well, to to the big slightly difficult to answer questions.
I mean, I think the the start almost too neatly,
you could say it starts really at the beginning of the 21st century because Putin comes to power on December the 31st,
January the first 2000, I think gives his first address as president on New Year's Eve.
And it takes a while for it to emerge what what Putin is all about.
In the beginning, he talks the rhetoric of democracy.
I think Bill Clinton says more or less this is the guy who's going to cement Russia's democratic transition,
but he becomes increasingly, obviously authoritarian.
And then, you know, by by 2000, seven, eight, he's he gives a big speech in Munich, which is a big challenge to the West.
He invades Georgia in 2008. But even in that period, I think he seems like an anomaly.
Merkel, I think, said around that time that he's a man of the 19th century.
He was struggling to survive in the 21st century.
So I think that it becomes clear that this is a more global trend a bit later, perhaps, when she comes to power in 2012.
And even then, we're quite we in the West often don't recognise what's going on.
I mean, I was one of the I remember meeting Xi with a group of people in 2013 and including people like Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd and so on.
And the assumption in the group at that time was that this guy is a kind of liberal reformer, at least economically,
and that maybe even politically people will write an article saying, you know, [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] open up China.
I think Nick Kristof of The New York Times said something like, you know, maybe [INAUDIBLE] remove Mao's body from the mausoleum and so on.
And none of that kind of happens.
And then in 2014, you get Modi and then 2016 Trump.
And I think those two were very significant because at that point it becomes clear
that you can have this style of leadership actually in democracies as well,
built around a cult of personality and a kind of authoritarian mindset.
As for populism and authoritarianism, I think that really applies more to the the ones in democratic countries.
And I think they are related phenomenon because I think that.
The central claim of a lot of these leaders is that the the reason you need a strong man leader is that the country is facing
some enormous crisis and that I'm the guy to fix it so that Trump talks about American carnage and says in his 2016 speech,
I alone can fix it.
And I think that's a common theme for a lot of these leaders, is that that they have the strength and the vision to cut through all the problems,
the problems of the country, which are sort of imposed by a globalist elite, and that you need me, a strongman figure to do that.
So I do think that populism and authoritarianism are quite closely connected.
Margaret. There's a sense that when when when faced this, I'm not criticising the commentators profession or indeed the academics.
But very quickly, when the age of the strongmen and Gideon's terms set in a lot of 1930s, analogies became common.
My question to you is how far do you think these analogies, the history of fascism,
the experience of interwar Europe, how far has it been abused in terms of its perils?
Or conversely, how useful isn't to think through the last five or six years?
I don't think history repeats itself neatly and precisely in the circumstances of difference.
I mean, the 1920s initially when Mussolini did the March on Rome and made himself a dictator,
were very different from the circumstances in many countries in the 21st century.
And the same thing was true in Salazar's Portugal.
The same thing was true in Franco, Spain, and, of course, in Hitler's Germany.
But there are features, I think, which are common. The claim that you speak for the people and anyone who opposes you is not part of the people.
I mean, that seems to me very much what's happening today.
You know, if you if you run Trump as it you know, you are not part of the people, you are somehow outside the magic circle.
And so I think there are features that are very much the same. And the notion of the leaders all wise and all powerful,
and the longing of people in difficult circumstances to have someone they can sort of give over responsibility to.
Eric from years ago, the German psychoanalyst wrote a book called The Authoritarian Personality,
and he said, there are people who want someone else to make the decisions for them.
And if you're living through a time, as Italy was in 1922, in the aftermath of the First World War,
which had been a very bad war for Italy and caused tremendous damage to Italian society and cost huge numbers of Italian lives with strikes,
violence, what looked like civil war developing in many parts.
Someone who said I can sort it out. I think for a lot of Italians it was just what they wanted.
And I think the same thing has been true very much with Putin.
I mean, Putin rose to power after the 1990s, which were Russia were appalling.
And again, I think people almost with a sigh of relief said, well, if he can sort it out,
let's not worry too much about the details of elections, free speech.
And of course, in the 1930s, the impact of the Great Depression made a lot of people think the same sort of thing.
I mean, even in deeply democratic countries, you know, in the United States,
the word authoritarian figures like Father Coughlin, who I have to say was born in Canada.
We some of our exports aren't great. But, you know, this was Ted Cruz is another of us.
I apologise for this. We shipped them to the US.
But so I do think there are parallels, not exactly the same,
but I think we need to be aware of what it is that made people turn to authoritarian leaders in the past and why they're doing it now.
It's not unlike what pattern. You've been very critical of the Chinese Communist Party's crackdown in Hong Kong.
But you've also commented quite vocally on the populist drift of British of British
politics in recent years and coming back to the key thesis of Gideon's book,
which is that populism and authoritarianism, populism in the West and authoritarianism elsewhere are deeply connected.
Do you see do you see a connection between this recent vibrancy of authoritarian regimes and populist forces in the West?
Well, first of all, let me excuse myself, because I'm, as you pointed out,
dealing with the informed commentator and with the great academic, and I'm just playing the usual Oxford role of plausible bullshitter.
And do so straight away and responding to your question.
And I think we lived in a period. As successful as the period after the Congress of Vienna through most of my lifetime,
partly because of extraordinarily good leadership in the 1940s and fifties, both domestic and international, and particularly from America.
And I think in the perhaps starting with the breakdown of the of the Washington consensus,
we've had pretty bad leadership in our democracies, both domestically and internationally.
In this country, we've created our own speciality of being populist without being popular, which is that which is, on the whole, a bit of an error.
I'm not exactly strongman involved either.
But but but I do think that things have gone badly wrong in the 2000.
First of all, as I said, because of bad leadership,
I think we've been very bad at reinvigorating the international institutions which helped to create such an extraordinary world of 40 years.
50 years after Stefan Zweig, it killed himself because he couldn't believe the world he could get better after the 1940s.
I think we've seen a combination of economic failure, of increasing identity politics, partly because of the Internet, not entirely.
And people who talk to other people living in this in similar silos and think that their prejudices are acceptable because they're shared by others.
And I think that most of the leading populist,
populist policies that one can talk about are there also because of some
particular specific issues in their own countries and their own political systems.
As you said just now, people were as Gideon said, people were surprised when Xi Jinping turned out to be unlike his father.
And it is quite surprising because, as I recall, his father was so badly treated that Xi Jinping's sister committed suicide.
Right. I'm looking at my guide on these things wrong, no matter who's in the second row.
So it was amazing that Xi Jinping turned out to be somebody who wanted to go back to Mao,
whether it was in terms of personality cult or in terms of not just having the party dominating the country, but himself dominating the party.
And whether that can last. I don't know.
But I think I think Xi Jinping is a case of of a particular surprising change in the person who would people had assumed would be like his dad,
who was a reformist and a great friend of Deng Xiaoping and indeed a protege of John Deng Xiaoping.
And I think you can think of similar stories in relation to others.
I think just on one. Personal reflection, I think.
My diary said at the time. Vladimir Putin.
I saw first the first time in 1999 when he was acting prime minister.
And I thought he was the nastiest person I've ever met. We were I'd just become a European commissioner.
And there was an EU Russia summit.
Which in Yeltsin was, of course, supposed to come to at the last moment, and he was taken ill.
Or having a hangover. And he sent along instead the then acting prime minister, Vladimir Putin.
And while we were waiting for him to come, there was a message on the tapes saying that there had been explosions in Grozny.
It's. And so when he arrived, we said, could he explain something about these these explosions to us?
So he said we hadn't heard about it. He said he'd find out by lunchtime.
So we came back to the subject at lunchtime and he said, Oh, it was, it was.
It was what you call an own goal, he said.
It was Chechen rebels who'd been organising at arms arms bazaars in Grozny, and there've been some explosions by that stage.
The tapes were all making it clear that Grozny had been attacked by Russian helicopter gunships and the point of the story and of dealing with him.
I think, which most people have found is he not only lied to us, but he lied to us knowing that we would know he was lying to us.
And that put him, I think, in a different category.
And I do think that with both in both the cases of Russia and and China, we were in a state of.
Considerable personal delusion, self-delusion about what was happening.
I reread the other day the wonderful document, The Long Telegram by George Kennan,
and George Kennan has a sentence in it in which he says about the Russians.
We have to understand that their view and ours about practicalities are incompatible.
And it's true. It's true about Russia. It's true about China today.
And we kid ourselves. Mr. Blair, I remember saying when China joined the WTO, the route to democracy is now unstoppable.
Something happened along the road.
Gideon We used to say that there wasn't a core ideology to post-Cold War authoritarianism, that they were often incoherent or intellectually poor.
There wasn't much to it. But you in your in your book, you do mention that there are themes that, you know, evolved over the years.
I'm specifically thinking of themes that seem to resonate with foreign audiences the anti-woke theme, the anti LGBT theme.
Specifically in the context of the Ukrainian war, a certain anti-imperialist, anti-Western hegemony.
These are very different points that appeal either to very conservative audiences or to leftist audiences.
But there does seem to be a sort of an ideological core here.
What would you say if there is such a thing as an ideological core to contemporary authoritarianism?
What would it what would that be?
Well, I think the Anti-woke stuff is relatively recent, and it's interesting to kind of figure out how opportunistic it is and how deeply felt.
But I would say going back a bit that the cool thing is nationalism.
It's a kind of nostalgic nationalism, so that when Trump says, you know,
make America great again in different ways, all of these leaders are saying something similar.
I mean, Putin is trying to make Russia great again.
She actually speaks about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.
Taiwan has this vision of, you know, Ottoman Turkey before Ataturk and Modi.
I mean, nostalgia goes back 800 years, I think, you know, not just before the British, but before the Mughal empire.
So but they all have this idea that.
The country, you know, was great, should be great again.
And some combination of sort of internal and external enemies are have done it down and need to be overcome.
And oddly enough, nationalism has a sort of cross-border appeal, which sounds a bit paradoxical, but I think, you know,
in an era of big global institutions such as the EU,
there are that there is an audience to say there's a guy out there who really sticks up for his nation.
You know, he's he's not a globalist. He's not embraced. Then that was, I think, part of Putin's appeal before all of this happened.
And I don't think one should forget that Putin had a considerable international fan club before, most of which is lost by now.
I mean, just two days before the invasion, Trump calls him a genius.
Nigel Farage, in an interview with GQ, I think, asked to name his political will,
what politician he most admired that Putin is sorry, it's losing that fan club because they now see him as a loser.
Yeah. And I think at a certain point, you know, if you bomb Mariupol flat, it becomes harder to say you admire the you know,
I wouldn't say it's inconceivable that he might make this sort of comeback among even amongst Western opinion in a couple of years,
depending on on how things work out. But then I think the Anti-woke thing,
which you mentioned it is worth discussing because certainly the last time I was in Moscow and sadly, I'm temporarily banned for now.
But it was interesting seeing this guy constantly malefactors of big fund.
I mean it's a interestingly paradoxical figure who speaks excellent English investment capital investment banker,
billionaire, but a crazed nationalist.
But he was particularly, I think, genuinely enraged by what he regard as wokeism.
And I said to him, you know, they kept going on about globalism. And I said, you know, what is globalism?
He said, it means no borders between countries and no distinction between men and women.
And but, you know, you can laugh about him.
He was laughable, but he was actually an organiser. He was he was the guy who was fixing up to see Marine Le Pen and so bringing
Salvini to Moscow because he had the money and the international connections.
And I think that a lot of that stuff, particularly about trans rights and all of that, played very well in the West.
You know, it plays well on Tucker Carlson. You can see it in some of the rhetoric of Georgia Maloney and all of that stuff.
So again, Putin was able to play and I think he probably meant certainly meant it.
And I'm sure Putin did. He was able to say, look, the West's gone mad, you know, and we we represent traditional values.
And there was a constituency in the West who would say, yeah, we have gone mad,
or rather the people in power have, and this guy knows what he's talking about.
So I think it became latterly quite important.
Margaret, I think is a good segue way into some of Gideon's points about history, to the question I had in mind for you,
which is why do populist movements and authoritarian regimes use history so consistently as both a justification and as a mobilising force?
This is something that seems to be central to otherwise disparate projects.
I've been thinking about it, and I think it's partly that. What else do they have?
Some kind of appeal to religion. But I think that's in most countries no longer.
And Putin has tried to appeal to Russian orthodoxy.
But I think that comes late in the day in what he's done and appealing to history as other sources of authority seem to be less important becomes,
I think, a very powerful mobilising force. And you know how else we hear it in the West, too.
History will judge as if history is this sort of impersonal panel sitting there, like the four of us saying, you're good and you're bad.
I mean, it's a complete misunderstanding of what history is and what historians do, but it is nevertheless very powerful.
And I think I think I was thinking about getting was saying I think some of that also comes out of fear that we've lost something.
And I suppose it's partly, I think tied up with globalisation which which you also mentioned that, you know, we're being swamped.
I mean I think if you look at Orban's Hungary,
the crest of is written very interestingly about this that what Hungary is really worried about what the
right and Hungary's worried about is is losing Hungarians the young and leaving the population is shrinking.
You know, they're trying now to encourage more Hungarian women to have children, and they're trying to.
But it comes out of fear as well, I think. But if you can say we were great in the past, you know, Russia, I mean, you may have seen it.
There's a fantastic series I saw on BBC iPlayer called Russia The Trauma Is, which I've been watching and they went through such an awful period.
Money was worthless. People were selling things on the streets, factories weren't able to run.
There was corruption everywhere. And I think in those circumstances someone says, Look, it's all right.
It was okay before we were great in the past. We just need to recover that.
It's sort of a very important sense that we may be in a mess now, but we're not doomed to be in a mess.
And it also, I think, can be a sort of light to the future that we have this vision, you know,
that here is this vision which we draw from the past, but we're going to have it again.
You know, it's part of us. And I think that is really important.
And the other thing about nationalism, which which you so rightly said doesn't get in, is it needs enemies.
You know, it needs the enemies within. It needs the enemies without.
And I think somewhere in there, again, the sort of emphasis on the decadence of society,
the emphasis on men getting married to each other, you know, these are the sort of rhetoric that Putin uses.
And I think there's there's a fear of sort of losing what makes you a powerful society.
And it gets all muddled up, I think, with gender roles and ideas about gender.
Also, the assumption, of course, that democracies are decadent. I think one of Putin's big mistakes was to think that the West,
because men could marry each other and women could marry each other, wasn't going to support Ukraine.
I mean, which is a very bit of logic, but I think was very much there in his thinking that the West was decadent and finished.
The gender aspect is very important and we'll come back to that in the second.
I have a question or a pattern about this assumption that populism is not necessarily anti-democratic and authoritarian.
And of course, far from me to it's not that I want you to wade into British politics in this regard,
but you haven't held back in the past in this regard, especially in regard to Boris Johnson.
Do you see the mobilisation of populist themes in British politics as ever a risk to British democracy?
Or do you think this was just a bit of a carnival that never really jeopardised, you know, the key institutions in the country?
This is going back to the initial question to Gideon whether authoritarianism abroad
and populism at home can really be pulled together as part of the same conversation.
I think it's it is a bit of a threat because populism and nationalism and it's why narrative is so important to them rather than rational argument.
They they they aren't very good at making an intellectual case.
And the problem is with liberal democracy.
Which is, I suppose, that fame is that it does involve both in stating a case and in establishing institutions, checks and balances.
It's not surprising that populists don't like checks and balances.
It's not surprising that the lot of the right wing of the Conservative Party,
the party of Edmund Burke, may remember and find things like judicial review an anathema.
So. And as far as the reliance on history is concerned, it's normally pretty bloody bad history,
which it's it sort of admits it's it's make it up as you go along history.
So and one of the great pleasures in life is to seeing people trying to shred it.
But we shouldn't forget that. One of the most intelligent of recent.
Right wing politicians made a great splash during the Brexit campaign by making this case against them, against intellectual argument.
And if you remember saying that we'd had enough of experts and didn't need and want experts.
You don't need experts. You've you find a thesaurus for a populist knee jerk.
And that'll that'll see you through.
I must say, I wrestled briefly with whether to include Boris Johnson in the book, and I did partly for narrative reasons,
because I think that 2016 the worse what was the but not only of Trump but of Brexit and that the two movements recognised something in each other.
In fact, I remember one of the talking to Steve Bannon actually for the book, and he said to me,
the moment I knew Trump would win was when Britain voted for Brexit because they were that same coalition of people.
But also I think that Boris Johnson did flirt with Trumpian themes.
There was when he resigned as foreign secretary, he said, You know, we're being too gentle with the EU.
We should treat them the way Trump treats the world, which was again this mistake that I think you saw Liz Truss repeat,
believing that Britain has the same kind of power of the United States, apart from the morality of it.
And then again, you know, he begins to talk about the deep state.
Frustrating Brexit does in fact shortly before he's forced out of office he's he's muttering about the deep state.
So a lot of these themes are there.
But because it's in this sort of jovial, very British style, I think people it was easy to dismiss as a bit of a joke,
but I think I think our checks and balances work relatively well compared to others.
But yeah, yeah, this is the source of his alleged popularity.
And in some traditional Labour constituencies where you're the politician, I think you have a better sense than me.
But I think that when I'm the politician who wouldn't vote for this.
You know, I mean, I think I think that he was a sort of make Britain great again, you know, just as Trump was Make America Great Again.
And I think that that theme resonated in and, you know, in some constituencies and I mean,
I was wary of sounding kind of snobbish, particularly speaking from a stage in Oxford.
But I mean, there was a current certainly with both Trump and the Brexit voters,
lack of a degree was a very strong indication of who they would vote for.
And Trump was it was not. He actually said at one point, we love the poorly educated.
I think there's also. If I could just. Yes, of course, there's a sense that both Trump and Boris Johnson are authentic and they're not.
I mean, they're great big liars, but there is a sense they tell it like it is.
I mean, not so often seeing people being interviewed at a Trump rally or a Boris Johnson rally, you know, he tells it like it is.
He doesn't mess about he doesn't pretend to be anything he isn't. And I don't quite know how that fits in.
But this sense that they're somehow real people, I think it's a taboo.
Smashing is very particularly with Trump, you know, the number of times that people like me would say, oh, look, he's finished.
You know, he's he said this terrible thing.
But in fact, actually, that built up the image of authenticity because people liked the fact that he would say these things,
that they knew they would be punished for saying something like that.
And so which is which was about nationalism and patriotism in this country.
I was very struck at the time of Queen Elizabeth's death.
At a sort of sense of gentle, decent, decent, respectful and patriotism and nationalism,
which you would think some politicians could actually tap into because it was hugely powerful.
And if if elderly members of a once German family can do it in Britain, why can't our politicians know?
Well, George Orwell put it very well, didn't he? Said this patriotism where it's my country.
But I can still criticise it. It's not perfect. I know it's not great, but nationalism, it's all or nothing, isn't it?
You know, if you're a nationalist, you have to defend your country. You see it as being beyond criticism.
Gideon, let me just say that I asked the question, but just to remove any doubt, Boris Johnson is entirely in good company in this book.
He very much belongs in this rogue's gallery, and there's no doubt about it by the end by the end of the book.
Let me ask you a question about the use of by strong men, of propaganda, of social media.
Their sophisticated deployment of those tools has been amply noted.
You've written about this.
Something that is perhaps less noted is that they often believe in their own lives and that there's an informational gap there.
They are, as rulers, being given bad information about what is happening in their own societies and they often get get things wrong.
And I think Putin underestimating the Western pushback in Ukraine was was a good example of that.
My question to you is, how do you prevent miscalculations on the part of strongmen who don't tend to receive accurate information?
Difficult.
I mean I mean, I think that my guess is that the longer they're in office, the more likely they are to fall prey to those kinds of miscalculations,
because they become what I think actually, as David Cameron, he said that, you know,
all leaders eventually go mad in office and that particularly if you're in an authoritarian system.
Somebody said to me about Britain, you know, he and he hasn't had to open the door for 20 years and then one day he's gone crazy do things.
I think. Yeah. And also you become increasingly obviously to stay in power that long, you have to institute something like a reign of terror.
You know, she has had I don't know how many was over a million people arrested.
And in China as part of the anti-corruption thing. People come to sticky ends quite regularly.
And so people are wary around you. They don't want to contradict you.
You built up a cult of personality that you become more and more detached from reality.
And I think associated that with that is paranoia are actually very, very often.
And one of the so one reason they may go wrong is that people won't tell you the truth.
The other is that you become detached from reality.
You don't really have a sense of what your own country is like anymore, but also you have a vague sense of threat.
And therefore, I mean, I used to think that conspiracy theories would generally come from the ranks of the powerless.
But actually a lot of these leaders are conspiracy theories.
I mean, other one is a classic example, I think really does believe that, you know,
George Soros is plotting against him in the league with the interest rate lobby and the CIA and all of that.
And Putin similarly, I think, is one of the reasons he may have underestimated Ukraine is I think he didn't believe
for a moment that the uprisings in the Maidan were spontaneous democratic movements.
He thought that they were all the kind of CIA plot there was no there was nothing real underneath it.
And that conspiracy, theorising and paranoia, I think, also leads you to misjudgement how you stop.
That is a harder question, which you'll notice. I haven't answered that.
I know I often say to my students, if you're thinking of as a career, as a dictator, think twice because you will go crazy.
There's a there's a story. I agree with you completely. I mean, there's a story of Stalin in 1952 and Khrushchev and I think it was Malenkov went
out to see him at his dacha and Stalin was sort of talking to himself and he said,
I'm finished and finished. He said, I don't trust any of them. And then he stopped.
He said, I don't even trust myself. And I think that does say something.
You can't trust anyone and you become convinced that you're right and you have to keep going.
I mean, I think this is sometimes, you know, what dictators blundering towards because they they need enemies.
They need to continue to mobilise people. They worry that people Stalin worried a lot that the Russians were sort of backsliding and won.
And, you know, if you look at the role, I mean, you know, Churchill was right.
I mean, democracies are a muddle, but they tend not to make as bad mistakes as authoritarian regimes.
And you look at, you know, Hitler became convinced that he could outthink his generals.
Stalin, the same Mao. We created disasters for China because he thought he knew better.
I mean, I think they end up making the most terrible mess.
And then people pay and then. It was paid the most terrible price.
But it's not terribly important because there's a great man view of history, but there's surely also a great ship view of history.
And people, great ships skip the top because they're great ships.
And that's that's how they get them, because they do bump people off or lie more than anybody else or abuse power more than anybody else would.
And they suspect everyone else is like them. Yes. That's why they built the law at this stage,
to reassure our audience that only very few of members of our student body actually consider to build careers as dictators.
It has to, because if they're going to play, I think becoming a dictator, they may already be crazy.
There's not a cause and effect. Laura Patton, I have a question for you about specifically if it could be answered in regard to Hong Kong,
but more generally, a few years ago you expressed some misgivings about just Western governments,
not just particularly the UK government, just European governments also being very,
very careful about dealing with China just as the first demonstrations were starting in Hong Kong.
More recently, you said that you were actually positively impressed by the way several governments have criticised China in this regard.
My question to you is about business reactions in the West to authoritarian regimes like the Chinese regime in Hong Kong.
I'm thinking of HSBC, I'm thinking of Jardine Matheson.
A lot of companies that, you know, to use the expression, the role of automation continue.
Exactly. But more generally, this this reaction to authoritarianism when it comes to the private sector seems to be lacking.
And in fact, a lot of our major companies from the West have very hassle free relationships with with regimes across the world.
Well. My own experience was that there was very little relationship between people's assumptions about how they had to do trade with China.
Doubtless Russia as well. And what actually happened?
And I don't I've always taken the view that by and large, and the Chinese do business on much the same basis as everybody else.
They try to buy what they want at the best possible price.
And if they can do that more easily, because they're people, because the people they're dealing with believe the narrative,
that in order to get them to purchase from them, they have to kowtow and they have to follow the the Chinese narrative.
And you can't blame them for playing the trick. But by and large, I mean,
figures that used to impress me were the difference between export performance before I became
the triple violator in Hong Kong and one while I was the triple violator in Hong Kong.
Nothing to do with me, but we had the fastest growth in export exports in the OECD countries in the period while I was
governor when things weren't exactly going hunky dory in our political relationship with the Chinese.
So I always thought there was a lot of nonsense and talk talked about that.
But I do think this there's one important thing that tends to make life easier if you're a if you're a rather nasty power throwing your weight around.
And that is the the assumption in too many liberal democracies that foreign policy is about being nice to foreigners.
I had a wonderful, impossible friend called Jonathan Mirsky.
Jonathan Mirsky was started off as a maoist academic in America during the Vietnam is.
And the more time he spent in China subsequently,
the more critical he became of the Chinese Communist Party and I think took the same sort of view that Frank DIKOTTER takes these days.
You can't actually expect the Chinese Communist Party to seriously reform anything.
It won't.
But Jonathan, some of you might have known and Jonathan stormed out of more dinner parties and parties and any other human being other than that,
he was, whatever is the word beyond feisty. But the reasons why he stormed out of dinner parties the normally rather admirable.
And he was covering Tiananmen. At the.
For The Observer in 89. And he's surrounded by a group of kids, a group of students, and they start having pop, pop.
And one of these students pulls on his jacket. Assistant White Grandpa says that only using plastic baton rounds.
At which point this kid. The tray fell.
Covered in blood. Into Johnson's arms. Dead.
And Mirsky took it as a reason for saying as loudly as you could.
When you thought things were happening that were wicked. And calling out things that were wicked and wrong.
And it's a it's a position which has had increasing sway with me as I've got as I got older and an allegedly more moderate and soppy.
And I think when people do things that are wrong, we should say so, whether it's China or Saudi Arabia or whatever.
And I don't think you do yourself many favours if you don't take a strong line on real abuse in human rights.
And when the Chinese the Chinese get away, I mean,
the most stupid advice I had was from a very clever guy who was had been Britain's ambassador in Beijing,
who said about the Chinese and they may, he said, be thuggish dictators, but they're men of their word.
Well, part of that was clearly true, but we were always reluctant to say when they weren't being men of their word,
we were always reluctant to call them out.
And if you don't call people out when they break the WTO agreement or break what they've said they would do.
And with the W.H.O., with the international health regulations or whatever, if you never call them out, they go on behaving badly.
In the medium and long term, I don't think you do yourself any damage and you can be a bit absurd about it sometimes.
And we've had one or two foreign secretaries recently who who have been blunt.
But I think I think by and large, when people behave badly, you should say, sir.
Thank you. Just a quick final round of questions before we open the floor to our audience.
Gideon. Authoritarians and populists and their cult, their reputation for competence.
Who is that in tatters today? It's looking a lot worse than it did, say, ten months ago.
No, it's interesting. I changed. I finished this book in December and ended on this rather vague,
hopeful note that this is a kind of flawed model of governance, and eventually it'll collapse.
But I didn't think that they would. I mean, I don't know, actually, whether Russia under Putin or Xi under China will collapse,
but they they've certainly both their reputations are a lot worse now than they were even at the beginning of the year.
Putin for obvious reasons. But I think what's happening in China this week is really, really fascinating.
You've now got the biggest demonstrations you've had, I think, since Tiananmen.
Certainly nationwide around the single issue. China's has so little upsurges of protest about particular actions, but we'll see how it goes.
I I'd love to believe that, you know, this is the beginning of the end for Xi.
But, you know, we've seen in Russia, Belarus, Iran, that and Hong Kong, indeed,
that the determined authoritarian leaders can can often fight their way through this stuff.
But nonetheless, whether or not he succeeds in staying in power,
I think that the claim that she and his supporters in the West were making really until quite recently,
that that actually specifically China's handling of COVID proved the superiority of the Chinese system is looking much weaker.
I mean, one has to be fair and say it is true. They've had much lower rates of death.
But but they seem to be now trapped in these lockdowns and partly for some of the reasons that I was discussing, particularly nationalism.
I mean, it's very strange that they've just been so unwilling to import Western vaccines, and I think they're now paying the price for that.
So, yeah, it's it's interesting to see both she and Putin who incidentally, start the year in a kind of embrace,
ideological embrace on February the fourth when they sign this joint document,
which is makes for interesting reading, partly because it's got this sort of common narrative about the West trying to undermine them.
Is that a lot about friendship without limits? Yeah, exactly. That's that's the friendship without limits.
And I think limits. Well, she's probably regretting that now.
And but he himself kind of is in trouble, I think.
Margaret, has the strongman dynamic peaked?
Do you think? It's too soon to say? And it will depend on what happens in different countries.
But I think there's less enthusiastic, both the populist movements and the strong leaders, certainly in Western countries.
I mean, initially, you know, the populist movements were very strong and then they actually got into office.
I mean, remember the case of the mayor of Rome,
who was a populist and people noticed the garbage wasn't being collected because she didn't know how to deal with that.
And this, you know, part of the populist and authoritarian argument is we both speak for the people.
We will sort things out. We're going to deliver efficient government to.
And they generally don't. Laura Patton sometime ago you said that I quote Leninism with capitalist characteristics is not a long runner.
Do you still feel that way? Yeah, because I still believe that at.
All dictatorships end badly and do end.
And when they end, we're all fantastically good at predicting after the event that they were
going to and saying that it was going to be it would all happen very quickly,
which of course it does when that when they end. But I don't I don't think I'm really impressed by mentioned I mentioned earlier Frank DIKOTTER,
who wrote three extraordinary books about China before and under Mao.
And he's written just written another book about China after Mao.
And it is it is fundamental to his argument that that Leninist capitalism, Leninism,
Leninism, Maoism cannot isn't capable of reforming a system and making it work really well.
And I'm just wondering when we're going to start with clever people writing books saying that.
China would have done much better without the Communist Party or Russia without Putin.
I think we're now in a in a funny way, in a more dangerous phase than we were.
I think post peak Putin is pretty dangerous when you look at how we end in Ukraine and I think
post peak China is going to be very difficult to deal with without an explosion of grievance.
So nationalism in Taiwan and elsewhere.
So I think it's a it's it's hold your hats for.
Thank you. I suggest we open the floor to our audience. We have about 200 people here and I think about 300 online or 400, in fact.
So can you please introduce yourselves and keep the question brief, preferably questions rather than comments,
and just keep it brief so that we can have as many of you participating this question over there,
and we'll two questions there and we'll pull about four or five questions before coming to the audience, to the to the panellists.
And please feel free if some of these questions you might just allude to them very briefly, but thanks for those presentations.
I wanted to ask if you could sort of sorry. Neta Crawford.
Nina Crawford. Sorry, I'm obviously new here,
so I wanted to ask if you could could say something about the relationship between
democratic erosion in these populist countries before the rise of the populist leader.
And in particular, I'm thinking about, you know, theories of democratic erosion.
Look at certain indicators, but they rarely mention war or Cold War or ongoing competitions, regional or internal.
So do you have any thoughts about democratic erosion in situation such as, you know, the United States after 20 years of war?
I could go on. What are your thoughts on that? Petra.
Petros later. This was a fantastically interesting panel,
and the question I have is really about the link between the authoritarian strongman that we discussed and democratic backsliding.
And one thing that is fascinating about the authoritarians that are running these
electoral authoritarian regimes is that they've developed a toolkit for doing that.
They've developed ways of essentially short circuiting the elections,
of short circuiting checks and balances, of controlling media, of politicising rights that really work.
And I wonder whether you see a process whereby Democrats or not Democrats, sorry,
populists and Democratic regimes who are kind of would be authoritarians are learning from those autocrats.
There's one in the back over there. Las Vegas just keep Latinos, quote government.
Thank you so much for a very informed discussion of you. Speak up. Yes.
Has just kept things cool of government. My question is, with regards to the democracy crisis,
don't you think that perhaps it's not the crisis is a new phase with kind of like mass democracy.
What I think I guess it calls democracy of the masses without the elite control that we had before,
the gatekeepers of within the parties, the role of the media.
We simply have to expect more populism. And basically coming back to normal is impossible.
So you're false and that. Thank you. Thank you. These are very rich questions.
So instead of picking up the five, I'll just pick up these three and you can address them.
And then we'll go back to the audience for perhaps starting with Gideon. Briefly, I do.
I've only just begun to think about the. The role of the war.
20 years of war before Trump.
But I think I'm sure we I'm sure that's that that has to be part of it, particularly because you see this detachment between the coasts,
which are still voting for conventional candidates in the heartland,
which where more people would have been sent to the front, which which was more prone to vote for for Trump.
And perhaps the number of people who will families who are affected by the war lost people or the very
high rates of suicide incidents amongst troops returning from Afghanistan must have contributed,
I think along with the up the other often more commented on things like the
industrialisation to the sense that the people running our country have messed things up,
you know, and that we are suffering from this and that therefore the appeal of, of a kind of an anti-system candidate is would be stronger for that.
I mean, that it's hard to pin down on that.
I'm probably have political scientists out there who would know how to do it, but to me, I think that was probably part of it.
The sort of host was the setting because it was a good question itself about the connection with Democratic backsliding.
Yeah. I mean, just just as we were talking, the thing that occurred to me, I certainly think that these leaders learn from each other.
And certainly Trump's language is picked up and then echoed by all the stuff about fake news.
Bolsonaro then picks up, Netanyahu picks up that they hope to have a developed vocabulary and and ways of behaving.
And actually, Kim SHAPLEY at Princeton is very interesting about how that there's a strange cult of Viktor Orban in the United States.
And, you know, the way that he is. I think Chuck Colson moved his whole show to Budapest for a week because Orban is
seen as this model and part of it's this cultural conservatism we're talking about.
But she argued that actually that the Republicans are very interested in the way in which Orban consolidated
power and manages to retain the facade of a democracy while actually taking control of the courts,
the media, etc., gerrymandering. And so, yeah, I think that there's definitely a lot of mutual learning out there.
Margaret I think just to go back to the question about war and democracy, I think again, it depends very much on the war.
You know, Britain in war,
the argument can always be made that we have to give up certain freedoms because we have to fight the war, we have to concentrate.
We can't afford. But and in Britain during the Second World War, the government stayed in office much longer elections to postpone.
But Britain returned to full democracy after the war, which I think indicates the strength of democratic institutions and an understanding.
But where institutions are under question, I think wars can often have the effects of a particular set of successful wars,
because then you can say the institutions clearly aren't working, democracy isn't working.
Look, look at the mess it's got us into. And I think on the use of institutions, I think you often see this with populist authoritarian movements.
They will use the institutions to get into power and then they will destroy those institutions.
You know, they'll use votes, they'll use courts, and then they will, once they got into power, dispense with the law or they will try and change them.
As you know, a number of Republicans have been doing it at the state level, on the national level in the United States to not just gerrymander,
but to try and suppress votes, to try and use institutions which they will then, I suspect, abandon if they can.
And one of the great line about the great but sinister line, which is he said democracy is a tram that you ride until you get to your destination.
Oh, that's very good. That's very good. Yeah. I bet Tucker Carlson knows that one.
And just briefly on elites, it's a very interesting question and unfashionable one.
I mean, I don't mean this is a criticism, but it's one we're not talking about enough because elites have been gatekeepers.
And one of the explanations I've seen for the dysfunctional institution that Congress has become in the United States,
that the party system is broken down, used to have these really tough old chairmen, the Lyndon Johnson, for example, who ran a tight ship.
And if a young congressman stepped out of line, that was it. You didn't get the assignments you didn't get.
And so that it was a type of gatekeeping which did actually acculturate people to the political system.
And they had to wait and they had to show themselves, they had to prove themselves.
And I think that has broken down. But you're a member of the elite, so you can tell us in just just a couple of points.
And Mr. Auburn was, of course, this university's contribution to the discussion here on a scholarship provided
by George Soros and which he appears to have very didn't stay very long.
So you to be he went back to fighting communism.
Yes. In Hungary. But I've always thought that it was quite interesting that the that the conservative appointed head of the
Office for Students who gives his lectures on freedom of speech and and a balanced and tolerant discussion.
Not very long ago was was speaking in support of one of Mr. Orban's conferences, along with some some rather unattractive right wingers.
He didn't appear to know who any of them were. Let's say one thing about him, about democracy or.
Fareed Zakaria wrote a very, very good book, I think, about 20 years ago on why democracy wasn't just about elections.
Of course, it helps if there's a politician in a democracy,
you accept that elections are determined when side one side gets more votes than the other.
I mean, that is, I hope, to the integrity of the democratic process.
But. ZAKARIA His point was that how important? I mean,
you could you were going to go to countries where you'd they'd be having making an effort to have an election and they'd have an election once.
And the things that matter in liberal democracies are due process, the rule of law institutions, including, dare I say, liberal universities,
which should be pillars of a liberal democracy and all those things which are part of what Karl
Popper would have would have described as an open society and did described as an open society.
So I think it's very important that we should recognise that there's a thicker
tapestry when you come to talk about liberal democracies than simply voting.
And one last point on this, I think it does help when people when successful leaders in liberal democracies appear to believe in them
themselves and believe in the institutions which are part of them and which also in international circumstances,
and work to strengthen the institutions which bring liberal democracies together.
And one of the extraordinary things is that that's led by America, which has been disastrous in this.
But all of us, we have paid very little attention to getting the right sort of people appointed to run UN organisations,
and Applebaum has written extraordinarily well on this.
And it's a real weakness if you think that these organisations, whether it's the World Health Organisation or the WTO or others,
all of which bring together our view of the world,
then you try to get good people to them and don't allow next nettlesome authoritarian regimes to do it.
And apologies to the U.N. Q We have several questions.
We have one online question. Klara, would you like to read that?
Michael Whittington has asked, Why does dictatorship automatically reflect evidence rather than benevolence?
Well, we have love you and golden in over there.
Thanks very much in gold. And good evening.
Economics hasn't been mentioned yet and the relationship between populism, authoritarian regimes, economic crises and inequality.
So I'd like to ask this wonderful panel whether they think that President Trump would have been in the White House without the financial crisis.
Whether they think Brexit would have happened in Britain,
without the financial crisis and obviously the Second World War without a financial crisis and the Great Depression
and how they see the relationship between growing inequality and the future of populism and authoritarianism.
Questions. So over here we have two questions. Nick Westcott and more like.
Thank you. Nick Westcott. Also, as a question, particularly for Gideon,
about the role of the media and whether aspiring strongman populists are able to abuse the freedom of the media,
which we saw both in Trump's rise and in the Brexit debate.
To treat truth and falsehood impartially, particularly kind of things like the pressure on the BBC to do that.
At one of you comment on that and whether it's a weakness of democracy that you are so easily able, it seems to manipulate it.
So too to two more questions, one here and then another one here, and then we'll go back to.
Hi, Marina Burgess from Department of Politics and Nuffield College.
So I want to go back to the allusion to the thirties, because in the thirties we were not in a period of mass democracy as we are nowadays.
So and we also talked about how dictators go crazy, how they lose contact with reality,
and how this is often one of the reasons why dictatorships fail.
But looking at the democracies today, my concern is that especially the populist Democratic strongmen like Trump and Bolsonaro,
their movement is highly, is very massive, is popular in our sense, that they is not so dependent on the strongman itself.
So we have DeSantis. Will he be very different as Trump was proposing?
I do. I have many other people that can replace him because these become became a popular,
massive movement that I'm not sure that we can make this comparisons in the thirties.
So so what does that looks like for our future with this?
It's like this majoritarian democracy that kind of leads this popular movement.
Thank you. Excellent question. And over here at the American. At the Oxford Department of International Development.
I would like to ask a question about economics as well.
In a sense, this the rise of these nationalist populist leaders could also be attributable to the effort to regain control of borders,
not really in the context of in the context of migration, but actually in the context of policies, economic policies,
because we've seen people like Danny Rodrik, Raghuram Rajan talking about the WTO, the World Bank,
creating a set of rules and insisting developing countries on regulatory harmonisation, which really reduces the scope for policy action.
So this might be connected with the larger struggle to regain economic sovereignty.
Thank you. These are very rich and wide ranging questions, so take your pick.
I'll start with Margaret. I'll leave the different ones.
Yeah, I'm going to leave the difficult ones for the other two.
I think on on the financial crisis, I think they did have an impact, but I think so did globalisation.
I mean, I think part of the appeal of populism was to the left behinds, you know, the hollowing out of industrial, vast industrial areas of countries,
the sense that jobs have moved offshore and they were no longer jobs that gave people dignity in the possibility of supporting families.
And I think that is I mean, this is part of what Trump was talking about to make America Great Again.
He had no policies, I think, to do this. But it was a very, very powerful message.
And I think the other one I will because I'm the historian,
I just would just will comment on I'll leave the rest to to to my colleagues was the 1930s.
There was quite a lot of democracy in the world, you know, a lot of European countries, a democratic North America,
Australia and indeed a number of countries such as India were moving towards greater democracy.
So I think we can look at that period and I think the same issues with the use of majorities to impose dictatorships I think were important.
I think there is a difference to which I think you perhaps were getting at that there are authoritarian
regimes which like regime in Pakistan which which where the army intervenes when it wants to.
But the sort of regimes I think we've been focusing more on the ones that seem to be focussed around a single leader, the single wise leader.
And this seems to be a very powerful mobilising force.
And yes, of course, these leaders, Bolsonaro well, he luckily left office more or less gracefully, unlike further north.
But people like Jinping, Putin himself, Orban, develop a cult of personality, you know, and they they don't want anyone around them of equal status.
And I think that that sort of father of the nation and again, I think there is this interesting gender thing.
I'm trying hard to think of women, authoritarian women, populist leaders.
Perhaps we need to get cracking on that. Margaret, you actually alluded to that briefly during the discussion.
Do you want to say a couple of words about that? There's a sort of macho politics.
Yeah, it's a macho side, isn't it?
And I don't quite I mean, someone I hope someone is going to write about this and perhaps someone has I just don't know it.
But there is this stress on masculinity, you know, hyper masculinity and Putin with no shirts,
Putin riding on horseback with no shirts on his trousers, which, you know, she doesn't that.
But Trump did the same thing, didn't they. You know, not put Putin.
No, but a modi as well. You know, this whole thing about the size of Modi's chest.
So it's still 56 inches, I think.
Yeah. And the language often is the language. It's great that you keep up with those.
That's yeah, it's yeah yeah.
Well the media one was directed to me.
I actually thought you what you were going to ask about social media, which I think is also part of the whole thing.
But, but you're right, as there's an interesting debate about how how far the traditional media, the left,
for example, should start saying more explicitly what Trump is saying is not just a claim, it's a lie.
You know, and I must say, when I first started reading it in front of my own paper, we said Trump lied.
I actually flinched. You know, all our news pages, that's not sort of you know, if you wanted to say that,
you'll get an independent expert to say, you know, this doesn't appear to be true, whatever.
So I think that there are there are reasons why, you know, we want to defend our reputation for impartiality.
We don't want to just preach to the converted.
It's increasingly a difficult thing because I think people do read papers that they, you know, for tribal reasons partly.
But but certainly the younger, younger culturally sometimes.
But the youngest of a generation of reporters, I think, do feel quite strongly that you should be much more explicit about saying Trump.
Lied, etc. I'm not sure where I come out on that one, but it's a very live debate in the papers.
I think the American legal times now routinely sets, you know, in a lie, blah, blah, blah.
But I also think that although traditional media were helpful to these leaders, actually social media was really key, I think.
And I don't think it can be entirely coincidental that this age of the strongman
that I was writing about was also the age of the rise of social media.
And I think that it's particularly helpful to them because they allow them to construct
these alternative narratives in a very in a completely unchallenged environment.
And, you know, on Twitter, you have followers, after all, which is a very kind of authoritarian idea.
And on Facebook, people like a post, they don't say whether it's true or false.
It's do you like this or don't you? It's a kind of appeal to the emotions.
And I guess successful politicians throughout the ages have often been particularly adept users of the media of their time.
So FDR was great on radio, Kennedy was brilliant on television, and Trump was the Twitter president.
He was he sort of got how to use that medium.
But but others as well, I mean, Bolsonaro, I think, was prolific on social media and detention of the Philippines was an early example.
I think what social media scholars have looked at, where Facebook was really, really important in allowing him to pump out false stories,
which then went viral and completely bypassed a lot of the traditional gatekeepers in the media.
What pattern?
First of all, on the media, it was interesting that our great national broadcaster during the Brexit campaign was criticised on both sides,
criticised by some the being absurdly in the hands of people with townhouses in Islington.
And I personally like Boris Johnson and sort of walk the walk his views on food.
And on the other hand there were those like me who thought it was absolutely absurd, the nose to show it wasn't biased.
When Mark Carney was on AM saying something about the economy and the BBC felt obliged to put Jacob Rees-Mogg on the other side.
And this did seemed to me to be taking an imbalance, a staged stage too far.
I used to kid myself that the reason why we'd never have a revolution or a dictator in this country was was two reasons.
First of all, because of the National Trust, and secondly, because we have a sense of humour and perhaps others do as well.
So I, I offer that up as my own example of disgraceful nationalist sentimentality.
I think we did mention, but perhaps not enough at the beginning.
The relationship between economics and the arrival of populism and the arrival of populist governments,
I would guess I don't know the figures that if you looked at the figures for what had happened to National I'm sorry,
the domestic income in the constituencies which voted for Brexit and then became the Red Wall constituencies,
if you looked at that disposable income in those constituencies in the ten years
before the Brexit campaign and what was happening in the rest of the country,
you would find that those were the constituencies which had done which had done worst,
and that assured that things would be terrific after Brexit and are now discovering that
unfortunately Singapore on Thames is a is a destination which we haven't quite caught yet.
We put Caracas in modern times, but that's not Singapore on terms.
So I do think there is a clear relationship between between economic grievance,
often justified economic grievance and the way people are likely to vote for simple populist solutions.
And that must be true. And what, of course,
and those of us who believe in free trade and hate the idea of autarky economic systems have to try to ensure is that the proceeds,
the economic proceeds are spent as evenly across the country as possible.
And I'm not sure we've been very good at that in this country. It's partly because of the fundamental problem we have of understanding that you
can't have and European standards of of public provision and American tax rates.
And it seems to me so fundamental, we haven't yet picked it up.
Hence one of the reasons for our lamentable state of the British economy.
So economics and populism. But I hope that the that lamentable state doesn't doesn't produce some the Farage dictatorship or whatever,
whoever would get to the top, probably not him. Gideon,
you have again a footnote to that quite interesting polling evidence from the
US about the connection between economic dislocation and voting for Trump.
And it's certainly the case that, as perhaps one might expect, people who'd suffered economic damage were more inclined to vote for him.
But it was particularly people who attributed that economic damage to unfairness in the system or racial unfairness in the system.
If they believed if they responded yes to the question, you know,
that that whites are discriminated against and that and attach their own economic misfortune to that,
then that was a very, very sore predictor of voting for Trump.
So I think that if you're a populist, what you've got to do is not just identify the group that's been damaged economically.
You've got to find the kind of a convincing grievance attached to them.
Then they're really in business. The villains who grew up, you know, who exported your jobs to China.
Exactly. You know, that kind of thing. Yeah, I'm going.
Okay. We have another round of questions of one question on line, please.
Both Jed and Brian have asked about climate change.
Is it a factor in AUTHORI Darian ism or do you think that the climate emergency and its apocalyptic presence will throw up more strongmen?
Thank you. It's the question here. You know, my question is, which are there?
Okay. Oh, my name is Adriano. I'm from Brazil.
And I was wondering, which are the roles of women in the age of these troll men?
Thank you. I can see your hand here. I'm fine, she said.
Hi, my name is Ryan Hamilton. How do we. We talked a lot about strong man and populism rising in a variety of democracies.
How do we explain the country that hasn't happened to the same extent?
So how do we explain the countries where populism and strongmen have not risen to the same extent as the US or France or Italy?
Hmm. Any more questions?
Andrea. So strength is Andrew Jerry.
DPR Strength is a relative concept. So you're a strong man if someone else is also weak or led to you to be the strong men.
So can we focus also on under what condition?
Strong men win against those.
They should resist their goals.
So how academics. Newspapers or politician have failed in democratic system to prevent the rise of strongmen and populist.
Thank you. This is our last round of questions. So if you want to throw in, there's still space for one.
One more, please. Clara, there's someone online. Jim Smith online has said.
What's the best way to remove an authoritarian populace regime?
Assuming you live under one. Thank you. Again, these are very, very interesting questions.
Lots of different themes. I'm going to start with Margaret, then Laura, and then I'm going to end up with with Gideon.
Okay. Well, because I'm a woman, I suppose I should say something about women in the age of the strongmen.
I suppose my first advice would not try and be like them.
And that's always been a temptation for women who want to achieve power, that they try and behave like men or what they think men should behave like.
And I think that would be a mistake. But I don't hold out any faith that women are nicer and gentler and kind of than men.
I think given a chance, women are just as capable of being well, I think as Mrs. Gandhi and India, Mrs. Bandaranaike.
They're just as capable of, you know, being authoritarian.
It may simply be that we at this moment seem to have mainly men,
but it doesn't mean that waiting in the wings somewhere isn't a very authoritarian woman.
The country, the conditions under which strongmen come to power.
I think we've talked about the conditions of crisis, the perception of unfairness, a perception that voices are not being heard.
I mean, other side of the economic issues is growing inequality,
the sense that there are these very rich people who are running things to suit themselves
and they're fine and they're not paying taxes and the rest of us are suffering. And I think that's important.
I think what also matters is that you don't get the institutions for various reasons that should oppose this,
that should stand up for the for the democracy.
And then just to use an historical example, then when the Nazis were rising to power in Germany,
too often the state bureaucracies, the military, the judiciary, who should have opposed them, let them get away with it.
In fact, many of them sympathised with it. I mean, the Army was complicit, I think,
with the rise of the Nazis and was not prepared to support the the democratic government and nor with the large numbers of bureaucrats,
felt that what they wanted was something that was efficient. I mean, this great plea of efficiency, I think is a very dangerous one.
I would leave it to my colleagues to talk about how you get rid of such regimes.
But as Peyton said, it's usually very messy and very painful.
The collapse of such regimes usually doesn't go easily,
but that's no argument for saying that they must be maintained because the damage they do will go on increasing.
Thank you. With that,
I was musing while listening to those questions about gender and and the political strength or political success that apart from Madame Mao.
No woman of any distinction has got to the top in China.
I mean, there's no member. There's no member of the standing committee of the Politburo now.
There was one education a member of the Politburo some time ago, but.
That hasn't changed. Yes, it did. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
On a different side. But I said that partly because the best public servant I've ever, ever worked with was a woman,
was on some chap who had all the toughness you would want of of a political leader,
all the decisiveness, and was also capable of, of, of considerable charm and a sort of in a very tough way.
And I could never understand why.
She didn't do even more in politics or international politics, an extraordinary, capable, capable person and a great dancer.
The day we were told, there was a question of the back of a climate change.
Last year, Jonathan Sumption made a very, very good lecture.
It was part of a series organised by No Bigger, I think he gave an extraordinary lecture in which he talked about his nervousness about.
International agreements on climate change, leading to catastrophic circumstances in democracies.
Because he is he was saying that if you if you are in a democracy and persuade people freely to make sacrifices,
to make changes in their life in order to produce the results, which will help to mitigate climate change.
And then they're capable and then they can open the paper and see that the
last month for new coal fired power stations were opened in China or whatever.
It's going to do terrible things to their belief in the and the fairness and effectiveness of democracy in dealing with really huge issues.
So I think there are all sorts of dangers ahead, unless we can get people to agree that when they sign international agreements, they keep them.
Yeah.
Well, the couple of questions, though, is one that we haven't got round here about countries where it hasn't happened, which is quite interesting.
One, because I was actually in Australia last week, which might be one a bit grey and I was asked this, you know, are we vulnerable to this?
And I had to try and, you know, and you could make a case why Australia has some of the factors that lead to this kind of leadership.
They have high levels of immigration, they have very sensitive issues around Aboriginal rights which could, you know, set the, you know,
it could be seen as unpatriotic once you start rewriting the Australian story to take into account the,
the origins of the country, they have a Rupert Murdoch good indicator of danger.
But but I think that they've also had 30 years of uninterrupted economic growth because they're
lucky enough to be 25 million people living on a continent stuffed with mineral wealth.
That probably helps. So I think that kind of that not having the economic crisis that we've discussed this evening helps.
If you have money to kind of smooth out different interest group disputes, it helps.
So, you know, I don't think they're invulnerable to it, but but they're they're in a better situation now.
The other country that springs to mind is Germany, which does have the AfD, but which hasn't really taken root.
And despite, you know, the refugee crisis, which a lot of people were worried would destabilise, Germany seems to be okay.
And I think their experience, you know, the Germans have seen this up close and they they have been inoculated against strongman rule.
And I hate the inoculation laws but I mean I think that they they see whereas I think
that Britain and the United States were complacent about their own democracies.
We thought it can never happen here. And that's that's really quite dangerous.
So and then, you know, how do you get rid of it?
Well, I mean, you have to hope that I think, first of all, that you're living in a democracy where you've got a much better chance.
I mean, and so, you know, America's institutions just about held in the last presidential election.
And they did get rid of Trump and hopefully he won't make a comeback.
It'll be a bit more hopeful than it was a few weeks ago.
But I think if you're in a system, in a system where democratic institutions either don't exist or have been powerfully eroded,
like Russia, Turkey, then then it's it's much more difficult.
And you find yourself, as the Chinese are now taking to the streets and hoping that something cracks.
While the Germans don't have cricket, which is perhaps also been useful in Australia and what they do have,
it seems to me something which we should, should get much more praise than it is.
They've been extraordinarily honest about their own history. Yeah.
Much, much more than I and I. Very much like Japan as a country, but much more than the Japanese.
When you when you think of some of the films about the Stasi, about Masters of Hitler,
and so it's been a cultural phenomenon as well as something they'd been prepared to to say and embrace them politically.
So I think they've they've they've shown shown us all how to how to really behave about one's history.
Thank you. This has been an excellent, excellent panel.
Thank you very much. I would just like to end by, again, conveying that much of the discussion took place around Gideon's book,
which is is, again, a major contribution to these debates.
I would also like to thank Charles Godfrey and the Martin School.
The Martin School is a very privileged location in Oxford for us to have these interesting and cross-cutting conversations.
I'm very thankful for it, for your support, Charles, and also Clara Bowyer and Hannah Mitchell,
the team that has ran this event so efficiently for us.
But I'd like to end by just think about our thanking our panellists for such a great time.