1 00:00:00,030 --> 00:00:02,669 Welcome to our special events this evening. 2 00:00:02,670 --> 00:00:07,170 Very different to the special events on the other side of the Atlantic, which is taking place exactly the same time. 3 00:00:08,730 --> 00:00:12,540 I hope that the director of the European Studies Centre and a member of the 4 00:00:12,540 --> 00:00:16,829 History Department and on behalf of the European Studies Centre and his college, 5 00:00:16,830 --> 00:00:22,670 it is my great pleasure to introduce this year's race up invites fellow in. 6 00:00:23,160 --> 00:00:27,690 As most of you know, the fellowship is named in honour of the former German president, 7 00:00:27,690 --> 00:00:34,259 who sadly passed away in February last year when right sector was a towering figure in German political life. 8 00:00:34,260 --> 00:00:39,270 Having been a central and highly influential politician for nearly five decades, 9 00:00:39,570 --> 00:00:48,510 and by second was mayor of West Berlin from 1981 to 1984 and then served as the federal public school president from 10 00:00:48,510 --> 00:00:57,600 1984 to 1994 and was universally commended for overseeing reunification with characteristic grace and sensitivity. 11 00:00:57,600 --> 00:01:05,010 As the first president of a unified Germany since 1945, White Secker also had connections to Oxford, 12 00:01:05,280 --> 00:01:11,460 having studied a Balliol College when he was 17 years old and was an honorary fellow of St Anthony's. 13 00:01:12,210 --> 00:01:19,380 No figure, more fittingly, embodies the ideals of strong German British relations and European solidarity. 14 00:01:20,100 --> 00:01:27,179 Now, as many of you also know, the German visiting fellowship here in Athens has been running for some 45 years and has brought 15 00:01:27,180 --> 00:01:33,960 pre-eminent German scholars in the fields of history and social science to Oxford for two generations. 16 00:01:34,440 --> 00:01:38,010 A distinguished array of academics, including Professor Tony Nicholls, 17 00:01:38,280 --> 00:01:43,680 the founder of the European Studies Centre and long time professor of German History here at Oxford. 18 00:01:44,340 --> 00:01:52,020 Hello, Professors Jürgen Coker, Timothy Garton Ash and Jean Kaplan have skilfully shepherded the fellowship over the 19 00:01:52,020 --> 00:01:57,330 years and we are all grateful to them for the outstanding effort and continue to support. 20 00:01:57,930 --> 00:02:04,530 Three prominent German foundations. Bosch Trust and Volkswagen have been extremely generous over the years in underwriting 21 00:02:04,530 --> 00:02:09,630 this important initiative of intercultural understanding and bridge building. 22 00:02:09,780 --> 00:02:16,680 And Dr. William Cole Volkswagen has been especially supportive of the programme over the years, 23 00:02:17,100 --> 00:02:20,100 plus, like they said Maran for organising this event tonight. 24 00:02:20,730 --> 00:02:23,580 Now let me turn to our featured speaker tonight, Professor Paul Norton, 25 00:02:24,270 --> 00:02:31,589 who is professor of modern and contemporary history at the university in Berlin, as well as the director of the Darwin Humanities Centre. 26 00:02:31,590 --> 00:02:36,389 There, Paul studied history and sociology at the University of Dusseldorf and at Johns 27 00:02:36,390 --> 00:02:40,860 Hopkins and wrote his dphil in the legendary history department at Bielefeld, 28 00:02:41,250 --> 00:02:47,880 under the supervision of the eminent historian Jürgen Cocker, whom we all pleased to have in attendance tonight. 29 00:02:48,510 --> 00:02:53,610 Paul wrote his ability to be the first in 1999 and has held fellowships at Harvard, 30 00:02:53,850 --> 00:02:59,520 Chapel Hill and Munich before securing his permanent post about in 2005. 31 00:03:00,180 --> 00:03:03,280 He's also editor 2000 Berlin Oh, sorry. 32 00:03:03,280 --> 00:03:11,430 Yes, of course. He is also edited a highly high profile social history journal, persisting as does art history and society. 33 00:03:12,250 --> 00:03:18,690 Paul is the author, eight books and numerous publications, and I hope that he will forgive me for not mentioning all of them. 34 00:03:19,050 --> 00:03:22,950 He has been long interested in various issues of contemporary history and politics 35 00:03:22,950 --> 00:03:27,690 in Germany and the US with particular focus on democracy and Republicanism. 36 00:03:28,230 --> 00:03:35,610 Paul's approach can be seen in several of his recent books, including Influential Voices Democracy or What Is Democracy published in 2012, 37 00:03:35,850 --> 00:03:42,750 as well as the Ordinal endorsing his own off the order ordering of German society published in 2000. 38 00:03:43,260 --> 00:03:45,569 I've long admired this last one in particular, 39 00:03:45,570 --> 00:03:52,470 which addresses the changing historical understanding of society in Germany since the late 19th century, 40 00:03:52,620 --> 00:04:00,059 not least because it is a rich study of the interrelationship between sociology and history as prominent narrative 41 00:04:00,060 --> 00:04:07,500 modes for analysing the shifting social pressures and identities associated with the making of modern Germany. 42 00:04:08,400 --> 00:04:15,000 In some ways, this book seems inspired by the work of Ralph Dando, who of course was a long time warden of this college. 43 00:04:16,110 --> 00:04:22,350 In in this study, Paul elegantly traces the history of how society, as opposed to the state, 44 00:04:22,740 --> 00:04:29,010 was conceptualised by various German regimes and thinkers as the very foundation of the political community. 45 00:04:29,580 --> 00:04:35,729 Anyone reading the papers these days about problems confronting Germany, especially concerning the refugee crisis, 46 00:04:35,730 --> 00:04:39,030 cannot help but notice how liberal ideas of German society, 47 00:04:39,030 --> 00:04:45,390 including discussions of who's in and who's out, are being severely challenged in various quarters. 48 00:04:46,140 --> 00:04:52,680 In his talk tonight, imaginary invalids, your Euro-American Populism and the Crisis of democracy. 49 00:04:52,680 --> 00:04:59,640 Paul's research moves in a new direction towards thinking about the historic significance of one of the real buzzwords of our time. 50 00:05:00,620 --> 00:05:05,960 Brexit and the victory of President elect and the so-called president elect does change the next few minutes. 51 00:05:06,410 --> 00:05:13,430 Donald Trump have popularised the term in recent months and it's hard to imagine a more topical theme, especially given the poll's lecture. 52 00:05:13,430 --> 00:05:18,680 Time happens to precisely coincide with Trump's inauguration in Washington, D.C. 53 00:05:19,250 --> 00:05:24,640 So please join me in welcoming Professor Knowlton as this year's ritual invites visitors. 54 00:05:40,760 --> 00:05:48,350 Yeah, Paul, thanks very much for the generous introduction and for the generous reception here at the centre in the past months. 55 00:05:49,040 --> 00:05:54,770 Dear colleagues, your students, your friends of St Anthony's College and the European Studies Centre. 56 00:05:55,790 --> 00:06:03,530 It is a great pleasure and even greater honour for me to be able to speak to you today and presenting the annual reception invited to lecture. 57 00:06:03,890 --> 00:06:10,520 I'll be proud and humbled by having received this fellowship for the academic year 2000 1617. 58 00:06:11,330 --> 00:06:17,270 And I'm well aware that this although the visitor nameplate is a relatively new stance in a long and impressive tradition 59 00:06:17,270 --> 00:06:23,149 that you just sketched of modern historians and social scientists coming to the downtown college with support, 60 00:06:23,150 --> 00:06:30,230 in particular from the Fox Foundation, which over more than four decades has invested so much not just money, 61 00:06:30,470 --> 00:06:39,500 but intellectual energy and curiosity in this place and its people, and especially in fostering exchange between British and German scholars. 62 00:06:39,770 --> 00:06:47,900 In a truly European context, I'd be honoured that the Secretary General of the Volkswagen Dongle and Call has come over from Hanover, 63 00:06:48,320 --> 00:06:53,090 British place of sorts, to attend this lecture. In all modesty, 64 00:06:53,090 --> 00:06:57,350 I can assure him that there is no better place to realise the goals of our very 65 00:06:57,350 --> 00:07:01,790 precious investments than St Anthony's College and the European Studies Centre. 66 00:07:02,540 --> 00:07:06,890 And this moment I should also like to express my deep debt of gratitude to Jurgen Cocker, 67 00:07:07,310 --> 00:07:12,200 who first created a seminal paper of mine more than 30 years ago and is here today. 68 00:07:12,410 --> 00:07:15,770 And to my great academic mentor, the late translator. 69 00:07:17,240 --> 00:07:22,220 While this may be a pleasurable occasion, or at least I hope you will agree when I'm done with my talk, 70 00:07:22,280 --> 00:07:28,220 but it was this is also an ambiguous moment in a very specific as well as in the larger sense, 71 00:07:29,090 --> 00:07:30,800 as Paul Betts already mentioned, 72 00:07:31,160 --> 00:07:38,569 the very hour my talk of this talk at 5 p.m. Greenwich Time is the moment when the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. 73 00:07:38,570 --> 00:07:43,310 Trump, takes his oath of office on the steps of the Capitol at noon Eastern Time. 74 00:07:44,300 --> 00:07:45,920 And although it follows is, of course, 75 00:07:45,920 --> 00:07:53,690 an attempt at making sense of this event in a larger transatlantic framework from an analytical and scholarly point of view, 76 00:07:54,410 --> 00:07:59,540 there may be more pleasant topics around, but this is, well, the topic of the day. 77 00:08:00,530 --> 00:08:05,270 When I came here in the first days of October to the centre at the beginning of Michaelmas term, 78 00:08:05,750 --> 00:08:13,280 everyone was returning from their summer breaks and I could immediately sense the intensity with which ongoing political events, 79 00:08:13,280 --> 00:08:20,300 and especially the repercussions of the British referendum of June 23rd impacted 80 00:08:20,480 --> 00:08:25,100 not just on the academic agenda and calendars of events in this building, 81 00:08:25,490 --> 00:08:29,900 but had hit everyone here in their very identity as citizens of Europe. 82 00:08:30,890 --> 00:08:37,129 This is what scholarship in our disciplines is all about a complex hybrid of restraint and 83 00:08:37,130 --> 00:08:43,280 engagement with the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency on November 8th last year, 84 00:08:43,280 --> 00:08:48,800 the distance between Europe and North America seems to have shrunk and grown. 85 00:08:48,950 --> 00:08:58,640 At the same time, politicians, media and civil society in Western Europe have reacted on a scale between unpleasant surprise and outright shock. 86 00:08:59,600 --> 00:09:03,860 And there is much speculation about a major shift in transatlantic relations, 87 00:09:04,010 --> 00:09:08,900 about the loosening of the classical post-war relationship by the incoming administration. 88 00:09:09,350 --> 00:09:16,130 That is certainly warranted by Trump's rhetorical signals during the campaign as well as during the transition period. 89 00:09:16,490 --> 00:09:21,709 Just think of his Times and Bildt interview earlier this week and possibly by his 90 00:09:21,710 --> 00:09:27,470 actions starting now from the point of view of the liberal public in Germany, 91 00:09:27,470 --> 00:09:29,030 the UK and elsewhere in Europe, 92 00:09:29,210 --> 00:09:37,160 their own countries and governments are now called upon to defend democratic regimes and lifestyles against not just a bull in a china shop, 93 00:09:37,670 --> 00:09:45,200 but against the temptation of authoritarian right wing rule that is looming in Washington when a ruthless populists takes the reins of power. 94 00:09:47,330 --> 00:09:47,719 And yet, 95 00:09:47,720 --> 00:09:56,390 the success of populist politics in the United States in many respects only reflects and repeats what has been going on across large parts of Europe, 96 00:09:56,900 --> 00:10:01,450 including the presumably so enlightened western half. Across the continent for many decades. 97 00:10:02,500 --> 00:10:10,390 Less than two years ago, it looked as though populism was the European pattern of political discontent in the beginning of the 21st century. 98 00:10:10,840 --> 00:10:16,659 While the problem of American political culture, both in its self-diagnosis and in the view from outside, 99 00:10:16,660 --> 00:10:22,450 was much rather the ever widening gap between the two major political parties and their constituencies. 100 00:10:22,450 --> 00:10:26,230 The loss of common ground, and, at least from a Liberal perspective, 101 00:10:26,470 --> 00:10:33,820 the radicalisation of the Conservative right epitomised in the rise of the Tea Party movement towards the end of the last decade. 102 00:10:35,330 --> 00:10:38,780 The rise and success of Trumpism has therefore, ironically, 103 00:10:38,780 --> 00:10:43,670 brought profound commonalities between American and European politics to the core 104 00:10:44,090 --> 00:10:49,100 and indeed commonalities between the social and cultural underpinnings of politics. 105 00:10:49,670 --> 00:10:54,770 Democracy, as we knew it, in a state of crisis on both shores of the Atlantic Ocean. 106 00:10:55,280 --> 00:10:59,780 And populism is the ghost that haunts Americans and Europeans alike. 107 00:11:01,610 --> 00:11:07,190 In my talk this evening, I should like to address the situation with an attempt at understanding populism, 108 00:11:07,520 --> 00:11:12,530 both in a broader historical perspective and with the categories mostly of a historian, 109 00:11:12,530 --> 00:11:16,729 not a political scientist, and as a Western phenomenon, in other words, 110 00:11:16,730 --> 00:11:22,640 as an expression of fundamental changes in advanced Western democracies over the past decades, 111 00:11:22,970 --> 00:11:25,940 reaching back into the 1960s and 1970s, 112 00:11:27,200 --> 00:11:33,499 we look at patterns of political culture relevant to the crisis of democracy and the rise of populism, for example, 113 00:11:33,500 --> 00:11:37,730 in the emergence of anti-elite prism and the transformation of party systems, 114 00:11:38,150 --> 00:11:43,160 which revealed both differences and similarities between the American and the European trajectory. 115 00:11:44,180 --> 00:11:48,469 Needless to say, the populist landscape in Europe is wide and rugged in itself, 116 00:11:48,470 --> 00:11:53,900 as are economic conditions and cultural foundations, out of which the populist challenge has grown. 117 00:11:54,680 --> 00:12:03,350 My prime European case is Germany, and I will mostly leave aside post-communist countries such as Poland and Hungary, and certainly Russia, 118 00:12:03,890 --> 00:12:12,830 in which righteous authoritarian governments with different kinds of populist appeal are testing the limits of democracy and the rule of law. 119 00:12:14,000 --> 00:12:19,610 And yet there is a case to be made in comparison with the United States for a Western at least Western 120 00:12:19,610 --> 00:12:24,890 European brand of populism stretching from Britain and France to the Netherlands and Germany, 121 00:12:25,280 --> 00:12:28,070 from Scandinavia in the north to Italy in the south. 122 00:12:30,050 --> 00:12:37,670 Obviously, this is a huge topic, and what I'm not going to discuss, among many other relevant facets, is the impact of media and technology, 123 00:12:37,940 --> 00:12:42,710 especially the Internet and social media, on the production of illiberal mindsets, 124 00:12:43,130 --> 00:12:48,530 the vulgar ization of political discourse, and hence the proliferation of populist politics. 125 00:12:49,280 --> 00:12:57,110 Instead, I'm going to focus in the major parts of my talk on the much debated issue of the social origins of populism. 126 00:12:58,160 --> 00:13:06,770 Although, and because one of the now most widely read interpretations of populism anomalous almost entirely leaves that dimension. 127 00:13:07,520 --> 00:13:11,600 Least you may have wondered about the imaginary invalid in the title. 128 00:13:11,870 --> 00:13:20,180 Beyond a literary reference to Moliere, the race seeks to capture an essential enigma and the quest for an explanation of populism. 129 00:13:20,960 --> 00:13:28,790 Who are its followers? Who are its voters? It is often assumed that populist attitudes such as anti-elite schisms, 130 00:13:29,000 --> 00:13:35,510 xenophobia and nationalism are an expression of marginalised groups in the age of globalised capitalism, 131 00:13:36,050 --> 00:13:44,720 an understandable and perhaps even legitimate act of protest against exclusion, disempowerment and injustice. 132 00:13:46,520 --> 00:13:52,250 Far from rejecting economic factors, indeed an important part of my consideration as will be devoted to them. 133 00:13:52,760 --> 00:13:57,920 My main argument, nevertheless, is about cultural mechanisms rather than economic inequality. 134 00:13:59,030 --> 00:14:03,440 The sickness often is, to put it provocatively, an imagined one. 135 00:14:03,830 --> 00:14:10,970 Both the alleged sickness of liberal democratic societies and the suffering of the populist electorate. 136 00:14:11,960 --> 00:14:19,100 While I'm trying to advance the complex multi causal model, as historians of course do for historical explanation of populism, 137 00:14:19,460 --> 00:14:28,850 I mostly see it as a reaction to the cultural dynamics in a new stage of the modernisation of Western societies as a cultural backlash 138 00:14:29,360 --> 00:14:38,720 against processes of liberalisation rooted in the 1960s and as an attempt at coping with an age of uncertainty and ambiguity. 139 00:14:39,230 --> 00:14:44,140 So the reaffirmation of traditional values. First. 140 00:14:45,840 --> 00:14:51,020 That would be called the critique of elites, especially economic and political elites, 141 00:14:51,020 --> 00:14:55,550 has not been invented by populism, only exploited and exacerbated. 142 00:14:56,150 --> 00:14:59,630 And it is, in fact, a major asset of democratic societies, of course. 143 00:15:00,410 --> 00:15:05,780 Therefore, it is not surprising that its traditions are historically stronger in the United States than in Europe. 144 00:15:06,680 --> 00:15:08,180 European political culture. 145 00:15:08,180 --> 00:15:17,030 In the transition from the early modern era to the modern age, from monarchical and aristocratic to more egalitarian conceptions of society, 146 00:15:17,370 --> 00:15:24,590 you have it has retained its hierarchical and deferential elements not only into the into the industrial period, 147 00:15:24,860 --> 00:15:28,940 but arguably into the post-war era of the 1950s and 1960s. 148 00:15:30,300 --> 00:15:35,490 Germany is a special case in point with its authoritarian habits that it supported fascism 149 00:15:35,730 --> 00:15:39,930 and all the more profoundly came to be challenged in the radicalism of the student movement. 150 00:15:40,740 --> 00:15:45,180 American politics have been characterised by anti-elitist traits since the 151 00:15:45,180 --> 00:15:49,440 Jeffersonian revolt against federalism and even more since the age of Jackson. 152 00:15:50,070 --> 00:15:57,000 Resentment against big cities, big business and big politics has run deep all over the late 19th and 20th centuries, 153 00:15:57,000 --> 00:16:02,120 and in fact constituted a major element in the appeal of the original populism of 154 00:16:02,160 --> 00:16:07,380 the farmers and small businessmen protest movements that culminated in the 1890s. 155 00:16:09,720 --> 00:16:17,880 What then has changed recently? While the anti-elite schism of the classical democratic age have mostly been advanced by the political left, 156 00:16:18,300 --> 00:16:21,060 whereas the right stuck with elite, abiding, 157 00:16:21,240 --> 00:16:31,470 patriarchal notions of social order, anti-establishment politics has transitioned to the right and construct new arguments about democratic liberal. 158 00:16:31,840 --> 00:16:40,080 Indeed, leftist elites who, in their progressive agenda setting, allegedly have lost contact with the aspirations of ordinary people. 159 00:16:40,320 --> 00:16:41,790 Kind of a political switch. 160 00:16:42,870 --> 00:16:51,870 At the same time, however, leftist anti-Semitism has been fuelled by growing social inequalities and the transformation of capitalism since the 1980s, 161 00:16:52,170 --> 00:16:58,020 with the emergence of a new class of superrich and the post production Financialized Market Economy. 162 00:16:59,390 --> 00:17:07,610 The story is complicated, and it's important to see both the overlap of right and left populism and the critique of elites and establishments, 163 00:17:08,060 --> 00:17:19,250 as well as markets differences. While leftist populism mostly projects the critique of elites at the 1% as the Occupy movement so suggestively put it, 164 00:17:19,880 --> 00:17:28,370 the elite threshold for right wing populism, sociologically speaking, is much lower as it often begins with the academic upper middle classes, 165 00:17:28,850 --> 00:17:34,430 with professors or journalists as major agents of political and public discourse. 166 00:17:35,180 --> 00:17:43,850 It works with us. Whether the gap between elites and ordinary people has indeed grown in the past three or four decades 167 00:17:43,850 --> 00:17:50,030 is hard to tell and subject to definition for the research and type of elites under scrutiny. 168 00:17:51,230 --> 00:17:55,550 The very rich have become even richer from the perspective of the lower middle, 169 00:17:55,700 --> 00:18:01,910 as from the perspective of the lower as well as the middle classes, and even more so in the United States than in Europe. 170 00:18:02,810 --> 00:18:08,030 The divide between the working class and the middle class already is much more difficult to assess. 171 00:18:09,110 --> 00:18:13,489 Political elites have probably become more plutocratic and in that sense, 172 00:18:13,490 --> 00:18:20,780 more estranged from the chances of common people in America, but not quite so in many European countries. 173 00:18:21,620 --> 00:18:26,899 Recruiting patterns of the political and administrative class in France for the system of the Grand 174 00:18:26,900 --> 00:18:34,370 Ecole have remained stubbornly resistant vis a vis both capitalist and egalitarian transformation. 175 00:18:35,960 --> 00:18:42,830 In Germany, meanwhile, access to the political class has long been relatively open and might have become less elitist, 176 00:18:42,930 --> 00:18:45,620 less elitist in recent decades for several reasons. 177 00:18:46,040 --> 00:18:52,760 With the entry of the amateur politician into the political arena in East Germany in the wake of reunification, 178 00:18:52,940 --> 00:18:57,829 think Angela merkel and so many East German minister presidents and one in West Germany. 179 00:18:57,830 --> 00:19:07,340 The Green Party has opened alternative paths for political careers from the marches with regard to political and some other functional, 180 00:19:07,340 --> 00:19:09,710 however not economic elites. 181 00:19:09,980 --> 00:19:19,400 It is quite safe to say that indeed populists are imaginary invalids, or at least the estrangement is on their part and not with the politicians. 182 00:19:20,480 --> 00:19:27,170 Certainly demands from civil society have raised expectations about transparency and responsiveness 183 00:19:27,620 --> 00:19:32,930 in representative democracy that politicians are now often unsuccessfully trying to catch up with. 184 00:19:34,220 --> 00:19:39,440 Again, the dynamics of the less left and of the right may be understood as communicating vessels. 185 00:19:40,100 --> 00:19:45,600 The crisis in representation, or rather in understanding representation is much more a question. 186 00:19:45,620 --> 00:19:53,150 Understanding representation has been nourished by older traditions of Marx's critique of liberal democracy, representative democracy, 187 00:19:53,300 --> 00:19:58,940 as well as by the more recent quest of progressive movements for the introduction of more elements 188 00:19:58,940 --> 00:20:03,920 of direct democracy in which we are seeing and welcoming in many Western European countries. 189 00:20:05,180 --> 00:20:10,790 The idea of the idea of a homogeneous interest of the people hindered in its fulfilment 190 00:20:11,030 --> 00:20:16,030 by the egotism of elites is a common denominator of left and right populism. 191 00:20:16,730 --> 00:20:25,150 A new Rousseau ism against which pluralist notions of interest and representation have been increasingly difficult to advance. 192 00:20:25,160 --> 00:20:33,890 This element of anti pluralism is one of the or perhaps the major argument in Bernard Muller's assessment of populism, 193 00:20:35,000 --> 00:20:44,870 I call it until you saw it and you it's only a new Rousseau ism because its importance the volunteers are now still there, 194 00:20:44,870 --> 00:20:48,680 the very real element and the overwhelming feeling of non-Arabic presentation. 195 00:20:48,810 --> 00:20:56,290 Its roots are in the rapid dissolution of the corporatist and associational society that had characterised 196 00:20:56,310 --> 00:21:03,530 social order in the age of classical modernity from the times of Alexis de Tocqueville into the 1970s. 197 00:21:04,280 --> 00:21:09,410 In this system, everyone, or rather every male citizen, white male citizen, 198 00:21:09,740 --> 00:21:16,250 came to be represented in a variety of social roles as a Catholic or as a member of a Protestant denomination, 199 00:21:16,700 --> 00:21:21,799 as a farm worker, as a member of a trade union in sports or in leisure clubs, 200 00:21:21,800 --> 00:21:29,240 or some voluntary association through closely knit communities and a high degree of identification with the leaders. 201 00:21:29,720 --> 00:21:35,000 The elites of those values and associations secured a feeling of individual empowerment 202 00:21:35,330 --> 00:21:40,520 to the rank and file that has been lost in an era of radical individualisation. 203 00:21:41,270 --> 00:21:50,270 Most of all, for the working and lower middle classes, the bonds that connected them to their local and intermediate powerbrokers have been destroyed. 204 00:21:50,540 --> 00:21:58,400 With the results were the result of a sense of loss of control and a massive wave of distrust in those when. 205 00:21:58,430 --> 00:22:09,250 Now operate without their consent. Step two before we further pursue this argument at the crossroads of manifest 206 00:22:09,700 --> 00:22:13,900 reorganisations and patterns of social order and their cultural repercussions, 207 00:22:14,380 --> 00:22:19,390 I would like to take a brief look at another aspect of the political embedding of populism, 208 00:22:19,690 --> 00:22:24,490 namely its organisational side and its locus in party systems in particular. 209 00:22:25,690 --> 00:22:31,150 If populism can be understood most fundamentally as an attitude towards society and politics, 210 00:22:31,660 --> 00:22:37,629 it may pursue its goals in various organisations, of course, but still the rise of populism, 211 00:22:37,630 --> 00:22:41,200 especially in Western and Central Europe since the 1980s, 212 00:22:41,620 --> 00:22:51,630 is inextricably linked with the erosion and sometimes even the collapse of traditional party systems that has lent stability to the post-war periods. 213 00:22:52,210 --> 00:22:56,080 And in many ways this can many ways can be traced back to the late 19th and 214 00:22:56,080 --> 00:23:01,000 early 20th centuries when social democratic as well as conservative Catholic. 215 00:23:01,240 --> 00:23:11,780 For many countries, parties emerged. The stability of these constellations, be it to party or multiparty systems, has been shattered as a consequence, 216 00:23:11,780 --> 00:23:20,450 among others, of the evaporation of social milieus and the just discussed retreat of a corporatist and associational society. 217 00:23:21,290 --> 00:23:26,030 The close link between the end of a polarisation of society, 218 00:23:26,510 --> 00:23:35,390 the breakdown of party systems and the rise of populist movement parties in their wake is most and most obvious in countries such as the Netherlands, 219 00:23:35,780 --> 00:23:40,819 with its long standing pattern of presiding, or Italy, where confessional, 220 00:23:40,820 --> 00:23:45,620 ideological and cultural camps that shaped the post-war party system in a similar way. 221 00:23:46,430 --> 00:23:52,850 In Italy, populism came to power with Berlusconi and his Italia Movement Party in the 1990s. 222 00:23:53,240 --> 00:23:58,190 And although Italian democracy has survived Berlusconi's long reign and moved back to 223 00:23:58,190 --> 00:24:02,960 more classical trajectories in many ways so across the fingers towards Washington, 224 00:24:04,250 --> 00:24:09,559 the organisation of interest and the party system has never recovered from its collapse and will, 225 00:24:09,560 --> 00:24:19,440 for the foreseeable future remain in the populist mode of post ideology and ad hoc mobilisation in many other European countries. 226 00:24:19,460 --> 00:24:27,980 However, party system step rather undergone a process of gradual erosion and transformation, as it is true for Germany since the 1980s. 227 00:24:28,730 --> 00:24:37,280 In such constellations, populism has organised in right wing parties that sometimes were formed on the basis of smaller parties that already existed, 228 00:24:37,280 --> 00:24:42,110 as was the case with Europe. Hiatus remaking of the Austrian Liberal Party appeared. 229 00:24:42,890 --> 00:24:47,959 Mostly, though, populist movements created new parties that were positioned on the extreme 230 00:24:47,960 --> 00:24:52,670 right of the political spectrum and with independence on national interests. 231 00:24:53,060 --> 00:24:56,450 France, or much more recently with the German ascendancy, 232 00:24:56,450 --> 00:25:06,470 the predominant German political culture since the 2000 has not been characterised by the high degree of polarisation of the United States, 233 00:25:06,680 --> 00:25:16,340 where the populist appeal is the hybrid really of right wing ideologies and a more centrist promise to bridge the cleavages in culture and society. 234 00:25:16,970 --> 00:25:26,330 On the contrary, in Germany, Germany stands out for its consensual and centrist political culture with a post ideological overlap of the form of both 235 00:25:26,570 --> 00:25:34,010 Christian Democrats and social Democrats embodied in a series of grand coalitions different from the United States. 236 00:25:34,040 --> 00:25:43,160 Populism in Europe has often occupied a space on the political right that have been vacated by the liberalisation of conservative parties. 237 00:25:44,090 --> 00:25:51,469 The AfD, therefore, is both a rather traditional conservative party with a bourgeois and sometimes even elitist, 238 00:25:51,470 --> 00:25:59,420 certainly elitist outlook and a modern populist party with a broader appeal to the discontented and petty bourgeois. 239 00:26:01,360 --> 00:26:06,070 In structural terms, the American case of Trumpism is rather singular in the Western world, 240 00:26:06,430 --> 00:26:14,590 and yet it exemplifies similar issues and the transformation of conservative politics at the beginning of the 21st century. 241 00:26:15,370 --> 00:26:22,600 Its singularity is in the hijacking of a major existing party and not a minor party such as the FBI. 242 00:26:23,050 --> 00:26:27,190 But one of the major players in an otherwise extremely stable two party system, 243 00:26:28,210 --> 00:26:33,760 Donald Trump has been the parasite surviving through and from his host the Republican Party. 244 00:26:34,900 --> 00:26:40,150 This pattern is remarkable since there is a well-established pattern of third party 245 00:26:40,150 --> 00:26:44,410 challenges in the United States that Trump may instead have chosen to follow. 246 00:26:45,190 --> 00:26:52,480 Indeed, the original populism of the late 19th century organised as a third party, the People's or Populist Party. 247 00:26:54,180 --> 00:26:59,399 Trump may have to get his credit for realising that these efforts have never carried 248 00:26:59,400 --> 00:27:04,650 someone to the presidency and that the internal crisis of the GOP more important, 249 00:27:04,650 --> 00:27:12,480 its own rift between moderate establishment and conservative zealots on the grassroots level had made it ripe for his own assault. 250 00:27:13,620 --> 00:27:21,150 Populism, hence, may flourish in a variety of organisational ways and with quite different positions in a country's party system. 251 00:27:21,810 --> 00:27:25,230 However, two features runs through those varieties. 252 00:27:25,530 --> 00:27:34,620 Number one, a previous damage to the party system by the realignment of voters beyond their traditional cohesion and milieus. 253 00:27:35,130 --> 00:27:41,400 And second, a crisis of conservatism as a political ideology and cultural worldview that has 254 00:27:41,400 --> 00:27:46,830 come under pressure with the attacks of both economic and cultural liberalisation. 255 00:27:47,160 --> 00:27:57,930 At the end of the 20th century, third set patterns of socio economic change. 256 00:27:59,580 --> 00:28:02,760 Now, why do people vote populist or even anti-democratic? 257 00:28:03,630 --> 00:28:10,500 Why do growing shares of the population countries that we used to think of as the most educated and most enlightened in the world, 258 00:28:10,860 --> 00:28:17,880 all for a political program and propaganda that is phobic, racist, misogynist, and nationalistic. 259 00:28:19,170 --> 00:28:27,600 The core question of the popular attraction of the populist appeal probably is I'm sorry, impossible to answer in any satisfactory way. 260 00:28:28,290 --> 00:28:34,170 Obviously, it is more than an empirical riddle that would only need more data to be solved. 261 00:28:35,190 --> 00:28:43,410 All of that is certainly true. Answers will be dependent on fundamental persuasion, on political ideologies and deep seated worldviews. 262 00:28:44,340 --> 00:28:48,990 Liberal optimists will assume that everyone will be following a path of enlightenment 263 00:28:49,230 --> 00:28:54,930 and rationality once impeding factors have been remedied a lack of education, 264 00:28:55,350 --> 00:28:57,090 growth, social inequalities, 265 00:28:57,450 --> 00:29:06,810 or a distortion of rational discourse in the Habermas model by the intrusion of power into the Lifeworld sceptics won't be so sure about this. 266 00:29:07,260 --> 00:29:13,200 They would argue that people do think and behave in irrational manners and that we shouldn't assume, 267 00:29:13,620 --> 00:29:17,730 as the history of the 20th century has demonstrated in ample ways, 268 00:29:18,150 --> 00:29:23,940 the weakest, outward bound to the universalism of liberal democracy and cosmopolitanism, trans nationalism. 269 00:29:24,660 --> 00:29:28,850 Now, where I stand, I don't know. Perhaps someone will. I have to look for some middle ground. 270 00:29:28,860 --> 00:29:37,860 I think perhaps we need both, like in the figure of Richard Rodgers liberal ironies, which might be of business consolation. 271 00:29:39,300 --> 00:29:46,050 Perhaps the most widespread explanation for people going populist is the leftist and progressive narrative of economic marginalisation. 272 00:29:47,370 --> 00:29:55,010 It appears in American as well as in European political thought, and points to major socio economic transformations during the past few decades, 273 00:29:55,320 --> 00:30:01,630 far beyond the economic and financial crises that have shaken the Western world from 2017. 274 00:30:02,670 --> 00:30:09,120 Although in that view, the last ten years, that certainly aggravated existing issues of social inequality. 275 00:30:09,960 --> 00:30:16,560 The roots, however, often in these narratives about the turnaround of the mid 1970s to early 1980s. 276 00:30:17,070 --> 00:30:21,990 That is in the end of the post-war era of prosperity, in the end of the now, 277 00:30:21,990 --> 00:30:26,580 especially by historians and very especially very particularly in Germany, 278 00:30:26,580 --> 00:30:37,500 so much discussed on global use with the retreat of Keynesian economics and the rise of neo liberalism in the immediate run up to the US election, 279 00:30:37,500 --> 00:30:42,389 the editorial of The New Yorker and a powerful endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president, 280 00:30:42,390 --> 00:30:50,760 I'm sure many of you read it succinctly, summarised this narrative anger and resentment in this reading, a vibrant within quote, 281 00:30:51,180 --> 00:30:56,970 a white working class that has been losing ground and for which a disconnected political class, 282 00:30:57,360 --> 00:31:02,580 particularly within the Democratic Party, has failed to convey any sense of empathy. 283 00:31:03,750 --> 00:31:12,180 And, of course, The New Yorker, even contrary, the original populism of the late 19th century by boldly claiming, quote, We are in the mess. 284 00:31:12,180 --> 00:31:15,900 We are we are in the midst of a people's revolt. 285 00:31:16,890 --> 00:31:20,850 The great debate concerning inequality. The Hollowing of the middle. 286 00:31:21,240 --> 00:31:28,350 Globalisation's winners and losers. We cannot dismiss the message because we deplore the messenger. 287 00:31:30,780 --> 00:31:35,879 While the moderate left or the moderate left in Europe would probably overall know, I'm sure, 288 00:31:35,880 --> 00:31:41,400 which overall be much more reluctant with adopting this American progressive narrative, 289 00:31:41,880 --> 00:31:46,130 certainly insofar as it lends legitimacy to the populist revolt. 290 00:31:46,830 --> 00:31:51,630 Public intellectuals on the radical European left echo and reinforce that. 291 00:31:52,770 --> 00:32:01,889 Sometimes. For example, I argued in such a way, taught by Slavoj Zizek three months ago at Berlin's Humboldt University has been announced as rage, 292 00:32:01,890 --> 00:32:04,890 rebellion and power in the face of populism. 293 00:32:05,130 --> 00:32:11,490 She doesn't come to the defence of liberal democracy. And why should he, as one of the last remaining Orthodox Marxists? 294 00:32:11,790 --> 00:32:15,389 But more is the fact that the very legitimate anger by the people as it is 295 00:32:15,390 --> 00:32:19,980 channelled into populism does not lead into a real rebellion and revolution. 296 00:32:21,180 --> 00:32:27,059 Hence, she would have to disagree with outgoing German President Jonathan Gauss well-received 297 00:32:27,060 --> 00:32:31,650 plea earlier this week that all of us should do more to defend liberal democracy. 298 00:32:33,580 --> 00:32:39,480 Now, this raises problems of political theory and political philosophy that are not going to further follow tonight. 299 00:32:39,510 --> 00:32:46,320 Suffice it to say that the question of the legitimacy of populism is a delicate one between the Scylla 300 00:32:46,440 --> 00:32:53,460 of giving some credit to racism and xenophobia in the name of larger power structures and inequalities. 301 00:32:53,820 --> 00:32:59,820 The neoliberal syndrome, so to speak, and the correctness of what Germans called Bella is shameful. 302 00:33:00,300 --> 00:33:07,710 The environment of voters who ought to be held accountable or to be held accountable for the illiberal views, balance and balance. 303 00:33:08,040 --> 00:33:13,380 But the danger with the danger of overlooking the origins of anger and hatred. 304 00:33:14,490 --> 00:33:18,270 Here we are again in this dilemma with the title of My Talk. 305 00:33:18,480 --> 00:33:23,660 Imaginary invokes in an empirical and historical perspective, 306 00:33:23,670 --> 00:33:28,379 it is very plausible that the economic dynamics of the past half century have 307 00:33:28,380 --> 00:33:32,670 contributed to the susceptibility of certain groups to the populist message. 308 00:33:35,700 --> 00:33:41,790 But the connection is more complicated and less obvious than the standard account of the neoliberal assault assumes. 309 00:33:42,990 --> 00:33:51,000 The age of the total of years in the 1970s has ushered in a period of relative stagnation in wages and living standards, 310 00:33:51,360 --> 00:33:57,210 while income from capital and financial transactions has dramatically grown and sometimes skyrocketed. 311 00:33:58,260 --> 00:34:01,290 For the most part, however, this is a relative experience, 312 00:34:01,890 --> 00:34:11,310 and living standards in 2015 are much higher for the lower and middle classes when compared to the still relatively post-war scarcity of 1975. 313 00:34:12,120 --> 00:34:20,040 Perhaps more so in Europe than in the United States. And the story is different is a different one for Southern and Eastern Europe, 314 00:34:20,190 --> 00:34:27,479 two regions that only began their trajectory of growth and prosperity in their new democracies and within the European Union. 315 00:34:27,480 --> 00:34:33,330 And, of course, with support of the European Union for all their current economic calamities, 316 00:34:33,660 --> 00:34:40,410 Greece and Spain today are worlds apart from their state of mostly rural poverty in the mid 1970s. 317 00:34:41,400 --> 00:34:46,080 A similar case could be argued for Poland and Hungary and certainly for East Germany, 318 00:34:46,080 --> 00:34:52,740 the former GDR, while the post-communist configuration in many ways has its own variables. 319 00:34:53,070 --> 00:34:57,120 Spain and Greece are politically deprived as they have witnessed major populist 320 00:34:57,120 --> 00:35:01,290 movements on the left rather than on the light on the right with Syriza, 321 00:35:01,290 --> 00:35:07,410 and put it in the older industrial countries that are more susceptible to right wing populism. 322 00:35:07,770 --> 00:35:17,760 Deindustrialisation has indeed hit the working class hard, and the link to the success of populist politics is obvious in the American Rust Belt, 323 00:35:18,030 --> 00:35:24,570 with blue states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that Donald Trump captured on November 8th, 324 00:35:24,930 --> 00:35:29,879 as well as in old industrial German regions in the northern part, for example, of Britain, 325 00:35:29,880 --> 00:35:35,850 back where the AfD scored major victories in the state elections of March 2016, 326 00:35:36,150 --> 00:35:39,750 such as in Manhattan Pforzheim, where they captured the air to the act mandated. 327 00:35:41,490 --> 00:35:46,470 However, if white males in those regions are most vocal in today's populism, 328 00:35:46,980 --> 00:35:53,190 it doesn't mean that they were that they were the sole or prime victims of deindustrialisation, 329 00:35:53,550 --> 00:36:02,790 the quintessential white male working class that appears in The New Yorker and has become almost topical or even a cliché in American discourse. 330 00:36:04,170 --> 00:36:07,770 When factories shut down in the American Great Lakes industrial zone, 331 00:36:08,130 --> 00:36:13,140 as well as in the German role could be migrants and minorities were equally hit hard. 332 00:36:13,470 --> 00:36:19,290 Little talk about them gets about from Italy or Turkey in Germany and African-Americans 333 00:36:19,290 --> 00:36:23,700 would come to the north with the Great Migration just one or two generations earlier. 334 00:36:23,880 --> 00:36:32,880 In the US it was predominantly men who lost their jobs in coal mines, steelworks and auto plants certainly. 335 00:36:33,510 --> 00:36:41,489 But rationalisation and the export of production to the southern periphery of the respective continents Southern Europe, Africa or Mexico, 336 00:36:41,490 --> 00:36:48,140 in the case of the US and Asia in particular, has probably even more engulfed industries, 337 00:36:48,300 --> 00:36:52,470 industries that had relied on female wage labour, such as upper. 338 00:36:52,600 --> 00:36:56,050 Six electrical appliances and most of all, textiles. 339 00:36:57,730 --> 00:37:01,630 Not all losers of globalisation have become permanently marginalised. 340 00:37:01,990 --> 00:37:06,310 And not all of the marginalised are turning their frustration into hatred and xenophobia. 341 00:37:07,240 --> 00:37:14,170 Women in particular, have probably been more successful in securing the new chances of post-industrial 342 00:37:14,170 --> 00:37:20,000 service society than men and the poorest and most economically marginalised have, 343 00:37:20,020 --> 00:37:24,400 according to preliminary data, rather than not voted for Trump on November eight. 344 00:37:24,460 --> 00:37:29,170 Trump voters are much more typically to be found in the lower middle classes, and besides, 345 00:37:29,170 --> 00:37:34,090 as is the case with populists elsewhere across the complete range of income and education. 346 00:37:35,290 --> 00:37:42,820 Indeed, this is what we would expect from historical evidence of voter support for right wing movements and the crisis of the Weimar Republic. 347 00:37:43,030 --> 00:37:50,230 Unskilled and unemployed workers gave strength to the KPD, while the NSDAP overwhelmingly benefited from middle class votes. 348 00:37:50,830 --> 00:37:57,580 Hence, it is important. It is important to ask questions for economic change when looking at political attitudes. 349 00:37:58,090 --> 00:38:04,450 But the answers may well go beyond economics or look in different directions, 350 00:38:04,510 --> 00:38:13,090 which may await children as the concept of deindustrialisation and globalisation are not sufficient in explaining the new populism. 351 00:38:13,390 --> 00:38:17,260 The larger notion of the emergence of a post-war society, 352 00:38:17,260 --> 00:38:27,040 of a post-war society may be helpful as a direct attention to other factors such as gender and organisation and the IS paradigm. 353 00:38:27,250 --> 00:38:35,410 The male breadwinner took centre stage. A skilled worker with his wage could support his whole family, wife and children. 354 00:38:36,310 --> 00:38:42,400 The inability to do so in a postcode economy has done more than material harm. 355 00:38:42,970 --> 00:38:47,530 It has come as a cultural shock to a deeply patriarchal worldview. 356 00:38:48,520 --> 00:38:53,140 Meanwhile, the destruction of this work environment, such as assembly line production, 357 00:38:53,470 --> 00:38:59,440 has served as a catalyst for the decline of trade union strength in Western democracies since the 1980s. 358 00:39:00,880 --> 00:39:03,760 But the flight from organisation is a much larger trend, 359 00:39:03,770 --> 00:39:10,599 also beyond the sphere of work and labour and rooted at least as much in a massive reorientation of 360 00:39:10,600 --> 00:39:16,840 cultural preferences from the collective cultural preferences from the collective to the individual, 361 00:39:17,200 --> 00:39:20,439 a reorientation that's across social classes. 362 00:39:20,440 --> 00:39:23,290 And we cannot emphasise this strongly enough, 363 00:39:23,620 --> 00:39:31,870 a reorientation of cultural preference to the individual that has widely and happily been embraced by people again across all classes. 364 00:39:32,590 --> 00:39:39,760 At the same time, a gap has opened in educational attainment and its consequences for economic achievement and social prestige. 365 00:39:40,210 --> 00:39:48,610 Increasingly, the pitting the academic upper middle classes against us, against the non-academic, lower middle and working classes, 366 00:39:48,970 --> 00:39:55,870 and producing resentments against the elitism and the increasingly liberal worldviews of the educated classes. 367 00:39:56,920 --> 00:40:02,680 This is why we finally have to turn to patterns of cultural conflict and understanding populism. 368 00:40:10,660 --> 00:40:15,490 Without losing sight of economic change, social inequality and their repercussions. 369 00:40:16,060 --> 00:40:23,740 Populism may be defined as a pattern of cultural resistance, namely as resistance against liberalisation of society. 370 00:40:25,560 --> 00:40:32,790 The cultural liberalisation of Western societies and in extension across the globe to which populists oppose, 371 00:40:33,240 --> 00:40:39,810 or at least which they do not instinctively grasp or rationally understand in relation to their own lives, 372 00:40:40,560 --> 00:40:44,970 is in a complicated relationship with the dynamics of economic liberalisation. 373 00:40:45,360 --> 00:40:48,210 Of course, summarised with the concept of neo liberalism. 374 00:40:49,590 --> 00:40:58,710 But it would be a mistake, both conceptually and historically, to conflate those two liberal forces of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, 375 00:40:58,980 --> 00:41:07,620 or to reduce the cultural liberalisation to a functional by-product of the larger neoliberal power strategy as Marxists tend to do. 376 00:41:07,650 --> 00:41:13,450 Like neo liberal, neo liberalism has freed women in order to better exploit themselves. 377 00:41:15,390 --> 00:41:23,040 Historically, the origins of cultural liberalisation, as we understand it today, brought forward by the protest movements of the 1960s, 378 00:41:23,340 --> 00:41:28,739 the student movement and new feminism in particular have preceded the global economic 379 00:41:28,740 --> 00:41:34,860 crisis of the 1970s and the paradigm shift in political economy from Keynes to Friedman. 380 00:41:34,860 --> 00:41:36,390 From demand to supply. 381 00:41:37,970 --> 00:41:46,910 The pursuit of individual liberties and personal autonomy and cultural liberalism sometimes, of course, dovetails nicely with the neo liberal ideas. 382 00:41:47,360 --> 00:41:57,140 Economic individuals who are completely set free from social bonds and obligations, free to move for your workplace regardless of family or whatever. 383 00:41:58,070 --> 00:42:05,120 At the same time, both set in stark opposition against each other with the new neo liberal quest for order and regulation. 384 00:42:05,540 --> 00:42:11,959 Think European Union. I think the German pattern of states order is very much not so much market, 385 00:42:11,960 --> 00:42:17,300 but the German pattern is very much one of state order neo liberalism running directly 386 00:42:17,300 --> 00:42:22,940 counter to the idea of grassroots organisations and creative self-realisation of individuals. 387 00:42:24,830 --> 00:42:32,960 In any case, culture wars have emerged as a salient feature of a new populism in the United States as well as in Europe. 388 00:42:33,650 --> 00:42:42,890 Culture wars that promote a politics of cultural and social nostalgia, or even reveals an aggressive gesture against modern society. 389 00:42:43,880 --> 00:42:47,540 Populism in this regard has become the heir to conservatism, 390 00:42:48,080 --> 00:42:54,380 and the populist tide might may indeed be understood historically as a second wave of protest, 391 00:42:55,160 --> 00:43:00,979 second wave of protest or backlash against the cultural liberalisation and value of change that had 392 00:43:00,980 --> 00:43:09,350 started in the 1960s and half a century ago prompted the rise of then new conservatism rather early, 393 00:43:09,350 --> 00:43:16,280 starting in the 1960s in America and 1964 was often mentioned as a kind of key year. 394 00:43:16,520 --> 00:43:20,629 And about a decade later, only after the turmoil of 1968, 395 00:43:20,630 --> 00:43:27,500 or even after the economic watershed of 1973 in Western Europe, the West German tendency and Thatcherism, 396 00:43:29,000 --> 00:43:36,200 the cultural agenda of current populism has certainly been influenced by more recent events and processes such as the mass migration of 397 00:43:36,200 --> 00:43:45,170 Middle Eastern and African refugees by the challenge of radical Islamic terrorism in the wake of 911 and the Western war against terror, 398 00:43:45,620 --> 00:43:54,020 and by new stages, in the new stages and the cultural dynamics of Western societies, especially with regard to minority rights and sexual politics. 399 00:43:54,200 --> 00:43:55,280 We should do this in a minute, 400 00:43:55,850 --> 00:44:05,960 but the core catalogue of grievances refers back to the 1960s and seventies with three larger issues of particular prominence symbolic significance. 401 00:44:07,480 --> 00:44:11,980 It's a rampant and it's really first point for me. 402 00:44:12,400 --> 00:44:18,940 First, a rampant anti-Semitism that comes in variations in degrees from the more traditional conservative 403 00:44:18,940 --> 00:44:25,080 housewife ideal promoted by the German team to the aggressive me largely of Donald Trump. 404 00:44:25,630 --> 00:44:33,250 But all almost always constitutes a core element, not just some obscure irritation in the populist agenda. 405 00:44:34,390 --> 00:44:40,030 Second, a vibrant nationalism that is not only and in many cases not even primarily directed 406 00:44:40,030 --> 00:44:44,470 against political transgressions of the nation state like the European Union, 407 00:44:44,740 --> 00:44:53,290 but is anchored in the cultural ideal of ethnic homogeneity and hence articulates its reservations against immigration and the ideal of ethnic, 408 00:44:53,590 --> 00:44:56,530 cultural and religious pluralism in modern societies. 409 00:44:57,610 --> 00:45:05,140 Third, if perhaps somewhat less important populism or currently still less important, yet less important. 410 00:45:05,170 --> 00:45:13,540 Populism also converges in its rejection of the ecological paradigm change that has transformed Western culture since the 1970s. 411 00:45:14,200 --> 00:45:21,670 The denial of climate change, or at least the refusal to act politically on it, currently looms large on the populist agenda. 412 00:45:22,000 --> 00:45:33,130 More so in the US than in Europe. But it reflects a deeper resentment against the redefinition of values along ecological or sustainability lines. 413 00:45:35,290 --> 00:45:41,200 In the eyes of a historian. Therefore, there is something like a cultural lack in the populous mindset. 414 00:45:42,340 --> 00:45:47,260 Almost a century ago, American sociologist William Faulkner, 1922, 415 00:45:47,620 --> 00:45:56,530 has introduced the notion of cultural lack in an attempt to explain the belated reaction of societies to processes of material and manifest change. 416 00:45:57,550 --> 00:46:04,790 This pattern of late reaction applies to both economic and cultural changes that go back several decades. 417 00:46:04,810 --> 00:46:08,530 By now, manufacturing plants have been closed. 418 00:46:08,530 --> 00:46:13,179 In think of tactile text on objects, industries have been closing assembly line. 419 00:46:13,180 --> 00:46:18,280 Jobs have been lost to other parts of the world since the 1970s and eighties, 420 00:46:18,820 --> 00:46:25,780 and it was often the fathers or the mothers, for that matter, of those angry today who lost their jobs and the economy. 421 00:46:27,130 --> 00:46:34,540 Women have attacked patriarchy and claimed their autonomy as individuals, their equal share of standing since more than a generation. 422 00:46:34,960 --> 00:46:42,850 And yet, the pursuit of female equality still doesn't seem to be culturally digested in a significant share of male society. 423 00:46:44,600 --> 00:46:47,870 However, one should be careful not to overemphasise the image, 424 00:46:48,050 --> 00:46:54,770 this image of continuity and cultural liberalisation since the 1960s, the beginning of the 21st century, 425 00:46:54,770 --> 00:47:04,100 not only witnessed as a second wave and cultural backlash, but also a genuine second wave in the dynamics of cultural liberalisation itself. 426 00:47:05,620 --> 00:47:13,630 What, half a century ago, equality and autonomy for marginalised groups, for women and minorities had been the rallying cry. 427 00:47:13,990 --> 00:47:20,320 The pursuit of equality and autonomy has now been extended to minorities who are largely out of sight. 428 00:47:20,590 --> 00:47:31,930 Two decades ago, at least in mainstream public discourse, people with handicaps, for example, or LGBT people, or as another example, take religion. 429 00:47:32,770 --> 00:47:38,589 In the early 1970s, German elementary schools were still struggling with becoming the main shots, 430 00:47:38,590 --> 00:47:42,430 going to school and rather than being confessional Protestant or Catholic. 431 00:47:43,270 --> 00:47:49,300 Only a generation later, the debate is about Muslim prayer and Islamic religious education. 432 00:47:51,010 --> 00:47:53,620 The new politics of sexuality, in particular, 433 00:47:53,950 --> 00:48:02,710 has challenged the notion of normality in different ways compared to earlier emancipation movements in the 20th or even the 19th centuries. 434 00:48:03,910 --> 00:48:10,450 Liberals and progressives sometimes too easily take this cultural redefinition for granted. 435 00:48:11,590 --> 00:48:19,390 We should pass a moment in order to understand the enormous historical significance of the barriers we are breaking today. 436 00:48:19,900 --> 00:48:24,400 For example, with the conception of marriage beyond heterosexuality, 437 00:48:25,480 --> 00:48:30,640 if liberals demonstrate understanding vis a vis economic disruptions and people's lives. 438 00:48:31,330 --> 00:48:37,360 They should also take cultural disruptions into account and without compromising on their principles, 439 00:48:37,780 --> 00:48:41,200 give others who are less privileged time to accommodate. 440 00:48:43,000 --> 00:48:46,600 Conclusion Populism. In an age of ambiguity. 441 00:48:52,180 --> 00:49:02,290 Populism flourishes in an age of ambiguity above all other variables in a complex configuration, economic changes and new inequalities. 442 00:49:02,770 --> 00:49:06,400 The dissolution of social milieus and the erosion of public systems. 443 00:49:06,730 --> 00:49:10,240 The distrust of elites and the crisis of representative government. 444 00:49:11,050 --> 00:49:17,590 It should be understood as a search for order. The search for order in an apparently orderly world, 445 00:49:18,280 --> 00:49:26,020 as an attempt at securing boundaries in a historical situation when boundaries disappear quite literally, 446 00:49:26,350 --> 00:49:35,230 but also in a larger figurative sense, how can we control our lives and maintain security with open borders? 447 00:49:35,980 --> 00:49:44,080 How can we care for ourselves and our local microcosms in the shadow of global elites to prosper in their unbounded existence? 448 00:49:44,650 --> 00:49:51,370 And be careful? We are part of these global elites. We are part of those form the next flights from Heathrow just a few steps away, 449 00:49:51,560 --> 00:50:00,400 not from any other people, but the irritations which translate into populism reached still deeper ours. 450 00:50:00,400 --> 00:50:04,000 This nature of the paradox of fuzzy realities. 451 00:50:05,380 --> 00:50:10,330 How can there be nation states and a European Union if the latter does not seem to 452 00:50:10,330 --> 00:50:15,670 transform itself into a sovereign federal state yet is more than a federation of nations. 453 00:50:17,750 --> 00:50:23,330 So as the Brexit make it clear to draw boundaries, women should be equal to men. 454 00:50:24,230 --> 00:50:28,100 But shouldn't we stop thinking in those bounded categories of gender at all? 455 00:50:28,610 --> 00:50:37,130 Whether with new designations of bathrooms or beyond trans categories all around us in times of liquid modernity. 456 00:50:38,150 --> 00:50:47,150 The latest thinking in Parliament has just passed away. Call it the West may be under attack from outside, but the real threat comes from the inside, 457 00:50:47,570 --> 00:50:56,800 with the tension between a hugely dynamic reinterpretation of Western ideals and the difficulties of many not outside the West, 458 00:50:56,810 --> 00:51:03,770 many in the West, whatever their economic situation may be in keeping pace with this ongoing revolution. 459 00:51:04,940 --> 00:51:10,640 Ironically, populism has brought the West closer together again on both sides of the Atlantic. 460 00:51:10,910 --> 00:51:14,330 America and Europe are in the very same predicament. 461 00:51:15,050 --> 00:51:21,380 They cannot stop this revolution in the name of freedom and rights, participation and inclusion. 462 00:51:22,220 --> 00:51:27,020 And yet they have to listen to the voices of those struggling to keep pace. 463 00:51:27,890 --> 00:51:29,150 Thank you for listening.