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>> This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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>> Welcome back to the Feast of Friends and the Giant Family.
Beyond the reach of capitalist realism, beyond the reach
of the technological absurd, beyond the reach
of the internet complex and the Dower Society of Spectacle,
we practice the persecuted religion of thinking here
in these catacombs of KZSU.
Again, the show is called entitled opinions as in everybody's
entitled to my opinion, as well as the opinions of my guests.
And if you cherish this show and think it's
in a category all its own, you have earned a title
to your opinion as well.
If on the other hand, you prefer to wallow in the Meyer,
so be it.
The pursuit of happiness takes many different forms
in this weird nation of ours.
And wallowing in the Meyer is one of them.
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>> Silence must be clear.
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>> And speaking of opinions, our topic today is the condition
of democracy and nothing is more essential to democracies
than the opinions of its plurality of citizens.
Where power resides with the people, where public opinion
influences policy, where the citizens vote matters,
where government is based on the consent of the governed rather
than the will of a ruler or a party, there we all have a right
to our opinions, as well as a right to voice them.
A functional democracy opens a public sphere
for the exchange of ideas and the exchange
of diverging opinions.
That sphere comes into being only seldomly,
like an island of light in the otherwise oppressive night
of human political history.
More often than not, the light is quickly snuffed out.
Such is the paradox of democracy.
It represents a universal human aspiration that assumes institutional form
only rarely, exceptionally and briefly.
Democracy is above all a public stage for human action,
which consists of deeds and words.
Action requires a performative platform on which to appear.
It's not by chance that the Greeks invented theater
at the very same time and in the very same place
where they invented democracy, namely in Athens
in the sixth century BC.
The Greek polity was a stage for the citizens performance
of democracy, a stage on which their deeds and words could be seen
and heard.
With the Greek model of democracy in mind,
Hannah Aunt, defined political freedom as the freedom to appear
in public alongside and before once fellow citizens as an equal.
To strut your hour on the stage as an actor in the drama
of self governance to express an opinion in the public sphere
before your fellow citizens, that was the most meaningful
of human actions for Hannah.
To act by word or deed means always to interact with those
with whom I share the world.
On this stage of interaction, my opinion gets tested, contested,
agreed with or discredited, in short, it goes through the crucible
of plausibility and persuasion.
Where democracies are functional, the opinions of citizens are subjected
to the centripetal pressure of the claim of reason, the swation
of evidence and the sanity of a common logos.
Where the democratic stage begins to wobble,
the centrifugal force takes over and our opinions tend
towards hyperbole, idiosyncrasy, outlandish.
What causes the stage to wobble is a matter of speculation
and that is exactly what my guests and I intend to do today,
namely to speculate about what he calls the neo-democratic
condition.
I, Swati Kumar, welcome to entitled opinions.
Thank you, Robert, for having me delighted and honored
to be back to entitled opinions.
Back is the word, I think you were with us in 2016, if memory serves,
and we talked at that on that occasion about your book,
Radical Equality, Gandhi, I'm Betkar and the risk of democracy.
And back then, you were teaching at Stanford.
Now you are professor and Sri Shanti Nath in Dao chair in political
non-violence, as well as you're the director of the Ahimsa Center
for nonviolent thought and action at California State and Polytechnic
University of Pomona down in Los Angeles.
And you currently have a book forthcoming titled
"Neo Democracy, Freedom and Violence After Neo-Liberulism."
And in this new book, you speak about what you call the
"Neo Democratic Condition."
And why don't we start with that term?
What exactly do you mean when you speak of "Neo Democratic Condition"?
Thank you, Robert, for that opening question.
Let's begin, as you were saying with the words,
the idea of the condition, as Arrant would say, the human condition,
is that there is nothing inevitable about where the world,
but especially our moral and political world will end up.
A lot of how we traverse our life together, our collective life,
has to do with how we think about it,
and how we therefore act on how we think about our shared world.
The condition of neo-democracy is something that looks inevitable.
The current moment looks sometimes often insurmountable.
The glaring inequalities, the glaring disparities worldwide,
the fraying of the modern social contract,
the withdrawal of an active and hostile withdrawal of elected governments
from the project of the common good,
but there is nothing inevitable about it.
And one of the things I mean when I use the word "condition"
is to complicate the common-sensical idea, largely Euro-American idea,
that democracy is on the verge of dying,
that there is something almost now irreversibly certain
about the emerging and appearing forms of tyranny in our political and social life.
The word "condition" complicates that narrative for two specific reasons.
And I hope that that will clarify what I mean by neo-democracy as well.
Firstly, the idea that democracy is the sovereign form,
perhaps the best moral and political form of government,
is a fairly recent idea.
We know that even the modern revolutionary traditions,
including the French and the American traditions,
do not actually, despite their constitutional commitments,
do not use democracy that often it's the Republican form of government
that is envisaged.
So when does democracy become, as you were suggesting,
a global and a universal aspiration?
It becomes a global, truly global with the movements
for decolonization in the middle of the 20th century.
That is when vast words of the world
become free from European colonial control,
and they adopt quite self-consciously with a very active declaration of independence.
Democracy to be even more precise in its institutional form,
liberal democracy to be the most durable constitutional form of self-rule.
That is when democracy becomes truly global.
So the anti-colonial moment needs to be taken more seriously
than those Dumseres who want to claim that democracy is coming to an end.
The second moment is something that is truly exceptional
about the American democratic experiment.
In fact, if there is something truly exceptional about American democracy
or as talk of all, it's a democracy in America.
It comes fairly late and much later than talk to themselves,
it comes in the 1960s with the idea of civil rights.
What happens with civil rights is quite subtle philosophically speaking.
We know about its political and social impact,
but philosophically speaking, this is the first time
that the classical notion of civic virtue
is now radically replaced, if not entirely displaced,
but certainly replaced by the primacy of civil rights.
That is when democracy really becomes a nod to the vulnerabilities
and the inequalities of large swaths of minority populations.
We remember, for example,
Arendt's critique of the notion of human rights
in origins of totalitarianism and part of that critique rested on her belief
that it was way to abstract and depended exactly
on the guarantees of sovereign states to enforce those rights.
In the end, thereby rendering them meaningless.
Well, rendering them meaningless for those who happen to become stateless
extreme circumstances, certainly not meaningless
for those who were citizens of functional states.
No, not at all.
In fact, that was there in open, simple, huge paradox.
How do societies that have much deeper histories of inequality,
of systemic prejudice, one can think, and we have,
you and I have spoken about, I'm a bit more in the end,
and it's critique of caste as a paradigm of government.
The idea that something more visceral is needed in order to bring
or eradicate the condition, the universal condition of rightlessness.
It becomes quite, quite prominently
theoretical and philosophical in the 60s.
And I think the notion of civil rights re-institutes or, in fact,
re-centers the human body, in this case, the black body,
but not just the black body, as the center of a new articulation
of democratic self-government.
What we now see is a certain tension between that antichilonial
and anti-racist equation and the creation of new forms
of political alignments and even new forms of political majorities
in different democratic conditions.
Well, let me go back to Hannah Addent and her theory of rights
and to the question of states and civil rights, because it,
it seems to me that the civil rights movement was a movement on behalf
of, as you say, a certain portion of the American population
that felt that the American Republic had not opened itself up to the full citizenship
of the black members of its society.
And that rather than performing a critique of the very concept
of the Republic or of democracy on the contrary,
they were affirming almost the sacrality of the scripture
on which the American nation was based and saying that it was not being true
to its own conception and its own founding and its own vision,
and it was calling for its now become a cliche,
but I think it's a very effective term, a more perfect union.
No?
So do you believe that democracy, in order to realize this full promise,
requires a strong state in order to back up and guarantee the dignity and rights
of its citizens?
Yeah, that is an excellent point.
And I'm glad we brought it up early in our conversation.
I think what is important to remember, as you're saying, is that the notion
and the claim of civil rights cannot be taught off outside of a
constitutional context, there is something profoundly constitutional about the claim
to civil rights.
And this is why some of these thinkers of the human condition in the period
after the war are deeply invested in the idea of constitutionalism.
B. R. M. Baker himself is one of the prime architects of the world's longest
written national constitution.
We see that reappear again in the American quest for civil rights and
to, you know, voting rights, for example.
So a cluster of rights that are guaranteed by a sovereign state are essential
to democratic self-government.
Right.
And without that commitment to an overarching moral and political authority,
democracy itself, just by way of a social understanding between citizens will not
work because, you know, there is a hope that that citizen, that modern
citizenry is a rational body, but it is not.
And that is where passion needs to be, or comes to be seen as something to be
regulated.
Right.
So that there are a number of issues I would like to go in deeper with you on
that, especially the assumption that there is a rational body of citizen.
In my intro, I suggested that when you have an open public sphere where
everyone is entitled to an opinion, not like on this show, this show is a very
special set of opinions that need titles.
But generally speaking, as Kant suggests in his essay, what is enlightenment, there
is going to be this, what I call this centripetal pressure applied on the
citizens' opinions because they are in a public sphere in a plurality,
namely a plurality of citizens.
And in order to maintain your opinion, it's going to be contested by someone
with a differing opinion.
You're going to have to reason it out.
You're going to have to persuade.
This is why rhetoric and republicanism and democracy have always, the great
moments of rhetoric and political history have gone with these kinds of
governments.
And that therefore, the claims of reason will tend to dominate when the
public sphere is functioning the way it's intended to function, namely, to
take all these opinions and through the kind of contestation that will take
place naturally.
Reason will somehow prevail over that whole process and lead to a kind of
center.
The question I raise in the intro is what's happening now?
Why those foundations are becoming wobbly?
We don't have to talk about now.
And where the opinions now are becoming extreme and becoming outlandish and
becoming, sometimes absolutely insane.
But to go back here to the question of the role of the state.
So Hannah Haddent looked at Greek democracy and she saw what we would call
direct democracy, civic participation where every citizen had an
active role in determining policy and how much budget and economy.
And so we, of course, don't live in a direct democracy.
There are too many of us.
We have representative democracy.
And there's also a form republicanism where the state has a much
stronger role in our modern democracies than it did in the Greek model.
In fact, Hannah Haddent was not particularly fond of the Roman and then
Neil Roman idea of a strong state that would guarantee the rights and so forth.
So this leads to this basic question, which is what kind of democracy do we
live in here in America and perhaps extended to Western Europe.
Is it one that you think is sustainable?
Is it different from the democracies of your home country, original home
country, which India, for example, or Pakistan or whatever, other constitutional
democracies we may identify around the world?
And what are the particular dangers that we should be aware of,
even though we might have this misconception that we are on the verge of
a whole thing collapsing?
Yeah, that's the new democratic moment is in that sense,
new precisely because some of the challenges that the classical ideas of
democracy come under today have never been seen before.
And even though one can always look back and there is a tendency to look back
immediately to the interwar period, look at interwar fascism of different kinds
as some sort of a precedent for what, for our present, that does not fully
explain the complexity.
For one reason, it does not fully explain the complexity of our present partly
because now democracy truly has to account, given account for itself,
given that it is a genuinely global form of self government.
Unlike the interwar period, when colonial powers were still ruling was,
was, was, was, what's of the planet?
Democracy is worldwide now have to somehow come out of the current moral and
political logjam as it were.
And some of these are a result of, of external threats.
But others, I would think are consequences of self-lacerating wounds that these
societies have themselves inflicted.
It's coming from within and out of words.
It's coming from within support.
For the first time, we see two very specific things.
One, that a plurality or a majority of the urban reasonable populations are willing
to go that far where democracy loses its, its political and social meaning.
India is a particularly clearing example of how vastly literate urban populations
who have benefited the most strong consolidation of liberal forms of government
and democratic government itself are willing to create new kinds of
majority and power centers that undermine some of the fundamental principles
of the democratic and the social contract.
But that's taking place within the rules of democracy.
Now, so if we talk about populism, which I think many people at least here
in America as well as in Western Europe, where you have these
populist governments or parties that win elections, the idea is that it's,
it's a democracy which is creating the conditions for a majority vote for
a populist party, which is, has anti-democratic sentiments, perhaps,
or anti-democratic prejudices and yet when democratic process is functioning properly
and it leads to these results.
This is why someone like Plato thought that democracies were self-consuming
and self-destructive from within because the people in his,
presumptuous philosophical perspective, people cannot be trusted to judge correctly
and to vote properly and that's why he believed that it took a kind of elite group of
philosopher.
Games we don't need to rehearse the personic critique of democracy, but
so I guess the question for you is the biggest threat to democracy
within democracy itself or is it from outside of the, the democracy?
Yes, and I think that that is exactly the point where we need to pause
from or refrain from making easy comparisons between the interwar fascism and the current moment
because the threat to democracy now is from within and there are new configurations of power,
new coalitions of both majoritarian and racial voting blocks across the world that are creating
conditions for the compromise of some of the self-evident as it were, self-evident principles of
democratic life. For example, in a democracy one of the prime practical ideas is a free and
functioning press, but increasingly you find elected officials ahead of the state refusing to
take questions or press conferences and that is what is quite dramatically unique about the American
situation is that even the most powerful elected official in the country cannot simply refuse the
press. That is not something that you see in other parts and perhaps even in the most populous
liberal democracies of the world.
That actually doesn't bother me that much because I'm not, I'm anything but anti-democratic.
However, I think it's absurd in America that the President of the United States is receiving a foreign
prime minister or foreign country and they're talking about issues that are of great consequence
to both countries and geopolitical. They get asked a string of questions that are completely irrelevant
having to do with personal scandal or anything of that sort in the public form. It goes too far.
It makes the whole institution of answering questions in the open public sphere quite ridiculous
and therefore maybe a certain moderation or a certain limitation of how far the press can go when
when it smells blood in the water. It makes sense. Sometimes to preserve democracy,
you have to limit its accesses.
That's fundamental to democracy and I don't think this argument is anti-democratic at all.
In fact, a very system of constitutional checks and balances where each arm of the government
and so-called fourth estate create a unified space where executive authority, legislative
authority, judicial authority and the public opinion as it were work in a certain sort of rhythm
that allows for normative truth claims to hold some water. It cannot be, and in that sense,
we currently do have a very, a rather toxic argument in the digital town square as it were or as
Twitter is called, around what we would call free speech absolutism.
Can anything simply go because everyone has a right to speak? And this is where the question of limit,
democracy not as an infinite invitation to overstay your welcome but rather as a sort of limit
on what can be achieved within practical reasons, in which truth has a part. This brings us to
one of the prime concepts that emerge in the anti-colonial tradition, including in the writings of
Ombetka in America, in the writings of Judith Schler, herself like Hannah Renton, Ex-elect figure,
can we imagine a form of politics in which truth still has a place?
Or are we doomed as our entworances again and again? Are we doomed to a politics in which truth
will never have a role to play? Or that politics can sometimes be held hostage to government secrecy?
Well, here now we go back to her understanding of the distinction between truth and opinion,
and also to her favoring of Socrates over Plato, because Socrates would go into the public
square, and he would interrogate his fellow Athenians about how they saw the world,
what their opinions were, and he was in the way she puts it. She was trying to turn
the Athenian citizens into friends, as opposed to the usual sign of Agon that characterizes it,
that society. Plato sees that democratic system condemn Socrates to death, and he says these people
have no right to have any sort of political power, because their opinions are nothing but
ignorance and what we need is truth. We have to found a politics on truth rather than opinion.
Hana, aren't this very uneasy about this claim too, because this is also the danger of
totalitarianism, and it's the danger of ideology, where you have regimes that presume to be in
possession of a truth that is extra opinion or that it's beyond the plurality of the citizens,
then you often feel entitled to use any means necessary to bring about the so-called truth
of your vision for the state. We've seen that time and again. This is the misery and tragedy
so-of-yet communism and also of other forms of totalitarianism, not seeism and so forth.
So truth, we need, but I think you're absolutely right, a democracy cannot function without a certain
degree of relative truth. How do we establish what is the proper degree of truth and which still
has room for the plurality of opinion? There are two, of course, two more than two, but two very
primary dimensions of this question. One, that truth that is a commitment, that is a personal or
moral commitment to speaking what one believes in. There is that part of truth, and then there is
there is the other dimension of truth which is political truth, which is the idea that whatever is
in the service of collective justice, whatever establishes our inherent political and social
equality alone can be truthful. And part of the unraveling of the modern social contract
comes to hinge on this very unresolved tension. How far should personal truths be taken
in complete disregard of truths that are meant to secure justice?
In the common word. On the other hand, how far can social justice arguments be taken
so that they can completely swallow the space for a citizen's right to conduct according to
truths that he or she holds dear to herself or himself, or themselves? Right now, and this is one great
great mover of what we were calling the neo-democratic condition, right now the Supreme Court
of different liberal democracies are going and going under a certain kind of stress where
constitutions themselves have become arenas of strife rather than arenas of arbitration.
So the judicial space has been shrinking more aggressively than it has ever been. And the
question therefore we need to ask is when did this shift from constitutions as arbiters of our shared
truth from constitutions becoming spaces of extra judicial interventions can a baker refuse to bake
cakes for a gay couple? Can a website designer refuse to design websites for same-sex couples?
These are the kinds of questions in which and that is why I think the point you were making is
so important democracy was never a commitment to an overarching transcendental truth. Democracy was
a commitment to a plurality of opinions in which there was always room for a certain sort of
relative notions of who we were, what identity itself was, and so many of the eruptions of violence
that liberal democracies now see more frequently than they have at least over the time period
that I study is partly because that very notion of relativism has been taken so far that perhaps
everything seems to go, like seems to pass. And therefore what needs to think of a new form of limit
in the Sanskrit tradition Gandhi works with the idea of Mariana which is the idea of a disciplinary
limit which is not the limit I impose on the other but the one that I impose on myself. And
in the end the neo-democratic condition seems self-lacerating because so many of these wounds
are inflicted not only on the other but inflicted to the extremeities where even the self can be
harmed. Glass chunks of the electorate in some of these most populous democracies in the world
right now have stopped voting according to the very classical idea of rational idea that public
good, if you if governments create conditions for an equitable distribution of public goods,
they will be rewarded. But often voting patterns suggest exactly the opposite. Large
majorities have started to vote in utter disregard of what the government actually achieves by
way of public goods. And in that sense we need to rethink therefore of the return of as you were
suggesting the return of ideology to democracy. An ideology of democracy. An ideology of democracy
which is not external to democracy but endemic to it. Well I think there is one major problem
with the current condition of democracies as we experience it at least here in America which is
again the public sphere and what you call the online you know town square and a completely unregulated
stage for the free expression of opinions. And it no longer has a center of gravity. It has become
a cacophony of voices way too many and when that noise level reaches a certain degree of intensity
the only way to get heard is really to shout and to embrace the most extreme positions. And therefore
the very foundations source and idealism is the ideology of democracy which is a free public sphere
for the exchange of ideas and the exchange of opinions becomes the wound that you're talking about.
And I think that I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that we're in real need of a kind of
system of regulation or you can call it limit but you have to regulate what can actually what
kinds of opinions are entitled to have a venue in the political domain. I just say very briefly
again going back to what is enlightenment that fundamental essay only seven pages long but
so crucial. He was speaking about the scholars freedom to publish and this idea that you published
your opinions. To publish your opinions meant that you already had to have a certain kind of authority
to speak that you got in you went through certain filters and you had to who you are what kind of
credibility you bring to your opinions. It's not just any opinion it's that there is a certain kind
of apparatus that will filter out the you know the opinions that have any sort of credibility from
those that don't and this was the case I think until more or less the case until the internet
for frankly and this is creating a huge exactly the problem that you're identifying.
I don't have any answer to how we can conceive of a new ideology of democracy unless we address this
technological issue. Yes I'm glad you brought that up because technology opens a completely
new front absolutely without president in the history of our political life and a new form of technology
technological change as well but but let me return to that very important word that comes up
I call it limit and you call it regulation which is which has always been central to what
a constitutional democracy ought to be in practice. What it ought to be is that no matter how
federal we are, no matter how much autonomy the union of states gives to individual members of the
union there has to be a certain overarching regulative mechanism, regulative reason if you will
that will shape the form and the future of the union. Right now at some point in American history but
not just American history regulation becomes a bad word regulation becomes a bad word because it
comes to be associated with the infringement on individual liberties by federal government.
Yeah and the minute it became a bad word that's when things started wobbling. Yes and there's
yeah no I agree with that assessment entirely. There is a genealogy of why things begin to wobble
around that particular notion and it goes very deep into our democratic history and constitutional
history itself. I mean if we look at the history of claiming individual liberty at odds
with federal authority or even elected government, it goes back to the idea that it goes really
Jewish clear would argue to the idea of slave ownership in the American south. So every time
there would be an abolitionist offensive against the rights of the American plants, the southern
planters to own slaves, they would be the first to proclaim that their liberties were under attack.
And Schler has this fascinating sentence where she says there is a reason why the greatest claims of
American liberty come from the slave owners of the American south because they came into the closest
contact with those people and human bodies who had lost all rights. Right so they knew what it meant
to live without liberty and that history is what perhaps we need to take more seriously every time we hear
a critique of regulation. But I agree because the civil war we need also to remember is that civil war
ended with the governments empowerment to enforce regulation namely you will not own slaves. Slavery
will be abolished. This is not a right that we are allowing. So now there is also capitalism as a lot
to do with the animus against regulation because a lot of the deregulation had to do with
the greed of corporations to pursue profit without with impunity essentially. And
Maybe that is another really a fault line in modern democracies because they go with a certain form
of economy, a capitalist economy which gets more and more extreme in other words the economic
inequalities which are not the same thing as political inequality. Political inequality is civil
rights where you are not a route you don't really have the right to vote. Martin Luther King and
others did not go in order to claim first and foremost economic equality. They wanted politically
equality that is how on an island understands the public sphere is the sphere of equality.
When you have the kind of economic equalities that come with a free market economy and they get
exasperated as we are seeing today it puts all the more pressure on the system.
Yeah I think this is the moment where I should finally answer in slightly succinct fashion your
opening question which is what is the new democratic condition and that is in the subtitle of the book
which is a new relationship between political freedom and political violence aggravated by
global wealth inequality, inequality of access to habitable regions of the planet itself
aggravated above all by the neoliberal order. So the new democratic condition cannot be
therefore understood outside of what has appeared on our horizon after neoliberalism.
I know I agree entirely and I think that if we are going to shore up the foundations of democracy
we have to deal with neoliberalism and consider it a monster that is devouring us all.
Absolutely and therefore there is a need to break out of this conjunction between what seems
outer democratic forms of power and oligarchic forms of power unless we rip democracy apart
from that nexus of capital. Of absolutely unregulated capital flows we will not create a world that is
less unequal. Forget an equal world we will not even create a world that is less unequal. The final
point therefore I would like to highlight just writing on the point you were making about
the monstrosity of capitalism. Is that the neoliberal capitalism? Is the institutionalized form
of hatred against the poor that it has made normal? I think the new democratic condition is
untinkable without the institutionalization of a new form of hatred against the poor. Not just the
unequal as you were saying that the political unequal can be different from the economically
unequal might even be different from the socially unequal like in a caste society. But what we
now see is a new form of mesanthropy, a new hatred of the poor itself. By whom? By the new
country of capitalist? By the new kind of majority and coalitions that increasingly vote against
not just public interest or self-interest but public goods itself. You mean people voting for
parties that are anti-immigration and things of this sort in Europe. In Europe too in any
Italy most recently but there are other places like Dictarchy and large swaths of the world in
Asia where you increasingly see a reaction against capitalism. To be appropriated, the reaction
against neoliberalism to be appropriated by groups that actually have more oligarchic interest than
the people who vote for them. But don't you think that these so-called illiberal democracies as
urban, calls hungry or that the illiberal democracies appeal to a large portion of the population because
that they offer a certain resistance to neoliberalist wide open free markets and that they're
actually containing some of those excesses in the name of its own citizenry. I don't know if this is
how a lot of the people who vote for those parties think of it whether it's a reality or not. But
clearly neoliberalism here in America that began with Clinton, with Ronald Reagan, all this deregulation
with Ronald Reagan then continued by Bill Clinton has impoverished a great swath of the country and
you talk about the hatred of the poor but I think that many of the voters, the populist voters,
what they hate is their own impoverishment, economic impoverishment that is brought about by policies
these that are either promoted by the government or policies at the government is indifferent towards.
And that is your government in bed with the neoliberalist interests or is it a bulwark against it.
Yes, it's the monster. We've identified the monster and what kind of democratic
reforms are necessary in order to rein in neoliberalism itself.
I mean this is a question that Mark Fisher asks in his book on capitalist realism. Is there
any alternative? Well, we have to imagine one. We have to imagine one. I absolutely agree.
And the idea that democracy needs reform and can be perfected
is in the end an idea that puts its fate a lot of its fate in human imagination.
To imagine a future, people have been writing about imagining a world without us.
There are different ways to rethink democracy now. And one particularly, I would even say a tragic
part about how democracy has come to be undercut from within is that the people who often tend to
lose the most out have started to vote for and according to vote for governments that will not
do anything for it. That is what makes it almost this sort of a suicidal state.
There are votes of resentment rather than votes of self-interest.
Yes, there are votes of resentment. There are votes in many ways driven by an unexamined form of
grudge in which the personal truth or belief takes the form of a collective
hubris, not even a lie or perjury, just hubris.
Well, you know, we began my opening remarks about I claimed that one of the most essential things
in a democracy is where providing a stage where the citizens can be both seen and heard which is
an aurentian concept. And I think that you're pointing to many people in many different democracies
around the world who feel of late in the last decade or two or three that they are not being seen
and they're not being heard. They are rendered invisible. And these votes of grudge,
this politics of rusantimo is something that they're voluntarily suicidal because as Nietzsche understood,
resentment is a very powerful force. And I think that we have to awaken to this psychology of
resentment for the sake of our own democracy.
I agree and therefore rethink this relationship between what we were calling self-evident truths,
but really what we are saying is self-knowledge, the idea of who we are and what we stand for,
dignity and resentment because sometimes what is driven by resentment can often be
couched in the language of dignity. And that reconfiguration of the relationship between dignity and
resentment is one of the great tasks of a democratic future.
And just to conclude, I think the difference between the civil rights movement of the 60s and the
populist phenomena that we're talking about now is that one was not driven by resentment and grudge
because they had not yet lot. They were not, didn't have the privilege to have lost
this, to have been thrown off the stage where they were seen and heard. We're talking about groups
of people who have been traditionally in the post-war period being accustomed to being seen and
heard by their governments. And now all of a sudden the resentment is different from that which
led Martin Luther King and others into the streets in the 60s.
It's been a fascinating discussion, Ashwati Kumar. Thanks again for coming on to entitled opinions
and that we look forward to your upcoming book which is called Neo-democracy,
freedom and violence in- -After neoliberalism.
That's a great title. Freedom and violence after neoliberalism. I look forward to the after, above all.
Thank you, Robert, for having me.
Thanks, your pleasure. Bye-bye.
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Now there's nothing left full luxury, nothing left to pay my high hidden bill.
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