Edward Luce on The Retreat of Western Liberalism (Live)

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. I take Ed Luce's new book, today's the publication date, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, to be fairly pessimistic about liberalism. So I'd like partly, maybe a bit out of character these days, to defend a more optimistic perspective. But having a taste for the esoteric, I'd like to start with a question. If we go back to the 1680s and James II takes the throne, right? And then William of Orange comes over from what we now call the Netherlands and pushes him out. Was that a liberal development or an illiberal development?

Yeah, at the time it was very much a liberal development, and of course we then get the Bill of Rights, we then get a further restriction of the power of the monarchy that comes with this new Dutch co-monarchy, William and Mary. But in retrospect, you know, given the fact that this is very much the Protestant fundamentalist, the Battle of the Boyne, the victory of the Orange forces, William of Orange. In retrospect, I think it's being celebrated in a pretty illiberal manner, and of course that's very germane right now in Britain, given that Theresa May's trying to form a government in which the DUP, the Ulster Unionist Party, are gonna make up the difference between being a minority government and a majority government. So it depends which bit of history you're looking at it from, is I guess my answer.

Are you sure it's liberal though? Because James, he's in office, he issues some toleration acts that will allow Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters to hold office. This is viewed as unacceptable. Foreign forces from what we now call the European Union invade your country and depose him by force. This leads eventually to a number of wars fought by the British, arguably an age of imperialism, higher levels of public credit, state building, yes, larger markets. But even to this day, do we know how liberal a development that was?

So foreign forces, I mean, I guess you can describe the Stuarts, remember this is pre the Act of Union.

Sure.

Which is 1707, which is 20, almost 20 years after James is deposed. Um, the Stuarts are Scottish, so they were then foreign. Hopefully they will forever remain not foreign, but we don't know that at the moment. Um, but you're right, I mean, you could argue that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 is the beginning of the, the real foundations of Imperial Britain, which is not exactly, you know, a term— imperialism— you associate with liberalism. I, though, would focus on habeas corpus on the right to trial by jury and all the various things that came with the Glorious Revolution and with the Dutch more evolved version of liberalism that existed in the Netherlands at that point, having rebelled against the Spanish Empire and having had their own Industrial Revolution and their own Enlightenment way before the English one. I think I would sort of minimize the foreign king taking over England bit and stress the fact that This was a king that understood that the divine right of kings was over. It was dead, and the Stuarts didn't really understand that.

So how many years do you think we need now to judge whether a particular development is a liberal development or an illiberal development?

So the much misquoted Chou En-lai thing about the French Revolution— what do you think of it? It's too early to tell. People have always assumed he was talking about 1789. Yes, but he was actually asked this question in, in 1968, and he thought it was referring, um, to the French protests on the Left Bank against de Gaulle of 1968. And he was right, it was too early to tell. Um, you need some time, uh, but some things you don't really need much time with. I mean, I don't think that, um, Brexit is going to stand the test of time, and I think I can argue that, if you wish me to, that judgment pretty confidently. I don't think the election of Trump is going to retrospectively be seen as a liberal moment in American history, in the non-American definition of liberalism. And I don't, if you recall George W. Bush's second term, when there was all kinds of sort of projecting Bush's place in history, and the analogy was made with Harry Truman, that, well, Truman was really unpopular when he left office, and so is Bush, and you know, they're both tough on national security, and so Bush is gonna look like Truman. I think that it was pretty easy real time to dispense with that argument.

Let's say we take the British election that was just held. So many people are calling it a mess, chaos, no good results. But say I offered you a revisionist view, how would you respond? I would say it's the first real election where voting by class has essentially fallen away. So you even have Kensington in London going Labour for the first time since 1974. Voting is now much more by age. You have more female representatives than ever before. You have 15 Muslims elected, 7 of those being female, uh, more LGBT individuals. And maybe the new liberalism is reflected by that kind of elevation. And then on top of that, the election definitely thwarted Scottish independence. It probably helped a soft border for Ireland. We hope it's helping a soft Brexit. No Corbyn, no UKIP. Wasn't it exactly the vote we needed and the most liberal outcome you could have imagined, at least relative to all the initial constraints? Or not?

Oh, it was. I mean, I think this election was a way better outcome than a thumping majority for Theresa May to negotiate hard Brexit. I always felt that the best possible result was a hung parliament. It's not quite hung enough, to use a rather indelicate phrasing.

What is?

And that's why a lot of people who wouldn't dream of wanting somebody like Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister voted Labour, because they knew it would maximize the chances of a hung parliament. So there are two things you identified that are very positive in the larger neoclassical sense of liberalism here, and one is voter participation, right? We can no longer make easy jokes about millennials. They did come out and vote this time. They learned from the mistake of Brexit of not voting, of being complacent. And the SNP being really heavily cut back, a lot of losses there in Scotland for Scottish nationalism, which I also see as a very positive development. But this is one of those elections that could change over time. Our perception of it could change. Will this result in a soft Brexit? Isn't soft Brexit an oxymoron? I mean, the idea now that the same pro-Remain, pro-business, pro-prosperity option is that Britain remains a part of the single European market but not of the EU and therefore pays $100 billion divorce costs, €100 billion divorce costs, has no say over future EU trade deals, over EU regulation, over movements of people, over any EU policies, and yet pays for the privilege. It's pretty hard to argue that's an improvement from the pre-Brexit situation. It's a loss of sovereignty, not a gain of sovereignty, and it's by For certain, it's a serious loss of economic clout.

Those may all be bad outcomes, but if you had to express your concern about British politics becoming illiberal or non-liberal or anti-liberal, where do you see that coming from right now? Or are we the only culprit, we Americans?

No, you're not the only culprit. Um, so people asked, um, where UKIP went in this election because UKIP vanished, which you could say but I didn't say, is the third sort of very positive event to come out from last Thursday. And the reason why I didn't say it is because the Conservative Party has essentially become UKIP. It has taken up some really base, low, anti-migrant politics which it tried— Theresa May tried and failed to sort of whip up enthusiasm with in the last few days of the campaign, but They covered all the ground that UKIP occupied. So Richard Hofstadter, the rightly celebrated American political scientist, said, "Third parties are like bees. They sting and then they die." UKIP has stung. Brexit happened. And the Conservative Party has now basically occupied UKIP's ground. There's just no way you can describe that as a positive development, whether we're hung up on the word liberal or not.

But say we judge the liberalism of a country or society in terms of levels rather than rates of changes. So the percentage of foreign-born in the United Kingdom today, especially London but not only, would be remarkably high by really any previous standards, 1066 for that matter. So there's a movement back, but it seems that gain has been captured permanently, right? It's not that foreigners will en masse be driven out. Some people from the EU may be sent back home, but even that seems to be in more doubt now. So isn't it just a slight retreat of liberalism after it won far greater gains than we might have rationally expected?

It could be, and I hope it is, and I'm certainly open to the prospect it might be. And, you know, I argued to some degree, well, successfully, with my publishers who wanted my book to be called The Collapse of Western Liberalism. I said, no, No, no, this should be the retreat, and retreat implies the possibility of regrouping. I don't think there's a collapse going on here. I do think there is a severe structural challenge to the way we conduct democracy, liberal democracy in the West, particularly in the English-speaking West. The outcome of the immigration sort of aspect of Brexit I think is one of those things that's going to be very, very hard to predict because Theresa May, or whoever replaces her— British politics is Italianizing. There's going to be another general election.

Maybe by the time this podcast is released, maybe by the time this podcast—

the dead woman walking will actually be dead. But the idea that a Conservative prime minister could remain leader of their party whilst keeping freedom of movement is pretty hard to imagine now. The party shifted very, very much to an anti-immigrant position, but the idea that anybody can survive and get reelected and generate growth by leaving the single market is also pretty hard to imagine. So Britain's between a rock and a hard place. There's really no good outcomes here.

Given the landslides of Macron in Finland, the true Finns are splintering. The Five Star Party in Italy had weak local results. No one thinks Germany's going crazy. Why does this move away from liberalism seem to be so Anglo-American? What do you attribute that to?

Well, I would dispute your premise to some degree. I mean, I think the Macron victory is a very, very positive moment, but if you were gonna ask me overrated, underrated, Macron would be in the overrated category right now. The first time the National Front, the Front National candidate, Marine Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, got through to the second round was in 2002. And it was a crisis of France. It was a drama of the republic. How could a fascist get through to being one of the last two? And Jacques Chirac led what was essentially a funeral march, no campaigning between round one of the election and round two, and everybody put the famous clothes pegs on their nose. Socialists, Communists, they voted for the Gaullist, they voted for Chirac, and he got 82% of the vote. And as I say, it was an existential moment in French democracy. So Marine Le Pen gets through to the second round as expected, wins a third of the vote, 11 million votes as opposed to 5 million, and it's a kind of normal event. So I would dispute the fact that nothing's changed. I think, you know, in September, hopefully Merkel or Martin Schulz will be elected in the German elections, but the AfD is going to breach the 5% limit below which you cannot achieve representation under the German system. And this will be the first time in German history since 1940, since its basic law was promulgated in 1949, that the far right has achieved representation. And then of course there's Austria. Where a modern neo-Nazi, a postmodern neo-Nazi, Norbert Hofer, lost with 47% of the vote, and we celebrated that as a breaking of the populist wave. I mean, how low should our bar be to celebrate the health of liberal democracy? That, that, that to me is too low. So I dispute that, that sort of premise of your question. But there was a second half to your question: why Anglo-American? Um, that is, that is a really good question. I mean, I think part of it is that the middle classes have fared worse. There are fewer supports for the middle classes, um, in, in Britain and the United States than there are elsewhere. So the level of frustration, um, I think is higher. It's a remarkable fact that there are more prime-aged males in work in France than there are in the United States. In France, of all places. So there's a male element to this too. I think that the cynicism generated by the Iraq War, the US-led but British-supported Iraq War in 2003, the fact that France and Germany very much stood apart from it, and I think correctly, and that's a decision that sort of matures like a good wine, it looks better and better over time. I think that that created a poison in our politics that is missing in Germany and in France, but I would most of all focus on something that a former French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, said, which is, 'We want a market economy, not a market society.' And I think that we have in the United States, and to a large extent Britain, I think we have commodified public life, and we have commodified society to a degree that you just don't see in places like Germany. And I think we should— I think we have things to learn from parts of continental Europe, including how they treat their middle classes. We, we confuse ourselves as in, in, in the US and Britain as to what skilled means. We think if you've got a college degree, you're skilled. I know lots of skilled people who don't have college degrees, and I know lots of people with college degrees, including myself, who are unskilled. And I think that there is a better understanding, particularly in the Nordic— in Denmark and Germany— of the need to accommodate a diversity of aspirations and aptitudes in the labor force, and they invest in things that we consider just to be low-skill stepping stones to either something better or to failure. And so we've got a lot more failures, I think, and they're a lot more frustrated.

But aren't we, in a sense, just ahead of them along the curve? So if you look at top French companies and try to find any that post-date 1975 in terms of origin, very, very difficult to do. So eventually those sectors will fall away or those companies will shrink. If you ask French people, do they think their children will have a future as good as what they've had, you get some of the highest rates of no in the world. If you look at Germany, it's in some ways economically more positive, but most of German industry is extremely vulnerable to Chinese manufacturing. And just as Chinese manufacturing has done that to Italy, Germany probably also is vulnerable, has poor native demographics, has barely had real wage growth, since 2000 has now a higher rate of people at work. But is it the case this is happening first to the Anglo countries simply because they're more open and the future comes here first? It used to come to California first. Sometimes I joke it comes to Israel and Singapore first because those are small, fairly open places where a small impact spreads quite rapidly. Is that a possible hypothesis?

It's, it's, it may be a probable hypothesis, and, and hence my pessimism about the future of liberal democracy on the continent. So, um, I would accept that France is probably going to go through some restructuring that is going to cause a lot of political gnashing of teeth, and Macron's program is a sort of soft Thatcherism, maybe you call it Blairism, I don't know what you call it, but Macron's— the rubber's going to hit the road quite soon. He's got a majority of— En Marche has a majority in the French Assembly, and a lot of these people have never served in politics before, that was part of the appeal, but it's a very thin— it's a wide but thin coalition that has been assembled by a very skillful young man, and I now really do feel old because, you know, he's like at least a decade younger than me, by promising all things to all people. Very clever politics, not necessarily a good program for governing. France has a politics of anti-politics, of people who don't vote and of people who protest by bringing politics to a halt, and I think we're going to see that tested. So I don't necessarily disagree with the premise of that. I think France and Germany are going to be subjected to a lot of harsh winds, as they already are, but they'll get harsher as China grows and others grow, and the proposition, you know, of whether their democracies are better equipped to cope with this will be put to the test. I do think, though, that there are some things they know that we don't. I mean, Denmark, for example, has an employer-government program where everybody can train at anything they like for 2 weeks a year, and most Danish employees avail of that, and they train in stuff, and so the labor market turnover in Denmark is way higher than it is in the rest of Europe because people don't feel wedded to one skill. They feel much more confident in a gig economy to move around and be more flexible and change jobs. So there are, you know, I don't want to generalize too grossly about which democracies are doing badly, which are doing well. What's important is what unites us, and that is a pretty profound existential challenge to how we do business, if you like.

What's the most plausible scenarios through which Trump and/or Brexit work out for the better? I'm not saying you have to agree with it, but if you had to say the most plausible scenarios.

So Trump working out for the better. I would say, is the system showing that it works? The Madisonian system showing that it works? Now, I wouldn't wish impeachment on anybody, but the system has to hold Trump to account. I believe there are good signs in the last few weeks and months of the system doing that. You know, the appointment of Mueller, the courts blocking the Muslim ban, again repeatedly. The media is doing a pretty good job of ferreting out stuff, and Congress, well, we'll see, we'll see, but it's sort of limbering up perhaps to do a good job. So I think the American system proving it works might be a net plus over time. Brexit, the, the, by far the best outcome is that the British do what our wise and, uh, um, and now by now more successful neighbors the Irish have done twice which has twice lost a referendum on Europe, on Maastricht and on Lisbon, and twice said, 'Okay, so now we're going to ask you again, having thought about it.' And it was a bit like round one of the French election and round two. There's a cooling-off period, second round the turnout shoots up, and the Irish having thought about it, but we need a second referendum in Britain. You cannot determine a country's future like this with 52% of the vote.

But then there is a sense of, we're gonna keep on voting till we get this right. And at least pro-Brexit people will say, well, you're opposing liberalism to democracy. There was a decisive result, not by a landslide, but it was clear. And after the result, it didn't seem very regretted, and people still seem to take some form of Brexit for granted. It's not really being challenged openly except by a small number of elites. So is your vision of liberalism something that ultimately comes before democracy?

I think it historically comes before democracy.

And still does.

I don't necessarily think it trumps. I think the two actually go together. But could I just sort of briefly say on the Brexit argument, here is an example of illiberalism. When people say, look, could we have a second referendum? As three judges said, well, they didn't quite say that, as three judges suggested that Parliament should have a say in this. After all, Britain is based on the sovereignty of Parliament. That is, if we're going to take back our sovereignty, Parliament should have a say. Enemies of the people— the three judges' faces were put on the front of not just tabloids but what we call broadsheets in Britain, supposedly more serious newspapers. Enemies of the people. And the kind of demagoguery that has gone on for anybody who's raised that debate has chilled the whole ability to have a rational discussion about what the trade-offs are here. So granted, if there were a second referendum and the Remainers lost it, that would be a high risk to call such a referendum, and it might well be the case that British people get really annoyed at being asked twice and the pro-Brexit margin goes up. But I think people should be given a chance to think about, you know, to cool off and think about what's at stake here, All the evidence shows that there was a really poor debate leading up to last summer's Brexit, and the electorate, you know, as famously Googled EU on a scale never seen before the following day. What is the EU?

We have a pretty good idea what liberalism looks like for agricultural societies, also for manufacturing societies, but say the big political issues of the future, maybe the present, were something like the environment The internet, intellectual property law, privacy, immigration, terrorism, and dementia, right? Not so implausible. With those as the major issues, do we even know what liberalism looks like? Just to say, people back in even the 1930s probably hardly ever debated gay marriage, if at all.

Look, if you were to ask me what are my favorite liberal thinkers, Yes, it would be Edmund Burke. And Edmund Burke, who is normally thought of as a conservative thinker— but I see no contradiction, I'm not using liberalism in the American sense of liberalism— developed the idea during the time of the French Revolution of the superiority of representative democracy. And remember, we had the Jacobins saying, no, we need instant electric democracy and nothing in between the people and the decisions. You are describing decisions here, very complex.

Sure.

Ethically, legally, societally, and internationally, very complex decisions that you cannot decide by plebiscite. And I don't care whether you can do it online and make it easier, it makes no difference. These are questions where you need to be able to delegate authority to your representatives, who you can fire at the next opportunity, to develop the skills, um, as full-time political representatives to make these judgments. And if you don't like those judgments, you throw them out. But I don't think the answer is either what you might be implying, because you could go to one of two ways: plebiscitary, you know, Robespierre kind of democracy on the one hand, or Singapore, you know, basically non-democracy and a rule of experts on the other. I don't see anything better than representative democracy.

I proposed to Mark Koyama a few days ago over lunch that we simply give everything to the House of Lords for about 5 years and then go back to the Constitution we have. Now, in the middle of these, we always have a segment, overrated versus underrated. You're from England, of course. You've moved to the United States. So I'm gonna ask you about a number of other Brits who've done the same, and you tell me if you think they're overrated or underrated. Stanley Kubrick.

You call him a Brit?

Well, do I call you a Brit?

I don't know. I see. Sorry, others who've done this have got it. Yeah. Um, you know, I, I think he's rated, um, pretty well, highly. He deserves to be rated highly.

Best movie.

But you, you're really going to, um, uh, Space Odyssey, 2001.

Okay. John Lennon, moved to New York.

Overrated. Why? It's a lot of people who don't know much about Lennon sort of worship him as the best Beatle, and he's the best Beatle because he died youngest. Um, I think, uh, um, I think Lennon was a bit of a jerk, frankly, although, you know, he's— he was a great lyricist. But I don't really— have you listened to I Am the Walrus recently? Does that make any sense to you?

It's sprawling, as they say. Alfred Hitchcock?

Overrated.

Why?

Um, because I think his movies were a lot more formulaic. His later movies were a lot more formulaic. It was a formula that worked, but his genius, his genius sort of faded much earlier than— I'm struggling here because he's a brilliant movie maker. Sorry, I'm really struggling, but I thought I should say somebody's overrated.

Sir, it seems they're all over it. Yeah, Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Thing is, you're, you're, you're throwing names at me who are all really highly rated.

Sure.

So I have to argue. Okay, I'd, I'd Yeah, I can't say he's underrated. Yeah, I cannot. You know, he's a very, very good actor, but, um, can I pass on that one?

W.H. Auden.

W.H.

Auden, 1939, right?

I think he's underrated because he's been forgotten.

Yes.

I mean, the— I think he was one of the most brilliant poets. I think we should forgive— we should judge him on his poetry and forgive the fact that he wanted to get the hell out of Dodge in 1939, because he wasn't— his contemporaries questioned why he was crossing the Atlantic at that particular moment. But his poetry is brilliant and eternal, and I'd say he's been forgotten.

You've written one of my favorite books on India, In Spite of the Gods, which I recommend to you all. If we think about the fate of liberalism in India, right now there's an enormous effort going on to biometrically record people and have markers of their identity and possibly tie this into some notion of a universal guaranteed income, or at least greater reliance on cash transfers. There will be much more aid to people, but also much more control of people under the Modi regime, which has pushed for both aid and control in different ways and hasn't liberalized as much as many people had expected. Is India right now moving in a liberal direction?

It would be hard to argue that it is. Um, Narendra Modi has been doing a lot of things under the radar in terms of chipping away at the Indian secular, Nehruvian secular constitution of India, and making it harder for minorities—Muslims, Christians, and others—to express themselves freely, in terms of allowing far-right groups associated with the Sangh Parivar, which is the sort of broad name given to the Hindutva movement, of which the BJP is a branch. The RSS is really the parent, allowing groups, the really, the most vicious youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, and VHP, another very hard-right part of the Hindutva movement, a lot more leeway legally to harass minorities, and changing of the curriculum to rewrite it in a, to make India Hindu and Hindu India, completely, you know, downplay the extraordinary important Muslim contribution to what is a syncretic culture, an array of faiths and interactions, and a glory of pluralism.

Is that overplaying political headlines too much? Because the situation of women in India is headed toward long-term improvement, wealth is rising every year, India's proven actually remarkably stable,— it's still quite democratic, albeit in a funny way with a very disconnected sense of accountability. And if it simply keeps in motion, won't you get over the medium to long term, say, at least a third of India looking a bit like Malaysia, Gujarat, having infrastructure being developed, people having richer, freer, more diverse lives? Not all of India, but Bihar, Orissa, they're still better off. Rural India moving more to cities, which is the single biggest liberalizing development you could imagine in a life. And thus, political headlines aside, India as a whole will be much more liberal 10 or 15 years from now, or no? Am I looking at the wrong indicators?

Well, I mean, you know, Modi's a— I think of him as a Jekyll and Hyde figure. The Jekyll figure, the good part, is that he is— he's a fanatic. He believes what he believes, and he's therefore not in politics for business. He's not in it for corruption or personal enrichment, and he doesn't tolerate people around him who are. And that's an extraordinarily refreshing and important change from the Congress government that he booted out 3 years ago. So the Jekyll is not actually a sort of classic laissez-faire liberal; it's a China model of development. He's a project executor. He believes in infrastructure that's built and on time and that works, and God knows India needs that. So if Modi— if Jekyll Modi succeeds, it will be a positive liberal event because more people will be lifted out of poverty, fewer people will be illiterate, and women, as you say, will be prime beneficiaries of this. But remember, he's also Dr. Hyde. Um, this guy is a fascist. Um, and if things go wrong and Jekyll can't deliver and he faces reelection 2 years from now and, uh, the possibility of losing a majority He will— he's a master bar none of whipping up Hindu sentiment and to override caste divisions. That's always the key, is how can you unite Hindus beyond what divides them? Because in India, you don't, you don't cast your vote, you vote your caste.

China had a communist revolution, a cultural revolution going back earlier. Tai Ping Rebellion. At least on the surface, partition aside, India appears much more stable than China over the long term. At least that's the cliché. Is it true? And if so, why is India so apparently stable?

I think India's diversity is a great stabilizing strength. The fact that it's got, I think, 18 official languages, although they do add to that. The fact that it has got every religion under the sun. The fact that, as E.P. Thompson famously said, there's not a thought that's being thought in East or West that is not active in some Indian mind. India's sheer pluralism is very stabilizing if you take a sort of 30,000-foot view. If you're in the midst of it, you think it's anarchy. But if you— the more, the more altitude you get on this, the more stabilizing it is. It is a country that lets off steam regularly, and that, um, and that's why I'm concerned that Modi— Modi doesn't celebrate that side of India, and I think it's an important, immensely valuable quality to India that gives it a huge advantage over China.

Before we get to questions, we have about 3 minutes left. 3 questions about you. You have about a minute apiece for each. You were speechwriter for economist Larry Summers. Other than the obvious, what particular skill does a good speechwriter need?

Um, thing is about speechwriter is there's no such thing as a generic speechwriter. This— you are speechwriter to A or B, and if Larry's A, you need to know Larry very well. I don't think being a speechwriter to Steve Mnuchin would be any help to being speechwriter to Larry Summers. You've got to know the individual you're writing speeches for. And Larry, you know, whatever his robust personality might be, you learn more from writing speeches for him in 3 months than you do in, you know, 1 year as a student. It's an extraordinary intensive learning process.

Second, about you. You're a famous columnist for the Financial Times. You had a particular path to the top. That path would probably be hard to replicate today. If you're giving someone advice today who wants to be the next Ted Luce, what advice do you give them, other than the obvious?

I would say do other things than journalism. Don't start out being a journalist. I would say the same for politics too, not that I have any credibility on that subject. I'd say do other stuff, acquire real skills and experience in completely unrelated fields.

Last question about you: what still surprises you the most about the United States?

The ability to reinvent itself, even though there is a complacent class, um, and I accept your thesis. It is the ability to keep changing, um, and there is that protein quality to America, which might have slowed, but it's still way more in evidence here than in places that never had it.

More in evidence here than in the United Kingdom? Yes. 'Cause that seems like a more different country to me over the last 30 years than the United States. We seem like a somewhat linear development of the Reagan years, whereas in terms of immigrants and connection to Europe, and that may be changing, but the UK seems radically different compared to my first visit in 1979. Well, food is certainly better, but I'd argue that reflects something.

I'd argue the food is better here too, and I wouldn't dare argue with you about food. So I don't know, I think that's a pretty subjective line, and the UK has changed a lot. That's right. I think— can I argue, can I prove to you America has changed more? I don't know. I mean, I think in 2002, if somebody had told you that gay marriage would be legal, that marijuana recreationally would be legal in X number of states, and that you'd have a black president asking something I didn't agree with for transgender bathroom rights in an election year, you would have probably scoffed at any such change being possible. I'm not saying all that change was positive, but I certainly think marriage equality is, and the speed with which that happened is remarkable.

Ed Lewis, thank you very much. Thank you. We'll take questions at the two mics. Please line up. These are not speeches. If you start giving a speech, I will cut you off. First, I'll start with a question from the iPad. Ed, who is the one columnist you'd like to fight? Physically? I don't know.

It's career-ending to give an honest answer to that. And you'd hate me for giving a dishonest one, so I'm not gonna answer.

Okay. First question here.

The regimes in Poland and Hungary, do you see them as an outlier that will be contained or something that's the forerunner of more to come?

That's a really good question. Look, I think if, you know, we'd had this situation with Hungary 20 years ago or even 15 years ago, America's involvement in Europe under the radar, behind the scenes, in chivvying Europe to take steps it needs to to take would have been far earlier and far more effective. Today we are suffering, I think, from an absence of leadership of the liberal international order, and countries like Hungary and Poland are able to move extraordinarily, you know, after having really craved to join the EU, to be European, to be Western, extraordinarily moving towards Putinism, or some form of Putinism. And I think America's absence is really important. So I'm not particularly optimistic on that score because I think America is going to continue to be absent on these questions. And I think we underestimate the degree to which America has been an exceptional power, and that this 70 years since 1945 has been what Bob Kagan calls an unnatural period in human history. Um, and it's been It's been a success broadly of an era of no mass wars and moving towards democracy because there's been a hegemon consciously pushing in that direction. That's a role America is no longer playing. I hope it plays it again, but until it does, I fear you're going to see Poland and Hungary moving further in the direction they've been moving.

Next question. We've talked about the illiberalism on the right. I think Brexit and President Trump and and all those sorts of things, UKIP. But what about the liberalism on the left? I think that the final nail in the coffin of Blairism came last Thursday when Jeremy Corbyn, who is an unrepentant Marxist, picked up 30 seats in that election. And Mélenchon in France, and Bernie Sanders here in the United States, I mean, the far left is really on a roll. Something of a role in the Western world. Could you speak to the far left's illiberalism?

Yeah, but I think it's a very good question, and I think it's an often overlooked one. Look, I think the left— if you're a Democrat looking at a candidate for 2020, there is essentially a debate going on in the party between a sort of Macron wing and a Corbynista wing, and these are the two sort of left responses we're seeing in Europe. Left illiberalism and anti-Americanism, to which European left illiberalism is very closely aligned, is very serious, very real. Mélenchon might have lost, but, you know, he got almost a fifth of the vote, as you mentioned. And I think that the further away we get from 2008, which is very much associated with the New Left, the Third Way left of Blair and Gordon Brown and others, the further away we get from that, the more we're going to see populist left-wing movements mushrooming everywhere. So I would consider this isn't just a right-wing populist moment, although that's been the principal manifestation of populism, and I agree with your identification of that. Next question.

This past weekend there was a plebiscite in Puerto Rico on statehood, and 25% of the electorate showed up. Today, yet again, we have another election here in Virginia. We have one every 6 months where probably 20% of the electorate will show up. Is this apathy, complacency, fatigue, or some— is there some illiberal mechanism that's holding the electorate back?

I think there is a cynicism about politics which incidentally manifested itself in France last Sunday. Round 2, the Macron En Marche landslide was 49% turnout, which is a historic low for France. We'll see this coming Sunday whether that, that, that goes up. I think there is a deep cynicism about politics, and I understand, and about experts and establishment politics. Remember, you know, in France there's also an anti-establishment thing going on. I think there's a deep cynicism about it, which is, which is really quite understandable if you look at what the experts have brought us. They brought us the Iraq War. The experts very much missold how that would fare. They brought us 2008. The experts were the last to see it coming. And I think millennials, who until last Thursday in Britain have been turning out at lower rates in most democracies than other age groups, have grown up with this cynicism and they feel it's normal. Now, Tyler Cowen would say that's healthy because they're not actually angry. They're just apathetic, and if you've got a choice between anger and apathy, let's go for apathy. But I think it's highly corrosive of liberal democracy.

There's a related question on the iPad. Is it— I'm rewording a bit— is it the case that elites have so used the judiciary and administrative law, in the case of the UK through the European Union, that actually Brexit and Trump are simply democratic backlashes wanting to take back for democracy powers that have been taken away from the democratic will of the people. And it had to get to the point of Brexit and Trump for that actually to be reversed.

Yeah, so that would be your history will look back on this as a liberal moment scenario, that this is a very violent sort of counter-reaction to the growing internationalization of law, to the increasingly widened field of stuff that's off-limits to democratic decision-making, which of course includes trade regulation, international— if you're in Europe, it includes all these things. And if this is simply a correction where we, we reject Davos, we reject the sort of elites run the world and decide all the big economic stuff, and we, we just stick with identity politics, then this could be a liberal moment. I think it's a very good question. I suspect though you don't just just have these little conniptions that then fade away. There are consequences to these conniptions, and I, I, I fear that Trumpism is going to— even if he lost in 2020— is going to leave a deeply disruptive mark, um, in the pejorative sense of disruptive, um, mark on American democracy and on the reputation of American democracy and American leadership around the world. And as I've said before on Brexit, We're about to sign up as the sane option to a world where foreigners decide our regulations, our trade deals, and our product standards and all, except we don't have a say over it. So, you know, if that's rational, go figure. Next question.

How does the multiparty system in Europe affect the retreat or advancement of liberalism versus the basically two-party system we have here in the the US.

Um, so the— until last Thursday, the assumption was the British two-party system is disintegrating into a European model where we're just going to have permanent coalition governments. But last Thursday was the peak two-party moment, um, in almost 40 years. The Conservative Party got a higher share of the vote, its highest share of the vote since 1983 when Thatcher had her you know, second big landslide. And the Labour Party had its highest share of the vote since 1983. Um, it's more than— sorry, sorry, it had its highest share of the vote since 1997 when Blair came in. So this is a two-party peak. The smaller parties have temporarily been pushed away. The United States, you know, you don't have two parties, you have many parties under two umbrellas, and you're a continent. So it's very hard to analogize the US with Europe, but one thing I would say is your system is not designed to be parliamentary. Your system works better when each party is a coalition between different interests, and the fact that each is becoming more and more monochromatic, more and more disciplined and parliamentary, is disastrous for this system. This system doesn't work like that.

IPad question: Russia is commonly considered the primary antagonist of liberalism. What are the chances liberalism itself takes hold in Russia in the next 20 years?

Perhaps pretty good. I mean, if you look anywhere around the world, cities— cities tend to vote for the internationalist option, and Putin was so complacent, rightly so, about his last presidential campaign in 2012, he allowed more than half of Moscow to vote against him. So, and of course Istanbul, Erdoğan strongly rejected Erdoğan's recent referendum on strengthening his powers. So Alexei Navalny, the leader currently of opposition to Putin, is doing something that Corbyn managed to achieve last Thursday. He's getting young people out and being quite bold and protesting on quite some scale. Across Russia, um, and you, you ought to draw hope from that kind of courage from millennials. We're used to thinking of millennials as slightly different, so I wouldn't rule out Russia turning from, um, a bane of Western democracy to being something quite hopeful. I think that's definitely, um, a positive thing that's potentially going on now.

Next question. Sure. Neil Ferguson concluded his book, uh, The West and the Rest, with the idea that the pusillanimity of Western democracies is to blame for the decline of Western ideas.

What do you think about that? Um, so he was talking about the overconsumption and deficit spending, I think, partly, right? I don't really agree with that. I don't agree with that at all. I think when people talk about the massive American debt, when we look at what, 75% of GDP, look at the publicly held debt, I don't think by historic standards that's remotely alarming. I think, in fact, we should have had more stimulus and had more countercyclical fiscal policy in the last decade than we have had. And I think the German answer, and here's where, you know, I would criticize the German pseudo-monetarist approach, has actually been very, very damaging to Europe, particularly to the Club Med group of European countries. So I'm not sure I agree with Niall Ferguson, but you know, he changes his argument about once a year, so I'll either catch up with him or he'll catch up with me.

Why do African Americans poll as being so optimistic about the future of this country?

Because they are getting better off from a much lower base, and Hispanics do too. Yes. They, I think quite rationally, see their children as being better off than they are. They're coming from a much lower base. They tend to be younger average age too, which affects that outlook. So I think it's as simple as that.

How much of the decline of liberalism in the West do you attribute to the possible disappearance of an existential threat? No Nazism, no communism, no Cold War. How much is that what's going on?

A lot of it, a lot of it. I think the last great foreign policy president the United States had was Bush Senior. I think he was a brilliant president who wound down the Cold War with extraordinary finesse and skill. He did not go and dance on the Berlin Wall. He did not go and beat his breast and claim credit for it. Can you imagine a president doing that today? I think the Cold War kept kept America honest, as it were, and enabled this bipartisan support for America's, as I say, unnatural global role of being the Hercules that sustains the liberal international order. So I think the Cold War played a hugely important role, and it's going to be very hard to reinvent it, nor should we wish to.

Is Pope Francis a liberal?

In a way, yes, he is. He is trying to push to the extent that he can for softer, you know, ecclesiastical law on divorce, on contraception, on rhythm methods, and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, although I'm not an Orange Man, I'm not a Catholic, and I'm tiptoeing through a minefield already, so I don't want to get too— I don't want to be too detailed in my commentary on Catholic law. I'm going to get something wrong.

Next question. The dysfunction of the US Congress, first of all, do you agree that it's becoming less and less functional? Secondly, how do you relate that to your point in which you pointed to the commodification of politics in society and not just the economy? And if so, how do we go then from where we are to what you propose as a a system of government in which we trust in the delegation of authority to people whom we trust to do the right thing, who've presented a vision of the right thing that we somehow come to share.

Just on timing, there are 2 more questions and we have like 3 minutes. Okay. So you'll have to give a super abbreviated answer to that.

So my super abbreviated answer is read Mansoor Olson, which I'm sure you have, and we can talk more about that later.

Hilton, penultimate question.

Yes, I'd like to push you to talk a little bit more about the retreat to something. What are they moving towards? And in this regard, I'm thinking of Tony Judt's argument that they're moving towards some kind of certainty and away from the liberal institutions that they perceive as having failed to satisfy their needs.

So democracy in the last 15, 20 years has actually been receding worldwide, including in Europe. Poland and Hungary are, as one questioner identified, wobbling, but there are 25 fewer democracies today than there were in 2000, and I think the retreat of Western liberalism isn't just that we're having our problems at home and having to relearn some of the lessons of what liberal democracy actually means, but I think because our models are not performing well, for the broad-based electorates that vote in our governments every few years. So the model of Western liberalism— that's just a very quick thing, so I know you want a quick answer— 2008 was described as a global recession. It wasn't. It was an Atlantic recession. China kept growing, India kept growing, and the relative attractiveness of the Chinese model therefore grew. And I think, I think the retreat of Western liberalism is as a model that delivers the goods to its people. That's the ultimate measure, is a kind of economic determinist one that I would apply.

Last question from me: if there's more human talent in the world today than ever before, and if liberalism is a good thing, why should we be pessimistic?

Well, we shouldn't. And if you look at the world from a global perspective there's never been a period where more people have been lifted out of poverty faster than today, and we should remember it's because of Pax Americana. It's because of the public goods supplied over the last 70, 80 years that China is in a position, and India, to lift people out of poverty on this scale, to cut child mortality, illiteracy, you know, underfi— whatever it is, maternal deaths. So globally, this is an immensely positive moment and more brain power is being plugged into the system, you know, exponentially over time.

But in the West we also have more talent, right?

In the West we have more talent, but we have way more wasted talent than we used to have. There's a lot more idle humans than there used to be and don't look at the unemployment rate, you know this, look at the labour force participation rate. Ed Luce, thank you very much.

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