Democracy's Midlife Crisis

is not alone in this regard. Indeed, those who care a lot about democracy worldwide have worried that everywhere in the globe democracy is in retreat, under attack, and under pressure. To discuss these challenges that democracy faces today, I'm joined by David Runsman, who's professor of Politics at Cambridge University.

He's the author of two highly relevant books, one called How Democracy Ends, published in the United States in twenty and eighteen, and the other Where Power Stops The Making and Unmaking of Presidents and Prime Ministers, which is coming out in two and nineteen. Professor Runsman is also the host of the Talking Politics podcast produced by the London Review of Books. David, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you very much. You've written a fascinating book called How Democracy Ends, in which you characterize democracy is having hit a midlife crisis. I am somewhere in midlife myself. I don't know if you count yourself in that same category of life, But tell us something about why you think democracy is hitting a midlife crisis and what you think a midlife crisis looks like. So I think, full disclosure,

I am. And people always say to me that presumably I'm writing about myself and I'm just transposing it onto democracy, and I don't think I am. But the reason I characterized it like that is I do think we're in the middle of this story, particularly in the older democracy. So I don't think it's a midlife crisis in Hungary because that democracy is too young. But the democracies that are really well established since the Second World War are,

in political terms, in a kind of middle age. And my feeling about a midlife crisis is that it's characteristic is a desire to change and at the same time a real resistance to change because we're comfortable, because we're well off, because we're prosperous, because we're settled in our ways.

Because actually a lot of what we are angry about we're also deeply familiar with and it's that kind of quality to our democracies, and by our I mean mine and yours, I mean particularly Brexit democracy and Trump democracy. There is a lot of acting out going on here, but it's middle aged acting out. It's not wild young person acting out. It's that desire for something new, something maybe exciting, along with a really deep reluctance to embrace newness.

Means so we kick away at our system, we were angry with it, we shake it up a bit, but deep down we don't want anything different. May I ask about the midlife their model? You mentioned the Second World War, but both British and American democracies, at least at their present scales, are really products of in the middle of the nineteenth century, and so they've been actually around for a good long time, not just since the Second World War.

If one thinks of post World War two democracy, is one thinks of Germany and of Japan perhaps some of the other European democracies. Can we really be described yours or mind as being in midlife or are we at the edge of our dotage? As as a North Korean had to say about my president, it's a really good question. I think it's a mixture of both, and that some of the characteristics of German democracy or Japanese democracy we're in the same historical arc, so mass franchise, mass communication,

and professionalized political party democracy. It's a twentieth century product. In the British and American case, you can probably take it back to the First World War. I don't think you can take it back much further. What makes ours different is that that form of democracy was channeled through institutions and institutional arrangements that are much older, and in the case of the British State, maybe it goes all the way back to sixteen eighty eight. In the American State,

it goes back the end of the eighteenth century. So our institutions have that really elderly feel to them. The Electoral College, the House of Lords, the way the British Parliament operates often strikes many people in the twenty first century is feeling not just old but antique. And yet some of the qualities that make our democracy democracy. Everyone gets a vote at election time, people try and communicate with the broadest possible cross section of a literate and

at some level informed population. That's a more recent thing, but it's still relatively old. I mean, even if you take it back a hundred years, say in the British or American case, you take it back to nineteen eighteen, a hundred years for a political system, it doesn't make it decrepit, but it means that it has outlasted the living memory of any human being who currently inhabits it, so no one can remember anything different, and that's what gives it that kind of middling quality. To me, it's

not dying. Ending is something very different from dying. Now you can end in an open way. There is something called being open ended, and ending is also about transition, whereas death is about death. So we're in the middle. But I think over that hundred year period that combination of a way of doing politics where the parties are the same. So in your country, in my country they

have the same names. The Labor Party, our current opposition party, is something that was born roughly a hundred years ago as a mass professional political party Labor, Conservative, Republican Democrat. Of course, these parties have been through changes over this period, but you know that gives them, in political terms, extraordinary roots and longevity. But also they're tired, they feel tired, they feel tired to me, they don't feel dead. They

could evolve. They could also have quite a lot of life left in them, decades of life left in them, but they feel tired. And it's that kind of quality of tiredness rather than panic, despair, collapse that I was trying to capture. It sounds a bit like the midlife person that you have in mind is driving a car that is perhaps in many ways one hundred years old and has been patched together and peace together and changed

and transformed. And that's the institutions that you're describing, the political parties, some of our constitutional institutions in the US which changed very very slowly. That the electoral college comes to mind. And so here we are in midlife, but equipped not with the latest coolest machinery or computers or software that would help us deal with the current circumstances, but rather to some degree constrained or limited by those institutions. Yeah,

I mean, I'm happy with that analogy. And I do have a variant on that in my book where I describe Donald Trump as being like the motorbike that the middle aged man buys partly because there is that feeling in a midlife crisis. The car is old, or the other analogy you could draw here is the marriage is old or the relationship is old. You know you've been start in something or with something for years or decades. You're frustrated with it. You have a sense that it's

over familiar. It served you well in the past, but you have a feeling that somehow it's not quite fit for purpose anymore. One classic midlife response is to think, well, I need the up to date version of this thing, so I need the motorbike, or I need the affair, I need you, I need to find the new version of this thing. When that's not the issue here. You're not going to solve your midlife crisis because you're frustrated

with your car by buying a motorbike. And that's what it feels like to me, is that, yes, these institutions are old and tired, they're also adaptable, so in a way, they're not like a car from one hundred years ago. They're like a car that has been updated regularly and yet we can still see the original model behind it. But the idea that somehow the solution to this is just a faster car, the latest model, rather than to

ask ourselves genuinely. If we want this thing that we call democracy to work and to continue for another hundred years, we've probably got to think much harder about how we're different, how the societies that we live in are different. You can't just plug in a faster, newer version of this thing and think it's going to make all the difference. What I think that we're missing always when we think about what's wrong with our democracy is genuinely thinking about

the future. And you know, we can leave this image in a moment. But that's the other thing about a midlife crisis. It's often nostalgia. You wish you were younger, You want the moment when you could drive the car fast. So if Donald Trump then is the motorbike Brexit is the walking out on one's spouse and going walk about. Yeah it is, and it's that thing of it underneath it.

There's a kind of complacency too, which is a characteristic of this kind of psychology, which is people are frustrated and angry, but they also believe we can take this risk. Maybe our marriage will survive it. Now, maybe we won't crash the motorbike. Because we're older and wiser. We're conflicted about these things we want to change, but deep down we don't want to change. And what people do in middle age when they have that feeling is they do

something impetuous and impulsive but not actually long lasting. The thing that we're missing is the long lasting reform. One of the things that representative democracy was meant to do from start, according to its theorists at least, was to

protect government against impulsive acts by the public. And that's one reason why the referendum would have been very much doubted as a good way of doing business by certainly by eighteenth century theorists of democracy, and then in the nineteenth century some people began to argue that, after all, the referendum was a more direct direct way of reaching the people. I wanted to ask you a question that I've really been obsessed with in watching from across the

Atlantic the entire bregsit melt down. And that is why, at this moment in time did Britain use a referendum when it's in possession of the most evolved representative democratic

institutions that there are. Because it's frequently struck me that the impossibility for Parliament of working out a solution to bregsit has come from the fact that there was a referendum with a yes or no question attached to it, and then that was being pushed upon an institution very different or represented institution that I've got its own internal logic, in its own internal structures of politics. So why the referendum? And am I right that the referendums mismatch with parliamentary

government has been part of the problem. You definitely are right. I think there is a context here, which is the Brexit referendum was not the first referendum, so it was one of a series. Governments had recourse to referendums in Britain for nearly a decade now, so there was one about changing the voting system. There was more famously one

about Scottish independence. And the conclusion that I think that government, in particular that David Cameron government drew was that referendums are a good fit with representative parliamentary democracy when the answer basically comes back as no change, and that therefore

they are a useful outlet. You give the people a chance to have their moment, their flirtation with radical change, they will come to their senses, they will sort of snap out of it when they realize just how dangerous the motorbikes or whatever, or the relationship, and they won't do the really dangerous thing. What we've discovered with the first referendum, when the answer didn't come back no change, the answer came back change please. We don't know what

change means. We just want change. And you hear anecdotally all the time in Britain when people who asked why they voted for this they wanted some form of change. It was an expression of frustration. There is no fit because then Parliament has to decide what change means. And Parliament can't decide what change means because Parliament doesn't agree on the necessary change. And the referendum doesn't tell you what change means, it just tells you there was an

appetite for change. So the shock to the system has actually again come from a kind of complacency, and you really saw it in the Brexit referendum. I mean, I think the catastrophic mistake that the Cameron government made was that they thought that the Scottish referendum had shown them that when you get to the day of the choice, people shy away, and they didn't appreciate that the data set there was very small. It was just one yes.

And actually I also think they learned the wrong lesson because there was this phrase used about the Scottish referendum, which was project fear, which was that what people shied away from in the end in Scotland from independent when they offered independence was the thought of the possible chaos, particularly financial monetary chaos, what currency would we have, what would our relationship be with the Bank of England and

so on. But actually, if you look at the evidence from the Scottish referendum and the polling evidence, people were moving towards independence and they didn't shy away from it at the last minute because they suddenly got afraid. What happened was the politicians got afraid and at the last minute all of the leaders of the British parties, the Westminster Parties, went up to Scotland and made all sorts of concessions to great a devolution, to more financial support.

It wasn't fear on the part of the voter, that was fear on the part of the politicians. They didn't do that in the Brexit case. So in the last week there wasn't from Cameron or anyone else a recognition that this thing was getting away from them, and they would actually have to say something to the people who wanted change which sounded like change. They carried on with fear, and now we are, as you described, in a position where we have two forms of democracy in this country

that cannot be meshed together. But it wasn't. It wasn't a one off, and I think the history of it only makes sense when you understand that it was the politicians who drew the wrong lesson about referendums because they thought it gave them a safe outlet. And the thing about safe outlets is that they're safe until they're not,

and then you've got a disaster on your hands. It's a genuinely fascinating answer because it also explains another puzzle that I was never clear on, which is why it was conservatives in particular who would have taken this risk with the referendums, since the referendum form, at least in its historical form, is always thought to be precisely about populism. It's about the whole reason to have a referendum rather than going through the legislature, is to get to the people.

On the theory that the politicians are in some way interfering with the will of the people and one has to get around them. And what I hear implicit in your answer, tell me if this is the right lesson to take away from what you're saying, is that it was, in a way the nostalgic or aspirational view of the contemporary Conservative Party that thinks of the ordinary British voter is really very sensible in the end and likely to do what the Conservative Partian imagines ought to be done,

at least what Cameron imagined ought to be done. That was the driving force behind them making the mistaken inference from one or two data points. I definitely think that's part of it. I think what we've discovered, and it's clearly not just in this country. Elections, both general elections and referendum results have been surprising people for a few years now that there was also this feeling. The Conservative Party often describes itself as the historically most successful election

winning machine in the Western world. It's been winning elections in one form or another two hundred years, and somehow it always stumbles across the right answer, and there is that feeling that the Conservative part he has an instinctive understanding of its people, and it didn't in this case. But there was also this other weird complacency at work, and I heard it a lot after the results. So the result profoundly shocked the party establishment, but it quickly adapted.

Theresa May became Prime Minister and the thought was, well, at least the thing that we have done as true Conservatives is that we have co opted populism. We offered this referendum, it didn't produce the result that we were expecting, but now that result can be channeled through the party

and we have killed our populist party. So the populist party was UKIP Nigel Farage's party, which was polling pretty high in the run up to the referendum, and then when they got what they wanted leaving the EU, the Conservative Party just took it over and performed its historic mission, which was basically to take over whatever was on the table and conservatize it. That's a word, you make it

fit conservative politics. And Theresa May and her supporters I heard them saying for a year eighteen months, we have performed our historic function. We have killed populism in Britain. It's rampant in Europe. It's frankly rampant. In the United States, Donald Trump has just used populism and actually infected Republicanism with it. We've done the opposite. They claimed, we have allowed a traditional conservative party to take it on and

then basically to defang it, and they were wrong. So here we are three years later, because they had no means of translating the referendum result into meaningful politics, and they still haven't worked out how to do it. We have Boris Johnson about to become Prime Minister on a frankly populist Trumpish platform because he has got to compete with Nigel Farrage his party yukit was killed and then reinvented itself as the Brexit Party and is polling at

double the level yukit was ever polling out. There has always been in British Conservatism a deep complacency which is somehow as long as it passes through us because we're Conservatives, it will be all right. And even a party that's two hundred years old is eventually going to make a fatal mistake. And I know conservative politicians in this country who believe the British Conservative Party maybe in its death throws.

So British democracy. I don't think it's in its death throws, but one of its traditional parties, and maybe even both of them, could well be dying. So tell me a little bit about your view of Johnson and in what way does someone who know sociologically looks not so different from Cameron turn into a Trump figure. Frankly, even six months ago, the prospect of Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister looked very very remote. So this is British politics has

turned around, very very quickly. And the reason Johnson is now seen by many Conservatives as the answer is partly because May's failure was total. It's partly because the last thing that Theresa May did was to try and forge some bipartisan consensus to get her Brexit deal over the line, which meant negotiating with Jeremy Corbyn. And it's almost like

the bin is not just our Bernie Sanders. He's for many Conservatives, he's further along the line to what they think of as Leninist catastrophe than that he is to

the left of Bernie Sanders on substantive policy. I think, for what that's worth quite a part from any allegations of Clinism Yeah, So what we had was a Conservative leader offering to negotiate with someone who, genuinely, I think for almost every conservative politician, is beyond the pale, and that seemed to sort of trigger in the Conservative Party a desire for the politician who would never think that that kind of bipartisan consensus was a way to solve

this problem. And it was almost a reaction to that that produced Johnson. Johnson's claim and he's repeated it throughout this campaign, which is about to end, but he's more or less already won. It is that he can be trusted because he was quite a successful mayor of London.

But when he was mayor of London, if you looked at Johnson, you would have said he was another of that generation of Conservative politicians of whom Cameron was another, who saw themselves as twenty first century Thatcher rights, and that Margaret Thatcher was their model. Margaret Thatcher is on no account a populist and on no account was anything like a Trump politician. She was radical in her way, but she was also small c conservative, particularly about institutions.

So there was none of that sense that you get with the current generation of populace that they're here actually to undercut the institutional basis of democratic politics. Margaret Thatcher was a classic politician We've had fifty years of them at that period, maybe coming to an end, who saw the challenge of democratic politics, to test the institutions, to push them, but never to think about breaking them. And

Johnson was one of those. It is the phenomenon of the last three or four years that has changed him into what looks like a more trumpish politician. He's also

a journalist. His journalism has always been you know, the people have been trawling through it and have found statements which you would think would rule someone out from needing a mature democracy because of the implicit racism in a lot of it, the imperialism, the nostalgia for a time when Britain ruled the world and people of different colors and different creeds knew their place. That's there in Johnson's past.

But I think in his own mind he would have thought, well, my journalism was kind of a sideshow to make me famous, and then my politics will be conventional thatch right politics. And I think he's noticed in the last two or three years that his journalism and that persona is the one that other populists around the world are using to win power. How far he's willing to push it, I don't know, but we're seeing signs of it already, that he thinks that the climate has changed and he's changed

with it. The way in which he's not Trump is that he is a professor politician. I mean, he's a journalist, but he's also a professional politician. He is flirting with this form of politics, and I think he's trying it out, and no one knows in the British context how far

you can go. The one other thing I would say about Boris Johnson is that say Britain, like the United States, is a country where that kind of politics populist, appealing to older voters, appealing to voters who didn't go to college, and speaking a language which flirts with racial stereotypes and other kinds of politics which would five years ago been thought to be outside the bounds of democratic decency. Say

you can get to forty percent with that. Trump's sealing forty five, forty seven when he's lucky, But say forty is the limit you can get to in a British context, Well, we do not have a presidential system we have a parliamentary system, and if Boris Johnson polls forty percent at the next British general election, given the other parties divide up the rest, he will be Prime Minister with a

massive majority in Parliament. If it is true that that kind of politics does undercut Farrage wins back the Farage people of the Conservative body, and it's feeling is forty percent Johnson wins, and he's not stupid, So there is

some political calculation at work here too. One more question about Baris Johnson before we start talking about other potential approaches to the midlife crisis, and it's this A central theme in your brand, brand new book, Where Power Stops, is that power reveals, a phrase that you I think rightly attribute to Robert Carrow and his fantastic books about Lyndon Johnson. In the case of Johnson, he hasn't yet assumed power, and so it's too soon to say with

any confidence what it will reveal. But what you describe as somebody who has already had two sides, the professional politician side a little bit more cautious and that right than the journalist side, much more outspoken, bordering on racism. Under some circumstances capable of populism, if that's what's called for, and they're in some sense in counterpoise with one another. And now if he does indeed take power and exercise it,

I suppose we'll find out. Power will reveal which of these two he really is, or really means to be. And I guess the question I have is, do you have an instinct do you think that he is? It sounds like you don't think that he is at heart a populist or at heart of Thatcher right, but rather at heart something of an opportunist, and that you think he'll go with whatever works. But I don't want to

push an interpretation around you that that isn't yours. Do you have an instinct about which way he will go in power? If he does acquire power. The lesson that I'm trying to draw is slightly different from the Karrow ones. A Caro's line is indeed that power reveals the true person, the true man, because he's writing about a man, Lyndon Johnson, and that when Johnson becomes president Lyndon Boris, we discover that deep down there was a man of compassion there.

And my argument is that most of these people don't really reveal anything about themselves in the highest office that we didn't know about them anyway. What we discover is more not who they are, but the nature of the power that can be wielded in these roles as president or prime minister. So in a way, with Johnson, we discovered more about what a president could do than who Lyndon Johnson really was. I don't think politicians change when

they reached the top. If anything, I think they become more fixed because the person they were is what brought them to the top. What we will discover if and when Boris Johnson becomes prime Minister is not who he really is. We know that what we'll discover is what

a man like that can do as prime minister? Can the office a prime minister be stretched so opportunistically beyond what we might have thought was possible over the last decades, that a character like Johnson's, so in its way fickle, are so capable of playing both sides, is able to achieve things that someone liked the reason may couldn't. And the character of the office of prime minister is changing, just as the character of the office of president is changing.

And I think we get acclimatized so quickly, you know, we forget that Trump is doing things that would have seemed inconceivable five years ago, and I suspect with Johnson the same will be true. But we will also find the limits. And in a sense, I think what we discover with these characters are the limits, but the limits aren't quite where we thought they were. And again with Trump, we're finding that some of the things that we thought

were limits aren't. But I think we're also finding that it's not that Trump has just achieved something with that office of president, which means that none of the old rules apply. Some of them still do. That leads me to then the real question of what is going to happen next in these midlife crises. You're careful not to say in either book that you have a solution or

that there's a simple answer of where we're headed. But in both cases of the United States and of Britain, these crises generated by midlife are going to have some trajectory. They're going to come out somehow or other. I tend to agree with you that the presidency will survive at Donald Trump, even if a bit changed, and no doubt

the prime ministership will survive. Baris Johnson. The question I have is what do you see as plausible roots out of these crises now, not normative solutions, but possible paths that we might be following. So I increasingly think that we have to recognize that when we tell the story

of democracy, we're telling these overlapping stories. There is the story of what we think of as democracy, modern liberal, representative, constitutional, mass franchise, mass communication democracy, basically the twentieth century story, and we could not just be in the middle of that. We might be quite late in that, and some of

those institutions I think are in real trouble. Of which political parties are first in the firing line, I think, especially the established political parties, ten fifteen years down the line, that scene could look very very different. I think you can see these parties breaking up. So I think some of the institutions that are familiar, over familiar to us could be in real trouble. But there's a longer story.

There is the story of representative democracy which does go back, particularly in the British and American case, not just one hundred years, but two hundred plus years. The idea that most of us don't do politics except very, very occasionally, but we vote for people who do it for us, and that there is a group sometimes called a class, who are the political class. I'm almost more interested in what's going to happen to that story, and I think

that one might be starting to slowly, very slowly break down. Two. So, to go back to your question about referendums, I mean, it wasn't just a political calculation. There's also this sense, I think from elected politicians that there is growing pressure from the voters for more direct input. I am starting to think that there is a deeper story, you know, the two thousand year old story two and a half thousand year old story about democracy, which is the ancient

Greek story about direct democracy. But also people feeling that what democracy gives you is not a quiet life, a comfortable life. Prosperity also gives you a sense of control of your fate, and that we have to recapture that. And we're going through the spasms of democratic societies where too many people, for different reasons, feel that giving that small group of professional politicians the ultimate decision means that

we have lost control of our fate. I don't think this will end dramatically with something happening in the next five or ten years that signals the end. I think it's a gradual unraveling of these hundred two hundred years stories. But over the next decades, those institutions, and particularly the institutions that have anchored professional politics as we've known it for the last couple of generations, that's the thing going

to unravel. And when you look at that hundred years story, that incredible success story, the twentieth century story, the democratic century, the liberal constitutional, representative democratic century, the professional democratic century, and you look at our politics now, and you look at how fast everything else has changed, it does look not just tired and old, but it looks like it got stuck twenty thirty years ago, sort of at the

dawn of the digital revolution. We must be on the cast like I can't believe that in ten twenty years time we won't look back to this period and see this was the beginning not just of the unraveling, but of the transition to something that we would think of is genuinely twenty first century democracy, and that will be more fragmented, more local, more digital, more direct, less professional, probably for a while, more chaotic. It could be better now.

The future is not determined by how democracy failed in the nineteen thirties or the risks that we ran in the nineteen seventies. The future is infinitely more open than the past. And this form of democracy has been really set in place for about a hundred years now, fifty to one hundred years. If it has an open future, it's going to look radically different. And say, we're at the start of that. It's challenging, it's scary, but it

could be hugely exciting. And I don't think we've I don't think we've opened our minds up to that yet enough because we're too preoctopied with Brexit and Trump and say they are the signals not of fascism or populism or racism. I mean, they do signal those things, but say they're not the signal that that's what's coming down the track. They're signaling that what's coming down the track

is meaningful change. They are not the meaningful change. There is optimism to be found in a midlife crisis too. It's very good to hear the chastened realist, nevertheless optimistic picture of what the future could hold. And I'm very grateful to David for speaking to us and share that, and then perhaps the next time we speak we can talk about the end of the end and how old age reaches everyone, even if it doesn't come in the

form of total collapse. But we have some time for you to write your next book on that topic or another. Thank you again very much for your time. David Runsman likens the challenges facing democracy in Britain and the US to a midlife crisis, and, in his faintly optimistic view about how such midlife crises come to an end, he thinks that will slowly take on a better stage of life, one with gradual changes in institutions, rather than a genuine crash and burn for the institutions of democracy as we

know them. Is he right well to find that out, We're going to have to watch developments very very closely, and we're gonna have to pay special attention to the question of whether we actually develop new approaches and methods for solving our democratic problems, like changes in our fundamental political parties, or whether we actually, the way a lot of people do after a midlife crisis, just go back

to the same old, same old. The test will come especially in the years after Britain in fact leaves the European Union, if it ultimately does, and after Donald Trump is no longer President of the United States, then we'll see whether we return to ordinary politics, to ordinary politicians, or whether the changes wrought by this moment of crisis are lasting and significant. Runsman thinks they will be, but it seems entirely possible to me that we may end

up right back where we started. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Jane Coott, with engineering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gara. Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass. Welcome Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Miah Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background.