How discontent destabilizes democracy

If there's one thing that people across the political spectrum can agree on, it's a sense of discontent with the current state of American politics. This week, we explore the origins of that discontent and why it's damaging to democracy. Our guest is Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, an assistant professor of political science at Clemson University and one of the authors of The Age of Discontent: Populism, Extremism, and Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Democracies.

Rhodes-Purdy and his co-authors argue that the most successful populist and extremist movements of the past 20 years have focused largely on cultural grievances, rather than on economic discontent. The book outlines what they describe as  the troubling implications of discontent on the long-term compatibility of liberal democracy and free-market neoliberalism.

Looking at case studies from around the world, the authors imply that democratic states must renew their commitment to social regulation of markets and to serve as conduits for citizen voice for  democracy and market economies are to survive.

Chris Beem
From the McCartney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I'm Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. This week we are joined by Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, a professor at Clemson University, and one of the authors of the book The Age of Discontent: Populism, Extremism and Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Democracies. Now Matthew was a guest or an attendee at a conference that we organized on populism, piety and patriotism. Back in the fall, that's how we learned about this book and the rest of his work. And if you take the subtitle of this book, populism, extremism and conspiracy theories, those three things together encompass half, maybe more of the episodes that we've done on this show, looking at those themes from different angles, but I think he and his co authors, tie them together in a way that we maybe haven't discussed before, using the idea of discontent, and how that kind of brings those three elements together.

Chris Beem
Yeah, I think their definition of discontent is interesting and has some theoretical half behind it. I also Yeah, I mean, we had a cast Modi was at that conference as well. And we had an episode with him talking about populism. It's not that, you know, we can't come up with anything more to talk about. It's that this is a distinctive, maybe not unique, but distinctive moment in world history, where populism, and nationalism, and often, if not always, religion, combined to make this really heady stew that undermines if it doesn't endanger democracy all over the world. So it's something that's worth trying to understand and to talk about.

Candis Watts Smith
One of the things that Matthew brings up is that in the book is comparative, that we see this, you know, many patterns around, discontent. And here, discontent is not just dissatisfaction, but severe, deep, I don't want to use the word now, dissatisfaction, but anger about, you know, how well things are going and that everything is going not good. And we see patterns in Brexit and and you know, Latin America and in other places in, in Europe, and in the United States, where there is a seeming kind of rejection of some of the basic tenets of democracy. And so then the question is why I think one of the helpful things about this book is that, you know, we tend to think about, you know, American politics or Venezuelan politics, or, you know, Spanish politics, but humans, across those spaces have a lot of similarities, psychologically, their responses to economic downturns, the ways in which we respond to minority groups. And so this book does a good job of trying to think through the patterns across the globe that we're seeing, and this what they're calling an age of discontent.

Chris Beem
No, I think that's a good summary. There is they say that discontent is this deep and abiding feeling that everything is going wrong. And there are, you know, they identify, I think, correctly, that there are two kind of main explanations, what is the driver for this? How did this come to happen? And one of them is economic. And he says that, you know, and they say, excuse me, they say that, you know, with the Great Recession of 2008, and then commodities crises and then COVID, and the economic downturn associated with that, there's just been this dramatic economic upheaval, and a lot of people feel a lot more precarious in their economic situation than they did before. And then there's another group that says that this issue is cultural, and that people who used to see themselves as being on the top of the top of the heap, right, who were economic, political and cultural hijab, hegemonic, they were the ones who were in the best position, suddenly don't feel that way anymore, and the values that they hold dear, are questioned or denigrated, right? And so when you see people arguing, or you know, decrying woke culture, or you know, trans bathrooms or whatever, that's what that is. And so, that is the other argument, right? It's one or the other, and it's very difficult to put these together. Right, because you know, you've got the whole whole economic and rationality and then you've got this other group that is, you know, looking at things that are kind of amorphous and which, you know, on culture is always changing, right. So what this book does is try to put those together and see them as a, as one phenomenon that they could kind of account for.

Candis Watts Smith
Right, they make a very complex, nuanced argument. And I think that it helps to situate the patterns that we see in other countries around the same time that have also experienced economic downturn. So I saw like, to my knowledge, there were no places that were quarantined from the effects of the Great Recession. And still more, they were no places that were quarantined from the effects of COVID. So you know, I'm some for that, that kind of baseline of that we see these patterns across the globe, that we do have to kind of come up, we have to, if we want to try to understand the global pattern, then we have to really kind of apps you have to move outside of just looking at the forest and the trees just in the United States.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, I think that's well said both of you. And we'll certainly hear more from Matt, in this interview. Unfortunately, we were not able to talk with all three of the book's authors. But I think Matt does a good job of representing their work well, so let's go now to the interview.

Jenna Spinelle
Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
Hi, thanks for having me.

Jenna Spinelle
So we're talking today about your latest book, The Age of Discontent: Populism, Extremism, and Conspiracy Theories and contemporary democracies. And, you know, as I was reading the book, and and reflecting on some of its main themes, that thought occurred to me that in some ways, these themes of populism conspiracy theories, even political discontent, more broadly, it's pretty well worn ground, you know, since 2016, there's been a lot of ink spilled a lot of audio minutes devoted to figuring out why things are the way they are, and our politics, what underlies some of these trends that we've seen. So I wonder if you could just start us off by talking a bit about why you wanted to wade into these waters and what you maybe you and your co authors thought that you could bring to the conversation that wasn't already there. Right?

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
Yeah. So very crowded field. Obviously, by the time we got in, the main thing we wanted to bring was just an awareness of how so many of these different phenomenon were, in fact, just different manifestations of the same basic impulse, you know, in the academic literature, conspiracy theories and populism, and, you know, foreign politics, a lot of the times they don't talk to each other, and they don't talk to each other regionally, as well. You have Latin American populism, you have European populism. And what we saw, just in sort of casual conversation with each other, myself, and Steven, Rachel was just there's a lot of overlap here. And we think there's something underlying all this, which is just this general sense that democracy is not working for people anymore. So we saw that, but we also saw the same debates over and over again, whether what's driving this? Is this about economic grievance? Is this about, you know, people are hurting, they're losing their jobs, or whatever. And that's why they turn to these sort of angry, aggressive forms of politics, or is this about cultural norms Is this the backlash is this, you know, older, more traditionalist voters against younger, more cosmopolitan voters. And we found evidence on both sides of the of that debate, it was really unsettled. And what we also found was just a general sense among people that both of these things have to matter. The they both seem like they're in there, like they're in the mix. But we hadn't really seen any good explanation for how economics, which is much more sort of materialist and calculating, as opposed to culture, which is more about identities and values and things like that, like how can you create an explanation that incorporates both of these things without, you know, coming off really, without just having a nonsensical theory. And so when we came down on our approach, which emphasizes the use of emotions that kind of unlocked a lot of things for it's like, okay, this explains why two very disparate areas of social life can be connected to each other because of these changes that people undergo when they're in economic when they're in heightened emotional states.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. And I want to come back to those two different hypotheses that you draw about economics and about culture. But before we do that, you do a nice job in the book of breaking down what exactly you mean by Democratic discontent?

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
So discontent is first of all, it's just more it's more intense than just sort of being upset with what's going on in the moment. It runs deeper than that it's not like oh, this policy is bad or this leadership is bad or this government is bad. It's Everything's bad. All of the politicians are bad all the populists isms are bad. We write that it is cumulative discontent builds over time, as a result of repeated disappointments in a sense that the situation is out of hand, and there's no evidence that it's going to be able to write itself or be righted through normal democratic means I think that's really the key one is this idea that the normal mechanisms of democracy that are in place to change things when they're not going well, or not functioning properly. And then the other really important one is just discontent is more, it's more intense, it's not. This is ill advised, or this is wrongheaded. It's this is evil, this there's a moral dimension to it, that creeps in, that you don't have with just the ordinary annoyances that we see in, in democracy.

Jenna Spinelle
And so I know that you're not a historian by training, but as you were just describing those elements, you know, I know you trace them back to the 2008 financial crisis and great recession and that period, but I wonder how much of this discontent is just kind of normal in some respects, in democratic politics, and that it maybe will ebb and flow and people will be more discontent at some periods, but less in others? Do you have any sense of that about how cyclical this type of behavior is, or these types of feelings and emotions are?

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
Yeah, it's I mean, there's always a certain percentage of the population who are just alienated and frustrated and angry, you're never going to completely banish discontent. But I think the perception that this is just sort of a normal form of politics that just exists out there. And then occasionally, you get a really charismatic demagogue who can whip it up and gain power because of their own personal characteristics. That's, I think, a mistaken view of how it works. There are clear social circumstances, I think, leads to this, we see it historically, we see in 2008. And these are sort of periods of dramatic social transformation, that undermined democracies ability to function that render old party systems and systems of representation non functional. And I do think we're going through that right now, you know, the helical waves of discontent, they tend to pop up when the economy is changing drastically. So Latin American classical populism, for example, when during the industrialization period, those systems did not make the transition cleanly and a lot of places and populism emerged. As a result, the same the transition away from state led economics to free market economics, same deal. Right now we're in a situation where the developed world the world, we study, the Americas and Europe has been rapidly de industrializing, you've seen the rise of the knowledge economy, as well as the service sector, the informal economy in terms of the gig economy. And what you have is the popular sectors in society, the people at the bottom of the social pyramid are not organized to a great degree, the way they were during sort of the height in the industrial period. And as such, it's very difficult for the kind of pro equality pro regulating the market forces to advocate for themselves effectively. And because of that, there's been a real reduction in the ability of democracy to sort of tame the worst aspects of the market and, you know, protect economic equality and, you know, protect the interests of people who are at the bottom of the social ladder. And as a result, that's where discontent emerged, we talked about 2008, but 2008 was the spark or the trigger, you know, the gravest economic crisis in the world will not set off an age of discontent without some underlying process that's been going on kind of building building pressure.

Jenna Spinelle
You write that economics are the roots. Culture is the branch and emotions are the trunk connecting the two, I thought that was a really nice metaphor to use a really nice way to put it. So how do you get from this sense of discontent, economic discontent, as you've been describing, to populism, extremism, and contemporary so we can take those all together or one at a time, whatever you'd like to do.

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
So the theory here is the economics to emotions to culture produces the discontent, which we argue is this latent concept of SAP. But there's that fourth thing that I forgot to talk about earlier. The fourth thing is that it's latent and unobservable. We don't expect people to have these sort of sophisticated political narratives that they create for themselves. They go out into the social narrative environment, you know, the media, social media, whatever, and pick up the ones that appeal to them, which a lot of times they're going to be ones that sort of validate their emotions and validate what they're feeling, even if it's not exactly the same story that's going on in their own heads. Because most people the story in their own head is going to be real vague. And so what those narratives are and how they're directed this way, or that way by the specific history of the country involved is really important for directing how discontent manifests. So the real common one we see as populism, obviously, because it is sort of a ready made narrative, to explain why you feel so upset and why democracy can't seem to fix things that you see as broken. It's this idea that the political class is completely evil and they've betrayed you for some other group. But then these outsider elites who are pushing these populist narratives, can graft, in fact, have to graft some kind of more comprehensive social narrative onto that, you know, who are the people for, you know, on whose behalf the political elite have betrayed you, you know, are they Wall Street? Are they the globalists? Are they this, that or the other thing, so that influences things. The other thing is just the structure of prejudice in society matters, when these emotions get kicked up. It's not like if you make somebody angry, they're automatically going to go off and be really mad at immigrants or people of color. Anger reinforces pre existing biases and habits of mind. So it's going to direct people's anger towards groups they're already predisposed to dislike.

Jenna Spinelle
So coming back to the idea of economic discontent, and some of the emotions that surround that I, I feel like the pandemic, some of the, you know, relief programs that were put into place, whether it was, you know, putting student loans on hold, or some of the, you know, rent provisions and increasing, you know, support for Children and Family Programs, like, that's the closest thing at least that I could think of is like an attempt at resolving or lessening some of those feelings of economic discontent. Would you agree with that?

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
Yeah, I mean, it was unprecedented that, especially in the United States, we've never seen that kind of universalistic social support in this. I mean, this is, we're a very liberal democracy, you know, small l, liberal democracy, most social assistance is means tested here, with the exception of Social Security and Medicare, we don't get universal programs like that. So things like the child tax credit, and the stimulus payments, I think were helpful, but everybody understood, they were sort of one time deals that weren't going to be repeated. I think the Child Tax Credit, in some ways, was the most revolutionary of those, maybe that in the expanded unemployment support, because I think those two things could conceivably have been continuing policies after the pandemic, you know, the government's not going to hand everybody 2500 A year or whatever it was, right. But they might have continued to do those things. And that would have been absolutely transformative, particularly because those kinds of programs don't lend themselves to the, they're giving the wrong people help narratives that we've seen underlying this transition to neoliberalism over the past 40 years or so. That was one of the main ways that sort of the Reagan and Thatcher coalition kind of built this as a global phenomena. It's not just the UK in the US, but those are sort of the two leading lights of it here. Particularly Reagan, I mean, that's how they built electoral support for this program of shrinking the state, you know, basically, pro inequality politics, was by suggesting that, oh, you meaning, you know, white middle class, people are paying for all this generous social support, and it's other people, namely poor people of color, who are getting all the help. And those kind of that sort of intertwining of economic and racial resentment was really the only way they could sell that kind of policy program to a broad electric because most people actually benefited from, you know, the New Deal, the New Deal system. And as a result, those means tested programs are really sort of can be politically sort of dicey to maintain, because there is always that potential, particularly when times get bad for kind of middle class kickback. Whereas the programs that came out of the pandemic, particularly those two that I mentioned, they were universal, they were things that benefited everybody. And there was a real risk of sort of middle class by and I think that's why, you know, people on the right work so hard to kill them,

Jenna Spinelle
You know, what you were talking about earlier, with the gig economy and people not being organized. Is that a factor here to like if there had been more if there had been more effort or more organizing among low income communities, communities of color in the years leading up to the pandemic, which of course nobody could have predicted? Or are no one was coming? But might there have been a stronger push back to, you know, keep some of these programs in place? For the long term, I realized that there's a lot of speculation in that question, but I guess I worry generally, how do you think about the role that organizing or lack thereof might have played here?

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
I mean, in a sense, lack of organization is at the, you know, you can only go so far back, right, we stop at the economic transformation plus crisis. Go back another step. It's the lack of organization, which really has everything here, particularly the social transformation away from industrialization. There's nothing special about industrialization, like industrial jobs were as miserable and poorly paid as the lowest of the lowest of service jobs these days before union movements and center left parties and legislation and things like that it was political decisions that made industrial jobs, the sort of engines of middle class development or whatever you want to call them. And that's down to organization. And the thing is, there's something very unique about the industrial era, because you have huge numbers of people at the bottom of the hierarchy, who are all together in the same room, you know, same factory 1000s of people being employed, who have very immediate things to gain by organizing in union, so they're easy to organize, it's easy to deliver immediate benefits. And then it's easier to parlay those immediate material benefits into political cloud. And that's kind of the story of the dominance of Keynesian and social democracy. In the you know, the 30 years or so, after World War Two, deindustrialization has completely eroded that you've had the reductions of the industrial working classes as a percentage of the population, the union movement has collapsed pretty much globally, even in the heartland of social democracy, the percentage of people who are part of unions has declined precipitously. So you have a disorganized and increasingly diverse both in terms of culture, but also in terms of education levels, occupation type group of people at the sort of bottom of the social hierarchy, and they're not organized at all. And when you're not organized, you don't have any ability to press demands, effectively, to a democratic state. So I mean, everything from the fact that this crisis was allowed to happen in the first place to the poor quality of democracy in the West, a lot of that is down to organization, because in order to prevent those things, or fix them now, you would need an organized, popular sector, in order to do that.

Jenna Spinelle
You talk about the greatest tragedy of the era of discontent is the tendency of neoliberalism as victims to turn against each other and against the politics that might provide a solution. So it sounds like you're saying here that not only are people not organized, but they're actively working against each other, it's sort of like, look at, if we could keep everybody distracted on fighting with each other, they're not going to look over here to see where the problems really are.

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
So anybody who's been to a big city, particularly big cities abroad, might have heard of something called the mustard trick, right? Where somebody comes up and squirts mustard on you, and they say, Oh, I'm sorry, let me help you clean up. And they sort of attempt to wipe up your shirt, whether buddy comes behind you and picks your pocket. I mean, all of this stuff on the right, it's very serious stuff, some of the stuff in terms of like the critical race theory, or the trans moral panic, some of these things, they're super serious, with extremely negative consequences for a lot of people, high possibility of violence, and just general, you know, burning books and censoring people and things that will not burning books, but banning books, you know, so lots of serious sort of consequences for ordinary people. And I don't want to minimize it. But frankly, that stuff is the mustard trick. They are trying to distract people and get them worked up about these sorts of if you really sit and take a breath. He's just sort of solvable social conflicts are things that reasonable people can deal with, they have to work up these moral panics because they don't want people paying attention to what's happening in the economy. But here again, I mean, organization plays a role, right? It's much easier to distract people, when they are not embedded in organizations that can tell them, hey, this is a distraction. You know, that's one of the you know, you talk about the role of social media, and you talk about the role of private media. I think the polarizing effect of media is enabled by the fact that people are not in organizations that can kind of inoculate against some of those negative aspects. But then again, it's just it makes it easier for people to be divided and for people's very legitimate grievances against what's been going on in the economy. And in politics, it makes it easy to redirect those against people who aren't really responsible or not profitable way of redirecting this, you know, if you're upset about the economy and Wall Street and the political class, not listening to you how it is, you know, bashing on immigrants or asylum seekers do anything positive to it doesn't but it's easy to redirect that with people when they're not in more, you know, when they're not in environments where they can be given better solutions and better ways to use those negative feelings to motivate them to achieve the sort of positive change.

Jenna Spinelle
And speaking of positive change, and maybe moving more into some of your current work, but also how you end this book. I mean, what are some of the ideas that you have about how we move forward how we attempt to address some of the things that underlie discontent? And I guess also, like, what should the goal be that we're working toward? It's obviously not going to be zero discontent, right. As you said, That's not possible. But what is a realistic outcome look like in your mind?

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
Right. I think realism is interesting, because I think, you know, there's this idea that sort of massive transformation is in some way unrealistic. I actually think that people who believe that you can take the current sort of basic structure of our current system and reduced discontent to a manageable level within its basic parameters with small reforms. I think that's unrealistic. I think discontent is in some sense, you know, kind of a red flag, it's this structure in the system is not functioning, we need some pretty dramatic changes to society, if you want to get discontent down to a manageable level, which I think is the goal. You know, even in, like I said, sort of the heyday of social democracy in Europe where you had super, you know, super responsive democracy is, and really strong government support for political equality. You have, you know, a certain percentage of the population who for whatever reason, individual, mostly sort of individual personality and psychological issues are just not going to be able to get with the program and not going to be able to accept the way things are, you're going to have people with authoritarian personalities, you're going to have people with serious pathologies, who just are malcontents, basically. And I think the key thing at that point is just reducing that group to the smallest possible size so that they can be looked at from a security perspective, basically, because if they don't have democratic discontent, then they go into sort of violent radicalism and militia movements and terrorist organizations and things like that. And that becomes a law enforcement issue rather than a democracy issue. So basically, it's like shrink them enough to get them off my plate and put them on to the security people's plate is the goal. But we look at specific things in the book. And there's two things we really point out. But the overarching theme is just neoliberal democracy is not sustainable. In the long run, those two things contradict each other in extremely fundamental ways. And you cannot have the neoliberal part while still having a robust democracy part. And the basic insight there is that there are very, very few genuine neoliberal or libertarians out there, you know, that a Scotch poll and Vanessa Williamson, I think her name is they have a book on the Tea Party that really demonstrates this very well, which is, most people who profess economic libertarianism are in fact, economic libertarians for everyone except themselves. They think their benefits are they deserve them, they're worthy of them, they should get support. It's other people and people they don't like, who should be cut. But the concept we use, which is sort of the thing I'm focusing on in my future research is this idea of continuous democracy, where it's not enough to have democracy just in the electoral arena. And just at election time, we really need to democratize society to a substantial degree. So among other things, that means people we need increased organization, we need parties that are deeply rooted in society that have connections to social movements, that can activate and get people energized about politics. But then there's the questions of things sort of outside the political realm, it's, I forget the name of the author. But the book is called Private government that we rely on basically makes the point that most people in democracy spend the majority of their time in authoritarian environments, because that's what economic firms are, they are very top down very hierarchical, and especially with the lack of organization, the people at the bottom of those hierarchies have very little rights in them. So can we really expect people to act as good sort of democratic citizens when they spend most of their lives in these extremely authoritarian environments? Yeah, I think really just more democracy is the key here and more effective democracy. But that's a short phrase that belies an incredible amount of work, that's going to have to be done in order to get us there.

Jenna Spinelle

So I hope our listeners will pick up a copy of the book and read more, as you may be able to tell from this conversation, you pack a lot into what is not a very long book. There's a lot of theory and examples and a lot to chew on, as we like to say on this show. So Matt, thank you so much for joining us today.

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed the conversation.

Candis Watts Smith
Well, thanks to Jenna and Matt, for that really great conversation. One of the things that came to my mind as I was listening, again, to the interview, is to really pinpoint who this book is about, actually, that this kind of idea of well, who is experiencing its content. And one of the things that is really well laid out in the book, and I think just Matt didn't have time to get to it fully is to think through the idea that not everyone feels this way. And one of the things that they lay out in the book is that if we look at, for example, the Tea Party, which in part came out of the 2008 recession, and how they thought Congress was putting the people who put us into this position that they were still getting stuff that was unfair that many of those people were middle class white folks who weren't for the most part, fine, they were fine. And what Matthew and his co authors outline in the book is that perception is reality that the perceive relative deprivation is what matters here. So I think that one of The things that in at least in American politics that it is often really hard to hear an argument about economic anxiety, is because the ringleaders who feel the most discontent and are speaking the loudest, tend to be people who are mostly fine. But by doing the right, by really taking care of the psychology component of it, what Matt and his co authors are able to do is to remind us that people are not rational. And that what really matters is their perceptions. And it also reminded me of Juliet, the conversation that we had with Juliet hooker, who talks about anticipated losses, that we tend to focus a lot on that we tend to see and hear a lot about anticipated losses, from, you know, cultural change, or economic change, or immigration, or LGBT rights, or whatever. And there's not actual any loss. But people get worked up around these things. And this is what this kind of discontent is what we get out of that.

Chris Beem
I think that's really interesting. You know, neither of us are experts on political psychology. But I do think that that is that they are correct to kind of frame it that way, you know, and, you know, anticipatory fear, you know, that's how horror movies work. That's how they scare you. Not when the monster is there, but when the when you know, the monsters coming, or the bad guys coming, and you don't, but you don't know where or when. And so I mean, that's, that's human psychology. I mean, the other thing, you know, I mean, I do think, you know, the more you know about psychology, the more you recognize that rational self interest, you know, on a good day, we can maybe get 20% of that, and I'm not talking about, I'm talking about we as Homo sapiens, are just not wired to be that good at it. But the one thing they said that really struck with me was this idea that conspiracy theories are rational. And I, you know, took me a while to put that together. But I actually think that there's a point to it.

Candis Watts Smith
Right, maybe rationales that that are maybe logical.

Chris Beem
Well, or self interested, maybe that's right. So you have this leader, who is an outsider who is going to take on all the powers that are undermining your standing, your position, your well being, and who are genuinely understood to be evil, and in bizarre ways, right? I mean, the pizza gate thing is just not I mean, it's just farcical that anybody would find that persuasive. But people did. But the point is that you have this leader, who is going to solve this problem, he is almost always a he is an outsider who is got the standing and power to defeat these forces and restore the status quo ante for the good, honest, hardworking, genuine Americans. And then you have the problem, that this person gets into power, and nothing changes, and that the forces are still lined up against his righteous, heroic efforts. And so you need to explain that you need to account for that. And you can't do it by giving up on this leader, you have to come up with explanations as to why this is not happening.

Candis Watts Smith
The other thing, I think that is connected to this and the other thing that Matthew talks about, and that the book talks about, is right. Instead of like focusing on conspiracy theories, what happens if we actually focus on this system that we are in which is, you know, a neoliberal governance structure where both folks on the right and the left have completely bought into the idea that the state the government should not actually be a primary player and solving huge collective problems? And that if instead of focusing on this one guy, as it usually is to be the Savior, and we look at the The harder question, the harder in the bigger barrier, which is that we have the kind of hegemonic idea around how the government works is that it should be hands off and that people should have responsibility for their own actions. But on these big issues of like, child poverty, medical debt, you know, and Education, right, like the quality of K through 16 education. These are things that both sides both democrats, republicans, liberals and conservatives, mainstream ones, mostly have said that like this is for you all to deal with, not for the government to deal with. And, you know, Matt argues and I agree that that is that's not working for us. And that's why people should feel dissatisfied.

Chris Beem
The issue is that with the acquiescence, I think that he would accept that word of politics on both of them the left and the right, to corporations and to economics. And when they see government, as primarily oriented, should be primarily oriented around sustaining and facilitating economic growth, then all these other means by which political power, put a check on that economic power becomes compromised, right. And you know, that is a narrative to write you have, it's just a fact that with the globalization of labor and capital, the means by which nations use politics, to constrain economic power and develop political power have all been compromised, right? Unions, people, safety nets, all these things have been are not nearly as operative. And it's not just here, it's in Western Europe, as well. And so what you're left with is this structure that in terms of the argument, makes these this kind of discontent, far more likely to happen, and far more dangerous towards democracy writ large, because these economic crises are going to happen. And if we don't have the structures in place, to give people a sense of empowerment, that or and not to mention safety, right then then these kinds of populist moments are just going to be ever more likely and ever more dangerous.

Candis Watts Smith
I could not agree more.

Chris Beem
Anyway, but this book  thought was very well written. So thanks to Matt and to Jenna on a yet another terrific interview. I'm Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith
And I'm Candis Watts Smith. For Democracy Works, Thanks for listening.

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