University of Chicago Monday, March 26, 2018Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Regenstein LibraryDirector’s Lecture

DEMOCRATIC DEGENERATION: THREE EASY PATHS TO REGRESSION

By Charles Taylor

Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University, is the author of many books, including Sources of the Self (1989), A Secular Age (2007) and, most recently, The Language Animal (2016). Professor Taylor has been honored with numerous awards, including the Templeton Prize for Affirming Life’s Spiritual Dimension (2007), the Kyoto Prize for Thought and Ethics (2008), the U.S. Library of Congress John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity (2015), the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture (2016), and the International Grand Prix for Literary Achievement (2018).

Unauthorized, Samuel C. Porter, Ph.D., transcribed and edited Taylor’s talk and Jonathan Lear’s introduction for readability. The headings, italics and footnotes are Porter’s along with any transcription errors (Source: https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/events/uc/directors_lecture_with_charles_taylor/; or, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWq6TABAHhw; accessed 7/4/2018).

Introduction

By Jonathan Lear

Lear is, in addition to Neubauer Collegium Director, a psychoanalyst, member of the Committee on Social Thought and a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His books include Freud (2005, 2015), Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), and A Case for Irony (2011).

Hello, I am Jonathan Lear, the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium and I’d like to welcome you to today’s lecture. I expect that many of you, like me, have been reading Charles Taylor all your intellectual lives. I remember from my student days reading The Expla-nation of Behavior (1964), “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” (1971) and then “Self-Inter-preting Animals” (1977) with delight and admiration.

Here was a philosopher who, in the face of massive social and intellectual pressures to study humans exclusively in terms of observable behavior and methods derived from the physi-cal sciences, was always willing to remind us, and I think patiently and cheerfully and doggedly, of who we are.

We are creatures who, if we are to understand ourselves adequately, must do so at least in part in terms of our self-understandings. We are, as he put it, self-interpreting animals. So, as we come to interpret ourselves, the very acts of interpreting need to be part of the interpretation.

For Taylor, this made the study of history essential. For to understand our current self-un-derstandings, we need to understand how they came to be. But for Taylor, we need to understand them not simply as causal antecedents but as alive in the present. Only then can we be freed up to make informed choices about how to live.

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Thus, Taylor immersed himself and his readers not only in the history of political change but also in the histories of linguistics, philosophic, scientific, literary, and religious thought.

Of the many remarkable features that characterize his work, I would like to mention its generosity of spirit. I am not here talking about a personality trait but a methodology. Whether he is writing about the nature of language, the history of philosophical thought, social explanation, or taking a side in a current political debate, Taylor consistently tries to make the best case he can for the positions with which he disagrees. And I take it there are two reasons for this ap-proach. First, only if one understands a position in its fullness can one come to understand the problems it genuinely faces in its genuine failures. And, secondly, only by interpreting an oppos-ing position generously can we hope to engage in a meaningful conversation with those who hold that position.

I think this has been a guiding light of Taylor’s career to encourage and sustain conversa-tion, especially across peoples and traditions who disagree.

We see this in his theoretical work. I think no one has done more to integrate the so called analytic and continental traditions of philosophy. And no one has done more to integrate the humanities and the social sciences.

I think we also see this in his engagements in political debate, in his attempts to reconcile the claims of regional nationalisms with the claims of the nation state, and the claims of the na-tion state in the face of globalizing pressures.

His commitment to conversation manifests his commitment to shaping a flourishing and just human future through thoughtful deliberation, and I think this would be an ethical fulfillment of our capacity as self-interpreting animals.

We live in times that challenge this hope. We seem to be living through a shift in what Taylor has called “the social imaginary.”1 Times have become ominous. I think this is different from living in times that are simply dangerous.

In dangerous times, we’re aware, however vaguely, that something awful and even cata-strophic could happen at any moment. But there’s no sense of inevitability. In ominous times, by contrast, we have a sense of living in a before, that bad things might be about to happen which we don’t know exactly when, where or how. Thus, I think there has arisen a more easy availabil-ity of a phantasy in which a future generation looks back on us in our innocence.

But an imaginary consists in more than shared feelings and fantasies. It also consists in modes of thought and outlooks that are taken as obvious.

1 Our social self-understanding, that is, “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004, p. 23. Chapter 2, “What Is a Social Imaginary,” pp. 23-30.

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In the second half of the 20th Century, prompted in part by the defeat or implosion of cer-tain totalitarian regimes as well as by an increasing globalization of the neoliberal economic or-der, it became popular in some quarters to believe that history itself was moving in the direction of democracy.

Not just that history happened to be moving in that direction but that there was an inner dynamic that so prompted us.

And when, to take a paradigm example, The End of History and the Last Man was pub-lished in 1992, Francis Fukuyama’s photograph was on the cover of The New York Times Maga-zine, which I think means something.

Now times have changed, and history no longer seems to be democracy’s shepherd. And I think it is a macabre irony that in such a short time that phrase, “the end of history,” has come to mean the opposite of the sanguine state of affairs that Fukuyama predicted. Or, the word san-guine has taken on the opposite sense of its ordinary meaning, bloody. We fear that if there is an impending catastrophe there won’t be any “last man” left to appreciate the gendered clang of that phrase.

Within the academic world we have seen the rise of what is called “the Anthropocene.” Officially, this is the study of the history and present impact of humans on the world. But by naming it as a period we are anticipating its end.

I think these movements of meaning mark an anxious shift in the social imaginary. What is to be done about this? Well, you can see before you one of my first answers. Invite Charles Taylor to come here and talk about it.

Charles Taylor is professor emeritus at McGill University, and just to mention the books that I think have become classics, he is the author of The Explanation of Behavior, Hegel, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, The Ethics of Authenticity, Multicultur-alism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Modern Social Imaginaries, A Secular Age, and his most recently published, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Ca-pacity.

Among the huge number of recognitions and honors, Taylor is the recipient of the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the John W. Kluge Prize, and the Berggruen Prize in Philosophy.

Finally, let me thank the staff of the Neubauer Collegium: Carolyn Ownbey, Brigid Bal-com, Mark Sorkin, Jennifer Helmin, Dieter Roelstraete, and Elspeth Carruthers who worked to-gether to make an event like this, and everything else we do at the Neubauer Collegium, possi-ble.

Please join me in welcoming Professor Charles Taylor who will speak to us today on the topic of “Democratic Degeneration: Three Easy Paths to Regression.”

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Democratic Degeneration: Three East Paths to Regression

By Charles Taylor

Thank you very, very much, Jonathan, for those very generous words.

Actually, Jonathan has given the background to why I wanted to talk about this. It’s a move to refute something which maybe doesn’t need any more refutation. The idea that we’re on a kind of escalator of history, that the countries that have not yet become democratic can look across and can say, “That’s what we want.” They make revolutions and then they become demo-cratic, and it spreads out.

We were kind of gulled into this, I think, by certain aspects of 20th Century history: 1919, a whole lot of new democracies, not necessarily a happy fate but they began. Of course, 1945 and after, decolonization. Then, of course, 1989. In the heady days of November 1989 it could look as though that was what was happening.

What happened since inspired, I have to admit, the extremely discouraging title, “Three Easy Paths to Regression.”

Now I will make you even more depressed by saying I’ve just chosen three. There are others. But I’ve chosen these three because they happen to be coming together now to make a very difficult situation for us.

So, let me launch into what these three are and how they’re combining, and then look at a set of problems of what we could conceivably do about it, which is going to be hard to discuss in totally general terms because, I think, these answers have to be worked out in each particular polity. But there are a set of common features.

Two Meanings of Democracy

I’d like to start by saying some words about democracy and the meaning of the term be-cause I think this is something very important to bring out.

About 200 years ago, the word democracy was not very highly prized even by the people we now think of as its founders. People like the founders of this republic, that is, the United States.

Let’s look at why. It’s the fault of Aristotle, like many things good and bad. Aristotle, as you know, defined democracy as rule by the demos – demos being the non-elites riding roughshod over the elites, mainly of money and birth. He defined oligarchy as the opposite, rid-ing roughshod by those who have elite power over the demos.

So, the ideal society was a balance, which he called politeia. Somehow, you’ve got to balance the powers so no one is totally dominated by anyone else, no one’s interests and good

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are totally disregarded in favor of others. That’s of course what the founders of your republic thought they were doing.

If you take politeia and think of Plato’s Republic, which is called Politeia in Greek, re-public is their word for that.

Now, how did it come about very quickly after its founding in 1787 that the word for the most desirable society flips from republic to democracy?

I think what that has done is put a permanent ambiguity in this term. I want to bring it out because it’s essential to see what is going on to separate the two.

The ambiguity, or the polysemy,2 if that’s the word, comes out in the fact that the word people in all modern European languages – volk, [two to four other non-English words for peo-ple …] you name it – has this double meaning.

On one hand, we can use it for the entire population of a given polity. That’s the people. So, we might say the French people were liberated in 1944 from Nazi rule. That’s a perfectly ob-vious use of the word, people, to mean everybody.

But when you get, on the other hand, appeals to the people against the elites, there you’re going back to the Greek demos.

In other words, our word, people, is systematically ambivalent between the word for the whole and a translation of the Greek word, demos, or the Latin, plebs. I mean the same thing. Demos, populus, the plebs. The plebs were the non-elites.

I think this corresponds to the fact that when we talk about democracy, we’re using it in two senses and at two levels.

On one level and in one sense, let’s call it the Freedom House3 meaning. When we have various attempts to say what countries are democracies in the world, and they say, “Well, the condition is: rule of law and regular elections, which include everybody and which are free and fair.” This is very important. Those kinds of countries are democracies.

So, that’s one use of the word where you take the wider meaning of “people” – rule by the people – as the whole.

But there’s another use of the word where the demos enters in, where we want to discrim-inate between countries that are unquestionably democracies in sense one, and those that are more democratic than others.

2 Polysemous: “marked by multiplicity of meaning.” Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1973, p. 893.3 Freedom House is a U.S.-based 501 U.S. government-funded non-governmental organization that conducts re-search and advocacy on democracy, political freedom, and human rights. Founded in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt an Wendell Willkie, it’s a research institute or think tank with nearly $31 million in revenue.

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What do we mean by that? Well, we mean that some societies are less democratic in this sense: when they precisely have a tremendous imbalance in favor of the elites. People from the non-elites don’t have a chance to get certain things heard, to have certain changes made, and so on.

Democracy as a Telic Concept

Here, I want to introduce this idea of democracy, not the one in Freedom House, but the one I’m talking about now, as a telic concept. That is, it’s a form of government with a telos.4 The telos would be that everybody counts, at the limit, equally. There’s not a great imbalance in which elites have the power to shut out influence and issues from non-elites.

Here we get something which, of course, applies to a given society. If that’s understood in this telic sense, as its telos. It applies whether it’s at its telos or far away. As a matter of fact, you might argue, there’s never been a society that has totally realized this telos.

But why introduce it?

Because, I think, it makes a tremendous difference to the whole social and political at-mosphere whether we’re living in a period where it’s generally understood that we’re moving to-wards that goal, as against living in a period where it’s generally understood that we’re sliding away from that goal.

Cases like the moment in 1989. For a whole lot of societies, the way was open to become a democratic society. Or the feeling you had around Tahrir Square in 2011 in downtown Cairo, Egypt. Alas, it didn’t yield its promise. But you felt the promise those kids in that square felt at that moment: excitement, the sense that we’re moving in this direction.

That shows that, I want to argue, when you come to the social imaginary, that is, the way people collectively understand their society, we, the majority of us in democratic societies, un-derstand our society as a democracy in that sense – the telic concept. It’s something that ought to be one which is open equally to members of the non-elite and the elite.

With the consequences that there’s a great deal of very deep resentment built-in along with the sense that this is not so, that there are blockages.

In a sense, the very idea that we could come to this telos, come to the end of it all and not slide back, when you think of it, is really crazy. That’s the depressing part. Let’s get that over with first. Because when you look at the 200 years in which democracies have been operative, we’ve seen the roots or bases of elite power shift from landed power, to owning large industries, to now finance to having overweening possibilities of influencing our lives.

So, the very bases, roots or background of power – against which you have to work in or-der to achieve a society with the telos of democracy – change. Not only that, but even within a

4 Telos: “an ultimate end.” Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1973, p. 1199.

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given type of power structure, history changes. So that what looks like a good solution at time T is no longer one at time T + 1.

The Last 200 Years

So, let’s look quickly at the history of this continent, for instance, over the last 200 years. You had landed power, which was the dis-equalizer at the time of the foundation. Then you get to the Gilded Age with this great industrial and commercial power. In that period, you have movements one way, and movements the other way.

If you think of the Gilded Age, you have a situation to which there was this tremendous reaction in the 20th Century. Partly the progressives, partly Teddy Roosevelt with the business of anti-trust legislation and, of course, FDR with the building of the welfare state.

May it rest in peace. I mean - what I really mean is I hope it comes roaring back in No-vember! [Audience and Taylor laugh.]

But you get a tremendous shift, and at the same time in European societies, sometimes starting in the ‘30s, sometimes starting after the war, the building of the welfare states, recogni-tion of union power and so on. You get an equilibrating of power.

At these times, there was a great sense that we’re building something new, important and realizing democracy. One measure of this is a tremendous turnout of the voting population in many countries.

Since 1975, on the other hand, we’ve been sliding in the other direction, and the sense here is really palpable.

First Path to Regression: Accentuating Inequality

Why are these paths to regression easy? That’s what I want to pick up on now because that is at the heart of our problem. I’m talking now about the first path, which is the path to re-gression through accentuating inequality, an inequality that builds on itself.

Because unfortunately it doesn’t trigger automatically. If you have a very rationalist view of how democracies work, and of how democratic citizens work, you might think that automati-cally people will say, “This is terrible. We ought to do something,” and they would start voting in greater numbers and so on. But it’s rather the opposite.

I hope that’s what’s going to happen in November here. I want to talk about November in this country because we’re counting on you. I really mean it. We’re counting on you! But be-cause if things get really bad, maybe it needs Trump there to get people mad enough to overcome this.

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Self-Feeding Spirals

But normally, in the way things worked after what the French called Les Trente Glo-rieuses, thirty glorious years, ending in ’75, the things that were weakening popular power were in a self-feeding spiral.

People Stop Voting

People stop voting is the first reaction to people feeling, “We can’t do anything about this. We’re powerless. Nothing can be done. Why are we bothering to vote?” Well, that doesn’t send them back to the poles in the next election. On the contrary, what you get is a situation in which there are even less obvious avenues of political power. So, more people resign or throw in the towel and don’t vote.

Increasing Role of Money in Elections

There are also some other ways in which these spirals feed themselves. Or, another way of looking at that spiral is the absence of high voter turnout and the absence of well-organized parties, like social democratic parties, has meant that the role of money has increased in elec-tions. Where does the money come from? We get a tremendous influence of money in this coun-try after the absolutely scandalous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which nobody else in the western world thinks is good jurisprudence let it be said. I hope that it will, at some point, be changed and cancelled. As a result of that, a tremendous amount of money is pouring in from PACs and so on, which are in-creasing the power of money, buying Congressmen and so on. So, there again is a spiral.

Dumbing Down

There’s another kind of spiral which we really have to get control of, which is the spiral of what I want to call dumbing down. I think where you have very active parties on the left, movements of the left, putting forward programs, getting some of them accepted and so on, some kind of sense of what the mechanisms might be to further this are evident to lots of people. This is particularly the case when you get Les Trente Glorieuses, the thirty glorious years, after the Second World War. In many societies, there was a big party on the right, and a big party on the left. If you wanted more welfare and so on you’d obviously vote this way. If you wanted less, you’d vote that way.

Feminist, Gay Rights and Ecological Movements Fracturing Big Parties

Now there’s a much more fractured situation, partly for a very good reason. It’s because of the rise of these very important movements: the feminist, gay rights and ecological move-ments. They have somehow fractured these big party movements of the left. So, you get people being less and less clear on who they would vote for in order to get certain things they’d like done.

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Enter Trump

Now that is a kind of dumbing down, a sense of helplessness, a loss of connection, con-tact, or grasp on what causes what. So, some extraordinary, almost figure of fun, you might say, comes along and says, “I’ll make America great again,” and somehow a lot of people buy this. But the actual mechanism by which this clown is going to make America great again is invisible. You couldn’t, and if you started to figure it out, you wouldn’t figure it out. Maybe people are now figuring out the mechanism doesn’t exist.

But what I’m pointing out is that there’s a great loss of the grasp of how things work, which further drives people into abstention.

So, we have this kind of spiral going on. I want to make one last point on this first spiral. This is painful for many people. Why do I think that? Well, that’s another way of saying that the way people live democracy is via a social imaginary of democracy as a telic concept. But why do I say that?

Spain

Well, because when people come along and offer real hope of having an impact, people flock to that. “Yes, we can!” I remind you of a previous U.S. election. One of the parties arising in Spain is Unidos Podemos.5 Yes, we can! That excites people for a while anyway. They’re given a sense that, yeah, they can reverse this trend. Whereas they’ve been living in a period in which less and less does it make sense to believe that you can have democratic impact as a mem-ber of the non-elites. We see the possibility of moving in the other direction in the sense of rising morale.

Another way in which this is self-defeating is the decline in the vote through discourage-ment is much more evident among the poor than among the rich, among the less educated than among the more educated, among people who live hand-to-mouth as against people with a regu-lar income, among very often minorities as against the majority.

India

But just to introduce a word of contrast, democracy is a very varied thing. In India it’s ex-actly the opposite. You have people who are lower caste, people who are upper caste, people who are very poor, people who are very rich – and that’s partly because there’s a tremendous sense that the election itself is a realization of human equality because we’re all there together before the same polling station. At least for a while, the election itself gives one a sense that something important is moving in India.

Now, how long that will last is another matter because part of what hangs over my whole talk is that these things just never prolong themselves by themselves.

5 Unidos Podemos, or United We Can, is a Spanish left-wing, democratic socialist, feminist, environmental, anti-military political party founded in 2014.

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Second Path to Regression: Exclusion

But anyway, that is one important path to regression. What we’re living in now is the marriage of that path, the path of accentuating inequality, with a second path I want to talk about.

There, another great need of democracy is a very strong sense of collective identity. We, “the people,” belong to this democratic society and are bonded by, first of all, a certain set of common principles. But more than that is a sense of commitment to this particular project of re-alizing these common principles.

So, quite rightly, you in the United States, you’re not just in favor of human rights, equal-ity and so on. You keep referring to your founding decisions, instruments, and documents like the Declaration of Independence and so on. They’re yours. You feel very strongly about them. I admire them, but I don’t have the same feeling. So, this kind of unity is really necessary for a so-ciety.

It’s necessary because societies have to have their citizens give something. They give taxes and sometimes go to war.

Also, because, as deliberative communities, I have to have the confidence when I’m de-liberating with you about the common good that you are not just thinking of you guys back there in the corner. You’re thinking of all of us.

As soon as you get into a society with very widespread suspicion on the part of some people that those other people aren’t talking about us when they’re talking about the common good, you get independentist movements. I’ve lived that in Quebec and know very well how that works. These societies can’t hold together.

So, there’s no such thing as moving to a kind of total cosmopolitan consciousness beyond national identity, which some people propose. That would be fatal for democracy. There would be no, as it were, ground of that heightened solidarity you have to feel if we’re going to have re-distributive measures, redistributive taxation. I have to feel that the people who are the recipients of this are my compatriots.

But exactly that is brilliantly worked out by Jeff Alexander in his book The Civil Sphere (Oxford University Press, 2006). Although there are these senses of common identity, which are partly matters of principle and partly matters of historical unity, they can easily slide into exclu-sionary form.

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For instance, Mitt Romney’s famous 2012 speech6 illustrates the ethos underlying the common identity of the American Republican Right. It was supposed to be for a private audience but was, fortunately, recorded and made public. In that speech, Romney said 47 percent of the population are just sort of hanging on being distributed to. The implication is the other 53 per-cent are really Americans who are really giving to the society.

There are certain kinds of becoming excessive with people who read Ayn Rand and their minds get scrambled. That, somehow, the American Way means being so self-reliant the others can drop dead if they don’t have their own means of getting health insurance, etc., etc.

I’m exaggerating, but there’s a tendency towards turning the ethos toward an exclusion-ary instrument because, visibly, these people don’t live up to it.

On the other side, the particular historical markers of this project are very often ethnic. If you’re in any European country, for example France and Germany, it’s very easy then to pick on the outsider, the immigrant and so on who is not really belonging.

So, there is this slide that can easily take place.

What you have today with so called populism is a case in which the anger at the first de-generacy, the anger at the loss of power on the part of non-elites, or the fact that I’m losing my job and I can’t get another job and the government does nothing for me, is channeled by people who are mobilizing the demos. But they’re mobilizing it in a different way in each country, but on an exclusionary definition of “the real demos” – which excludes those other people outside.

Which is of course utterly disastrous for two reasons. First, it deeply divides the people. Secondly, it has nothing to do with curing the reasons why these people are finding their stan-dard of living declining or are not able to find a job and so on, which requires other kinds of measures than simply excluding those people.

Quebec, Canada

6 During a private fundraiser in May 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said,“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the govern-ment has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this pres-ident no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal respon-sibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.” David Corn, “Secret Video: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He Really Thinks of Obama Voters,” Mother Jones, September 2012 (Source: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/secret-video-romney-private-fundraiser; accessed 3/26/2017). See also Robert Farley, “Dependency and Romney’s 47 per-centers,” FactCheck.org, September 18, 2012 (Source: http://www.factcheck.org/2012/09/dependency-and-rom-neys-47-percenters/; accessed 3/26/2017)

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Here we get to something that is very varied from society to society, and this is where the remedy in each society has to look at these particular things. I want to talk about my own society and I mean not Canada as a whole but Quebec.

We had a society in which a tiny number of people were left, about 70,000 on the shores of the Saint Lawrence in 1763 when the French government signed over Quebec. In the famous Treaty of Paris, they had this discussion in which the English Navy took these French posses-sions and the French Army took Hanover and said, “Let us do a trade, guys. Okay, we give you back Hanover and what do we get? Well, on one hand, you had the rich sugar islands in the Car-ibbean and, on the other hand, Canada.”

“Quelques arpents de neige!” – this is what Voltaire said. “A few acres of snow!”— and that’s been wrankling ever since!

But anyway, you get this situation of 70,000 abandoned Francophones who have now brought about a society of eight million people, which is a vibrant society, a French society and so on. They have a great sense of having fought tremendous odds.

So, there’s a great worry about – when we had our commission7 and went around the province, the question that came up again and again: Vont-ils nous changer? Will they change us?

Interestingly enough, I was reading about the situation in Germany and the propaganda of the AfD8 in Germany and the same question arose, “Are they going to change us?”

So, you have this kind of, I think, very understandable worry – and you have to talk to that.

Just to carry on this example. It’s very interesting that you can find some way very often – people have complex identities – to talk against that by appealing to other things with which people are concerned or really attached to.

So, when we had in Quebec the Parti Québécois government in 2013-2014 proposing this charter which would force Muslim women, if they’re wearing head scarves, not to have employ-ment in the public sector, they had a poll that asked, “Are you in favor of this?” About 55 per-cent said Yes. Then they had another poll that asked: “Should anybody lose their job because of this?” Fifty-five percent said No. So, there were people who had second thoughts about that.

I think we can always find that for the nastiest forms of identity that tend toward exclu-sion, concrete human beings can very often be appealed to with something else.

7 In 2007 Canadian Premier Jean-Charest appointed Taylor and the sociologist Gérard Bouchard to Co-Chair a one-year Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodements reliées aux différences culturelles to study and explore the widespread, highly charged debate centering on the social accommodation of religious and cultural minorities in Québec. The commission published its 300-page report in 2008. For an abridged version see, http://red.pucp.edu.pe/wp-content/uploads/biblioteca/buildingthefutureGerardBouchardycharlestaylor.pdf; accessed 7/10/2018).8 Alternative for Germany, Alternative für Duetschland, AfD, a right-wing to far-right political party in German.

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But one of the toughest problems you find in this country, and to some extent in ours, too, is what Arlie Hochschild in that wonderful book, Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), calls “precedence notions.” That some people were here first, the Scotch-Irish. They get sort of first. Then, the other immigrants are sort of later, and then later and later and later. So, any act of great generosity towards these other people is seen as kind of queue-jumping.

Largely in the South, there still is this idea: rich white poor white black. So, these are very tough things to beat.

But you have to find a way of connecting people with something else in their identity with a larger movement. That’s the only way to beat these things.

In any case, we have here this very dangerous “populism,” and I want to object to a cer-tain use of the word.

I think the word populism is very logical to use in a way which applies to let’s say the progressives in the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th Century, and that applies to Bernie Sanders. What it is is a movement that says, look, the present system is shutting the people – in the sense of demos – out. What we have to do is somehow get channels – make a movement – that allows them to impact the decision-making process.

So, the way we should really be using vocabulary – and this is spitting in the wind be-cause populism has become so popular with the media – is we should say there’s good populism and bad populism.

You may not agree in detail with Bernie Sanders but he was onto something, which has some relationship to curing the ills that were actually driving people into the arms of Trump. Whereas Steve Bannon has nothing of that kind at all. So, we should talk about exclusionary populism and inclusionary populism.

Anyway, that’s a side thing.

Third Path to Regression: Defining Demos Against the Outsiders, and the Elites Pandering to Them

So, the third path of regression follows, in this case, from these two – accentuating in-equality and exclusion – though it could arise independently. That’s where you begin to define democracy as rule by the demos against enemies as a kind of excluded or external force – these elites.

In that situation you’ve abandoned the notion that a democratic electorate constitutes a single deliberative community which has to go on talking to each other, resolving problems, moving onto other ones, living together, having a long sense of commitment to each other.

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You break that with the idea that these are outsiders – in this kind of exclusionary pop-ulism. Both these outsiders, judged on exclusionary grounds, and the elites pandering to them, are not really part of the people.

So, anything goes as far as attacking, excluding and disempowering them and so on. The result of that is the present very anger-filled insult, for example, the intensive language of Marine Le Pen, or of the Trumpists or of certain Republicans who go along with them in this country. This, of course, is another disaster for a society.

So, here we have three paths to regression. There are others. But I’m naming these three because they happen to be working together in a kind of very bad synergy in many of our soci-eties, sometimes still incipient.

Like today in Germany maybe we can still fight back. Certainly, in France we stopped combatting Le Pen. But it could come back.

But this kind of deviation in our politics makes it very hard to win our way back.

Four Problems We Must Work on to Stop Hurtling to Regression

So, just briefly, what are the big problem areas?

First: The Need for Good Economic Policies

The big areas that we need very much policies in are, number one, we have to have good economic policies to insure the kind of neglect of the people we see in the rust belt areas of the world does not continue. The thing is we bought too easily certain kinds of facile neoliberal no-tions that somehow globalization, that is, trade liberalization, on one hand, and, as it were, jack-ing up productivity through technological change, on the other, and that these two together would make the global economy richer. True.

The other good thing that globalization did is that it made the global economy less un-equal across the whole because very poor countries managed to accede to a higher status.

But what these neoliberal notions didn’t do was to insure there were not sacrificial losers to this process within the advanced countries themselves.

The only societies that systematically insured against this were the Scandinavian social democracies, which had very complex – when Trump mentioned Norway I thought he sees, but it turns out he really didn’t see – ways of insuring that people are retrained, that they have the support and so on so that they aren’t just made the victims who pay for everyone else’s success.

So, we need good policies in this area.

Second: Fight Against Dumbing Down

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We also need ways of fighting against what I call the dumbing down. We need mobiliza-tions of different kinds. This seems to be happening in the United States. Now particularly, as I look at television of these kids from all over, but starting in Florida, I’m just so impressed. They’re so clear and focused on this, and they’re not taking all this nonsense like “You can’t do it.” “American rights,” and so on. They’re just not taking that.

Now is it possible that that will continue, and a lot of other movements, so that you are to the point – and this is the second great thing – where the mobilization is sufficiently powerful to actually overturn some of the legislatures in the western world and scare others who have to join the program in order not to lose their seats?

That is a real possibility.

When I first started thinking about this about three or four years ago, I was a little bit in despair because of the popular reactions to some of these very bad distributions. For instance, in-equality in both income and wealth, which has grown catastrophically, were producing great, popular protests like Occupy, for instance, in Zuccotti Park in October 2011.

But these wouldn’t link up with the actual political representative system in which people get elected to positions where they could actually change the legislation. It was horrifying to see some journalists who went around Zuccotti Park and asked, “Are you going to vote Democratic in the next election?” to which the reply was, “Vote? Vote? What’s that got to do with it? This is a completely corrupt scene here. We’re standing up….”

The same thing must be said about the Printemps érable in Quebec in 2012. Instead of the Arab Spring we called it the Maple Spring. Students turned out and campaigned against uni-versity fees and so on. This, again, was thought of completely as a movement that would some-how galvanize and produce the effect without anybody dirtying their hands with politics.

So, I was a little depressed on this score two or three years ago when I was trying to work all this out. Now I see that there is some kind of hope. But this is definitely my second big area where we have to become mobilized and organized.

Third: Think Through How to Organize Democracy at the Base

The third big area is, I think, we have to think through much more how we can organize democracy at the base.

There are certain cities in this country, and in other countries, where we have people do-ing community organizing of a very interesting kind. For example, when they bring people to-gether regardless of their political position but, taking account of influence and knowledge in the community, they talk together and rapidly overcome their sense of, “Well, you’re a Republican and I’m a Democrat,” or whatever the division is. They rapidly come to see some of the things that can’t be done. For example, certain possible replacements for an industry that has pulled out of this North Wisconsin town. I’m thinking of a real case that somebody I know is involved in. But this is something else which can be possibly brought in as an alternative.

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Two things go on. They not only get much smarter about what they have to work for, what the goals should be, and what they therefore should press state and federal governments to do. That’s one way in which dumbing down is overcome.

Secondly, the people actually change their view of who their allies are and who their ene-mies are because they come to understand each other. This is tremendously precious and, of course, can’t be, right now, generalized. But it’s something very valuable. The more you have these kinds of communities organized in this way in a society, the less dumbing down there is and the more clarity there is about what needs to be done.

You also have no-go areas for very poisonous kinds of divisive speech. These people can’t be divided anymore because you’re on one side and this one is on the other. They’ve learned to work together and to understand how much they owe to each other. So, they’ve be-come changed in their sense of politics and in their sense of who their allies are. That’s a third thing that really needs working on.

I wish I had more developed things to say about this. But I am a neophyte, I have to ad-mit. My niece is one of these organizers, and one of my great sources of knowledge about this.

Fourth: Find a Language to Talk to People Mobilized Against the Excluded

Bur, fourthly, and this is the most difficult thing, and it’s going to be different in every so-ciety. We have to find a language in which to talk to the people who have been mobilized against some other, against those who are excluded.

It is not going to cut it to say, “You are deplorable. You are backward.” Maybe this is true in some sense. But it’s not going to work. As a matter of fact, it’s going to work against us because that’s what Trump built on: “I’m not politically correct.” He got tons of votes saying, “I’m not politically correct.” Tons of votes saying in effect, “The ordinary decencies of human life don’t apply to the way I speak.” But nevertheless, phrased like that, it worked.

So, the issue is where are these link-points?

Where’s the equivalent to what I was talking about in Quebec of making a majority among people who don’t want to fire women who have studied in order to be teachers or nurses and happen to be wearing a hijab? There’s something really bad doing that. So that it will over-ride the sense of discomfort.

You also have to work on the sense of discomfort because, in this case, it really does de-pend on a lack of contact. Within Montreal, where there’s much more movement between popu-lations, you don’t have the same kind of fear to anything like the same degree.

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But there are measures which we put in our report9 which have been shelved by the gov-ernment, as inevitably happens, maybe not inevitably, in which we were trying, as it were, to present projects that increase contacts between Montreal and these more peripheral areas.

Now that can be pushed along, but you can’t go a hundred miles an hour. It’s something you have to work on over the long haul.

In the meantime, you have to get other kinds of points of possible common mobilizations which will bring in people who have very complex identities.

Imagine that you are somewhere in Appalachia or another part of the Rust Belt and you have lost your job. You’re mad. You’re not a feminist. You’re prejudice against people lower down on the precedence scheme to you. But, as a man, it’s expected of you to be able to feed your family – and you can’t. Your dignity is really undermined.

Well, everybody can understand that. You don’t have to appeal to being anti-feminist.

What I’m saying is that people’s identities are very complex, right? So that they have all sorts of elements in them. Some of which make you creep and crawl, and so on.

But there are ways of getting many of these people into the same political house – and only by doing this will you overcome politically.

But you also change them because of what I said earlier about local organization. People talking to each other become changed. They have another sense of themselves and who their al-lies are.

You can bring about change in that way by bringing them into some political movement with other people.

So, we all have to see – I mean I don’t know quite – I can see what French President Em-manuel Macron is doing. I can understand that. I can understand what we’re doing in Quebec. But every society has to work this out on its own depending on this precise understanding of what is getting to people. We have to understand what’s really getting to people, what’s really worrying them, and how they see things. That’s the only way we can hope to get out of this very bad case.

All right. So, there are three paths to regression on which we’re hurtling at a thousand kilometers an hour.

How can we stop it? Well, there are four areas we have to work on, each in our own country – and let’s start!

Thank you very, very much.

9 See footnote seven.

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Below are some links to essays and lectures that give some sense of how Taylor is developing his thoughts on democracy – SCP.

“The Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion”Journal of Democracy, Vol. 9, no. 4 (1998): 143-56(Source: https://muse-jhu-edu.libproxy.uoregon.edu/article/16921; accessed 8/2/2017)

“Is Democracy in Danger?” Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture, University of King’s College Halifax, Canada, November 6, 2012 (Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxgqwnBvCv8; accessed 12/13/12)

[A Paradox of Our Modern Democracies] Acceptance Speech, U.S. Library of Congress John W. Kluge PrizeWashington, D.C., September 29, 2015(Source: https://www.loc.gov/loc/kluge/prize/taylor.html; accessed 4/27/2016).

“Democracy and Its Exclusions: Political Identity and the Challenge of Secularism”ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation], Sydney, Australia, 5 April 2016(Source: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/04/05/4437500.htm; accessed 7/30/2016)

“Why Democracy Can Slip Away”Hunter College, New York, New York, October 17, 2016(Source: https://livestream.com/roosevelthouse/charles-taylor/videos/139152910; accessed 1/9/2017)

“Is Democracy Slipping Away?” The Democracy Papers, February 7, 2017 (Source: http://thedemocracypapers.ssrc.org/is-democracy-slipping-away/; accessed 10/3/2017)

“The Challenge of Regressive Democracy”McGill University Beatty Memorial LectureMontreal, Canada, October 12, 2017(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqZ4vG3fbTw&feature=youtu.be; accessed 10/21/2017).

“Democratic Degeneration: Three Easy Paths to Regression”The American Academy in Berlin, November 16, 2017(Source: http://www.americanacademy.de/videoaudio/democratic-degeneration-three-easy-paths-regression/; ac-cessed 7/9/2018)

“Democratic Degeneration: Three Easy Paths to Regression”The University of Chicago Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Director’s Lecture, March 26, 2018(Source: https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/events/uc/directors_lecture_with_charles_taylor/; or, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWq6TABAHhw; accessed 7/4/2018).

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