On Politics: Myths of Populism

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One of my favourite English expressions is to talk of someone missing the word for the trees, and it's a special risk for people who pay close attention to politics, but you can be so close to the new cycle that somewhat paradoxically you miss the larger scale changes behind individual events and eventually find yourself completely, politically lost. Politics across Europe has hardly lacked dramatic change over the past couple of decades. Often these have prompted commentary in the form of puzzlement. How could Britain vote to leave the European Union? How could post Soviet states vote for strongmen? How could post fascist parties so easily launder their reputations? How has socialism made it come back? And why aren't people just sensible or rational? Sometimes the many-headed conceptual hydra of populism is invoked as an explanation for this, especially as many parties set themselves up as the representatives of the real, the only real, people. Most often there is some anxiety behind these questions, anxiety about the difficulty of sustaining democratic politics in an increasingly factional culture, and whether the things the citizens want might be, in the end, incommensurable with each other. The certainty of 20 or 30 years ago certainly seemed to have slipped away. You're listening to On Politics on the LRB podcast, I'm James Butler, and I am joined this week by a thinker who has chronicled many of these political transformations for the London Review of Books, demonstrating time and a game, the way political philosophy can enrich and deepen our understanding of what democratic actors, citizens, politicians, protestors actually do. Jan Werner Müller is Roger Williams-Strauss professor of social sciences and professor of politics at Princeton University and author of, among other work, what is populism and contesting democracy with a very strong account of 20th century political thought, and a new book, Street Palace Square, the architecture of democratic spaces released just last month, and we will come to all of those, I think. Jan Werner Müller, welcome. Thank you very much for having me. I thought we'd start by casting our minds back 20 years or so, and 20 years ago arguably European politics looked quite different. We hadn't yet had the financial crisis of 2008 through 2010, 2004-05 saw terrorist bombings in Spain and in the UK. The constitutional project of the European Union had floundered, but the eastward expansion of the EU was pretty much cemented. The kind of politics we would think of as anti-systemic was not very powerful, so that the protest cycle that had accompanied the big summits, the sort of G8, well trade organisation and so on, they'd receded, and lots of the populist parties hadn't yet begun their rise. I mean, you know, an exception, I suppose, would be Poland, where you had Yaroslav Kaczynski just starting his first term as Prime Minister. Britain was still in the European Union. UKIP was doing very well at European elections at that point, but Britain was still in. Russia had for the first time sort of flexed its energy muscles. There was a brief strategic cutoff, I think, over a pricing conflict with Ukraine. Internationally, the United States and China, you know, looked in some way similar to what they are now. You could see things coming, the US was, you know, morally discredited, but militaryly powerful, very present, obviously in the Middle East at the time. Obama was just sort of rising to prominence. The Bush government was discredited. China had begun to surpassed individual European economies. The first anxieties in Europe about sort of export strength and competition with China had really begun to surface. The Al Gore film and inconvenient truth had been released in the United States. So climate change I think had begun to become mainstream at the time. I at the time was doing my interviews for university, and I remember sitting at this B2005, I think, sitting in a common room, you know, nervously waiting for you, and there was a political discussion. The big issue in the UK at the time was the ID cards. No two ID was the big movement. So that seems a very, very different place to what we are, what we're doing now. I think that would be just around the time that you were coming to the end of your period at All Souls College Oxford. Obviously you were very attentive to politics at the time. What elements in that political picture, that sketch I've just made, you know, are discernible in the carry-through today. And, you know, what's surprising in what's happened since? I mean, that's a long period of time. And it looks like a completely different world. Allow me to say two things and then add if I may a kind of meta-comment that relates back to what you said at the very beginning about trying to see the larger picture. So indeed, in retrospect, it can seem like a lot of the problems we had in those days were what you might for short-term call luxury problems from our vantage point today. At the same time, as always, we should resist the temptation of thinking that there was some kind of golden age or that everything in the 90s was completely quiet. As nowadays, people sometimes like to say, I would highlight two things in particular which are easy to forget. So one is that, yes, in retrospect, the fact that the so-called constitutional treaty for the European Union was rejected at the time can also seem like a luxury problem. It has hardly ever been talked about since, in the end, nobody felt that it was a huge problem, that this thing didn't pass in the Netherlands and in France. At the same time, when we look back now, we can also see that actually ever since the EU, which, to be sure, is not the same as Europe, has been in a lot of difficulties. So enlargement has effectively come to a stop. The story that was told to us, in those days still, about an ever expanding Europe. The story that was also told to us in those days, that Americans invade countries with their militaries to change them. Whereas the EU, I know it's a very obscure reference, but bear with me, is a little bit like the classic Hollywood horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the countries look the same, but they've been profoundly transformed from within. I'm not sure why people thought this was an appealing thing to say about the EU, but nevertheless, you get the logic that we do it peacefully and we are an ever expanding quote-unquote empire of member states, which forever will have become democratic, subscribing to the rule of law, peace and prosperity ever after. That story was still told to us in those days. What happened instead? Enlargement effectively has come to a halt. The EU for 16 years tolerated an autocracy in its midst. I'm of course talking about Victor Orbán's Hungary. What was always celebrated as the Franco-German motor of the whole enterprise has been stuttering and sometimes has these to function completely. And of course, Britain leaves EU. So I think that's one aspect where one can say, look, it was not inevitable by any means, but it's also clear that already then maybe there were some indications that things weren't quite going to work out as it had been promised by all the Euro optimists, Euro cheerleaders and so on. The other aspect would simply be relating to what you said about the United States. I think it's true, as you said, that it was morally discredited, but I think we should also not fall into the trap of thinking that George W. Bush was still an entirely normal American president, that everything in those days was fine. What we've seen today, beginning with, you know, the ominous choice of words, homeland, homeland security, the seeds were planted then. Again, that's not to say it was inevitable or it couldn't have gone any other way, but we should remember that a lot of things that happened back then were already not really in line with, you know, the kind of naive, idealistic visions of the United States that were sometimes still sort of told to us immediately after the end of the Cold War. One meta comment, if I may, I completely agree that it's very important occasionally to take a few steps back, try to see the larger picture, but there's also a danger if Polka Science, you know, becomes the sort of transporting and we'll probably get to that later in more detail, but I think one of the most pernicious, alas, tendencies of our day has been always to basically reach for one particular image or metaphor to capture what has been happening in the last 20 years or so. That metaphor or image is of course the populist wave or his Nigel Farage, whom apparently the wave was too puny an image given his own role once put it, the tsunami of populism. That has become the kind of go-to image or metaphor when one tries to understand what's been going on. And I think it's empirically, profoundly misleading, and it's also politically pernicious because the more that social scientists and pundits and politicians keep telling everybody that there is a supposedly inevitable wave. The more likely that so-called mainstream politicians are going to say at one point, "Oh, that's just nothing we can do other than to adapt to this supposedly inevitable development." I can say more about this later if you wish, but I think it's worth just pointing out that, yes, it's important to try to get the bigger picture, but it's not particularly fateful if our sort of interpretation of the bigger picture is, as it is in this case, misleading. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think in one sense, an image like that reduces a complex political system to something in which there is only one source of motion or one source of act, and that would be of those populist parties so called. I was interested in your response. You mentioned there was a brief flowering of thought about empire. I think a few years after that period that I was just outlining. Partly as a response to the question of sort of American empire, the bad empire versus a good sort of decented empire like the European Union, I remember reading a book by Jan Zulongka, I think it is, who advocated but also suggested that the way that the world was moving was towards a sort of decentralized system of almost city state like powers aligned in a network to sort of empire. Those dreams seem very much of their time. There seems to have been a much stronger move back to the nation state, maybe proving him wrong. I guess the other question here and one of the chief actors in over this period has been economic power in the shape of certain international banks, but also state institutions, central banks, European central bank in particular. I mean one of the big questions is whether the sort of sovereignist politics that characterizes lots of these anti-systemic or populist parties is simply an outgrowth of economic change, so whether they rise sort of after the big financial crisis or whether they are actually just predictable from that centralising drive of the European Union during that period, what do you think? Allow me again to say two things. So on one level, everybody has always already been a sovereignist. This idea that so-called mainstream politicians like sheep go to Brussels and then sell out the national interest and so on, that was never true. What was true is that occasionally somebody took a risk, probably the last person who truly did that in a European context for the sake of an ambitious project was Helmut Kohl for better or for worse, who really risked some whole capital for doing what he thought was the right thing. Although that was ultimately also justified with reference to the national interest. So in that sense, what sort of far-right populists keep telling us that everybody else is a starry-eyed, euro idealist at best, probably also just corrupt because selling out the national interest to so-called globalist forces, that was never true to begin with. But the other point is that when you look back on the sort of great seizura of the last couple of decades, so financial crisis, but then not to forget COVID, it's hard not to conclude that when the chips are down, nation states call the shots, they close the borders, they put it bluntly, decide to save certain banks or certain companies, and other players are sidelined. Again, if you think about the EU, there was a time when people thought, "Wow, the European Commission is really in the driver's seat. Jacques De Law has real visions of what to do." And that was not untrue. But especially during the so-called euro crisis, the Commission was completely sidelined by national leaders and arguably it has never truly recovered the role that some people in the '90s still and after thought that was now normal in terms of taking the lead in a European context. Do you think it's a mistake to read, as some people do, the conflicts over political representations, whether people are adequately represented at the European level and have genuine democratic, or decision-making power, and at a national level as well, there's a tendency to read those as expressions of economic malaise, so that they're ultimately contingent on distributional questions. So whether actually my concern over whether I'm democratically represented is really secondary or grows out of my desire to have more money in my pocket, or I've been experiencing wage stagnation where I'm left behind in some sense. I think you can probably tell from the way I'm asking the question I'm skeptical about this argument. I think you're right to be skeptical. There are many different interests, many different political ideas and identities in play. Again, we sometimes have the tendency to wish for a supposedly golden age when everything was simpler. I mean, calling crouches for a while, very influential diagnosis of post-democracy, maybe actually more influential and continental Europe than the UK was to some degree riding on this idea that there was a time when, in a sense, politics had been more straightforward, parties had more power. I'm not saying that's all wrong, but the idea that we could somehow time travel back into the 1950s, and that would be desirable or even possible, I think this clearly is clearly a mistake. A starry out, as it might sound, democratic politics is always a dynamic process where we don't have given interests, which are somehow going to be in a mechanical way, be reflected in the system. It's also a matter of, for better or for worse, parties or even for that metaphorical entrepreneurs appearing on the scene and telling people, look, what do you thought about your interests or even your identities in a different way? What if you've actually never really been represented because what you really care about isn't really on offer by way of a party? You can see sometimes dramatic changes. Think of the surprising success of Sinn Fein and Ireland, for instance, for a while, where you say, wow, somebody can all of a sudden scramble the whole seemingly very fixed system, and that can be punished sometimes to be sure, but it can also be in a good way, creative, and actually allow people to do things which they thought they couldn't do at all because they'd never seen themselves as a group that could be represented. They never understood that, actually, they might have certain important interests or for the matter identities in common with others. I think this is also often in the problem with strategies which have basically, to put it bluntly, told us that, okay, all these people who now vote for the far right, they're just confused, and if only a proper left-wing party explained to them that neoliberalism is the culprit, and then there's a genuinely good socialist option on offer, then they're all going to switch back. I don't mean to caricature, but this was a little bit what one of our, you know, colleagues in Polka theory, Shantelmouf got to implement in 2017 when she was advising Jean-Luc Milauchon. If you compare the 2012 election campaign that he did in France and the 2017 campaign, it was clear that he really was betting on left-wing populism. 2012, red flags everywhere, very universalist language, everybody who drowns in the Mediterranean is our concern because we are France, the universal nation. 2017, many more French flags, very Franco-centric rhetoric, I'm not saying that's in or of itself pernicious, but it was clearly a bet to say we're going to get voters back from what was then still the foreign national if we kind of make this offer. And if I remember correctly, the results were pretty poor, not overall for Milauchon, but in terms of how many people actually switched back, turned out, well, I think 2% or something like that. So to think that, okay, deep down, it's all economics, stupid, and you know, if only you explain that to people properly, then we can forget everything else. Clearly that's too reductionist and the usual pedantic insight from social science, everything is more complicated. It's a useful insight and one that I think politicians forget in the search for easy solutions. I mean, certainly to add, you know, it is the case that for a number of years, there have been any number of left-wing organizations, forces, political parties, which have attempted to articulate that sort of strongly disemphasized sort of national message, not necessarily anti-national, not necessarily anti-patriotic, but tried to move things onto the train of the economy. And it's obviously an incomplete solution in one sense or another. But this takes us nicely to the question of sort of left and right in contemporary politics, and one reading of the situation that we're in, or that we've arrived at, is we have the historic parties of left and right in Europe, so in Britain, labor and conservative, but these are things that are replicated elsewhere. These are being out-competed or broken up by newer, sometimes, you know, so-called populist, but certainly less sort of system-committed parties, ones which are more, you know, more ready to articulate a critique of the system as a whole. And sometimes those parties call themselves, you know, neither left nor right, transversal in one sense or another, but, you know, in my reading, they're certainly generally recognizable as coming from right or left, even if they have one or two policies. So, you know, I mean, here, implausibly, Nigel Farage has occasionally said things about, you know, utility companies and monopolies like that, which is, you know, traditionally left-wing position. But one thing that's certainly true is that they are less moderate generally than their predecessors, they're less inclined to the rhetoric of moderation. Anyway, is it useful to think of all these parties as populist? Does that label help us? Let me preface the answer by reminding ourselves of a saying from the 20th century from a French philosopher who said that anybody who claims that there's no longer left and right is usually not on the left. And I think this remains broadly speaking true today. Also, I think in retrospect is true when you think about, you know, the great 90s talk of the third way or when you think about what Macron was trying to present around 2017, who you remember. Also said, I'm actually beyond left and right. I'm the reasonable center. I don't care whether you used to be a goalist, a right-winger or a socialist. Anybody who's reasonable can come to me and and and join me. And I don't think it's an accident that a lot of these projects in retrospect were revealed to be a little bit more on the right than on the on the left. So I think basic distinctions, basic conflicts and cleavages, I think remain. They haven't fundamentally changed. I don't think there's a problem in and of itself with actors on the scene who can be perceived as to pick up your term less moderate. You can have strong demands. You can use strong language by all means, even insult your opponents without necessarily putting democracy into question. Democracy is not about consensus. It's about conflicts and hopefully resolving them peacefully in one form or another. So all of that, I think, is problematic. If we simply say, "Ah, so-and-so is shrill or so-and-so is new and unusual," and we then lump all this together as populism. For better or for worse, I've been trying to suggest that populists are those who are not just sort of anti-elitist or criticize the establishment. Any of us can do that. That can sometimes be wrong to be sure, but that's certainly not in and of itself very distinctive. Nor is it necessarily, of course, any sort of danger for democracy. What is dangerous for democracy, and that goes a little bit to the point about transversal strategies, is when actors appear on the scene who say, "I and only I, or my party and only my party, represent what populists then very often call the real people," with the implication that all other politicians are basically illegitimate. So it's not even about policy disagreements, it's not even about disagreements, about values, which again, is completely normal, ideally even productive in a democracy. And less obviously, anybody who then is said not to belong to this supposed real people, anybody who doesn't fit this construction, symbolic construction of normal people, real people, etc, is basically cast out. And of course, in the case of the right, this usually means already vulnerable minorities, without thereby suggesting that anybody who is far right is necessarily populist. I think that's an important distinction to bear in mind, especially in recent years, because we've now seen a number of quite obviously successful far-right figures, like Meloni, who are not necessarily populist, who do not necessarily claim that I and only I represent the true Italian people, but who in terms of policies are very clearly far-right. So you can be a populist without being far-right, you can also be a left-wing populist, and you can be on the far-right, and actually in a certain way, even be quite elitist. It's sort of long forgotten as a phenomenon, but there was a party in Hungary during some of the urban years called Yobik, that in its own way was quite elitist, but very clearly far-right, in some degree, even neo-Nazi. So again, a pedantic reminder that we need to be very careful with these, with these concepts, partly to avoid the temptation to kind of, you know, follow the pundit line, that oh, we live in the age of populism, anything we see now as populism, and thereby potentially also declaring illegitimate some court-encored newcomers on the political scene, who one might not like, but who certainly aren't a danger for the democracy in the way that the person who claims this monopoly of representing the real people is always a danger, as we've seen with Orbán, Trump, Erdogan, etc. And is there for you, I suppose, it's a political theoretical question, really? I mean, there's a long tradition of revolutionary thinkers, desiring to find that the volante generale, the general world, the popular world, the idea that there is, you know, discernible or, you know, something can be arrived at and that represents an authentic expression of the will of the people as a whole. Is that idea simply fundamentally anti-democratic? Not necessarily. It's a question of how you talk about it. First of all, I think it's worth clarifying that all populists are anti-pluralists, but not all anti-pluralists are populists. So if you're a Leninist, you're likely to be pretty anti-pluralists, dare I say, but you're also likely to be very elitist in a certain manner, because you will say that you're heading a vanguard party and the party knows best. And it's perfectly fine if the party is relatively small. Parti doesn't necessarily claim to represent, you know, real people as they are out there, because the real people out there, you know, at best might get to trade union consciousness and will not truly understand what they actually want, how to bring about, you know, the best possible revolutionary outcome and so on. That's one point. The other one is indeed, do you basically treat something like a popular will by which you really mean a large majority, let's say, in favor of something, as a fellible proposition, such that you could be proven wrong at the polls, or do you, this reminds us a little bit of what someone like Carl Schmidt and others were saying in the 1920s. Do you treat this as something quasi-mystical that what Schmidt dismissed as a kind of purely mechanical statistical exercise of actually counting votes in this privatistic individualistic thing called, you know, voting booth and the ballot box and so on, they can basically dismiss this. This explains why I'm not saying always, it's not an empirical regularity, but still it is striking how often the kind of popular I'm talking about are disputing election outcomes, because if you say that you and only you represent the people, then by definition, it cannot really be happening, that, you know, you don't get an overwhelming majority at the at the polls, you know, minus the nefarious elites, of course, minus the people who don't really belong to the people, so to speak. Hence it's, I think not an accident that what Trump has done, even though it's an extreme case of this, is actually not so unusual. They want to repeat elections. Remember what Erdogan did in 2019 when he, you know, first time around in Istanbul, didn't get the right outcome. Or at the very least, they do want, I think in 2016 or 17, the losing candidate of the far right in Austria did, after he had surprisingly for him, lost against a Vienna-based green party professor of dubious ethnic origin. I mean, ticked all the boxes in terms of not being the real people. This couldn't, couldn't possibly be true that the men of the people lost against a figure like that. So he said, it's a little bit hard to translate, but I hope it comes across clearly enough. He said, well, he has been counted for, i.e. the count was in his favor, but he has not been chosen, as if there was somehow two options. So one is, you know, the boring, we count, we count the, you know, the ballots, and then somebody has more than somebody else. And then there's quasi-mystical other process where somebody isn't really actually elected, almost religious in a certain way. I hope you can see what I'm trying to say in terms of they open up this sort of difference between, what they imagine are, you know, different at different outcomes. And that's dangerous. Having said that, again, pedantic addition, of course, is perfectly fine to lose an election. And then say, look, there are structural problems here, campaign finance in the US being an obvious one, where you say, I hear our system has deep, deep structural problems. But saying that is a little bit different from basically standing there and claiming it's rigged because I didn't get elected. That seems to me to be fundamentally important in some ways. I mean, you know, the story in Hungary, of course, is an interesting one on this front where, you know, a candidate has contested what are very obviously slanted elections and one, you know, the defenders of all bands say, well, this proves that he's not a strong man because, you know, it was possible to contest an election and he he conceded it. I mean, I think that's obviously in some sense, you know, not true. One of the importance in maintaining the distinctions that you are, you know, allows us to take a critical viewpoint of defenders of the system. So it's one of the, one of the real problems, I think at the moment, is there is an anti-populist political argument which says, oh, actually, all the institutions are fine. What's worrying here is the idea that people should be too involved in politics, that actually politics is a technical skill that the institutions require, you know, sensible people at the centre who will administer it correctly and you get to approve of it once, you know, once every so often. That seems to me to be as dangerous, perhaps less obviously so, but it seems to sort of, you know, have very, very deleterious consequences for the legitimacy of a democratic system. And I wonder, So whether you have a sense, there's a number of left-wing partial defenders of a populist politics who would say that populists are actually just doing democracy, right, that they are making appeals directed towards the people and criticisms of them very rapidly become anti-crowd criticisms of the kind that were visible in the late 19th century or which characterized lots of sort of 20th century thinking about extremism, and actually they just portray a sort of fear and hatred of the masses. Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense and I also agree with your implicit criticism of technocracy. In fact, we've often seen a really vicious circle between on the one hand and technocracy, on the other hand, the kind of populism I'm talking about. So when figures appear and say there is a uniquely rational solution to the policy, policy problem, it's bound to provoke others to say, wait a minute, democracy without choices, that's not democracy at all, where are the people in this? And that's perfectly legitimate, but if then, you know, these same actors end up saying only we represent the people, then actually we have sort of two contending anti-pluralisms. We have a technocrat who says we are the only ones who know the right solutions. If you disagree, you reveal yourself to be irrational, and then basically anti-pluralists to say only we represent the real people and if you don't agree with us or stand with us, you're basically a traitor to the people or to the nation. And I fear we saw this in a very strong form during the Euro, so called Euro crisis, when you know, very strong technocratic claims, you know, there's only one thing we can do in this situation, provoked indeed in some countries a reaction, which I would not actually necessarily call populist in my sense, yes, they called themselves populists, which of course you can say is an argument against what I'm saying. But I think they also very quickly actually went from, we will actually represent everybody against a tiny elite in Spain, that say with Podemos, to becoming somewhat more recognizable as you were also saying earlier on, left wing, left wing parties with certain policies, who sometimes criticized their opponents as corrupt, which again, is sometimes got for a bit maybe justified, but who didn't deny outright that anybody who wasn't with them was by definition totally illegitimate. And that's the kind of thing that either with us or against us rhetoric, which you will see in which again, is very likely to lead to much more authoritarian outcomes. Just one more word I completely also agree that it's been very convenient for many people to very casually blame certain outcomes on the people themselves. I'll just give one maybe less obvious example. For a while it was very convenient to say, oh, well, it's so bad that Poland and Hungary went down this so-called "illiberal" but the effect to just outright anti-democratic path. But you know, what can you do, our brothers and sisters in central Europe, they suffered under dictatorship for so long, they probably have authoritarian attitudes, they didn't really understand multiculturalism, no wonder they can be mobilized in the name of inciting hatred against refugees and so on. If you look at actual opinion surveys, you cannot make the argument that somehow these countries are inherently much more illiberal than other countries. Yes, they're important, different, simple cultures, nobody denies that. But the sort of sense that, yeah, there was demand for an Orban, there was demand for a Kaczynski and these governments and fulfilled these demands is simply wrong. Plus, when they won their decisive election, so Orban in 2010 and Kaczynski in 2015, they went out of their way to say, we are normal central right parties, we're not doing anything funny in terms of abolishing the rule of law, vote for us because there's going to be a new constitution, vote for us, there's going to be new judges, they kept all that very carefully hidden. So you can't blame people for basically doing what democratic theory would tell them on a certain level, which is in a sort of two block system, if you're, you know, dissatisfied with the one lot, you give the other lot of chance. I mean, it couldn't be more banal than that. And that's exactly what both Orban and Kaczynski initially played on. I think it's exactly this kind of condescending, especially Western European view, that says, ah, citizens, you know, unenlightened, you know, desperate for something illiberal and so on, which is empirically simply not correct. We're listening to unpolitics on the LRB podcast, bear with us now as we take a very short commercial break. The National Gallery has an online art history course called The Story of Painting. You'll explore the secrets, mysteries and tales behind a thousand years of painting through expert teaching, lively online discussion and reading recommendations. It's designed for curious beginners and art lovers alike and book your place today, just start your journey, just search for National Gallery Story of Painting. And you can select the modules you're particularly interested in or join for the whole year and watch the online lectures live on weekday evenings or catch up with the recording afterwards in your own time. You're listening to unpolitics on the LRB podcast, I am James, but I am speaking with Yann Vannermulla on the paradoxes of populism and the strange transmutations of democratic politics in Europe. I wonder, I mean, in your account, so the anti-pluralist characteristic of populism as you've described it, that seems to me to rule out a great number of parties on the left, which have either built themselves, as you say, or get talked about as populists. So it makes it much more recognisably within European politics today, at least, a phenomenon of the right. As you say, historically, a sort of conspiratorial or insurrectionist or Leninist party would very clearly fall under that kind of anti-pluralist label. But maybe that's a way into thinking about kind of exceptions to this. So as we've said, there is this overarching story of these historic parties being discredited or sort of evacuated or hollowed out in sort of Peter Mayer's very famous kind of analysis and these other parties rising as kind of challenges to them. And I wonder if we can talk about exceptions there. So a partial exception may be in Spain at the moment, where the socialists in Spain, you know, that is the historic social democratic party in Spain. They've made quite a significant return after the sort of withering of Podemos, a similar picture, less pronounced has happened in Greece, Syriza has sort of retreated. Passok is polling better than it has. I mean, obviously, they're not in power and not in government. You know, is the story just a little bit more complicated than I've outlined? It's sort of long been a cliche that social democracy in crisis and crisis, that the century of social democracy, the 20th century is over. And for various reasons, that's, of course, not totally false. But at the same time, if you ask the proverbial person on the street, even, you know, ask them what a socialism, I dare say they will come up with some kind of answer and probably the most likely answer today revolves around social housing and certain affordability issues. The center right actually has a much more serious problem in terms of being unable to define what it is truly about. That's particularly true of Christian democratic parties, but I think it's true of the so-called center right more broadly. For a long time, of course, they also went around saying we're consciously unidulogical. You know, it's the other parties that do poke philosophy. You know, we are just competent. But in many countries, that promise took a big hit in the last couple of years. I'm partly again because of COVID. You know, yes, there was a very strong anti-incumbency effect afterwards, but I think in a certain number of countries, you know, basically parties which had seen as we know how to do this. You know, we're good at managing things, I'm thinking in particular of Germany. They took a big hit. So all of a sudden, I think that's actually where a much bigger problem is. And of course, the weakness of the center right often translates into the strength of the far right. So that's point number one. Point number two is that as incredibly banal as it can sound, retail politics, presence on the ground is still an incredibly important part of democratic politics. You just saw it in Hungary. You saw it with Mamdani. I know, this is really, you know, you don't need poke theory professors to tell people this, but it is astonishing how often it is ignored in favor of consultants who will tell us, oh no, you got to finesse your message about immigration. Just a tiny bit more this way or a tiny bit more that way. If we think about upcoming elections in the eastern part of Germany, where again, everybody is so ready to have some long historical cultural explanation of authoritarian attitudes throughout the decades and so on, it's rarely pointed out that parties other than the far right have no strong presence on the ground, have never really taken root after 1990. And that makes a big difference because yeah, the far right is the far right. And they say many things which are, you know, profoundly problematic to put it very politely. But the far right also is just there and says, tell me about your problems. I'll help you with, you know, bureaucracy and so on. Again, this is incredibly basic, but it is astonishing how often it's been forgotten. And then lastly, I think more difficult is the question of what to make or what in the last decade or so emerged as so-called digital or platform parties, where especially, you know, with figures like Milo or Shaw, but also remember, Grillo in Italy, one saw the attempt to work out a somewhat new model. Again, democracy ideally is an open dynamic system. You should be able to run these experiments without immediately, you know, paternalistic voices saying, oh, that's dangerous because it's new and it could be populist and so on. I think the worry there is simply that a lot of these experiments in certain ways turned out to be fairly authoritarian. So I think it's not a secret that Milo Shaw actually runs LFE in a way that is not exactly living up to some ideals of, you know, openness and everybody really has a voice and so on. So I think either at when in this way or it went in the direction of becoming, as we discussed earlier, relatively quote unquote normal, more or less left wing parties, you know, one can lament that, but one can also say, look, it showed to citizens that something new is possible. They aren't always stuck with the same actors. As we also discussed, it's not a sign that democracy is in trouble if something like a left, right, divide on certain issues remains visible. So in that sense, I think it would be too quick to say, ah, you know, all bad and nothing good came out of it. At the same time, this very strong promises, I think it's fair to say, haven't been kept. It's a useful way, and I think of thinking maybe a little bit more about, you know, the question of democracy in itself. You use a line, quite a famous line from a Hungarian, I think famous in a very limited circle, but from a Hungarian political theorist's van Bibo, as an epigram to one of the chapters on your book on 20th century political thought that being a Democrat means primarily not to be afraid. And I think anyone can look at kind of contemporary politics in Europe, in Britain, certainly in the United States, and see that fear is really, really present. It's a strongly animating force for lots of politics. You know, whether that's in terms of sort of economic fear, whether it's in terms of racial fear, whether it's in terms of fear about security and enemies both internal and external. And I wonder, you know, as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the political shape of the 20th century, which faced some very serious situations with very good reason to be fearful, is this an unusual condition for democracies to be in? I'm generally reluctant to use the term polarization because it's often very casually thrown around. It's assumed that, you know, strong conflicts in a democracy are in and of itself a problem for democracy when that is clearly, clearly not the case. It's also, I think, profoundly misleading to talk about the situation in the US as simply a matter of polarization when the real issue is that one of the two parties has become a far right in many ways anti-democratic party. And we should, you know, really call a spade a spade as opposed to this potentially euphemistic language. Having said that though, it is true that we have an increasing number of what you might call for shorthand blackmail elections. This can be obviously very pernicious. A far right populist say, if we don't win, they're going to take the country away from us. We're going to have, you know, evoking the infamous conspiracy theory, the great replacement, which is when you think about actually really a threat of genocide at the end of the day, which, you know, really is obviously very, very pernicious for any democracy. And I don't mean to say it's quite the same as the reaction you sometimes might have to that, but the reaction is also a form of blackmail that operates with fear. I mean, remember, my call in '24' basically saying, oh, give me another election outcome where good small our Republicans in France are going to show to us that I still have an overwhelming majority and basically the specter of the far right is so fear-inducing that this is going to generate a certain legitimacy for my projects and policies, which, as I've become clear by then, where sometimes extremely controversial didn't really work any more and so on. So I think this is bad for democracy. And what's the answer? Well, for short-hand, and I know it's going to sound again, very banal on one level, parties have to think about real attractive, programmatic commitments, as opposed to simply saying, vote for us because we are not the far right or vote for us because, you know, we supposedly have heard you and we're going to follow the Danish model and, you know, be ever more restrictive about immigration and that's sort of our only selling point, really. I think these are all very bad responses. They all do write simply on fear instead of simply saying, look, so many other problems are calling out for answers. Again, in a way that I fear has become very cliched by now. If you think about the Mamdani campaign in New York is just astonishing that something like this could have happened, it was among other things a way of saying, look, I hear you about your actual daily problems and here are some ideas of what to do about them. Again, couldn't be more banal in terms of what democratic politics should be about, but so often it's astonishing how in particular social democratic parties, let's not talk about the UK even in this context, don't seem to get this message, which there are not many very robust findings in social science, one has to concede. But you don't win by imitating the far right. That is a pretty robust finding. And so many are not seeing it, are not hearing it. And so many indeed, instead, seemed effector to go for a certain kind of project, project fear in the way that I think you recently wrote about this. There might be now this sort of labor calculation that says, oh, if it's us against reform, even progressives who don't like us will come back to us and we're going to win it if it's set up like this. I just don't think this is a good approach in terms of the overall health of a democracy. - I wonder, it's a very simple question, but one that's very hard to answer. Is there a feature of kind of political psychology among social democratic parties that doesn't allow them to hear what is a very robust finding in social science that that sort of imitative strategy doesn't work? - I'd rather not speculate about people's psychology because then they might start speculating about my psychology. But I think there certainly is what in the US is sometimes called reactionary centrism, which is the view that if you somehow find yourself in the middle and if you also suggest that, yeah, of course, there's an extreme right that is very dangerous, but there's also an extreme left that is very dangerous, and you sort of start to triangulate. You must be doing something right. I think that has often had very pernicious effects. I'm not saying that centrism is always necessarily purely opportunistic or there was nothing to it. In, let's say, the context of the 20th century when occasionally it did make sense as a certain form of liberalism. But in our day and age, I think it simply means that you basically reflexively without really thinking conjure up some incredibly dangerous specter of quote unquote, "wokeness." Then you equate it with a far right. So in the American context, yes, Trump is dangerous, but cancel culture on campus is also very dangerous. And then you sort of do this tortured middle path in such a way that what you've actually ended up doing is make lots and lots of concessions to the far right. And I think this remains an attractive model alas for plenty of liberals in the wider sense of that term, for plenty of social Democrats. And I fear again, it's the kind of lesson that one could easily take away from what, after all, was a very important election hungry. That people now say, "Ah, it's because Madhya sort of, you know, was also tough on immigration and wasn't sort of a euro idealist." Hence, you know, that was confirmed. Not seeing that, again, what really made the difference was the anti-corruption rhetoric was the incredible presence on the ground, goes back to the point about retail politics. And the fact that he's now actually willing to do things which look much more left-wing should maybe give pause to those who say, "Ah, the center right just needs to borrow a little bit "from the far right, and that's going to be the ticket "for winning elections." - Yeah, I'm going to ask you a couple of questions. One is first about reactionary thought. So, you know, and I think it's something that sort of hovered over this bit of the conversation. You read a wonderful book on the sort of the Naq Laban of Kalshmit, Nazi jurist, and his reception in political thought. I'm very interested in kind of anti-democratic thinkers. In a way that's actually sometimes, I think, a bit of a cliche for left-wing thinkers is to be interested in these kind of quite radical anti-democrats. But it's striking to me that we go back to what we were talking about at the start. 20 years ago, the presence of Kalshmit in, you know, among sort of thinkers was very much to do with sovereignty and the exception to sovereignty. And there were obvious causes for this partly. The influence of a gambon was everywhere in political thought. But also, you know, the US was running these sort of extraterritorial camps. And it was a very strong, you know, very clear issue about where exceptions to legal regimes take place. Today, that aspect of Kalshmit's thought seems to have receded. And what seems to be central instead, certainly for thinkers on the new right, and certainly for people who try to grapple with what's happening in European politics, but politics more generally, is that that fundamental friend-animated distinction, right, which, you know, is taken up by lots of thinkers in different ways, often very crudely. And I wonder if you just have, you know, some way for people who are, you know, who are searching for a kind of democratic renewal to get around that sort of very brutal sort of Schmittian distinction between friend and enemy, which is taken to constitute basically the entire basis of political thinking. - It's maybe worth reminding ourselves that the appearance of Schmittian concepts and ideas on the left in the '90s had something to do with a broadly speaking post Marxist left looking for anti-liberal resources. And what has happened since is that, of course, various forms of Marxism themselves have come back. And not really obvious anymore that you can do all that much with Schmitt, except for the occasional sort of hit and run job in terms of basically doing something with complacent liberals or saying very general things like, well, maybe there was a kind of post '89 liberal promise of indeed trying to displace all political conflicts into either ethics, immoral questions, human rights, or economic questions in the way that Schmitt had diagnosed in the '20s. So I think that explains why this sort of scene has changed quite considerably. At the same time, we have a rise of a so-called post liberal in many cases outright anti-liberal hard right, very often Catholic, maybe more in the US than in the UK where post liberalism has taken a very different shape. And these folks are very often outright anti-Schmittian, even if they kind of tell nice stories to do with, you know, Thomas Aquinas and subsidiarity and so on. Ultimately, when the chips are down, it is the strong state that is recognizably Schmittian in certain ways. Now to actually answer your question, I think here I actually agree with Shantan Muf, who I think sort of phrased it exactly right when she pointed out that conflict in a democracy is completely okay. You just need to treat your opponents as political adversaries and not as enemies who ideally are gonna be disappeared from the scene entirely. And again, you know, far-right populists would say there's a real people and would say that everybody else is corrupt and shouldn't be here to begin with. They clearly don't share this view of adversaries. And they don't really recognize any legitimate opposition, which is also why, as also alluded to earlier, they have such a problem with election outcomes when they lose, because the other side should never really be in power. You know, in the Trump case, obviously, if you think about the other side as just simply un or anti-American, they have no, they simply have no right to govern. And again, as basic as this is in terms of democratic theory, as our great colleague, the Comparative Politics scholar Adam Schewolsky pointed out, democracy is a system where parties lose elections. And when you start saying, no, we must never lose an election, it's a problem for democracy. It's as simple as that. - Trump gives us a nice way into thinking about buildings. He's extremely obsessed with, I mean, there's just been the Kennedy Center ruling which has irritated him greatly, which is very gratifying, I think, for the rest of us. But your latest book takes up this question of democracy in rather a new way, actually. So lots of your work has been concerned with the conceptual, with the question of political ideas, how people think about politics and how people practice politics. This book is also about how those ideas are incarnated for a bit, for one to a better word, in the spaces and buildings, and places that democracy happens. In the period that we've been talking about, lots of Europeans poured into public squares in parallel with the Arab Spring, and the square, the Agorah, the Pnex, not technically I suppose a square, it is a primordial image of democracy, right? And that's one of the spatial concepts you use in the new book. And that seems to me, the book seems to me to be a way of using these buildings to think about the question of publicness, how democracy takes place in public. And the requirement of physical proximity, which is of course a really strong feature of ancient democracy, of Greek democracy in particular, as you point out with, and I think it's Cicero, who points out that sitting down is a feature of Greek democracy. And the question of scale, whether things are too large, too small, and the symbolic power of buildings. I'm just wondering, was there a queue to turn to the spatial question, rather than the conceptual form of democracy? Believe it or not, it had something to do with that inevitable thing, populism. So I was precisely worried that there was a tendency, and you alluded to this earlier, that populism is also, you know, any sort of crowd, let's say in a square, and then there's a person with a half open white shirt on a balcony, and the masses are always so ready to be seduced by the great demagogues, a real revival of 19th century mass psychology with all its profoundly pernicious prejudices about the masses as irrational, also as feminine, and so on. And I was just interested in how can we think about the co-presence of people differently? Clearly, there's been somewhat of a tendency, sometimes spurred by Vincent Bevin's important book about the last decade to be somewhat dismissive, saying, oh, yeah, people assemble all the time, but in the end, nothing really happens. I would count opposed to that, the findings of a great colleague of mine here, Mark Bicinger, who showed in a book called the Revolutionary City, that actually, when people get close to a seat of power and can hold the space long enough, there's a good chance that something will actually happen. Now, the problem, as with all these things, is that the autocrats have also read Mark Bicinger's Revolutionary City by now, and they will have perfectly understood how important it is to keep people away. I mean, putting kind of pioneer this in Moscow, in terms of, you know, when he was still sort of keeping up a facade of democracy, legality and so on, always telling people, yeah, you can demonstrate, but in this very far away place, which also has, you know, echoes by now, I fear, in basically established democracies, where we've seen many, many restrictions on freedom of assembly. I don't need to give you a lecture about the Public Order Act in the UK. You remember what Meloni has done in Italy. This is already in many ways, a quite fragile, right? It's a right where, you know, we always add the word peaceful. We don't do this with other rights. We don't say, you know, free speech, but only peaceful, usually. Most subject to prior restraint, they need to get permissions and so on and so forth. And while I don't want to idealize it, in terms of, you know, this is bound to generate positive effects, it remains incredibly important, and we should be more worried than we are, I think, about the sort of creeping pushback against people's ability to spontaneously get together and live with the uncertainty that we're never quite sure what's going to come out of people spontaneously getting together. The question of the sort of symbolic aspect of democratic politics. I was thinking about this a bit. When thinking how much better Americans are at, with some serious caveats at the moment, but how much better Americans are at, the ceremonies of democracy. So I was thinking about this in terms of, sort of, Mamdani's inauguration, which was this sort of huge, festival day, really, in New York, and the willingness to participate in what are, you know, effectively, you know, the secular religion of democracy. That's much harder to discern in British politics, partly because I think British people tend to find it a little cringe-worthy to be so earnest and sincere in public. It's just a matter of national temperament, I think. But I was struck, and I was thinking about a passage that Anir and Bevan writes in his book In Place of Fear, when he's addressing, basically, this is in his kind of more or less his post parliamentary days, but he's addressing, you know, that a new, you know, an imagined new labor MP, and he says, you know, you'll come into the palace of Westminster and you will see that it's covered in these frescoes of the history of the people who are not your people, right? And so he's quite a quite strong kind of class sense of what that palace means for a sort of socialist parliamentarian arriving, right, that it's, you know, that it's a resistant space. At the same time, I actually think that, you know, that the accidental space that is the debating chamber is pretty good. I think it's good to have people facing each other. I think it's good to have a sort of formal agonism there. But Bevan is concerned about the way in which sort of symbolic forms, architectural forms, artistic forms can be used to sort of to baffle the expression of democratic politics. And that leads me, I think, onto a question, is there a democratic architecture? Is there a single kind of aesthetic expression of democratic values? I'm glad we have three hours left to resolve this very simple issue. Allow me one word about Bevan. I would draw the things between two dynamics, if you like. So I don't think it's inherently problematic, let alone undemocratic, if such buildings come across as dignified. Because after all, something important is happening there. Somebody is making collectively binding decisions which, you know, when the chips are down, authorize state agents to coerce people and, you know, use the legitimate means of Ireland. So this is not just an entertainment complex. This is somewhere some place of people should in a sense get the idea that yeah, it matters. what goes on here. But it doesn't mean that any sort of particular national history has to be glorified. Let alone that, as again, plenty of far-right populists have done in our own day, architecture gets instrumentalized in order to communicate messages about the real people, as we've seen with Adeduan in Turkey, to some degree, Orban in Hungary, also more than India. That's been a very strong tendency to say, actually, yes, we want to use iconography, to get our point across about what the real India is, what the real Turkey is and so on. And that is indeed, then, a good reason to say, I feel alienated. This is not for me. This is not my story. This immediately sends me a message about the body exclusion, which I think in an indirect way points a little bit to an answer to your main question now, which is that, of course, spaces should be inclusive and should maximize possibilities for different kinds of agency. Beyond that, what you find plausible will depend a little bit, again, pedantic as it might sound, on your initial conception of democracy. Because as you also hinted at an agonistic conception of democracy, yes, that's more likely to point towards something like the House of Commons where you say, look, what is most important for us is to dramatize conflicts, to give people a clear picture, this lot stands for this and that lot stands for that. But of course, there are other entirely legitimate understandings of democracy, which would prioritize other elements. So it's more a fundamental question of what is sort of the core activity. Democracy is actually just a range of activities. It's not just one thing. And then depending on what these fundamental decisions look like, spatial configurations might also look somewhat different. What you can't do, I think, against easier to kind of go negative and say, well, it can't be this is, well, just grasp for the most blindingly obvious example right now, is what Trump is doing in terms of, you know, the ballroom is clearly not a democratic space because it's a perfectly controllable, curated audience that is going to be there for acclimation. Nothing surprising will happen there. And it's also telling that all the spaces around the White House are at least as of now, as far as I know, completely blocked off in the name of, as the phrase now goes on all these big banners, making DCs safe and beautiful. The effect of the outcome is that people can't protest, they can't get anywhere near the powerful. That is recognizably something that's not very democratic. And last point, I'm not equating the two, but the Trumpian tendency to basically only care about façades, to only want certain effects, to basically just use architecture as a form of creating a stage for then a display of power, that certainly has dark echoes in the, in the 20th century. It's something, you know, everybody knows the story about Hitler wanted to be an artist, and Hitler wanted to be an architect. He more specifically wanted to be a sort of architect of stages. And if you look at the actual then designs for what would have been the world, capital, you know, Giamania, according to Albert Speer, it's all first parts. It's all about overwhelming people in a certain way. Again, I'm not equating what Trump does with, you know, fascism outright, but we should also not shy away from sometimes saying, yeah, these, these calculated effects are very, very similar. And I'm not even going to mention the Trump for large. I have a, a final kind of spatial question for you and it's partly to do with that sort of sense that, you know, democracy depends on proximity in one sense, right? And one of the characteristic problems, you mentioned the Vincent Babin's book, which, you know, grapples with some of these issues, when the characteristic problems I think of our, you know, of our moment, is the way that a kind of digital politics has arisen, which constitutes each individual as, as just an individual, right? Not as someone who's a participant in a collective body of one kind, or another. And so when they discover experiences of collectivity, they can be both extremely powerful, but also extremely, extremely disordering, but also quite weak, right? My question, so these, these three, the three concepts which organize the book, Square Palace Street, these are in one sense distinctive democratic spaces, right? They are distinct from each other. On the other hand, they interact in the lovely poetic phrase of the reactionary poet, I suppose, but a very good one, WB8s is, it's not unusual to hold the little streets upon the great, that is a thing that happens in the course of the 20th century. I wonder if there is a way of thinking about these spaces, as spaces that interact with each other, that, you know, of course, from time to time, people capture the winter palace and put it to other ends, but is there something that can feed back into our understanding of democracy that thinks about how you make that link between the square, say the people assembled in the square and the institution and the palace and the tendency to take to the streets? What for better or for worse, I tried to show in the book was that there's a sort of in-between layer of different political forms of formations that serve purposes that are democratic, but that also need different kinds of spaces. So one example, protest, even if it can look quite radical, by definition, accepts existing authorities. We are just here to protest, we want you to change, but we're actually not here to overthrow the system. That can often be done with a march, sometimes too predictably with a march. You know, for a long time in France, let's say, people knew, okay, there's yet another march from Place de la République to Nassion, okay, you know, very clear what's going to happen, etc. Which is one reason why I think my call also got very scared, generally got very, generally got scared with the yellow vests, because all of a sudden it was different spaces and different methods and different strategies. But protests different from what are some kind, sometimes called prefigurative politics, where you're actually not addressing the authorities, you're doing your own thing to work out maybe a totally different vision of future politics that go way beyond what we have at the moment. It's kind of difficult to do with a march and on a street, but it's something you can do on a square. So that's a very simple, maybe simplistic example of how these different configurations can serve different functions in terms of what people want to do together. Again, there's no simple scale that would say, oh, if it looks like this, it's necessarily, you know, more radical. It really depends on what people actually are up to. And maybe also worth emphasizing, probably more controversial these days. In principle, it is also important that, yes, people can get close to the powerful and give them a sense that we're out here to hold you accountable. Obviously, this is now overshadowed by January 6th, by January 8th in Brazil, by what happened in a whole range of countries now. But again, it unfortunately might be a reason for authorities to say, okay, the people can't go anywhere near these places anymore, because clearly it's so dangerous, you know, they might invade and destroy everything and kill people and so on. So again, it's a way of saying, no, it is important that people can show up and make themselves heard. And if in doubt, we should not go back to another aspect of our conversation earlier, not sort of too easily in a facile way, you know, rely on these prejudices about the great unwashed the masses, everything always gets out of hand and so on. That will just, in all likelihood, lead to a pernicious over-policing of protest. I'm turning to us just a final question. Does this point us to the party as a connective tissue between those spaces? Is that a thing a party can act as? Three things of my name. So in general, yes, I unlike some of our colleagues, I don't think that the party as an institution is finished or is exhausted. We talked about, you know, the importance of retail politics. I mean, it still remains an incredibly important, basically, 19th century invention, the mass moral as bureaucratic party as a means of mobilizing people. Having said that, I'm referring it to the work of one of our colleagues in social science, Paul Kenny, it is also true that we now have other means of mobilization, which in certain ways are kind of unprecedented. So think back to a figure like Bolsonaro, who I think switched parties eight or nine times. He was president without having any party. And not entirely, of course, because eventually he was also, you know, backed by, you know, big aggro business in Brazil. But at least for a while, it really seemed like a guy in his backyard with a not even particularly good cell phone can also mobilize people by establishing this direct connection. Now, that's not to say that social media is the end of democracy. It's all pernicious. You know, we should be where this kind of facile techno determinism. But it's not crazy to say that if this, you know, remains your only way of mobilizing people, you probably again have a tendency to go for these sort of blackmail election scenarios where you say, everything rides on this, you must come out, they're going to take the country away from us, et cetera. So it's not entirely neutral maybe. And we should think more carefully about whether we really want sort of party less politics. And then very last point that might be worth thinking about in this context is that again, as some colleagues in political science have pointed out, we've sometimes also seen the return of, in this case, specifically protest forms, which had really disappeared for a long time. I'm thinking of things like rough music or Sharivari, which, you know, if you think back to EP Thompson's work, you know, for a long time, medieval times already, was sort of a way for people to get together and say, look, we want to sort of tell an official that we're really not okay with something, or there's somebody who we want to reintegrate into a moral community, which, you know, could be very pernicious in certain ways, vigilantilism, shaming and so on. I'm not making the case, this is all great, but it's interesting that we've seen instances of this recently. And I think, again, in a certain way, it might point to the weakness of fragility of party politics, because parties don't do this sort of stuff. They might organize a big march, but they don't really say, "Go to go to so-and-so's house," and, you know, kind of shout something and bang pots and pans. There might be some situations where it's actually positive. So when Argentinians, for instance, went to the house of perpetrators after the detector ship and said, "Look, you know, this person has never been held accountable, impurities not okay." I think that's something attractive to think about. But again, in a roundabout way, it also shows us that there are certain things that party politics can't be replaced with. And if we see other formations becoming more important, it's also a sign that party politics isn't working as well as it really should. Great. I'm glad I asked that question, but that's a perfect place for us to leave it, then. Yand-Venomula, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks to Yand-Venomula for being such an eloquent guide to the transmutations of populism within European politics. And of course, it's worth saying if you've enjoyed this conversation, both parties in it, right, for the long review of books, and in the latest issue, which is on newsstands right now, you can find Stefan Kalini on the changes to the university system. David Runsman on gamification, Debra Friedel on the presidential ambitions or otherwise of Gavin Newsom, and much, much more, thanks for listening.