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Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Illiteracy Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Benson, a senior policy analyst at the Heartland Institute, a national free market think tank. We are in the episode 140 to 150 range, somewhere in there. So not a very new podcast anymore. But for those of you just tuning in for the first time, basically, what we do here in the podcast is I invite an author on to discuss a book of theirs that's been newly published or recently published on a thing or person or idea or event, etcetera, etcetera, that we think you guys would like to hear a conversation about.

And then, hopefully, at the end of the podcast, you go ahead and, give the book of purchase yourself and give it a read. So if you like this podcast, please consider giving Illuvreacy a 5 star review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show, and also by sharing with your friends as that's the best way to support programming like this. And my guest today is doctor Kurt Veyland, and doctor Veyland is Mike Hogg professor in liberal arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Democracy Without Equity, Failures of Reform in Brazil, The Politics of Market Reform and Fragile Democracies, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela, and Bounded Rationality and Political Diffusion, Social Sector Reform, and Latin America. He also publishes in scholarly journals like World Politics, Comparative Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Democracy.

And he is here to discuss his latest book, Democracy's Resilience to Populism's Threat, countering Global Alarmism, which was published, let's see, just about a week or so ago by Cambridge University Press. And so, yeah, doctor Blackbird excuse me. Doctor Valen, thank you so so much for coming on the podcast. I do appreciate it.

Yeah. My pleasure to talk about these very important issues with you and your audience.

Thank you. So, you know, normal entry question to everybody that comes on the podcast. You know, what made you wanna write this book? What was what was the genesis of it?

The the genesis of this book is a was a very long time back because when I was a doctoral student working in Brazil at the time, there was a new leader coming up pretty much out of the nowhere, who then won the presidential election in 1989, long time ago, and who, in many ways, was politically a populist author. He didn't seem to have the kind of policy approach of a populist. And I followed his very mediocre rise and was then also stunned to see that within 2 and a half years, he was impeached in ignominy over corruption allegations. And so I saw the dramatic rise and fall of a populist leader. And since then, off and on, I followed these populists who we initially saw in Latin America, like Alberto Fukimori and Carlos Menem in Argentina, then we saw him come from the left, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

And then also in Europe, we saw more and more of them starting, of course, with Pelasconi in Italy, but then especially Eastern Europe. And so after I had done research on populism off and on here and there with the different varieties, whatever, I thought finally now that this topic is really at the top of people's agenda and interest, I would kinda write up what I had thought and put it in the overall systematic framework. And then also, there's a God and a limb by drawing inferences about the United States, which I'm not even American citizen. I'm not an American politics specialist, but I thought based on all the comparative experience that I have, let's give this a try and see whether they can draw some lessons on your country. So let's hope it's all out.

Alright. So I guess maybe first things first, the best thing to do, would be, I guess, define, just exactly what you mean by populism, because that has a you know, you ask a thousand people what populism is, you're probably gonna get a 1, 000 different answers. So so how would you define, populism? What is populism?

So I define populism in a distinctive way that that also came up a long time ago, which is as a political strategy. So a whole bunch of people nowadays define populism based on its discourse, and its discourse is, of course, the pure people against the corrupt elites. But I think if you define populism by its by its discourse, it doesn't really get at the core of it, because populism is not so much the pure people against the corrupt elites, which makes it look like a autonomous bottom up mass movement. But what populism actually is, it's a leader starting the discourse. So and that leader is really the main figure in populism, and leader uses the discourse making making people believe that they are empowered and that they are at the forefront, and it's actually the leader that is central to populism.

And so what I do is I define populism as a political strategy of leadership, and I define it by 2 features that are kinda social science jargon. Personalistic, which means these domineering, extraordinary personalities that think that they are selected by divine providence to turn the country around. And then the other feature is that they base their movement and their access the exercise of power and what I call plebiscitarian mass support. So appeals to a broad segment of people, to a very heterogeneous amorphous mass, the people. Because those people are so amorphous, they cannot really act on their own.

And it's the leader who claims that they inherently and automatically incarnate the will of the people and they act. So that's the plebiscitarian app aspect that ask for acclamation. It's not bottom up autonomous demand making and mass representation, but it's acclamation of what the leader does. So that's my very distinctive definition of populism as a strategy of leadership, and the leaders are central in virtually every populist movement that we know of.

Gotcha. So, I guess well, we'll get right into it. So how severe worldwide is the, populous threat? I mean, just for the record, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you probably figured this out, but populism is not an ideology I have much time for. I'm not a big fan of it.

Not really never had been a particular fan of, the politics of grievance in any way, shape, or form, and I'm also not a big fan of mobs or crowds or and or movements really of any kind. Just, you know, just for some reason, I just, it's never something I've really been drawn toward in any way, shape, or form. But yeah. So this populist threat, how severe is it? You write in the book that, you talk about, you know, personal plebiscitarian leadership.

There's no indication in the last half a decade that the threat of this personal plebiscitarian leadership has grown. And furthermore, as you point out in the book, there's only a small minority of cases where, populists or these, you know, personal plebiscitarian leaders who have gained power have been able to destroy a system of liberal pluralism. Is that all was that right?

So so that is that is the whole issue because we're having business. So we saw over time, a gradual advance of populist movements and leaders in various countries. As I mentioned, populism has been endemic to Latin America since 1 turn on. And then we saw it kind of rising in Europe. At first, you had these fairly radical right movements that didn't seem to go very far, like Jean Marie Le Pen in France.

And then the daughter took over and made it more palatable and less toxic and less extreme, and so it's growing there. And then we also see it, of course, in Eastern Europe. And more and more of these parties have advanced slowly, and we have also seen increasing number of leaders, winning chief executive office. But, of course, what was the turning point that suddenly turned this into a big concern was the election of Donald Trump. The consummate populist in the United States, and it was like, oh my god.

If even in the United States, which is the paragon of liberal democracy, a populist leader can win office. And then in the perception of a whole bunch of people put pressure on liberal democracy and trying to concentrate power on that. Oh my god. You know, we thought that only Latin America was fragile, and then we thought maybe Eastern Europe. And now even in the countries of the global north, populism is rising and doing its kind of power concentrating business.

So you had this upsurge of concern and fear in a sudden turnaround. The United States had been considered for a 150 years as a completely consolidated There was absolutely no risk and no danger. Suddenly, you have this shock, almost like an earthquake and a sort of flip in the perception. You know, maybe US democracy is fragile, maybe it's precarious, maybe it's threatened. And they had an outpouring of books.

The the excellent book by my friends, Steve Levitsky and Daniel Siepland, how democracies die, and you see a black cover, and die is in capital letters. And a stream of similar kinds of things. You know, democracy unrestrained, democracy at risk, fascism rising, all kind of stuff. And so after a while, I kinda got tired of it, honestly, and I thought it was quite exaggerated. For the reason so so what I thought is, okay, we have to look at what actually happens.

And as you mentioned, you know, the book shows, it's actually it is a problem. It is a threat. It does put pressure on liberal democracy, but it doesn't, very often succeed in really I call it strangling, suffocating democracy because it does it gradually. So we have to and I also thought so then I looked at 1 of the conditions under which it does destroy democracy, and those conditions are so fundamentally different from what you have in the United States. There is just not this whole fear that suddenly your rest democracy is precarious was really exaggerated.

And so that got me to write a whole chapter in the book about the US and saying, you know, calm down. I mean, you know, yes, there are issues and there are problems, but that US democracy would kinda crumble is really not there.

Yeah. I'm with you. III mean, we'll get to that, I guess, when we talk about the United States, but I'm increasingly just exasperated by, sort of catastrophic, forecasting from everybody on either side about the, you know, the littlest things mean, you know, the sky will fall. And it's something actually we we touched on. We had, Larry Bartels from, Vanderbilt on the podcast.

Yes. A while back for his book about Europe, Democracy Roads From the Top. So, you know, so this is this is something we've discussed here before on the podcast. So regular listeners would know that, but, but not yeah. I'm with you.

But, anyway,

1 second. But the old book is actually quite smooth to mind because it emphasizes the role of leaders, democracy around the top, none of movements.

Right.

It has the message, you know, yes, populism advance a little bit. It's not this massive wave and tsunami that will wash everything away. And, yes, it happens in some cases, but not many others. So in that sense, I didn't know he was fighting the book. Sure.

When I saw it. And then I read it. I thought, hey. You know? So, you know, from different perspectives.

Yeah. Yeah.

Great minds. Thinking alike. Look at that. Yeah.

That's good. That's good.

Anyway, alright. So you write that really this populist destruction of democracy, really, it's really like a a star is aligning kind of thing. Like, it it can really only come about if 2 things meet at the same time and, you know, conditions have to almost be just exactly perfect, for it to work. First that, you know, there has to be whatever governing polity, whatever country it is, there has to be institutional weakness in the political system. And then there also has to be, what you call, an an unusual conjunctural opportunity.

So, what is what is that? What is an unusual conjunctual opportunity? Explain what you mean and why.

So you so you see how this works. So I define populism by personalistic, plebiscitarian leadership. So it means them the more dangerous, the more room and the more cloud they have. So a personalistic leader is more dangerous if institutions are weak, and that expansive tendency of a person as a leader can really, you know, kind of work itself out. And then the second condition is when the plebiscitarian mass support is really big and overwhelming.

So think of an example. Like, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador has 80, 90% approval. Nobody can stop it. You can essentially do what he wants. Okay.

So how do you get that kind of support? Not many populist leaders have that massive support. And so I looked at the conditions, and the conditions are essentially twofold, and it's interesting that they are sort of of an opposite nature. Because 1 way how a populist leader can achieve and maintain for a while that massive support is a big revenue windfall that people like Hugo Chavez got from the Global Commodities Group. Because there you saw just 1, 000, 000, 000 and 1, 000, 000, 000 of dollars streaming into a country under the command of the government, and the government could use them to, if you wanna use a strong support.

Big, no social programs, juicy contracts for business people, you know, putting a whole bunch of middle class people in the government. And everybody was happy and had 60, 70% support, and that really enabled him to strangle democracy. But then, also, it's the opposite, interestingly. Another type of conjunctual opportunity is an acute severe crisis that is resolvable. And a prime example there is hyperinflation.

And hyperinflation is very serious. I define it strictly as 50% price increase per month, which is a catastrophe. So a ton of people are suffering. A ton of people are experiencing serious losses. So then you have a populist leader who comes in and, Bond, with a bold, dramatic stabilization plan can end hyperinflation quickly and relieve the people of these massive losses.

They are a hero. They are the savior of the people, and they get very strong popular support. And so you see economic crisis, but you see you see them depending on a country's institutional relative degree of institutional strength or weakness. In some countries, an economic crisis is sufficient to enable a populist leader to win that massive support. In Latin America's presidential systems, which have stronger checks and balances, you actually need the coincidence of tool prices.

So Fukimori, not only hyperinflation, but also a big guerrilla challenge that Fukimori defeated. Only under that condition, that unusual constellation, a double crisis that he managed to take care of. Only then was he able to win this massive support. And I contrast it in the book with 2 other Latin American presidents. 1 of them faced hyperinflation and couldn't do it.

The other 1 faced the gorilla movement and couldn't do it. Only when both of those things coincided and the leaders succeeded in marking them out, only then the democracy actually fallen. So you see, these are really quite unusual circumstances, really quite restrictive conditions. So democracy, even in countries like Latin America and Eastern Europe, which don't have the strongest institutional frameworks, countries' democracies are actually competitively resilient. That's how I then, you know, that's what I highlight in the title of the book.

Mhmm. And another thing too, populism has working against it or is the the personal publicitarian leadership, that model comes with its has its own structural weaknesses and and structural frailties. So as you mentioned, populism really is I mean, that model is much more likely to burn itself out or kill itself than it is to, you know, stifle democracy or strangle democracy or or, you know, overcome it.

No. No. That is another another important aspect. So, you know, people write books how democracies die. So then I got tired and wrote an article how populism dies, because many of these leaders I mean, if you are if you are really big and personalistic and you essentially depend a lot on confrontation and polarization, you turn politics from a legitimate democratic competition into a war, you run a pretty risky political life, and a lot of people will wanna pay you back.

And then the second thing is if you base your cloud and your government on this plebiscitarian mass support, that's not organized. That's not reliable. You can be a hero, and then you hit a big corruption scandal, and you can be a villain very quickly, and you are you're basing your government on feeble, flimsy kind of support. And so you make mistakes. You have a big scandal.

You can very your support can very quickly deflate, and then you are prey for the establishment sectors or other political forces that you offended along the way, and they're gonna turn on you. And so I I documented in that article, how populism dies, and I've mentioned it, you know, throughout the book here, that a whole bunch of populist leaders don't serve out the 1st term. They get booted out by mass protests, by impeachment, whatever. And, of course, the striking thing is we remember the emblematic cases that did destroy democracy. You know, we remember for him all.

Oh, how scared. We remember Chavez. Oh, how scared. We remember

Right.

What time in Hungary, how scared. But we don't remember the many little figures that fell by the wayside and that are justly forgotten. Who remembers caller? Who remembers a fellow called Pukaram from Ecuador? Who remembers another guy Gutierrez from Ecuador?

There was this guy, Pedro Castillo from Colombia. There was a guy, Igor Matovic in in Slovakia. They're forgotten. Right? And so our our perception, our memory is skewed, and that is 1 reason why we overestimate the danger of populism because those that did destroy democracy, oh, they're on everybody's mind.

And the many, many who somehow either tried and didn't succeed and were booted out fairly quickly, they are forgotten. Yeah.

And

so we have to we have to we have to keep in mind that skewed kind of perception in memory.

Right. Would you say that you talk about all these little guys that don't make it or try and fail. Would you say in any way that those attempts, those failures act as sort of like, sort of like an inoculation against against future attempts at that sort of thing, or is it, or does it really depend on the country, depend on the on the the circumstances? Because, I mean, is does it's like if there's like a serial country where it has like a problem with like serial populism or something like that, does 1 automatically strengthen populism further down the road or does it tend to lead towards strengthening against populism down the road?

So this is a very interesting question, and I haven't looked at it systematically, and I think scholars haven't looked at it that systematically, but it really depends. So there are some cases where a populist rises in a system where institutions, sort of, of middling strength and very especially where political parties still have some strength. And the populist bias is, you can say, in some sense, sort of by accident. That happens especially in presidential systems because in those, you only need a plurality in the first round. Or if there is a no second round.

You only need a plurality to to make it into the second round. And then in the 2nd round, you can win, you know, based part of yourself on accident. You know, think of Milan, Argentina. What a bad head. Right?

You know, the chainsaw, wild hair, and he makes it into the 2nd round, and then sort of for left and left right alignment, he wins. Or even worse, a guy called Pedro Castillo in Peru. So in Peru, the party system is completely destroyed to make it into the 2nd round with 19% of the vote in the first round. So you have can can have accidental presidents. Now in Brazil, with Kona, parties were comparatively strong.

So after they after he fell in an impeachment, it was completely done in procedurally correct way. The established party sort of regrouped, got their act together, stabilized the country's economy, and they are essentially caller's experience served as as you say inoculation. Like, oops, they're not gonna do that again anytime soon. So for about 20, 25 years, there wasn't very much populism before they ended up with Boris Bolsonaro. But, so you can have that.

In other cases, what you have is where parties are comparatively weak. The populist experience, even if it is unsuccessful, often tends to destructure the party system even more. And so it leaves behind the wasteland, which then means, of course, who can draw an organized support? There really aren't that many politicians left who can do that, and so the the corrosion, the restructuring of the party system, in some sense, opens the path for more populists along the way. And so in those cases, you know, your your quote, I I use my friend Kenneth Roberts' concept of serial populism.

In those cases, you can have 1 populist after the other. They're not necessarily worse than the guy before. Cases like that, Equadopo, Peru, but also Italy. You know, think of Ediardo Bellosconi, who for 20 years kinda dominated Italian politics, then he finally gets booted out over his personal indiscretions and his political scandals. But, you know, it doesn't inoculate Italy against populism.

Then you have Patrick Carrillo and the 5 star movement, and then you have Salvini and the Northern League, and it's like, oh my God, we don't get out of this because the party system is so messed up and so de structured. Who can rise in a country like that if there are not big personalities who draw on this broad aim of his mass support? And so it really depends.

Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, stepping ahead a little bit, but, you mentioned the, weak parties. The weakening of parties helps advance this, and I think that's certainly true here in the United States, where the I mean, because honestly, I mean, the Republican party and the Democratic party don't really have much institutional power anymore over their members, and I can imagine that if they did back when they were powerful, say, 40 or 50 years ago or even 30 years ago or maybe even 20 years ago, that there is no way, they Donald Trump ever could have won the Republican nomination in a Republican party that actually has a say in in who is gonna be its president. Or in the same thing with, the Democrats and Bernie Sanders.

There's no way the Democratic nomination. It just wouldn't have been possible. The Democratic nomination, it just wouldn't have been possible. And, you know, what the effects of Trump going forward on the Republican party means to be seen. You know, we've certainly seen a lot of many people trying to ape his rhetoric and his style and, you know, try to draft a sort of policy position around, you know, try to create like a Trump is, you know, sort of policy principle that, like, really doesn't exist.

And then we've seen the rise in a lot of, left wing populism too, and the Democrats, the same. But, so I I see your point. I think that's definitely true here in the United States.

Definitely. I mean, when you think of it, you know, as you say, when Donald Trump ended the race in 2015, so it's nobody thought he would win, and the whole Republican establishment was against him. Right? And they tried to keep him out, but because of the fragmentation of the field, he knocked out 1 guy after the other. And at the end, you know, he ended up based not on the on the majority of the world, but a plurality to end up winning.

And the interesting thing, of course, is when you say totally about your openness. I mean, 111 reason why Trump won among the republicans and Bernie didn't win among the democrats is that the the democrats at the time had these super delegates by 20%. But the delegates were were, in some in some sense, you know, from the elite. Right? So the Republicans are more democratic.

They've Sure. They've opened up more room for some charismatic populist leader to clean up. The democrats, you know, always like, oh, we are more democratic. They actually had kind of a safety margin here that made it, you know, for the longest time. I mean, Bernie Great.

Yes. Had a very hard time to beat Hillary on the delegate count. And so the the paradox is that and, I mean, that is 1 of the 1 of the huge paradoxes of this era of populism that, you know, we lose sort of trust in the common people. Like, how can you vote for someone like Trump? How can you vote for someone like Bernie?

How can you vote for a racket like Milan, Argentina? Right? And so these many ways, we might wanna have some safeguards against too much popular participation. Right? We might wanna have some way of, you know, limiting what these populist leaders can do.

And so we are in this dilemma. Do we say you know, we enlightened elites think that people are being misled and seduced by these populist demagogues, and we we somehow or other try to limit how far the people can go, you know, super delegates, all kinds of ways. Or do we say, you know, you know, we embrace democracy to the fullest? So it's, hey, capitalism is very, very, very, very tricky thing that poses all kinds of dilemmas. You know?

How do you Yeah. Sure. How do you contain them? How do you limit them, and how far do you go? I mean, you see that obviously with Trump, like, you know, should he be banned from social media because he helped incite the January 6th attack of the capital to limit somebody's political rights because you think it's dangerous.

Is that the way how to deal with it?

So Well, no. I don't think that's the way to deal with it. But, I mean, the the democrats were smart, in my opinion, to have the superdelegate as something to act as a as a break or a counterweight, to something like that. And I think they have gotten rid of that because of the uproar. They have gotten rid of the superdelegates.

But, just the idea that we have these 2 political parties and that basically they have no control over I mean, anybody can just sign up, pay the fee, you know, and say, I'm a Democrat and I'm running for president, or I'm a Republican and I'm running for president. And then, you know, the parties then just have to be like, well, okay, These guys are running for president under our name. The idea that there's no sort of, like, institutional control over who gets to to the I mean, they do it a much better, in England, for example, where or in Britain, I should say, for example, where, you know, if you want to if you wanna run, you actually have to be, like, a dues paying member of the conservative party or the, you know, the Lib Dems or labor. And then like, if you're interested in running, you have to like actually go and interview. And, you know, before the party itself will come out and say, okay.

You're gonna be our nominee for, this seat in parliament, and, you know, and, basically, here's the Tory party platform. These are the things that you believe that you are to support. We can give you leeway on 0.6 and 0.12 and 0.15 because of the special circumstances of your district. But everything else, if you don't go by this, then it's we're not gonna support you. You know, so there's some sort of, like, wild west.

It's like, yeah, whoever. So that's somebody like Trump or somebody like Bernie Sanders or whoever it's gonna be in the future, can just glom on and just and there's there's no control over, over any of that in the process. It's just sort of, there used to be. I mean, you know, we just used to have the smoke filled room and, you know, the the party hacks just pick who they think is gonna be the best guy to run for the president. And, you know, if you look at the track record between smoke filled room and the primary voters, the smoke filled room seem to, you know, get it get it right with a higher percentage than the primary voters.

You know what I mean? And, so I don't know. It's our system is just completely, asinine when it comes to picking candidates like that. I don't know. Sorry for going off a rant, but it it just drives the advantage.

There you see also, of course, you know, the role of person is leadership because in England then, there is a platform that a candidate needs to buy into in the US. Right. It's it can be the other way around. Right? I'm Trump.

I rise in the Republican party, and then I reorient them away from an economically liberal globalist position to an economically nationalist Yeah.

There is no the Republicans haven't had even had a platform for the last 2 election cycles because of trade.

Right. Within a few years. And a and a very big change in the orientation of the party that, of course, rips apart the party as we saw, you know, on Saturday. Again, do I vote for Ukraine? Do I not?

But you see the I mean, so populism revolves around personalistic leadership, not program, not ideology. And you also saw, of course, with Trump, Biden, allegedly, he was, like, 10 years ago considering, should I run as a democrat? Should I run as a republican? Then I could do it either way. It's like, woah.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Alright. Let's get back to that in a second.

But, I wanna make sure we get this in before we talk of the US stuff. So you have sections of the book on what's going on in Asia and Latin America and, Eastern Europe in particular. Yeah. Is there anywhere on the globe that we should be specifically concerned or more concerned about, the threat of populism? Obviously, you know, if you ask people in America, or the United States, I should say, in Latin America, normally when people think of, like, populism, they, you know, they think of Chavez and, you know, that sort of thing and the, you know, the the Codillos and and all these different Latin American countries.

Is there anywhere in the world we should be particularly concerned about the the threat of populism or is it really, you know, overblown that threat overblown everywhere?

Right now right now, I think the biggest threat is in India. And I don't know that much about the Indian case, which is the reason why I deal with the Asian cases on in the conclusion. But, you know, the biggest democracy. Modi, very close to winning a 3rd term, and this is turning ugly. You know.

This Hindu nationalism is really inciting problems and violence in an extremely ethnically, religiously pluralistic country. The government is using all kinds of tricks. You know, they're doing stuff that we that really suggests an authoritarian intention in, like, locking up opposition politicians, this harassment that you see. So you you don't accept the level playing field. You try to secure it in favor of the government and you try to perpetuate yourself in power in all kinds of ways.

So I think India's on the verge of turning into, what people call competitive authoritarian regime. Some of the ratings agencies have already downgraded India as a nondemocracy. I think that's a little too early, but that is, in some sense, the biggest front line in the conflict between populism and and democracy these days. I mean, land you know, a lot of Latin American countries are potentially susceptible and fragile. Eastern Europe, as we saw in Eastern Europe, 1 of the best things that has happened recently is that, the law and justice party lost the election in Poland last year because Poland was kinda on the verge too, and they would have set a very bad example.

Because if you have 1 guy, Orban, it's sort of an exception. But if it takes if it, you know, kind of turns more into a wave, if there's a second 1, and then then it can go downhill. Like, Hugo Chavez was a problem. But when Evo Morales in Bolivia, in Latin America, in in Ecuador a few years later followed his script used to constituent assembly to roll back democracy. That really made it worrisome.

And then you also get in a situation like that when this and seems to be turning into a wave. Then you also get your opponents of populists, kinda get paranoid and really intransigent, and then then it really turns problematic. But but I think right now, I think India is sort of the really the biggest issue. And I'm very worried about India. I mean, as I say, not not knowing very much.

But man, it's it's not going well there.

Mhmm. Well, 1 quick thing on Latin America because I know that's sort of your your specialty. Because, obviously, there's, you know, 2 different kinds of of populism in or populism coming from different 2 different sides of the spectrum. In Latin America, you have, you know, the the neoliberal or or right wing populism and then your classic sort of Bolivarian left wing populism, you know, from the left. Do these, I mean, obviously, they have differences, but do these 2 types of populism have, anything in common?

Is there, like, a horseshoe, you know, effect with the with the populisms, the, you know, right and left wing populisms in Latin America? And is is 1 a graver threat than the other?

So, totally, they have a lot in common, and that is something that some of my Latin American friends don't like very much because many political scientists have their heart beating on their left, and so they make excuses for the left thinkers. Oh, but they empower the people. Oh, but they do social measures and whatever. Mhmm. From a political perspective so from my definition of populism, they're very, very similar.

These big leaders whipping up mass support, claiming that they empower the people, but India are empowering themselves. Right? Hugo Chavez. Char he always went around saying, Chavez. Chavez is the people, and the people is Chavez.

But who make the decisions? Not the people, Jarvis. And so politically speaking, it's exactly the same strategy. And it has exactly the same tendency. Expansive, power concentrating, pushing up against you know?

There are also similarities due to the personalistic leadership. There are similarities in the whole, call it, decision making style. You know, these people are haphazard. They're arbitrary. They're whimsical.

They don't have a very systematic policy approach that can shift, they're unpredictable. They're prone to mistakes. Now prone to mistakes, especially in policy, but they they also have this, I don't know, amazing sort of political intuition. And you you think, you know, you think, like, man, this was a crazy move to make, and it's it so happens that they can pull it off, and they can win support with measures. And so you see that in cases like Chavez, who really pushed very, very hard, you know, the brinkmanship, the kind of the boldness that I'm defining people.

I'm using polarization and confrontation, and you think that, oh my god, that was 1 step too far. And somehow or other, similarity with Donald Trump, right? But so many times people have counted him out. Oh my God, Access Hollywood, that was the end. Oh my God, the first impeachment.

That is the end. Oh my God, January 6th, that's the end. They're like, okay, you went 1 step to file. Finally, that will induce people to, you know, oh my God, he's indicted here and there and back and right. This is finally going to be the end.

And so you see that kinda uncanny political instinct that these people have. And, you know, of course, a bunch of them do fall by the wayside. They do push too far, but then you have some that just kinda have this sense, you know, how far you go and what you need to do to maintain the firm and support of your mass constituency and mass followership, that is also quite similar in all of those. Left or right, neoliberal, non neoliberal, culturally conservative, whatever. You know, there are some very basic commonalities.

And, I mean, that's, in some sense, the core assumption of the book, that this is, politically speaking, the same, essentially, the same phenomenon.

Right. Okay. Alright. So let's get back to Trump and the United States. We only have about 15 minutes left.

So let's get back to so, again, we've talked about exaggeration, but you're basically the opinion that this that this sort of this widespread alarmism about Trump winning in when he won the election in 2016, this sort of doomsday rhetoric coming out in a lot of places, A lot of that was extremely exaggerated. Correct?

So yes. And, of course, it was exaggerated because the United States hadn't had much experience with populism in a long time. You know, when you think of it in by many definitions, the populist, the last populist in the White House was Andrew Jackson a 100 you know, more than a 150 years before. And so that that's what made the election and assumption of power of a populist in the United States very surprising and kinda left many American politics specialists at a loss. What did we make of this?

What is this? How is this going to pan out? And that's the reason why I thought we'll bring comparative experiences to bear with raw inferences. And so and and I draw inferences in the following way, I do agree that a populist leader poses a threat is a problem for liberal democracy. I mean, the very logic of populism is running up against institutional checks and balances.

There is a strong illiberal tendency. There is this personalism is, you know, not what we think of, populist. The the appeals to the mass are often coarse and crude and, you know, not in line with our ideas of civilized discourse and all these kinds of things. So populism is a problem. It's a significant problem.

But I thought that the institutional framework of the United States, you know, consolidated for so many decades, centuries, and a constitution that is rock solid just provided a good amount of institutional safeguard against leadership like Trump. And then that, you know and then that is interesting that also, he wasn't, of course, able to bring very much broad mass support. You know? I mean, during his whole presidency, despite a roaring economy from 2017 to 2019, Donald Trump never won 50% approval by votes. Right?

So how are you going to be the savior of the people if the majority doesn't actually, you know, accept you?

Yeah. I was gonna say that's sort of the thing. 1 of the many sort of, I guess, insurmountable constraints. I wouldn't I shouldn't say insurmountable, but most likely insurmountable restraints to this type of thing happening. The thing that, like, you know, Democrats think is gonna happen or or some democrats or, you know, that Trump is gonna work as we know, stuff out democracy.

That even that the polarization that has overtaken the country in the last 20 years or so, which is, you know, has gotten so extreme. Also, guards against I mean, that is in its own weird way, its own, bulwark against a character like like that just because, no matter who you are, most likely, you're never gonna get more than 52, 53. I mean, like, if you're a extremely popular president, you know, you're only probably gonna get 52 or 53% of the public to vote for you. I mean, your approval rating might go up or down, but, you know, so no matter who it is, half the country, practically hate your guts from the outset. Right?

So, so you cannot build that sort of mass groundswell of support to really do the things, that populists were able to do elsewhere, just because there's so many people who would, you know, not take kindly to it.

That that is something, a point that occurred to me along the way. Because, you know, everybody I mean, polarization in this country is a serious problem. You saw that, for example, in the delay of the Ukraine aid for, like, 6 months or whatever. Right? I mean, the congress is often dysfunctional, All that kind of thing.

So polarization is a big problem, and that is the established view among my American politics specialists. But what I kind of noticed and realized along the way is the politics of populism is strange, and in for the politics of populism, something that is a serious issue for American democracy in general, for the politics of populism is actually a benefit and a safeguard because for the reason you mentioned, right, it automatically, a priority, limits the support that a populist president of the United States can get, and it prevents any populist from winning that overwhelming that massive mass support that allowed the Fujimori or that allowed, Chavez or that allowed the Bukele and El Salvador to just sweep away institutional constraints. So no populist leader can win that groundswell of backing that can, you know, push aside brittle institutional safeguards in other countries. And then your institutional safeguards aren't brittle. So in many ways, the populist leader has neither 1 of the basic preconditions for really destroying democracy.

It can damage democracy. Right? And, I mean, you see it. I mean, the discourse in this country has not benefited from Donald Trump's interventions. And, you know, there is a certain corrosion of institutional checks and balances because, you know, so many Republicans, especially in the house, are worried about primary challenges, and they don't wanna trust the man, and they don't wanna kinda oppose.

But

but because then you see, even there, you see many of them don't actively oppose, but they drag defeat. You know? And so so, you see that the the preconditions for the real destruction of democracy and the others have just not given. So there can be pressure, there can be damage, there can be problems. You know, I mean, clearly, especially the questioning of of electoral results, I think, is very damaging in the US because there isn't any real evidence for, like, electoral fraud and illegal immigrants voting or dead people voting.

But if you question election results, you sow a lot of doubt and trust. And then, you know, based on the rhetoric that's being used these days in the US, I mean, you hear from so many, like, poll workers. They are worried. They are threats. They face harassment and trouble.

And so, you know, a good amount of damage has been done. But sort of the change of American democracy, I think that is something that has withstood. And I think it will withstand again if he gets himself reelected.

Yeah. So so, I'm with you. And the, we're all pretty familiar at this point. I mean, if you're, you know, unless you're a vegetable or something like that, we're all pretty familiar with how Trump has, you know, been pushing the limits of liberal pluralism. You know, the January 6th, you know, everyone knows how horrible that was and all this election, you know, the rigged election bullshit that he is always on about, you know, and bringing all these cases.

And, you know, all that is bad, very, very bad. That's a but, you know, but the election fraud stuff, I mean, before Trump glommed onto that, election denial was 1 of those things that was basically on the provenant on provenance in the left going back to 2000 where, you know, the 2000 election was rigged, you know, for Bush. The Supreme Court gave Bush the election, blah blah blah. And then in 2004, you know, it was the voting machines. And in Ohio, the Deibel voting machines that, you know, Barack Obama and a bunch of other people said we needed to investigate and all that stuff, and then Hillary Clinton still wanna admit that she lost the election in 2016 fair and square, and we have, you know, we had a democratic governor of of Virginia saying that, you know, the 2000 election was rigged, and and Biden's press secretary saying that a gubernatorial election in Georgia was rigged, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So, can you talk about how have the democrats I mean, other than how have the democrats also been guilty of lately of pushing the limits of this of this liberal pluralism?

So when you think of when you think of, how this all started in 2000, I mean, I remember because I think I watched it. I mean, Al Gore gave a speech and conceded. Right? I mean, there was a lot of controversy, a lot of issue. And you think what a crazy situation.

Right? The dimpled chats and people voted for somebody who they didn't mean to vote for. I mean, honestly, I'm not an American politics specialist. When that when that came up first, I thought, well, I obviously have to repeat that election in that district. You can't have an election decided by a crazy butterfly ballot in a couple of counties in Florida.

I mean, if these people made massive mistakes, then something has to be repeated here. So that was a very I mean, there was actual, you know, there was actual evidence of something going badly wrong.

Well, no. I mean, because there there have been there have been 2 I think the USA Today and the Miami Herald or I think somebody else, 2 papers looked into it. They opened up they basically went through the entire vote thing, and they both found that no matter if they hadn't stopped the recount, if they had stopped the recount, whatever way George w Bush would have won that election, no I can remember.

So so I'm not I'm not talking about the count, but what I'm saying is the election administration is

Oh, okay. I got you.

Serious problem.

Okay. Yeah.

There were 1, 000, you know, tens of hundreds of thousands of people who thought they were wanting for Algo and they were wanting for some minor person because their butterflood ballot was a main subject. You would have so crazy something crazy. Right? So you you had a very clear you had very clear evidence that something wasn't going well here. Right?

And then after the whole adjudication, both sides pushed and both sides claimed and, you know, how many votes and how do we count and all that kind of thing. The supreme court got involved. You know, it was very controversial decision. The democratic candidate conceded the election. I mean, Al Gore, you know, gave a speech, and he said, look.

You know, I'm not happy, whatever. I forgot exactly. It's a long time ago. But, you know, he he is the winner and I'm the loser. And I go home and I don't launch tens of whatever court cases, I don't I don't have my supporters go around, you know, for years afterwards claiming that w is illegitimate and whatever.

No. Well, but that's as well. I I agree that Trump, Gore conceded, and the level of the denial is not the same. But again, the, you know, there were Democratic surrogates, Clinton Clinton Gore surrogates that, like I said, Terry McAuliffe, who was the governor of Virginia not that long ago was a Clinton Gore guy. I mean, he was on TV years after the election saying that that election was stolen from Al Gore.

There I mean, this is something that's been going on a lot. So I'm not saying they're they're equal in their in I think what Trump is doing is obviously worse than what the democrats have done, but the Democrats have but the Democrats opened the way for Trump to do what he's doing, by basically, crying foul on every presidential election we've had that they've lost in the last 20 in, you know, 30 years.

So so that so there are 2 things. 1 is 1 is and this is I'm not an American politics specialist. I don't even know the name of the governor of Virginia. I have to admit that. So I have to agree with ignorance, whatever.

So, there are 2 2 big differences. I think 1 is that Donald Trump, before the election, have impressed, will you recognize the result if you lose? It was, I will recognize it if I win. I will I will accept the result if I win. Right?

So, I mean, it was from the beginning, before the whole thing was run, that he already cast out on it and had this, yeah, when you think of it, crazy, crazy criterion. If I win, it was fair, and if I don't win, it was done. I mean, that is that is not precise.

Oh, no. No. No. Absolutely. Yeah.

And that's

it's Everything of procedures. Right? And then the second thing is, I mean, about the 2020 election, there have been so many investigations and studies and whatever. Right? I mean, first of all, the Trumpians didn't bring proof.

Oh, right. And, actually, I'm I'm totally III think

all that proof. There isn't there isn't you know what I mean? There's no indication. There are no dimple chats. There were no, you know, whatever.

There were no, I mean, they recounted and they I think they recounted twice or 3 times in Georgia. These were Republicans running the election. This Raffensperger guy was 1 of his friends, and he said, look, I'm not gonna find 11, 800 votes for you. I mean, this so this is a very different kind of thing in that respect because, you know, evidence. Right?

I mean Mhmm. The guy, Rusty Bowers of Arizona, whom they pressed, he said, give me evidence. Give me evidence. Oh, yeah. I'll be happy.

Well, show it. Give me the names. Give me the whatever. Nothing there.

Oh, yeah. I'm totally with you. IIII have no time for any of that that nonsense that Trump and his people have been going on about with the elections in,

in 2020. About about 2 more minutes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I know that. So I was just about to say, we're right on a heartbreak. Sorry.

We can't discuss that further, but just, let me just, quickly, if I can get to 1, like, we normally have, like, a normal exit question on this podcast too, and that is what, you know, what would you like the audience to get out of this book, or what's the 1 thing you'd want a reader to take away from it having

read it? What I wanna have readers take away is that populism is a serious problem, but I think it is not so overly powerful that we have to be unusually concerned. And I think populist leaders are potentially dangerous, but there are a number of ways in which they can contain, especially where you have a strong institutional framework like the United And in the country where you have a strong institutional framework, the best strategy is by conventional political participation. And you see, surprisingly, in the United States, in some sense, the potential challenge and threat of Trumpian populism has led to a remobilization of the electorate. Higher electoral participation.

Like, in the 2018 election, the highest midterm turnout that the earth had seen in a 100 years. And so, surprisingly, there can be kind of a a rejuvenating impact that a populist challenge can have on the democracy. So not everything is lost, and, you know, that's, in some sense, the main message.

Alright. Great. Well, again, the name of the book is Democracy's Resilience to Populism's Threat, Countering Global Alarmism. Fascinating, look into this, across the globe and and obviously here in the United States too. Really, really, really, really interesting.

If you're, interested in that sort of thing, make sure you check it out. Very, very cool little book. Once again, Democracy's Resilience, the Populism's Threat, Countering Global Alarmism. And the author, my guest, doctor, Kurt Vahlen. Doctor Vahlen, thank you so so much for coming on the podcast.

I know you gotta you gotta go, but I just wanna say I appreciate you coming on, and, thank you so much for, you know, taking the time out of your life to actually write the book and let us enjoy the, fruits of your labor. So I appreciate it.

Yeah. No. Thank you very much for having me. It was really interesting to discuss this book with you, and thanks for your interest in my work and that book.

So Alright. Thanks. No problem. And, again, if you like this podcast, please consider leaving us a 5 star review and sharing with your friends. And if you have any questions or comments or have any ideas for books you'd like to see us discuss in this podcast, you can reach out to me at tbenson@heartland.org.

That's TBENS0N at heartland.org. And for more information about the Heartland Institute, you can just go to heartland.org, and you can also reach out to us on twitter/x, whatever you wanna call it. We have our Twitter account there. It's at illbooks, at illbooks. So make sure you check that out, and that's pretty much it.

So we'll, yeah, we'll see you guys next time. So take care, everybody. See you next time. Love you, Robbie. Love you, mom.

Bye bye.