Martin Wolf on saving democratic capitalism: the ‘democratic recession’

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Martin Wolf on saving democratic capitalism: the ‘democratic recession’

[FOOTSTEPS ON METAL STAIRS]

Martin Wolf
So I’ve come up to the rooftop garden here at the FT’s head office. It’s in the city of London, which is, of course, the heartland of British capitalism. And I have a wonderful view of the neighbouring buildings, some very tall skyscrapers, churches and the biggest building and the most famous is St Paul’s, which is just to my right. But I’m actually more interested in another building, which you can just see peeping out in the distance. The pale Gothic tower stuck, perhaps symbolically, between vast skyscrapers that dwarf it — that is the Palace of Westminster, which houses parliament. I’m Martin Wolf, and this is Episode Two of my series Saving Democratic Capitalism. And today I’m going to focus on the democracy part of that title.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

As an institution the parliament of Westminster is quite old. It dates back to the 13th century. But British democracy, in the sense of everybody who is adult has a vote, only goes back to 1928, and that’s a bit less than a century ago. It’s a similar story across the rest of the world. For thousands of years of human history, people are being ruled by kings or emperors, and basically they have no say whatsoever, with very few exceptions in how they were governed. But since the Industrial Revolution, things have changed with the rise in prosperity, greater education and so forth. We have seen demands for democratic rule, and that democratic rule has been really, in all, a remarkable success. And yet in the last two decades, things have gone into reverse with the re-emergence of anti-democratic forces, even in the most advanced democracies. Last week, I discussed why I thought this was happening. This week I am going to talk to somebody else. And today it’s going to be Larry Diamond, professor at Stanford University and a leading, perhaps the world’s pre-eminent scholar of democracy.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So maybe we could start at the beginning with the sort of fundamental idea: how would you define a liberal democracy as opposed to things we now are being taught to call illiberal democracies? And indeed, is there such a thing as an illiberal democracy? 

Larry Diamond
Well, first of all, we need to understand what is the absolute minimum irreducible condition for a democracy. And it is the ability of the people to choose and replace their leaders in truly free and fair elections. Period. Full stop. If you take seriously the requirements for free and fair elections, you have to have a reasonably level playing field. You have to have some reasonable access to the media in order to have contending points of view find expression. You certainly have to have a fair administration of elections and accurate counting of the votes, and you have to have everybody be able to vote. And if you don’t have a level playing field and there’s no decent chance for an opposition candidate to win, or if, as was the case with the presidential election in Turkey, it would require a Herculean effort of the opposition with one hand tied behind its back to prevail, that’s not a democratic election. Sometimes, as with Milošević in Serbia, you can have an unfair, undemocratic election, then the opposition can prevail. But we should have no illusion that just because there’s a serious contest, it means the election is a democracy.

The liberal part, Martin, you well understand, comes with the rule of law dimension in which everybody is equal before the law and no one is above the law. And there’s accountability. There are independent institutions that can hold executive power. And a lot of the institutions of capitalism that have run amok accountable and then protect property rights, civil liberties, things like that. When you put that together, that’s the winning package of liberal democracy. If you look at the data and ask, is it possible to have an illiberal democracy? The answer is yes. There are democracies around the world that don’t do a very good job of maintaining the rule of law, that don’t do a good job of protecting human rights or even property rights. But, you know, for a time they stagger on with electoral competition and maybe for a long time, as in India. But what we find statistically is that it is the illiberal democracies that are most likely to erode and break down. 

Martin Wolf
So if you look at those conditions and particularly the possibility of organising an opposition, that would seem to imply some degree of economic decentralisation, you need some sort of market economy. If the government owned everything, democracy would be almost impossible, as you’ve defined it. 

Larry Diamond
Yes. If there’s no private ownership of property, if the state owns and controls everything, there’s no way that you’re gonna hold the state accountable and protect civil liberties. 

Martin Wolf
Now, let’s talk about the democratic recession. What has been going on in the last 20 years or so, as you see it, across the world, and including even high-income countries, which we thought of as having completely consolidated democracies? What’s going on? 

Larry Diamond
The number of democracies in the world, which saw dramatic expansion, particularly in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, to the point where about 60 per cent of all the countries in the world were democracies by around 2005, 2006, has been slipping backwards in the last 15, 16 years. And so pretty steadily have levels of freedom, political rights and civil liberties. And it seems to be an accelerating trend of more and more democracies either struggling to survive in the face of illiberal and undemocratic challengers for rule, or undemocratic and illiberal incumbents trying to roll back democracy. And we’re now to the point where, according to my data, only about 28 or 29 per cent of people in the world are living in democracies. And one reason why we’ve seen a very dramatic change is, I think in the last two or three years, India has ceased to be a democracy, and that is a very stunning and worrisome development. 

News clip
All right. Let’s, in fact, now go back to the big developing story that has come from India where Rahul Gandhi, one of the foremost leaders of the opposition, has been disqualified.

Rahul Gandhi
Please understand why I have been disqualified. The prime minister is scared of my next speech. I’ve seen it in his eyes. So he is terrified of the next speech that is going to come. And they don’t want that speech to be in parliament. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Larry Diamond
The playbook that the autocrats have been using starts by demonising the opposition as illegitimate and not really of and for the people and rejecting political pluralism as a principle. This is the populist element. You know, country’s broken and only I can fix it, to quote Donald Trump. And the opposition’s as a bunch of losers and disloyal to the country, they’re not real Americans like you and me. But early on they go to war on the media. Because if you don’t have a free and pluralistic media, you’ve lost one of the most vital checks on tyranny. Then they go to war on the courts. You look at what’s happened in Hungary, you look at what’s happened in Poland. They try to suborn, neuter or gain control of the judiciary so that the upper reaches of the judiciary and particularly the constitutional court, cannot be a check on their authoritarian ambitions. And then they just move through the other levers of power, the civil service, the intelligence services, certainly the state security apparatus. They allege that, you know, all the old professional non-partisan civil servants are really at deep state disloyal to the new political project. And so they try to politicise those and purge those. And they go to war against civil society, against the universities, think-tanks, independent organisations that could be, again, a check on the abuse of power. This is a common playbook. It’s visible across all these authoritarian projects.

Martin Wolf
When you look across the world, is this a global movement with common causes or not? 

Larry Diamond
I think the answer is yes. It is a global trend that has unique elements in different countries. But there’s a common playbook which I have articulated to you. There’s a common ambition which is as old as human civilisation, which is to amass and acquire power and wealth and to build monopolies of both, if you can get away with it. And there is, I think, the contagion effect. You know, you see how Orban did it and that kind of inspires and influences others. You see how Erdoğan got away with it and then you get some ideas. But there are, I think, several global changes that help to explain both why we’ve been in a global democratic recession and why since around 2006. So the first factor, I would say, is the disaster of the American invasion of Iraq and the squandering of our treasure and our stature in the world in this ill-fated adventure and the sense that the world had when weapons of mass destruction were not found, and we could only justify the invasion by a project of building democracy in Iraq, that democracy promotion was imperialistic and coercive. 

[GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS]

George W Bush
My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger. 

[GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS]

Larry Diamond
This gave a very bad odour to what I think was a noble project of trying to support and facilitate democratic transition around the world. Then it was only a few years later that the financial crisis happened. And again, where did that begin? In the United States. And I think that the deep-rooted inadequacies of our regulatory institutions, as a well-known Financial Times columnist, namely yourself, has articulated, has had a lot to do with it. And you are right, I think, in arguing that these two existential challenges to democracy and to capitalism are deeply intersecting now. And there’s more and more people that are questioning capitalism as a system, and there are more and more people that are questioning democracy as it’s been constructed in the west.

The third thing that I think has played a role here is the rise of social media because, after all, when did social media really get going? It was around 2006, 2007. The Facebook revolution. It has been a toxic mess in terms of polarisation, disinformation. And then I would also note we have become everywhere, perhaps partly because of social media, much more polarised on identity terms, which is a great gift to illiberal populists because that is what they like to exploit is identity divisions. Finally, you have the rise of authoritarian challengers, particularly China and its bid to displace the United States as the most influential and powerful country in the world. And if it looks like China is capable of building infrastructure and managing its economy and the western world is not, that is going to be a great competitive disadvantage for democracies generally in the world. 

Martin Wolf
Do you think that this label, populism, helps to understand important parts of what’s going on, and in particular distinguishing between populism as distrust of elites and the phenomenon you described earlier, which is anti-pluralism, populism of saying we or you, my supporters are the real people, and all those other people aren’t real people, and that often has racial elements to it. Is that a useful analytical category in your view?

Larry Diamond
Yeah, I think it is, and particularly if you understand the current wave of populisms. Whether it’s Modi or Le Pen or Brexit, they have a number of common currents. They think the existing institutions are rotten and also constraining of what a leader needs to do to serve and in a way liberate the people from being mistreated by elites. They’re obviously anti-elitist. That’s always the common current. They are bigoted often, or at least they elevate exclusive conceptions of ethnicity that are almost always in this day and age, anti-immigrant and often chauvinist and biased in other respects. So the Hindu chauvinist version in India has had alarming implications for the rights of one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, the roughly 200mn Indians who happen to be Muslims. And if all else fails, you’ve got to have an enemy in this kind of identity populism, a vulnerable minority to rally people against and to mobilise fear against. And what we’re seeing in the world now with sociologically interesting regularity is that if all else fails, you can pick on the LGBT community. And that’s what a lot of African populists are doing now, or autocrats who can’t find some other wedge identity issue because in a country like Uganda, there is no majority group. So you can say Christians are all straight people. We’ve got to rally against this alien minority.

I will say, Martin, that historically there has been another kind of populism that is not so much about identity, but more economic populism, railing against the exploited of elites. And, you know, a little bit of populism may be a useful thing in challenging some of the encrusted and monopolistic privileges of capitalist elites who have created barricades to real competition and accountability. But, you know, once you start playing the populist card, it tends to go down this road to illiberal hell. 

Martin Wolf
So let’s focus a little bit more on your country, which is the most important democracy in the world. So a lot of the playbook is clearly here. The war on woke, which Ron DeSantis is really playing, the war on books and the war on institutions. I mean, this is really, to many of us, a deep puzzle — how it was possible for Donald Trump not only to try to subvert the election, but to get the support of a great American party, a conservative party, for that effort. How do you explain? And did you in any way foresee this to us astonishing volte face in the bastion of democracy? 

Larry Diamond
I did not foresee it. I think I can at least partly explain it. But having made the mistake once in 2016 of saying there’s no way someone like that can get elected to be president of the United States. One mistake I’ve resolved to not make again is to dismiss the possibility that he can be reelected and he will have a significant chance of winning if he’s the Republican nominee. 40 per cent, 50 per cent, of who knows? A horrifically high chance if you consider that he is, in my view, a unique threat to the future of American democracy. 

[PEOPLE CHANTING]

Donald Trump
Thank you very much. And if you put me back in the White House, their reign is over. Their reign will be over and they know it. And America will be a free nation once again. We’re not a free nation right now. We don’t have free press. We don’t have free anything. In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today, I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution. I’m not gonna let this happen. (People cheer)

Larry Diamond
Trump has made clear that he intends to launch a frontal assault on our democratic institutions and constraints on power if he’s reelected, and having served in power for four years where things didn’t go the way he wanted, he’ll come in certainly with an agenda for revenge. He’s already made that clear and perhaps some awareness of where he didn’t press far enough or skilfully enough last time. Why? I think that a lot of Americans are very estranged, very upset by their place in the social order. And they feel insecure or challenged in a variety of ways.

Now, for some, it’s an identity challenge. They’re having trouble adjusting to the pathway America is on of becoming in the next two or three decades a nation in which there is no racial majority. And they have, in my view, a very crude and atavistic attitude toward immigration. And many of them it feels like the world they knew in which men were men and whites were you know in the majority, and there was some kind of social and racial hierarchy that they could be comfortable with. They just feel uneasy with it. And they feel sincerely that racial minorities have been getting special advantages, cutting to the head of the line, as Arlie Hochschild portrayed the analogy in her brilliant book, Strangers in Their Own Land, and they see Trump as the instrument to put it right. Others I think it’s really about economic insecurity and the fear of globalisation. It’s an antitrade, anti-financial globalisation backlash.

And Trump, he’s a very skilful politician, and he knows how to exploit fear and grievance. One talent of a bully or an incipient successful autocrat is that they can smell and manipulate human fear and insecurity. And I think Trump has been brilliant at that in two levels — the level of the American populace, the electorate that he’s trying to appeal to, and the level of Republican officeholders. And once it became clear that he was the party leader and that in the context of American electoral politics, where you win the nomination in a low-turnout party primary, in which perhaps 10 or 15 per cent of the total electorate will vote, so you get the most angry, militant, disaffected, 10, 12, 15 per cent, and that gives you the nomination. And then we are stuck with this two-party system and you’ve got a 50 per cent chance of winning on average if you’re the party nominee. And what happened is a lot of members of the Republican party then lost their courage and just went along because they saw that Trump had the power to appeal to that militant 10 to 15 per cent of the electorate and deny them renomination. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Martin Wolf
One issue that is quite interesting to me, if you look across all these various countries, with the exceptions perhaps of Venezuela, it’s very clearly the right, the conservative reactionary right, that is winning. But why has the right been doing so much better than the left in this race for a new sort of politics? 

Larry Diamond
I once was interviewing a Nigerian politician, asking him about — he was a northerner — whether he could forge an effective relationship with southerners. He said a line that has stuck with me throughout as a political scientist. This was 40 years ago. Blood is thicker than water. And what he meant is identity will always trump other lines of cleavage in politics. So ethnicity, religion, whatever form of identity you can mobilise as a kind of blood bond, that will trump.

And I think that too many on the left have had a bloodless, intellectual, cosmopolitan attitude toward their programs and their campaigns. Here’s what we will do for you to create jobs. And how can you not see this is gonna be in your rational economic interest? And a lot of conservatives, Trump brilliantly, but George W Bush understood this, too. The reason George W Bush beat Al Gore, we all know it, is the famous line in a public-opinion poll. Who would you rather have a beer with? A lot of average Democratic blue-collar voters felt they’d rather have a beer with George Bush, you know. He could joke. He, you know, wasn’t impressed with himself. Gore seemed more stiff, more intellectual. And I think a problem with a lot of left political parties around the world is that they haven’t captured this cultural element of disaffection and connection. And this is embodied in two famous phrases now in American politics. One, she was partially misunderstood, Hillary Clinton, when she said . . .  

Hillary Clinton
You could put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables . . . 

Larry Diamond
Crude, hillbilly truck-driving, beer-drinking . . . 

Hillary Clinton
Right . . .  

Larry Diamond
You know, white rednecks. 

Hillary Clinton
They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it . . .  

Larry Diamond
And the other is this notion of flyover country. There’s the knowledgeable, you know, cosmopolitan, liberal coasts in the United States, the west and the east. And then there’s all the no-nothing flyover country. If that’s the way that the leaders of left parties are regarded by their supposed natural constituents in the working class, you know, they’re going to feel a cultural alienation. 

Martin Wolf
So one of the new cleavages, which you’ve hinted at is between people who haven’t gone to university and the now very large number of people who have. And there’s clearly quite a significant cultural division between these people. So the people who have the more socially advanced, quote unquote, views, progressive views tend to be the people who’ve gone to university. And they also are the people who, the people who haven’t gone to university think looked down on them. So the cultural world looks, in very important ways, like a war between the university-educated and the not university-educated. Would you agree that’s actually quite an important cleavage in our societies? 

Larry Diamond
Oh absolutely. One of the most striking ways of sorting voters in the United States, if you take the white electorate, is those who are college-educated and those who are not. The white non-college-educated population broke overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 and 2020. Both Clinton and Biden won the white college-educated vote. And so that is a very, very clear cleavage. Now, I’m gonna tell you something that just happened recently that not enough people have paid attention to. Biden gave a speech recently on economic policy and he said . . .  

Joe Biden
You know, everybody talks about college education. Will there be a plumber and pipe fitter? Whatever you think it takes, it takes you four to five years of an apprenticeship by going back to school, going to four years of college. And folks, look, these are good jobs you can raise a family on. They don’t require a college degree. My dad used to have an expression. He said, Joey, a job’s about a lot more than a pay cheque. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s being able to look your kid in the eye and say, Honey, it’s gonna be OK, because there’s nothing worse than not being able to provide for your family as a mother or a father. 

Larry Diamond
And I think he’s on to something in terms of saying all you people who didn’t go to college, I respect you. I want to be your president, too. 

Martin Wolf
And of course, in the old days, the Democrats, would it be I mean, matter of course, that was what the working man and the trade unions supported. So it’s a big change we’re talking about.

Larry Diamond
It is, this is part of the big sort, at least in American politics, perhaps in European politics as well, that the left of centre has become more of a party of the college-educated, the cosmopolitan elites and the minority groups. 

Martin Wolf
So how bad could it get in the US? 

Larry Diamond
Oh, I almost hate to answer that question because we’re on in a sense, I guess, in international broadcast. And the last thing I want to do is fan anxiety about the future of American democracy or about the unreliability of the United States. So I will just preface what I’m about to say by saying that I believe Donald Trump will be defeated in 2024. But I do not dismiss the possibility that he could win, which I really did dismiss in 2016. I will concede.

If Donald Trump were to become president of the United States again, I think we would have very early on, a profound constitutional crisis. And I think that he would move very quickly with very extreme elements of his government and cabinet. There’s gonna be no more Mr Nice Guy, no more “I’ll choose this establishment figure to be defence secretary and that establishment figure to be attorney-general”. The gloves will be off from the beginning. Michael Flynn will probably be brought in again as national security adviser. A true believer who will just be a yes man will be put in charge of the justice department. They’ll immediately go after the FBI and the IRS and other elements of the, quote, deep state to try and politicise them. You know, they’re already going after universities and foundations and so on, the Republicans in Congress in a very disturbing way, alleging them of being biased and threatening to take away their tax-exempt status. I think this war would be elevated in a Trump presidency, we’d be on the road to Erdoğan, Orban or Modi, something like that. It would test the strength of American institutions and the courage of American politicians, judges and justices to a degree that we’ve never seen before in American history. 

Martin Wolf
It would seem obvious we don’t need to go much further, that if that happened, the situation of democracy in the world will be pretty terrible given the role the US plays. But assume that doesn’t happen. So we continue to have somebody, whether Republican or Democrat, who is fundamentally committed to democracy. In that world what should the democracies be doing to protect their position and protect democracy itself elsewhere in the world? And how should they, in doing that, relate to autocratic powers, notably including China, but also a backsliding power like India? 

Larry Diamond
Well, one strategy, of course, is that they need to shore up, improve and protect their own democracies. I am strongly in sympathy of the effort to raise the retirement age in France from 62 to 64. But the effort by Macron to simply force it through over widespread opposition without bringing the people along and persuading them, and thereby establishing Marine Le Pen as the frontrunner for the next presidential election in France, seems to me not a very smart strategy for advancing democracies and sustainable capitalism in France. 

News clip
This was Place de la République in Paris last night. (Protesters shouting) Some protests turned violent. Police clashed with demonstrators and hundreds were arrested. 

Larry Diamond
So I think we have work to do in the advanced industrial democracies. We have a lot of reform work to do in the United States in that regard. Secondly, democracy is in serious trouble in most of the global south. It’s just a fact. You look at Latin America. OK. Bolsonaro narrowly lost in Brazil, hmm, 48 per cent of the public voted for him. Brazil is still politically polarised. You said populism is mainly a phenomenon of the right. That’s generally true, but not so true in Latin America. We’ll see how President Petro, a former guerrilla, plays out in Colombia. But there are people who are worried about where he’s really coming from. And Peru is a basket case torn between right and left. We have a lot of work to do. 

Martin Wolf
And Mexico . . .  

Larry Diamond
And Mexico, of course. Fortunately, it looks like López Obrador will not be able to get himself a second six-year term. But the point is, the project is there. And in Latin America, it’s coming more from the illiberal left. So we have a lot of work to do to try and get economic growth and investment going in Latin America. So there is a pathway of entrepreneurship and people can see expanding jobs and opportunity and hope in the nexus between democracy and capitalism.

I think we need to lean very hard on some of these backsliding democracies collectively and as much as possible to avoid hubris in doing so. So the more we can talk about the challenges of making democracy work and defending democratic principles is a common project. Rather than we are democratic, looks like you’re backsliding, you’re inferior. You better be like us. We all have challenges. You know, we all have to be honest about our deficiencies. But that shouldn’t restrain us from calling out threats and dangers elsewhere.

I think India is enormously important to the economic future of a free world and to the political future. But I think it is extremely shortsighted of the Biden administration to pursue a tactic of simply going silent about Narendra Modi’s democratic backsliding. And then we need a strategy for countering Chinese and Russian efforts to use covert, coercive and corrupting practices to penetrate and undermine democratic societies and to push out their global propaganda in the world. We have to fight again as a community of democracies across north, south, east, west, global community for the idea of democracy. First principles of, if you will, democratic capitalism, civil liberties, rule of law, the liberating potential of entrepreneurship and private property, properly facilitated and regulated, free elections as an important constraint on the abuse of power, human rights and so on. And I think we have kind of given up the battle for making the argument and making it multi-vocal through the voices and narratives of multiple cultures and civilisations. I think this is actually one of the most important imperatives now for fighting against democratic backsliding. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Martin Wolf
This makes me think the sort of hubris we had, and I must say, particularly the US had after the fall of the Soviet Union, the idea that we won, we could do whatever we liked, that the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism was complete, led to some truly terrible mistakes and I think greatly weakened our position with what you call the global south. So we have to admit to ourselves, these were profound errors and we’re living with the consequences of that. So the challenge is huge. Would you like to leave us with the idea that we can actually do this? Do you feel that we are up to this challenge? 

Larry Diamond
Yes. I would like to leave you with that idea, and I do so with the following quick points. Number one, I have found that when you engage audiences outside of our advanced industrial democracies with an element of humility and open-mindedness, and you freely concede that there have been many mistakes and even very arrogant and overweening ones in many of our rich, established democracies, and that now we’re all kind of groping in common toward some shared aspirations for what kind of world we want to live in, it defuses some of this anger and resentment about the hubris of the West. That’s number one. So tone, humility, partnership. These are important starting points.

Number two, Martin, as you know, I do a lot of looking — I think you do, too — at the global public opinion data. You ask ordinary people around the world, you know, what kind of regime they want to live in. There’s no surge of desire to live in a fascist regime. People want accountability. They want self-determination. They certainly want freedom of the press and protection for their civil liberties. So if you say to people, look, let’s think about what we have in common, we all would like self-determination. We’d all like our rulers to be accountable to us. We would all like to live under a predictable rule of law where, you know, the knock on the door is not something you have to fear in the middle of the night. We would all like to know that we can speak, publish, worship, think freely, and not have to fear the consequences of that. And if we make investments and create new wealth, that it will be protected under a rule of law. We’d all like to do those things. Most of us still believe in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights. So how can we build a future going forward? Do you really think that the Chinese model of a neo-totalitarian, Orwellian surveillance state where Big Brother is watching in every direction, will be following every move you make on the streets, every purchase you make with the digital yuan, every tweet that you post on Weibo, do you really think that’s a future you want to live in? Very few people want to sign up to that. When people say they like the China model, they like the China model of, you know, doubling your per capita income every 15 years.

So if we start with values that we have in common that are not western values, they’re universal values and say, how can we move those forward together? People really rally to that kind of invitation. I think there is some evidence of the continuing resilience of that. It’s evidenced in the fact that with all of the disadvantages that the opposition faced, massive disadvantages in media control, the ruling military controlling the electoral administrative apparatus and disqualifying some candidates, nevertheless, the opposition won a staggering victory against military rule in Thailand recently. 

[PEOPLE CHANTING]

Pita Limjaroenrat
The ability to form a majority government coalition because we passed the 100th milestones and the incumbent did not manage to surpass that at all. 

Larry Diamond
So I think there’s still a lot of public aspiration to live in free, open and accountable governments. And that’s the wind we have at our backs right now. 

Martin Wolf
So the tide of illiberalism can be turned back? 

Larry Diamond
Yes, it most definitely can be turned back. And I am confident it will be turned back at some point. The question is how much tragedy we have to experience before it happens. 

Martin Wolf
Larry Diamond, thank you very, very much. 

Larry Diamond
Thank you, Martin. Nice to be with you. 

[CHURCH BELL RINGING]

Martin Wolf
That’s St Paul’s Cathedral marking the hour. And it also marks the end of this episode. I’ll be back next Saturday speaking to the journalist Anne Applebaum about the extent to which autocrats are conspiring to subvert democracy everywhere. Because, to paraphrase the poet John Donne, no democracy can be an island. And each time a democracy withers, it’s a warning to the rest of us that the very notion of democracy is at stake. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

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This week’s episode of Saving Democratic Capitalism was produced by Laurence Knight with help from Marc Filippino and Samantha Giovinco. Manuela Saragosa was the executive producer and Breen Turner, the sound engineer. The FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. 

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