How to Save Democracy: Speech to Nobel Laureates
Updated: 3 hours ago
I gave a speech in Oslo last month to former Nobel Peace Prize laureates and other inspiring folks. I shared one of the core strategies we've identified at Democracy Hub with thousands of frontline democracy defenders: democratic populism. It's part of why we've recently celebrated HUGE wins in Serbia and Brazil, and Hungary before that. I think it's how we win.
It's only seven minutes. You can watch it below, and the full text follows.
So, I have four super cute little kids that I love to bits and think about all the time. We've talked a lot of scary talk about the future up here, but one of the places my brain goes when I think about their futures is how rare democracy is — how precious, how anomalous it is in human affairs.
Look at thousands of years of recorded history. We got a brief moment in a city in ancient Greece 2,000 years ago, and then a moment that started a couple of centuries ago. That moment only touched a minority of humanity, and it could be about to end, because our keystone democracies — India, Brazil, the United States — are close to falling, even over the next two election cycles. And the smaller democracies, like mine in Canada, won't survive a world of authoritarian great powers. We are already under assault.
So I've spent the last five years quietly working with thousands of frontline democracy defenders and leaders to study the authoritarian playbook. Not in the autocratic countries we've been discussing, not Iran, not Russia, but in the countries at the bleeding edge of the authoritarian world, the ones that might fall next. And we have been developing our democratic response. I feel cautiously confident that our playbook is a vaccine, a cure and a tonic for our democracies. You can see it and judge for yourself at antiauthoritarian.com. And if you want to join the community of people shaping it, you can join Democracy Hub at dhub.org.
The playbook is very complex, and today I'm talking about just one strategy in it: democratic populism. By that I mean a powerful political and social movement rooted in the desires and concerns of ordinary people. I founded and led Avaaz, a movement of over 70 million people fighting for democracy, climate action and human rights, for 15 years. So I feel like I've been doing democratic populism my whole adult life. Here's what we found works.
Number one, it must be both a political movement and a civil and social movement. The two must be separate but working in tandem, and smart about each other.
Number two, it must dominate on digital. We have to defeat the tricks that have swamped our online spaces.
Number three, it has to have a big, inclusive story that includes all of us. And I'm sorry to say, it must have an opponent, an enemy — but make that a narrow opponent. Don't make war on a good portion of the population. It must also have, and fight for, a vision of tomorrow: change in people's lives that they can see and feel and taste. Real stuff.
And lastly, it must build smart, big-tent cooperation among democratic forces. Not unity, but smart cooperation.
To some, all this might sound obvious, maybe even easy. It's not, because political parties and social movements are the way they are for many reasons, and change is hard.
For example, establishment incumbents and centrists are often a problem, because they want to manage the status quo rather than change it. They tinker with broken systems. They sometimes oppose real, effective solutions to the problems people are facing in their lives.
Radicals are also often a problem. Democracies frequently die through cumulative extremism — this is the moderation point President Santos was making. Left and right fuel each other to turn the pluralism, the give and take of democracy, into a zero-sum knife fight for ideological supremacy. In that knife fight, democratic culture and democratic norms are discarded. Pluralism is punished. All that matters is winning the war.
Culture is upstream of institutions. Kill the democratic culture and the institutions will not stand. That's the play Steve Bannon and others are running right now. So we have both a right-wing and a left-wing problem in many countries. It often takes two to tango to destroy democracy — not usually as equal threats, but often each playing a necessary role.
And that problem is anchored at the elite level. I'm conscious of the room we're in here. Research by More in Common shows that strong progressives who are highly educated and consume a lot of news — at least in the United States and a couple of other countries — are the most deluded group in society about what their political opponents actually believe. I'm not preaching here. I saw this in myself, and I'm still in a detox period from getting out of it.
As a result, elite progressives, like far-right radicals, have become increasingly cut off from the people. They become convinced and self-righteous — for example, that keeping immigration at levels acceptable to a country is somehow racist.
The biggest illusion is that most people stand with such ideas. The truth is that most people aren't divided into left and right at all. According to the World Values Survey, views on culture and economics are not left-right correlated in any country in the world. I found that mind-blowing. There just isn't a left-right divide among people on all of these issues. So the delusion about what divides us is largely driven by elites.
This is the disease that democratic populism cures. It listens to people again, without prejudice, about what our problems are and how to fix them. It depolarizes by transcending the divide with an inclusive vision. And it builds a truly disruptive movement that fights for real change.
Serbian students, Nepalese students, Slovenian feminists, Arévalo in Guatemala, Lula in Brazil, Magyar in Hungary, Gandhi in India — they have begun to show us what democratic populism looks like in practice. We need to perfect this practice if we're going to save democracy in our time.
But maybe we can do even better than that. I remember a scene in a Star Wars movie where the villain, Count Dooku, shoots his evil lightning at Yoda, and Yoda takes the lightning, bundles it, absorbs it into his heart and says, "Much have you to learn, Dooku."
I know there's been an enormous amount of pain and fear and anger in this authoritarian season. So many people in this room have suffered so much. But what if we could eat that bitterness? What if we could take it in, let it make us stronger and wiser, and democracy could come back stronger than ever in this next season of the human journey?
That's the future I get excited about, for my kids and for all kids.
Thank you.
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