- hoje
Professor da Universidade Johns Hopkins e “pensador favorito de Barack Obama” denuncia o populismo e outras ideologias autoritárias, dentre elas a cultura Woke
Acompanhe O Antagonista no canal do WhatsApp.
Boletins diários, conteúdos exclusivos em vídeo... e muito mais.
Link do canal:
https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Va2SurQHLHQbI5yJN344
Apoie o jornalismo independente, torne-se um assinante do combo O Antagonista | Crusoé e fique por dentro dos principais acontecimentos da política e economia nacional:
https://hubs.li/Q02b4j8C0
Não fique desatualizado, receba as principais notícias do dia em primeira mão se inscreva na nossa newsletter diária:
https://bit.ly/newsletter-oa
Ouça O Antagonista | Crusoé quando quiser nos principais aplicativos de podcast.
Leia mais em www.oantagonista.com.br | www.crusoe.com.br
Acompanhe O Antagonista no canal do WhatsApp.
Boletins diários, conteúdos exclusivos em vídeo... e muito mais.
Link do canal:
https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Va2SurQHLHQbI5yJN344
Apoie o jornalismo independente, torne-se um assinante do combo O Antagonista | Crusoé e fique por dentro dos principais acontecimentos da política e economia nacional:
https://hubs.li/Q02b4j8C0
Não fique desatualizado, receba as principais notícias do dia em primeira mão se inscreva na nossa newsletter diária:
https://bit.ly/newsletter-oa
Ouça O Antagonista | Crusoé quando quiser nos principais aplicativos de podcast.
Leia mais em www.oantagonista.com.br | www.crusoe.com.br
Categoria
🗞
NotíciasTranscrição
00:00Olá assinante, seja bem-vindo a mais uma edição de Cruzoé Entrevista, o programa de entrevistas
00:12da edição semanal da revista Cruzoé. Eu sou Caio Matos, repórter da revista Cruzoé e do site
00:17O Antagonista. O nosso entrevistado desta semana é o cientista político teuto-americano Yasha
00:24Monk. Monk é professor na Universidade de Johns Hopkins, no campus de Washington DC, nos Estados
00:30Unidos, e tem formação acadêmica pela Universidade de Harvard, também nos Estados Unidos, e pela
00:36Universidade de Cambridge, no Reino Unido. Monk é um dos acadêmicos mais renomados quando o assunto é
00:43crise da democracia liberal e ascensão do populismo. Ele lançou o seu livro mais recente em 2023,
00:49inglês, intitulado Identity Trap, em que traz também uma abordagem crítica, uma análise
00:55crítica sobre as políticas identitárias em movimentos de esquerda na atualidade, algo que também é conhecido
01:03como cultura woke. Monk nasceu na Alemanha Ocidental, em uma família de origem judaica, e hoje é conhecido
01:10como o pensador favorito do ex-presidente americano Barack Obama.
01:15Olá professor Monk, obrigado por gastar seu tempo conosco, como você está?
01:19Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to hear your beautiful language.
01:25Thank you very much. So, to begin, could you tell us why are liberal democracies in decline
01:33today? And just summarize what they are.
01:39Yeah, so first of all, you know, it's helpful to think about the nature of our political system.
01:43As you say, it's called a liberal democracy, but of course, what we mean by liberal in Brazil,
01:48in the United States, in Germany can be very different, and it can be different in different
01:52political contexts. You know, I think our political system is fundamentally defined by two foundational
01:59values. That of collective self-determination, that we want to rule ourselves, rather than
02:06letting some king or dictator or monarch or army general do that. And individual freedom, that
02:13we think the majority doesn't have a right to tell us what to say, how to worship, what kind of personal
02:21relationships to lead, you know, even if it's democratically constituted. So, that is the
02:27democratic element, collective self-determination, and the liberal element, individual freedom,
02:33a sphere in which we can make those decisions.
02:36I do think that we see a serious threat to democracy around the world. Part of it comes from straightforwardly
02:44authoritarian powers like Russia and China that are coming to be more influential and more powerful
02:50around the world. But part of it is homegrown, as it were. It's domestic. It is in the kinds of populist
02:58of political systems who want to undermine the basic elements of our political system. And they do that
03:05because they claim that they and they alone truly represent the people. And so any limits on their power
03:11are not legitimate. That starts to undermine individual freedoms, and eventually it can make it hard to
03:18sustain fair and free elections. Or it can lead to rebellions, as we've seen in Brazil, but also in the United
03:25States against the outcome of elections. Now, why all of this is happening today is a complicated
03:34question. In the people versus democracy, I think it's called something like
03:40in Portuguese.
03:44I argued that there's three main causes. Economic frustrations among a large percentage of the
03:52citizenry, rapid cultural gender demographic changes that are embraced by some but resisted by
04:02others. And finally, of course, the rise of the internet and of social media, which makes it much
04:07easier for new political movements to form. Today, I would probably add a fourth argument. And that is that
04:15in many countries, certainly in the United States, the sort of ruling set of people, the ruling
04:21milieu has become increasingly separated from the rest of the population. And I think that's led to a real
04:27crisis of confidence in democratic institutions, and is making it easier for these kind of populists to win
04:36that.
04:37So, just mention your book, The People Versus Democracy, which is one of your most renowned books. But I'd like also to
04:48talk about your latest book, which is called Identity Trap. It was launched this 2023 and is a critique towards
04:57identitarianism politics in the current leftist movements in British and American universities. Some
05:07people call it a woke culture, but you rather use the term you coined identity synthesis. So what is identity
05:17synthesis?
05:18Yeah. I call it the identity synthesis because it is, in my mind, a genuinely new ideology. I'm on the left
05:27and from the left historically. I joined the German Social Democratic Party when I was 13 years old. I had
05:32to lie to join the party because you have to be 14 in Germany to join a political party. So I pretended that
05:38I was a year older than I was. But what it is to be on the left has fundamentally changed over the course of those
05:45decades. It used to be that part of being on the left meant emphasizing that we're not so defined by the
05:55group into which we're born. That we can understand each other across the lines of ethnicity and religion
06:02and perhaps nationhood. That we can stand in political solidarity with people who appear to be quite
06:10different from us. And today's left has been transformed by the rise of a new ideology about the role that race and gender and
06:19sexual orientation do and should play in society. And it's become very skeptical of these ideas. It claims that if you,
06:27Kyo, stand at a different intersection of identities to me, then we're not truly going to be able to be in conversation to
06:34to understand each other. It says that we should be very worried about ways in which members of one kind of
06:41identity group might be influenced by the cultures of another identity group. That's a form of cultural
06:48appropriation that we must avoid. It has turned against a value that the left has historically defended
06:56or free speech saying that we must crack down on remarks that are somehow bad or offensive or wrong.
07:05And so in my new book, The Identity Trap, I chronicle the history of where these ideas come from,
07:12the process by which we were able to gain a lot of social and cultural and political influence. I critique
07:19the application of these ideas to everything from the way that children are taught in schools to how we
07:25think about public policy. And finally, I defend a liberal alternative to this, one that takes
07:32injustices seriously, but I think can do much better at creating a fair world. You know, in the process
07:41of that, I do try to boil down this tradition, which has many different themes, many different origins,
07:47to three main claims that I think help to define it. And it's number one, that the key prism for
07:53understanding the world is race, gender, and sexual orientation. Number two, that universal values or
08:00neutral rules, like those enshrined in the Brazilian constitution or those enshrined in the US
08:04constitution, are really just an attempt to pull the wool over people's eyes. They're really just an
08:09attempt to fool people into thinking that they're trying to make the world a better place. And therefore,
08:16third, the solution is to rip those principles up and make how we treat each other and how the state
08:21treats all of us always depend on the kind of identity groups to which we belong. So if you want a kind
08:26of definition of quote unquote wokeness, I would say that these three claims stand at the heart of much
08:33of that ideological tradition. I'd like to talk a little bit more about this wide picture. But first,
08:40I'll go into specifics because of a time sensitive matter, which is the war in Israel and Palestine.
08:50And in a recent interview for the British newspaper, The Telegraph, you said that, and I quote,
08:58it takes an identity obsessed ideology that only sees people through whether they are whites or people of
09:05of color, whether they are colonizers or colonized, to justify what Hamas did on October 7th. You were
09:13talking about, of course, about the terrorist attacks in Israel. So could you elaborate a little bit
09:21more on how that authoritarian politics is related to antisemitism or to put it in another way, overseas
09:34empathy towards Hamas? Yeah. And here I want to distinguish between the broader Israel-Palestine
09:41conflict, which is very complicated. And we certainly should have empathy for civilian victims, which exist on
09:49the Israeli side, but also exists on the Palestinian side. And the particular way in which much of the
09:59left throughout the world has responded to the initial terrorist attack by Hamas, which killed 1,200 people,
10:10slaughtered innocents at a rave at a music festival, killed babies and grandmothers in a gruesome way.
10:19And you saw among a significant portion of the left an endorsement of this, seemingly elation
10:33in some circles at it. You know, solidarity letters from leading academics, artists, writers,
10:42sometimes outright defended Hamas or at the very least failed in any way to distance themselves from
10:51Hamas, describing this terrorist attack at military action, for example, in one example.
10:59And so that's what I was trying to describe. How is it that people who claim that they want a better
11:07kinder world can end up effectively on the side of a theocratic terrorist organization that, by the way,
11:17is terrorizing and, you know, treating with extreme disdain much of its own population?
11:28And the answer to that, I do think, has to do with the identity trap, with the ideas I'm talking
11:35about. And there's three key ideas here. The first is to divide the world into whites and people of
11:41color, to think that the particular racial divide that has defined American history can be imposed
11:46in other countries and explain what's going on. The second is to think of a world in terms of settler
11:51colonies as the United States historically was. And to think that you can understand a very complicated
11:58historical conflict like that in Palestine as, you know, these distant settlers turning up and
12:05taking away land of the people it rightly belongs to. And thirdly, it is an understanding of racism,
12:13which is exclusively structural, which says that it's impossible for a member of one group to be racist
12:19towards a member of another group, unless there's also a power relationship between them. So that,
12:25as one American magazine recently wrote, it is literally impossible to be racist towards a white
12:31person. And therefore, perhaps it's actually impossible to do an injustice against somebody
12:35who's perceived as white. And so then you apply all of this to Israel and say, well, the Israelis are white,
12:39the colonizers, any resistance against them can't be racist, it can't be unjust, it has to be justified,
12:46even if it's murdering children and grandmothers. Now, all of this is a very simplistic view of what's
12:52going on in the country, because a plurality of Jews in Israel today are Mizrahi, they are of Middle
12:57Eastern origin, having been thrown out of countries like Iraq and Iran and Morocco and so on since 1948.
13:07They are racially not clearly distinct from Palestinians. It is not obvious that they are on average
13:13lighter or less white than Palestinians. To say that they're whites versus the Palestinians people
13:17of color is simply wrong. It's completely unclear how they're colonizers. They're thrown out of the
13:22countries in which the ancestors lived for centuries over the course of the last decades. And Israel was
13:26the only country that many of them had a right and an ability to go to. And the idea that all of that
13:33justifies killing a three-year-old who's descended from a family like that is just monstrous, I think.
13:41So, Professor Monk, getting back about the wide picture...
13:48Ele é professor na Universidade Johns Hopkins nos Estados Unidos
13:52e ele é um dos cientistas políticos mais renomados
13:55quando o assunto é crise das democracias liberais e ascensão do populismo.
14:00E hoje também ele é conhecido como o cientista político favorito
14:04do ex-presidente americano Barack Obama.
14:06Professor Monk, voltando ao quadrado,
14:12você já falou sobre como a esquerda tem,
14:17at least not the left, as all leftist movements or leftist thinkers,
14:24but a significant part of the left nowadays has come to
14:29get a little bit sceptical about free speech.
14:38But now I'd like to ask you, what is the limit to free speech?
14:44When does a free speech become hate speech or fake news
14:49and should be something to be restricted?
14:54So the term fake news, I think, or misinformation is particularly troubling
15:01because it is completely unclear what the definition of that would be.
15:07And in fact, the most prominent case in which we've used the frame of misinformation or fake news
15:14in order to restrict discussion of an idea has been during the pandemic
15:18when Facebook and YouTube notably limited discussion of a so-called lab leak theory,
15:26the idea that the origin of this virus may be in a lab from, you know,
15:33which was doing gain of function research, research into how viruses work
15:37and trying to understand potential threats from puffigans
15:40and in which perhaps through an accident that virus was able to escape.
15:46I don't know whether that theory is true or not, but at this point,
15:50it is taken very seriously at the high scientific levels
15:53and a number of intelligence agencies in the United States and elsewhere
15:56have said that they believe it to be true.
15:59For a good year during the pandemic, we were not able to talk about this theory
16:03because it was labeled misinformation.
16:06And so I think here we start to see one of the first problems
16:08with these kind of limits and restrictions on free speech,
16:11which is the classic one pointed out by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty,
16:15but each generation thought of itself as truthful.
16:18Each generation thought we had figured out the world,
16:20and yet looking back at the history of the world,
16:22we know that previous generations were wrong about fundamentally important things.
16:27So what, Mill asked, gives us the arrogance to think
16:30that we're the first generation in history to get everything right.
16:34When it comes to hate speech, I think somewhat similar questions end up applying.
16:45So I am a free speech absolutist in the sense that I don't think a state
16:49should ever have the right to put a citizen in jail
16:53for expressing political opinions, no matter how vile.
16:58We can certainly refuse to be friends with somebody who expresses those opinions.
17:03We certainly can decide not to publish them ourselves.
17:07I run a magazine called Persuasion.
17:09I wouldn't publish something that I consider hate speech.
17:12But I do not think that that is a decision that the state should be involved in.
17:18And the reason for that is very simple.
17:22It's that I don't trust anybody else to make a decision for me
17:27about what kind of things I should be allowed to say,
17:32and more importantly, what kind of things I should be allowed to listen to.
17:35And I think it is very naive to think that the people who make those decisions
17:40are systematically going to be on the side of the weak and the marginalized.
17:45There's an assumption here in the background that when we have hate speech laws,
17:49they really will just get, you know, protect vulnerable minorities
17:54from the speech of dangerous majorities.
17:57But by definition, the people who are making decisions about censorship
18:00are usually going to be very powerful people.
18:02So why are we so confident that they're going to be on the side of the weak and the marginalized
18:06rather than on the side of the dominant?
18:10Now, there are certain very limited categories of speech
18:15that have historically been off limits.
18:18One of them is imminent incitement to hatred or violence.
18:22So if you're standing in front of a baying mob and say, go beat up that person,
18:26that is incitement to a criminal act that can be forbidden.
18:30And another, which I think should be quite narrow, is forms of calumny.
18:38So if you're saying, you know, Kyle murdered somebody
18:42and I make this claim without any kind of evidence,
18:45that is something that should have a civil penalty where you can sue against this person.
18:54Isn't it a little bit utopic to let just a society regulate hate speech
19:03in the sense of outcasting those who promote it?
19:08Isn't it a little bit too impractical nowadays?
19:12No, I think the opposite is utopian.
19:16What's utopian is to assume at a time when Donald Trump may very well be the next president of the United States,
19:23Jair Bolsonaro was the last president of Brazil,
19:28to assume that it's always going to be the government who's on the side of the truth
19:32and that it's going to punish only people who say terrible things.
19:40I think it's much more dangerous to give a government the tool to censor people
19:45than it is to do the opposite.
19:49And we often see that governments end up abusing those powers.
19:53We've seen that in the case of Europe,
19:55where, by the way, you know, the French government, for example,
20:00has forbidden a number of pro-Palestinian protests
20:03because some of their members were displaying symbols that were sympathetic to Hamas.
20:09There was, you know, a justification that was perfectly in keeping with French law.
20:14I don't think that that is a good idea.
20:15That is the kind of abuses to which these government, these policies lead.
20:21In the United Kingdom, there was a protester also at a pro-Palestinian protest
20:27that had a picture of a prime minister, Rishi Sunak,
20:32with a picture of a coconut, implying that somehow,
20:37though he's brown on the outside, he's white on the inside.
20:40It's a ridiculous idea that I deeply dislike.
20:44But if robust criticism of a sitting prime minister is off limits,
20:48well, then what isn't off limits?
20:51Where does the government not have a right to shut down criticism
20:54of its governing policies?
20:57In Germany, during the pandemic,
21:01the interior minister of one of the German states of Hamburg
21:04criticized citizens partying during the pandemic in quite harsh terms.
21:12Somebody on Twitter said, what a dick.
21:14The next day, the police was in front of his door searching the apartment.
21:19This is the kind of abuses to which government's speech regulation leads.
21:25I think it's utopian to assume that governments will always be on the side of the vulnerable.
21:30So, getting back to the wide picture about the crisis and liberal democracies,
21:36you mentioned Brazil as, well, we had basically a reprisal of your January 6th insurrection
21:46there in the United States.
21:47So, and that's clearly the most painful and concise moment of crisis and democracy in Brazil.
22:03So, I'd like to ask you, how do you analyze the erosion of Brazilian democracy?
22:09And how much responsible, would you say, Lula and Jair Bolsonaro,
22:18who are the most divisive and influential leaders in Brazil today?
22:22How much Bolsonaro and Lula are responsible for that?
22:27Yeah.
22:28They are equivalently responsible as well.
22:32Well, I'll speak a little bit carefully because I haven't followed sort of recent developments in Brazil,
22:41especially since January 8th, as closely as I might.
22:46You know, certainly, you know, January 8th was a bizarre event in part because it felt, to me as an observer,
22:59like a sort of live action role play of January 6th.
23:03It just felt so clearly like an emulation of what had happened in the United States.
23:11And with a strange irony, but in America, there had at least been a kind of specific purpose of protesters,
23:21which is that on that day, you know, Congress was meant to certify Joe Biden's electoral victory.
23:29And so, you know, we hand over the presidency on January 20th.
23:33So there was some idea of ensuring that Donald Trump stays in office.
23:43As I recall it, the strange, slightly bizarre element of a Brazilian case is that by that time, Lula was already president, right?
23:50Because he had become president on January 1st, so, you know, seven days earlier.
23:54So it was a kind of, you know, live action role play of what had happened in the United States,
23:59but sort of decoupled from what the original purpose of those purchases in America had been.
24:04Of course, the purpose was deeply illegitimate.
24:07But it just made the whole thing sort of even more surreal in my eyes.
24:12But it illustrates a fundamental aspect of authoritarian populism,
24:19which is that it is directed against political pluralism.
24:24It cannot accept the idea that the political opposition might be legitimate,
24:30that people on the other political side may, in the win election, have a fair justification in ruling.
24:37Because I and I alone really speak of this country, and the people on the other side,
24:41but not just adversaries, they're traitors.
24:43And that is something that right-wing populists like Trump and Bolsonaro share.
24:49It's something that left-wing populists can also be guilty of.
24:53Certainly, Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela destroyed their democratic institutions
25:00by the use of, in this respect, very similar rhetoric.
25:05As I understand, and read Lula, he is a deeply polarizing figure
25:13who is not afraid of leading into political polarization in Brazil.
25:23There are many things, including his foreign policy,
25:26on which I have significant disagreements with him.
25:30From my understanding, he does not seem to have undermined the peaceful handover of power
25:40or the persistence of other political forces to the same extent.
25:48So, while I am certainly critical of Lula,
25:52I would not see his responsibility as being equal to that of Bolsonaro.
26:00So, as my last question, I'd like to talk about our neighbor, Argentina,
26:08because recently they elected libertarian Javier Millet as their president.
26:15He is also a deeply polarizing, divisive figure.
26:19He also is not shy of attacking institutions of Argentinian democracy,
26:27most significantly the central bank.
26:30And I'd like to ask you, how do you see Javier Millet in this wide picture of rise of populism
26:38and decline of liberal democracies?
26:44Yeah, Javier Millet is an interesting figure,
26:47and it's a little bit hard to know exactly where he fits in for now.
26:51I think the next years will tell us more about just how radical he is
26:58and just how much some of his flirting with anti-democratic sentiment
27:02or with a re-evaluation of the military dictatorship in Argentina
27:07will turn out to matter or to have substance.
27:11You know, I will start by saying that you always have to try and understand
27:18why it is that populists have a chance of winning.
27:21When everything is going well in a country, it's hard for populists to win.
27:25And when people have deep trust in their political institutions,
27:29it is unlikely that populists are able to win majorities.
27:33In Argentina, the answer to that question is particularly easy, right?
27:39This is a country that has been declining for a very long time in economic terms.
27:47A hundred years ago, Argentina was roughly as rich as the United States per capita.
27:53Now it is at about 30% of America's GDP.
27:57And when voters are given a choice between an unproven, slightly strange candidate
28:10that promises to be a breath of fresh air, that promises to change everything,
28:15and the sitting finance minister who has overseen an inflation rate of 140%,
28:21who is a representative of a political tradition that helps to explain
28:27why Argentina is now at 30% of America's GDP when it was once at parity.
28:34Well, it's not hard to understand why a lot of people are going to say,
28:39let's try this new thing.
28:41Perhaps I have some trepidation about it.
28:45You know, about half or nearly half of the people who voted for Malay in the second round
28:49had not voted for him in the first round.
28:50So clearly not all of his supporters are super fans of him.
28:53Many of them will have some concerns of their own, but they understandably,
29:04I'm not sure I agree with them, but understandably judged the status quo
29:08to be worse than taking that kind of risk.
29:11So I think that background is important for assessing Malay.
29:14Now, you know, there's two questions for the future of Argentina.
29:21The first is, what does he want to do?
29:24Is he going to go through with dollarization?
29:27Is he going to go through with trying to change the social and economic model of Argentina
29:36to the extent that he promised in the campaign?
29:39And the other question, of course, is whether he's going to be able to do that,
29:42because for now, at least, his hold over the political system is limited
29:48because of the semi-presidential system, because he doesn't have governors,
29:55because he doesn't have his own majority in parliament.
29:57And so even if he is a populist akin to some others in terms of his intention
30:06to concentrate power in his own hands, there may simply be too many institutional obstacles
30:10for him to be able to do that.
30:13And finally, of course, his ideology is a little bit different.
30:16There is a kind of radically libertarian element in his ideology,
30:20which is unusual among populists.
30:23Even somebody like Donald Trump, for example, who certainly is right-leaning
30:28on economics in certain respects, was notable by comparison to other Republican grandees
30:34by being more moderate on the economy, by saying, for example, in the 2016 primary
30:39that some amount of health coverage is a responsibility of the state,
30:44something that his competitors refused to say.
30:49So here we have a little bit of a novelty, somebody who looks in certain respects
30:55like a classic right-wing populist, but who is elected under circumstances
31:02where you understand the sort of popular frustration that gives rise to him,
31:05and who at least claims to be motivated by this rather high-minded libertarian set of ideas
31:14that are interesting in theory, but rather unproven in practice.
31:20So, you know, it'll be a very interesting experiment to watch.
31:27And just in the interest of Argentina, you know, I hope that he is able to get the country
31:35back to a path on economic growth, even if I'm not holding my breath for that outcome.
31:41Thank you very much for spending your time with us, Professor Monk.
32:08Thank you so much, everybody enjoyed this.
32:11I am Caio Matos, reporter of the Cruzoé magazine and of the Antagonist site.
32:15See you next time.
32:38Thank you.
32:39Thank you.