Snap judgement: Japan PM’s electoral landslide

0:03Rebecca Jackson: The Economist.

0:10Rosie Blau: Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blau. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:25Rosie Blau: In the past decade, American universities have become a hunting ground for almost every phase of the culture wars. Today, free speech and why Republican states seem to have a problem with Plato. And 50 years ago, taxi driver brought us a moldering New York and a misfit who raged against the society he couldn't find a way into. No wonder, says our correspondent, that the film still feels so relevant.

1:01Rosie Blau: First up, though.

1:10Andrew Miller: This weekend, Japanese voters braved record-breaking snowfall to head to the polls.

1:22Andrew Miller: There, they delivered a record-breaking victory for Prime Minister Takeichi Sanaya, who called this snap election just weeks ago.

1:31Rosie Blau: Noah Snyder is our East Asia bureau chief.

1:34Andrew Miller: It was a high-stakes political gamble, and it has paid off big time. The result is set to reshape Japanese politics for years to come.

1:45Rosie Blau: Noah, it was a political gamble. It paid off. Just how significant is this victory for Takeichi and her party?

1:53Andrew Miller: It's a really historic victory, Rosie. It's hard to overstate. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which Prime Minister Takeichi heads, has basically dominated Japanese politics since 1955, ruling with only two brief interruptions. And this is the biggest victory they've won, the biggest margin they've had in the lower house of parliament, in the entirety of the party's history. So the result is a massive mandate, a super majority for the LDP on its own. They picked up more than 100 seats in the course of this election and they now control 316 on their own and together with their coalition partners will control over 350 of the 465-seat chamber.

2:39Rosie Blau: As you say, we weren't sure she could do it. So how did Takechi pull this off?

2:44Andrew Miller: The question was always whether Takaichi's personal popularity, which was quite high, according to opinion polls, would be enough to bring her less popular party along. And clearly, her popularity has proven to be a potent force. She's had really long coattails in this election. Part of it is that she has a personal appeal. She represents change for voters who are eager to see an end to the old way of politics. She's the country's first female prime minister, but perhaps more importantly, she comes from a kind of middle class background, a family that could be like the average Japanese voters, rather than from the sort of political dynasties that many of her predecessors hailed from.

3:27Andrew Miller: She speaks in a kind of plain spoken style. She has a bit of panache, a bit of flair. She used to be a heavy metal drummer. She likes riding motorcycles. She's comfortable on TV, on stage, on the world stage, and increasingly on social media, where again, her predecessors, who are mostly older men, have really, really struggled. And finally, she's really put in the work. And I think that's something that resonated with Japanese voters and has resonated since the start of her campaign. The sort of slogan, the catchphrase of her administration has become her pledge to work, work, work, work, work.

4:06Andrew Miller: And she's been taking to repeating that and to really acting on that on the campaign trail, racking up thousands of kilometers crisscrossing the country and outrunning her rivals.

4:17Rosie Blau: It's easy to see this now as something that was fated to happen almost. but remind us why the LDP's reputation had taken such a hit in recent years.

4:28Andrew Miller: That's a really important piece of context for this election. The LDP has long been the dominant party in Japanese politics, going back to its founding in 1955. But in recent years, especially since the resignation of Ms. Takeichi's political mentor, Abe Shinzo, in 2020, the party has stumbled. It's gone from one scandal to another, from one short-lived prime minister to another forgettable short-lived prime minister. And in the last two national elections, an upper house contest and a lower house contest, the party took a real drubbing and it had struggled even to form a governing coalition. So last October, they decided to revive their fortunes by turning to Takaichi.

5:15Andrew Miller: And she came in, again, leading a very fragile coalition. The old coalition partner ditched the LDP. She had to bring in a new coalition partner. And she really barely got over the line to get confirmed as prime minister. So the party was really struggling, certainly by LDP standards.

5:33Rosie Blau: And where does this leave the opposition?

5:36Andrew Miller: Well, that's the other big part of this story, Rosie. It's not just about Takaichi's triumph, Takaichi's popularity. It's also about the absolute collapse of the mainstream left of center opposition in Japan. The biggest opposition party heading into this election was the Centrist Reform Alliance, which was a kind of a hastily formed merger of two longstanding parties, the Constitutional Democratic Party, which was the traditional opposition force and Kometo, which was the LDP's former coalition partner. And this new alliance between the two of them lost more than half of the seats that they had held heading into the election.

6:18Andrew Miller: So like many a merger gone wrong, it was a muddle rather than a synergy. The two parties lost sight of their identities. There was an unclear leadership structure, and the party's core supporters seem to have abandoned them. We also saw a big drop in support for smaller left-wing parties, suggesting that voters might see their sort of traditional ideological pacifism as out of step with today's turbulent world and that they may trust Takaichi as a stronger and more decisive-seeming figure to lead Japan in this turbulent moment. We also saw a new kind of trend emerging or strengthening rather in this election, which is the rise of upstart political parties.

7:04Andrew Miller: So there were a handful of smaller new parties that picked up seats, but not necessarily as many as they had hoped and certainly not as many as they would need to pose anything like a credible threat to the LDP's new grip on power.

7:20Rosie Blau: So what is Takechi going to do with this big mandate?

7:24Andrew Miller: Well, I think it's clear that she wants to move much faster. As I mentioned before, she's a motorcycle enthusiast. And I think that's maybe a good way to think about where Japan is heading now. She's just been handed a brand new Ducati and being given the keys to take to the open road. She has no opposition inside the party left that will challenge her after a victory like this, and no opposition within the parliament that can really stop or slow her ambitions. So the question is what she chooses to focus on and where she chooses to put her pedal to the metal. She has talked about two big sets of policies, one having to do with security, making Japan stronger.

8:03Andrew Miller: So that involves spending more on defense. It involves beefing up Japan's armed forces and Japan's sort of defense industry, Japan's security state. So doing things to make it easier for Japanese defense industrial companies to export weapons and thus to sort of build a more sustainable domestic defense industry. It involves things like building out a national intelligence apparatus, which Japan has tended to lack in a post-war kind of modern form. And then on the flip side, there's a set of policies related to the economy, to making Japan more prosperous, as she puts it. And here she is pursuing what she calls a responsible and proactive fiscal policy.

8:44Andrew Miller: And that may sound a bit like a contradiction because in fact it is a bit of a contradiction. So she wants to spend big on a host of industries. She wants to sort of really use expansionary fiscal policy to try to drive growth. But she wants to do so in a way that isn't perceived by markets as being irresponsible. And she's doing this, of course, in the context of rising inflation, rising interest rates, and rising questions from investors about the sustainability of these plans. So the question, I think, for Takaichi is whether she can drive faster while staying on course.

9:23Rosie Blau: Noah, thank you very much.

9:25Andrew Miller: Thank you for having me.

9:30Rosie Blau: And you can hear more about Japan's economic woes and Takeichi's plans to reshape the economy on Money Talks, our business and finance podcast, which was out last week. You'll need to be a subscriber.

9:50Noah Sneider: The next couple of weeks, my aim is to give you a crash course in the philosophy.

10:00Andrew Miller: We are really interested in the theory.

10:05Rebecca Jackson: Recently, I had the chance to sit in on a philosophy lecture at Texas A &M University, America's biggest university.

10:13Rosie Blau: Rebecca Jackson is the Economist's Southern correspondent.

10:18Rebecca Jackson: It was delivered by Professor Martin Peterson. And as an undergraduate philosophy class, it was pretty par for the course. Utilitarianism, the prisoner's dilemma, the usual fare. But compare the course syllabus to the one that he initially submitted to the university's philosophy department, and you may notice a key difference. One text had vanished from the reading list. Plato's Symposium. And it's that omission that's recently landed the university in the midst of a media frenzy.

10:50Andrew Miller: Oh, someone discussed our class in Washington Post today or in the New York Times. And I saw that it was an op-ed in Wall Street Journal today.

10:57Rebecca Jackson: Yeah.

10:58Andrew Miller: Et cetera, et cetera. That's, yeah.

11:00Rebecca Jackson: As Professor Peterson explained, this is because Symposium discusses, among other things, Plato's views on gender and sexuality. His was one of 200 courses said to be under review by the university's administration for prohibited content. He was told to either nix Plato from the syllabus or be reassigned to teach another class.

11:24Rosie Blau: So why did the university ban Plato's work?

11:29Rebecca Jackson: This is part of a broader effort by university administrators who tried to comply with a slew of harsh new higher education bills that have come out of the Texas state legislature. In the past couple of years, Texas politicians have passed laws that ban universities from teaching DEI, they overhaul the curriculum, and they give less and less power to faculty to decide what they want to teach. Another professor who I spoke to in the School of Government told me that in the first week of classes this term, his ethics of public service class was canceled because he couldn't tell the dean which days he planned to speak about race and gender.

12:07Rebecca Jackson: Professors across A &M in all different departments are anxious because they've seen the stakes of this kind of crackdown. In the fall, one professor who was teaching about gender fluidity in a children's literature class was fired by the university after a video of her teaching came to light in Austin.

12:25Rosie Blau: And is it just Texas A &M or is this a bigger thing?

12:29Rebecca Jackson: It's much bigger. Texas A &M is perhaps the starkest example of it. But I also visited University of Texas at Austin, which is the state's flagship school. There, 40 % of faculty said that last fall they changed their curriculum to try to comply preemptively with the state's laws. I spoke to the president of the University Democrats, a student club there, and she told me that the club now has to jump through hoops to get their outside speakers approved and has to read this disclaimer at the start of every meeting saying that their opinions don't represent the university. This is part of a trend that actually goes far beyond Texas.

13:05Rosie Blau: So what's

13:07Rebecca Jackson: happening more broadly then? There's a drive across Republican-run states to legislate what is taught and to punish professors and students who speak of prohibited ideas. A new report by a non-profit called Penn America found that lawmakers in 32 states filed 93 bills last year censoring higher education. 21 of those passed, subjecting more than half of America's college students to these policies.

13:31Rosie Blau: We've had a number of years of people trying to monitor other people's speech on campuses. Isn't this just a corrective from the right?

13:42Rebecca Jackson: So that's certainly what a lot of conservatives are saying. There were real problems and universities needed to be reformed, and this is the proper way to go about it. But I dove into a database of free speech cases collected by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression, FIRE. What they found is that in 2020, most of the attempts to censor student speech on campus involve left-wing efforts to curb right-wing speech. But in the years since, there's been a striking political reversal. Now, as many as 80 % of these cases are coming from the right. I put some of this to Brandon Creighton.

14:18Rebecca Jackson: He's a former state senator in Texas who was the author of many of these bills. And this year he was appointed as the chancellor of Texas Tech University, one of the biggest public university systems in the state. He explained to me that academic freedom is in fact alive and well. He said that campuses across America have been commandeered for decades. And if anything, he sees a shift back towards the center now. He also explained to me that he sees public universities and is as an extension of the state.

14:47Rosie Blau: So what do you make of that assertion that academic freedoms are alive and well?

14:52Rebecca Jackson: Rosie, to be honest, I don't find it so compelling, and neither do lots of the researchers and faculty that I spoke with. And even some conservatives who have been fighting against the left-wing influence on campuses are pretty shocked by what's going on now. One of those people is Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank. For years, he has been saying that there need to be real changes on college campuses and that wokeism has infected the way that we teach and the way that students learn. But he says that the establishment Republicans who have been fighting for reforms have now been crowded out by radicals who are overcorrecting.

15:31Rebecca Jackson: In some cases, these laws have been so dramatic and so absurd that the courts have had to step in. One court struck down a Texas law that attempted to ban on-campus expressive activities between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. The federal judge in that case quipped that the First Amendment does not have a bedtime. So where does that leave academic freedom in American universities? At least in red states, Rosie, I think academic freedom is really at risk right now. If you look at Texas A &M, since we published this article, they have gutted their Women and Gender Studies program entirely. Many academics will now have to decide whether they're going to sit there quietly and adapt in order to comply with these rules or stand up for the cause of free speech?

16:15Rebecca Jackson: I asked Martin Peterson, the philosophy professor who nicks Plato from his syllabus, where he stood on that question. In terms of, you know, poking the bear, do you not feel that...

16:26Andrew Miller: So several people have told me I should stop now, don't, don't poke the bear too much, etc., etc. But I guess that is the problem here, that I can keep poking the bear up to a certain point. and when it's too late, it's too late.

16:40Rebecca Jackson: You're willing to take the vote?

16:43Andrew Miller: I'm the chair of Academic Freedom Council on this campus. If I can't speak, who can? I feel I have a moral obligation to do it, and even if it has catastrophic consequences for me. With the Lutheran theory, I do it for a greater good.

16:57Rebecca Jackson: Come March, he will skip over the unit on Plato. But instead, he's planned a two-class series on the value of free speech.

17:06Rosie Blau: Becca, thank you so much for talking to me. Thanks for having me on, Rosie.

17:26Yes, we're talking to him, or at least about him.

17:30Rosie Blau: Andrew Miller writes our backstory column on culture.

17:34Noah Sneider: Released 50 years ago this month, Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese's sleazy, highbrow masterpiece, routinely ranks among the best films of all time, and often tops lists of movies set in New York. It's revered not only for its depiction of the city, but also the character of Travis Bickle, a cabbie-turned-vigilante, coruscatingly played by Robert De Niro. Half a century on, I think one of these characterisations has held up better than the other.

18:05Noah Sneider: Today's New Yorkers often complain about urban blights like high prices and rats, but watching Taxi Driver really puts that in perspective. There was a sanitation strike when the film was shot in the summer of 1975, and it shows. Unemployment and the murder rate were soaring, the population was shrinking, and New York City in this film is overrun by drunks and druggies, strippers, pimps, child prostitutes and stick-up artists. Everything was worse in the 1970s, you might conclude after watching it, except for the movies. Now, on screen, as in reality, New York contains multitudes. It's the home of moonstruck lovers and greedy financiers, hustlers, mafiosi.

18:46Noah Sneider: It's where Harry romances Sally, King Kong swats a biplane, and Superman takes flight. Yet for many movie fans, the cesspit city in Taxi Driver is cinema's supreme version of New York. In a way, I think that's a mistaken way of thinking about the film, because if you watch Taxi Driver closely, it's clear that it's less a portrait of a place than of Travis Bickle's febrile perception of it, refracted through his rain-slicked windscreen and crumbling mind. In this film, the shimmery surface of the metropolis is a mirror. Maybe great cities always are.

19:26Noah Sneider: And as for Travis's character, Well, he's a damaged, alienated Vietnam veteran. He's transfixed by what revolves him. He loathes the decadence of the East Village and Times Square, but hangs out in porno cinemas. Above all, he's a loner. The taxi is kind of a symbol of his isolation. It's as if there's a secret to communicating that no one's told Travis. He wants to make friends and court women, but he doesn't know how. One of the shocks in a film that's full of them is a late mention of his parents. He had seemed so irredeemably alone.

20:07Noah Sneider: Travis is a product of his era, but his neuroses and contradictions feel very familiar today too. As for a lot of misfits, politics offers him a jolt of power for his ego and a sheen of virtue for his rage against filth and scum. The politician he fixes on hardly matters, nor does it really matter whether Travis supports him or plots to assassinate him. Racism and misogyny are outlets for him too. You're just like the rest of them, he tells a woman who bolts after he takes her to a skin flick on a date. Today, Travis Bickle would find consolation on incel forums. He buffs up his body like an acolyte of the manosphere and in the end he seeks redemption in violence.

20:50Noah Sneider: His most loving relationship is with his guns. As for too many mass shooters over the past half century, murder seems the only way for Travis to get the world's attention. And the cosmic joke of the film is that it does.

21:07Noah Sneider: Throughout the film, Travis's anguish has appealed to viewers' sympathies, while he's repelled them with his prejudice and his bloodlust. The climax is a horrific shooting spree, at which we, the viewer, finally see Travis for the psychotic he is. But at the same time, within the story, society takes him at his own estimation and the newspapers decide that his is the right kind of violence and that Travis is a hero. I think in a way posterity has made a similar mistake with Taxi Driver, replacing the alarm it's supposed to cause with admiration. These days, the film's most immortal line, you talking to me, tends to get parroted as a slogan of macho bristle, whereas it's actually spoken by a maniac to his own reflection in a slumland bedsit.

21:57Noah Sneider: Outsiders in New York often feel like they're in a movie, gawking at the city's skyscrapers and the yellow cabs like Travis's and watching the steam rising from manhole covers. So does Travis, actually. He thinks he's in a western or a gangster film. But in a way, I think 50 years on, his genre is horror. he embodies something that still today is very real and very close that you prefer not to see

22:49Rosie Blau: That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. See you back here tomorrow.