25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal

28:46Or even enjoy it. And even enjoy it. And I just wasn't cut out for that. I'm actually, I think, a pretty tough guy in a way, pretty resolute. But I really found that difficult. And I admire people who can put up with that and above all retain their sense of humor. I got very humorless about it towards the end. You know, the great politicians laugh it off, and it's really wonderful and life-enhancing to see them do that. But I just, I got over-serious about it and uptight about it. And fundamentally, just to conclude the thought, I didn't like what I had become. And I like myself, I mean, within limits, I like myself better now that I'm out of it.

29:27So I worry, though, sometimes that the personality that you have to develop in order to endure the campaign, win the campaign, can unfit you for government. So in a UK context, Boris Johnson is astonishingly good at laughing off the attacks. Liz Truss was incredibly good. I mean, she's very tough, very resilient, laughed at all the attacks, didn't seem to mind. But I think that was a problem, too, because it meant that when they're sitting around the cabinet table, they simply don't have the ability to think about complexity, to process things which are ambiguous, to have the necessary intellectual humility or curiosity to be able to run things well.

30:14So I wonder whether you feel this, too, that maybe the personality required to endure modern politics may get in the way of your ability to actually run the country well. Boy, I never got close to running the country. I was in opposition the whole time. So I never actually knew you. You actually got around the cabinet table and Ali helped to run a government for a decade. I didn't get close. So I don't know what governing would take. But I sense that you're right. I found opposition didn't prepare me for anything other than getting used to getting beat up all day. And that wasn't bad. I mean, don't cry for me, Argentina.

30:51It toughened me up in a way that I think was useful. But I think you're probably right. Our political system does not train us to govern. I think I remember Tony Blair saying when he came in in 97, it just, it took him the better part of a decade to understand how to actually govern a country well. And I think that's a real problem. But I think that's always, I think it's an intrinsic problem. I mean, if you think back to one of the most dramatic transitions of all was, you know, Franklin Roosevelt dies in early 45 as the war comes to an end. And this kind of nondescript, mediocre senator from Missouri becomes president overnight and has these earth shattering decisions to take with no preparation.

31:41And he turned out to be, I think, one of the great presidents. So I just think that's maybe intrinsic to politics. And it's a little technocratic to think, okay, let's design a political system that will prepare people for the burden of office. The burden of office is always unexpected and frightening and scary and test you to the limits, which is precisely why over and over and over people seek elected office because they want that challenge. Go back to your life as an intellectual. One of the things that we talk about on the podcast a fair bit is the sense we both have, I think, of a lack of ideas, a lack of new ideas being generated.

32:20Do you agree that that's a problem, not just in politics, but in the world more generally now? And what's your sense of where new political ideas can come from? I think I'm supposed to say at this point in the proceedings, because I'm an intellectual, that we need more ideas. I'd like to see competence. I'd like to see just steady incremental delivery so that people have more confidence that politicians know what the heck they're doing. Every time we have a victory, that is every time, for example, COVID is well managed, it incrementally boosts or deals with what I think is the salient problem, which is the gulf between the political elite and the electorate.

33:07This enormous sense of suspicion, which is fed by social media. I'm not sure good ideas are the solution. I think that the solution to me, maybe this makes me an unimaginative incrementalist, but I just think every time a politician anywhere in the world gets something done right and done well, it's a matter of rejoicing for democracy everywhere. And that's the key thing. Michael, can I just go on this? I mean, clearly, you've pointed with talking about rising inequality and to what seems to be a massive problem in our economic system. I mean, it does feel as though the consensus of the 1990s, these kind of global liberal free markets, was hit very hard by the 2008 financial crash, and in Latin America by the crash of commodity prices.

34:00And there is a real sense of stagnant incomes, of rising inequality, of many parts of our country feeling credibly excluded, and many other people feeling just precarious, feeling they're barely hanging on by their fingernails and debt. And so it does feel as though we need a new economic settlement, whether that is a new form of industrial strategy, new forms of taxes, new forms of investment. And I'm not feeling that. I'm not feeling that any of the Western leaders are producing something convincing, which actually deals with that problem. Oh, Rory, you have to be right. I mean, I look at the numbers.

34:40I simply look at distribution of income in most Western societies since the 1970s. And you see that. And I look at my children having the struggle to get a foothold in the 21st century, and I found it effortless to get a foothold in the 20th century. I'm sure you're right. What I'm skeptical of is the idea that there is a new economic settlement. What I'd like is persistent, bold experimentation, as Roosevelt said, at which you try one little thing, and if it works, you make it bigger and you try and scale. I think we're flying blind in terms of knowing what will actually fix this problem. And one of the biggest problems, which is eating away at the legitimacy of politics worldwide, but particularly in Britain, is the sense that the determinants of the economic fortunes of the citizens of Great Britain are determined outside Great Britain altogether.

35:40by a global economy that's just raging around and reallocating advantage thousands of miles away and stripping jobs out of Sunderland or stripping jobs out of the Northeast and plopping them somewhere else. And politicians desperately trying to use industrial strategy, old nostrums from the you know, the 80s and 70s to plug the holes. And that's why I don't hear a new synthesis. And I'm suspicious of one because the problems are so large that what I like is incremental success anywhere I see it. And so, I don't know, I'm picking an example at random. When I hear that the Norwegians are about to ban or have nothing but electric cars by kind of 2025, 2023, I think Hooray, you know, now let's get another country to do that and, you know, and begin to scale as we get more electric chargers.

36:42Because, you know, Karl Popper said, you know, he didn't believe in big plans. What he believed in was piecemeal social engineering. And I think I've become that way, too, simply because I don't see a new Keynesian synthesis, for example, that would solve the problem that, Rory, you rightly want to address. I just don't see it. But Michael, is there not a danger with that, that you mentioned Joe Biden, who I agree with you, I think he's an incredibly effective politician. But in his State of the Union address, he basically said that the coming, the dividing line in the world at the moment, essentially is between democracy and authoritarianism.

37:20And Roy and I do this Q &A every week. And we had a question last week, which I've been reflecting on ever since we got it, was, is capitalism destroying democracy? So people look at China, and even for all the horrors that are going on now, look at Russia, and look at Iran, and look at Saudi Arabia, and look at Erdogan, who's just won another election. is there a risk that unless the democracies come up with this sort of big new answer that gives people that confidence that actually people start to say do you know what the chinese might have a point boy challenging stuff i fundamentally disagree the thing i think that makes democracy and capitalism necessary and essential twins is that democracy is the one system that allows you to correct mistakes, and we're bound to make mistakes.

38:13The Chinese system has enormous difficulty reversing mistakes. Just look at the amount of capital poured into housing that's just vacant. Look at the total failure of their demographic policy in terms of they're way below replacement rates. The society's central authority just is too rigid to change. Democracy can change much faster. It's much better at admitting its mistakes. It's much better at going into reverse. So that's the positive side of democracy on the economic front. On the capitalist side, there's simply no question. But this is, you know, I'm a 60s Canadian liberal. I believe in the purpose of democracy is to keep capitalism from destroying society.

38:59You know, I'm not a socialist. I'm a liberal centrist. But I think you have to regulate and regulate. And even now, these big guys who run chat GPT and all the artificial intelligence are basically begging governments around the world, particularly the democracies, to regulate a technology that they know could destroy us all. So nothing encapsulates the necessity of government, the importance of government than the AI problem. And nothing vindicates, it seems to me, the ways in which democracy, for all its failings, I think can get in there and regulate capitalism before it gets out of control.

39:41All right, Michael, lots more to talk about, including Canada, future of the world, all sorts of stuff. Back in a minute. Ah, the sounds of an Etsy holiday.

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40:37Welcome back to The Rest is Politics. Leading with me, Rory Stewart. Me, Anistar Campbell. And with Michael Ignatieff. Michael, two things. Canada, it's a sense of Canada and Trudeau and where the strengths and weaknesses are, how you'd analyze what's going to happen in the next election, Canada. And I think the second thing related to that is the question of the relationship between democracies and the transitions we need on climate change. Because of course, one of the other arguments often made is that the challenges of climate change is so extreme that only an authoritarian state is able to carry them through.

41:12I've never believed this stuff about the need for an authoritarian solution to the climate change crisis. It's been around for 50 years, by the way. I remember hearing it in the 1970s. I didn't believe it then. I don't believe it now. What I see around me in my lifetime has been a vertical climb in public consciousness of the environment, a vertical climb in the search for alternative technologies. We're in the middle of an epical energy transition that has been basically driven by markets. I'm a big believer in markets and their capacity to signal and allocate demand. I don't have an anti-capitalist bone in my body because I think it's the most efficient signaling system in the world and beats authoritarian systems every time.

41:58The problem is it's not happening fast enough. But I don't think this climate change should give us an excuse to limit democracy. We need more democracy, not less. As for Canada, Canada is right in the middle of this because we pump just about as much oil as Saudi Arabia. We're an energy superpower and we're pumping some very dirty oil south and our income, our national income depends crucially on it. The issue divides the country deeply because all the oil is pumped out of Alberta and the rest of the country prefers to virtue signal and say, we want to have a nice free green future when in fact, we're all sustained by the petrodollars we earn from Alberta.

42:41So energy policy is a national unity problem in our country in a way that it is in many other places. And frankly, I just don't know how we're going to solve it except to persuade Albertans, one Albertan at a time, that we have got to move us into a sustainable future. And there are some signs in Alberta and other parts of our country that we're beginning to get the message. We're on a hiding to nowhere if we stick with fossil fuels indefinitely. But, you know, this is where I'm frankly glad I'm not in politics. This is a really tough issue in our country. And we're going, I think, as fast as we can, but we're not there yet.

43:18Trudeau is one of those guys, it seems to me, who is pretty respected around the world. But has he yet got into that position where a lot of leaders get to where they're more respected abroad than they are at home? And secondly, this guy, Polly Evra, the opposition guy, is he as populist as some of the the leaders that we've had to deal with here, such as Johnson? I think my successor as leader of the party is an incredible politician. He fully inhabits the role. And I mean that as praise. I never inhabited the role the way he does. He just is completely in the role. He's unpopular in Canada because he's been around for a while.

43:58He's, I think, haunted by the shadow of his father, who was the great politician of the 20th century. And he never quite can manage up. Justin Trudeau is a formidable political actor, probably, you're right, more respected overseas than he is at home. I don't know. As for Poliev, I think, and this allows me to say something that I think is generally a crisis in Western democracy, which is that a lot of the world that I grew up in was not built by liberals and socialists and social democrats. It was also built by conservatives. You know, you think about, you know, Macmillan, Harold Macmillan and housing, you think about all these conservatives after the Second World War, who's basically supported the welfare state.

44:39And you think about Europe, the Christian conservative tradition basically created the modern Europe with social guarantees for everybody. It wasn't a left or a centrist achievement. It also involved this constitutional conservatism that built our world. And it's not my family. I'm not part of it. But in Canada, we call it a progressive conservative. Well, there are no progressive conservatives left. This is why Polyev is an important phenomenon. He's a kind of grade B Canadian imitation of DeSantis. And that's terrible. We had an indigenous conservative tradition, which was progressive conservative, more fiscally conservative than us liberals.

45:22But part of the idea of building a country around a broad center, that's gone. And I think it's gone in most countries. I've watched British conservatism go into some extraordinary places that I just never thought possible. And you see this across Europe. Michael, why is that? I mean, why has British conservatism gone in a weird way? Obviously, it resonates with me because I feel that I'm one of the victims of this. But is it something about our age? Is it never going to come back? Are people like me doomed? I mean, what's going on? Rory, I never thought you would ask me that question, since you're one of the world's living experts on that one.

46:01I think some of it is top line stuff. I'm so struck by the difficulty Britain has had to accept a post-imperial reality. I mean, I just see from the coronation on, I love Britain. I lived there for 20 years. as a Canadian, I've always admired your institutions because we borrowed them all and stuff. But I feel a tremendous decay of your institutions. I feel a kind of enfeebling nostalgia that is at odds for the other side of Britain, which is a very post-imperial country with innovation everywhere. You know, go to London and people love London precisely because it's so post-imperial and so modern and so 21st century.

46:41But the party is, I think, trapped in a kind of imperial nostalgia, which is tremendously disabling. And I think that then produced a desire to escape from Europe. And the suspicion of Europe is a 500 ,000-year-old tradition in Britain, and there's some good reasons for it. But I do think that turning away from Europe was a catastrophic cultural mistake, let alone economic mistake. And Europe is extraordinarily enfeebled by the British departure. And it results in something that's just amazing to me. I live in Vienna here, I'm talking to you from Vienna, everybody in Europe speaks English. It's the lingua franca of a continent that you just left.

47:22That just seems tragic to me. Why the Conservative Party has gone that way is not just a question about Britain. It's a question about what's happened to conservatism across the world. The central problem of democratic politics to me now is the ways in which conservatism, and you see this particularly in the United States, is at the edge of the constitutional order. In France, it's at the edge of the constitutional order. The key question in French politics will be, will Marine Le Pen respect the constitution of the Fifth Republic? Yes or no? We don't know the answer. Will a Trump president in 2025 respect the constitution of the United States?

48:00We no longer know. We know the answer to that. Well, the answer to that is no. Let's plead that it's still an open question. This is a new question in politics never asked in my lifetime. It goes back to what I was saying before. We had a conservatism which built the world we live in, and we've lost that conservatism. I'm much more worried about the conservative end of the argument than I am in my own political family. My last question, Michael, and thanks for giving us so much of your time, is you said earlier, I thought it was very interesting, about the day after your election defeat. you basically said, well, that's it.

48:38That's my obituary written. But I just wonder, looking back at your whole life, politics having been a part of it, do you view your whole life thus far as a success or a failure? Boy, I don't know. What I would say on the success side is that I lived my damn life. I lived it. I didn't sit around. I lived it. I took some risks. I took some shots. I wouldn't judge it in terms of success or failure. All I would say is I lived it. hopefully with both hands and full heart. That's all I feel about it. And Michael, how have you dealt psychologically with criticisms or envy from people trying to deal with the fact that you have done so many varied things in different fields, that you've been a novelist, you've been an academic, you've been a politician, been a philosopher.

49:28And presumably that means that people within each of those fields will be suspicious of you, feeling that you haven't become a profound enough novelist or a dedicated enough philosopher or a professional enough politician. Do you feel that sometimes? Do you feel that you became too much of a circus performer doing too much? And how have you come to terms with that and found pride and confidence in the way that you've lived your life? Well, that's a question you must ask yourself because you've been incredibly successful at a range of different things. But you're exposed to what I get exposed to, which is jack of all trades, master of none.

50:07And all you can say to that is this is about who you are, your deepest temperament. It's just who you are. I mean, I often wish I'd sat in a, you know, a monk cell for all of my life and written some absolutely beautiful masterwork, but I didn't because I'm not a monk. I don't want to be in a cell. I want to get out and see the world. The key point is provided you're prepared to pay the price, whatever the price is for doing a lot of things. And part of the price is people being envious or jealous or saying, well, he's really not very good at that. Provided you're prepared to pay the price, the full freight, fine.

50:47Michael, lovely to talk to you. That was great. Lovely to talk to both of you. Thank you, Michael. That was lovely. Bye-bye.

50:57So, it was a weird interview for me because it's one of the first times we're interviewing someone that I know much better than you do, whereas obviously with Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell, they're your friends. What did you think of him? I enjoyed it. I found it a little bit depressing because of his assessment of politics, I guess. I want to maintain the belief that very, very clever people, intellectuals, can go into politics, can really do it, can make a difference. I thought he was very authentic. I thought I said I didn't say I have read his book some years ago, but I had a real sense that that stuff goes quite deep in him and he's not kind of hiding or camouflaging anything.

51:39I feel we do need intellectuals to be coming up with big ideas at the moment. And I don't know, maybe it's just he's in a different stage of his life now. But I enjoyed it. Yes, I think the thing that maybe that was frustrating you is is he didn't want to produce big ideas. He talked about bold experimentation or Karl Popper and, you know, small incremental changes. And I think he probably struggles with this, but I guess he's also somebody who has lived through the dangers of big ideas. Maybe, I guess, the Soviet Union and great utopian fantasies that he's worried about. It's interesting, too, this question around democracy.

52:19I mean, he's absolutely insisting, and he's written a beautiful essay on this, that the best way of dealing with climate change is through democracy, because it requires you to be flexible, to get the consent of the population, bring them with you. Whereas he thinks an authoritarian approach to climate change can be much more brittle. But at the same time, he's acknowledging that in Canada, it's brutal. I mean, what do you do really to try to deal with the fact that Alberta, and indeed much the Canadian economy is pumping filthy fossil fuels? And how do democratic politicians come to terms with that?

52:52And if you just bring that to the UK for a moment, Keir Starmer having come out with a pretty bold announcement on oil and gas in the north of Scotland, the political fight back on that is already starting and it's becoming quite strong. I guess what we saw in Michael was the conflict between, a little bit like with Kate Raworth, but he did actually go into politics, but it's the conflict between idealism and a sense of, I know what I want the world to be, I know what I want to do with power. But then when you get into power, feeling you have to become something different. And I guess I think there are lots of people in politics who are very, very clever and who can do that.

53:34You know, my old boss would be one of them. Clinton would be another. Macron, I think, up to a point. There are lots through history who have done that. But I guess what he's saying, and which reflects something that we talk about a lot, is that it's just become a lot harder to do. Yes. And I think the brutality of his experience, his book, Fire and Ashes, goes into this. And he keeps coming out, putting an optimistic spin on the end of it. But I think the truth of the matter is that to have taken over as the leader of the Liberal Party in Canada, to have been in all the opinion polls about to be prime minister against a opposition leader that he basically despised going into an election, losing it catastrophically, getting this leader that he despised back in power.

54:22And at the time, seeming as though he'd actually destroyed this party by putting into third place, I think was incredibly painful. And he talks about, you know, how the the Sikh waving at him out of the cement truck helped rebuild him. But I think anybody listening can pick up the fact that the scars were really, really brutal. And it was such a catastrophic defeat. It was so big. It's almost impossible to imagine the scale of that defeat. When he mentioned the Sikh cement truck driver, an image popped into my head. I remember after Neil Kinnock lost to John Major in 1992. and Fiona and I went with Neil and Glenis and some other friends and relatives of Neil and we were down in the West Country.

55:07And I can remember we were out in this little village and it wasn't long after the election. We were in this little village in a very, very Tory area and virtually everybody came up to Neil and said, I'm so sorry for what happened, I voted for you. And after about half an hour of this, Neil's sort of sitting there and says, I'm really surprised I'm not Prime Minister. because this Tory stronghold, everybody voted for me. But I think Michael was right, that people, they don't necessarily want to pile on the agony. But I think for him, I don't know how you recover from that. And it was interesting his answer to the question about whether he saw his life as a success or a failure.

55:46He sort of said he'd lived his life. He didn't really want to go there, did he? He was obviously a very successful agony. It's a very interesting question you asked. That was quite a profound question. So I'm going to maybe end this little reflection by turning it around on you. And it was a question that fascinated me. Is it a question you sometimes ask yourself? I mean, do you think of your life as a successful failure? How would you answer that? I won't decide until shortly before I die. I do think a lot about that thing about thinking in terms of obituary. I know what the first paragraph of my obituary is.

56:17And it has Tony Blair in the sentence. No matter what I do, it's not going to say Alistair Campbell, who topped the UK podcast charts for a long time with Rory Stewart died yesterday, is it? It might be down paragraph eight. But so I think I've had a good life and a really interesting life with a lot of success and a lot of failure en route. But I'm one of those people that I don't actually believe in that life is about the pursuit of happiness. I think it's about, yeah, it's about the pursuing of fulfillment. And you get that in all sorts of different ways. And I thought your question about jack of all trades was interesting as well, because I'm seen as a political figure and I've never actually done what you and Michael have done, which is go into elected politics for reasons that we've talked about.

57:02So yeah, I'd say, I think when just before I die, I'll say, well, that was quite good. I enjoyed that. That was all right. I did quite a lot. But I don't think you can say success or failure until you're close to the end. Very good. My final question to you though, did you agree with Max Weber about soldiers not making good politicians? I think Weber is fascinating. So there's this amazing essay by Max Weber called Politics as a Vocation, where he basically makes the argument for what today we'd call the professional politician. He's very doubtful about the idea of people going into politics later in life, having experience elsewhere.

57:36And you're absolutely right. He makes this point about soldiers being too rigid. I mean, I was a soldier for a very short time, but I think it's something that a Daily Mail columnist called Andrew Alexander once said to me. he said, I remember having lunch when he was in his 80s. And he said in his political life, he'd often observed that soldiers made bad politicians because, and he's not talking about people like me who were in for a short time, but people in for 10, 15 years, because oddly, they are trained in obedience. And so although they have immense physical courage, they often lacked the moral courage to rebel or stand up against their parties at critical moments because they like to be loyal.

58:16They like to fall into line. I also think that somewhere in this Weber story that you've raised is this question about integrity, because Weber's vision of politics is very, very Machiavellian. He basically says that you have to make incredible moral compromises. He almost creates this kind of heroic idea that politicians have to do evil things for the greater good. And he's very dismissive of people who put ethics too centrally in politics. He says, you know, the public realm is completely different from the personal realm. And in effect, you can lie, you can cheat, provided you achieve the greater good.

58:53And I'm still desperately trying to resist that. But it may be a bit like Michael's defense of democracy, my defense of integrity in politics, maybe less about the realities of the world, more about something I've taken from earlier life. But Weber is interesting because he's another one, like Machiavelli, actually, who are renowned experts on politics who never became politicians. Yes. Well, particularly Weber. I mean, he was a real academic. Yeah. Whereas some of the others that we often read have spent a short time and failed and gone to exile. And that's why I think these perspectives are interesting.

59:31So Machiavelli, I think, was briefly a senior member of the government in Florence and then thrown into exile. Burke, the great conservative hero, basically failed as a politician. Tocqueville was a politician briefly and then was booted out. Cicero, again, in some ways, you know, had successes, but ultimately, maybe like everybody, his career ended in failure. So I wonder whether that there isn't something interesting that the really successful politicians, the kind of Tony Blair's this world or the Bill Clintons, almost because they haven't failed, never quite get the headspace to do the full step back intellectual reflection on all the features of it.

1:00:10And it's the ones who are a little bit at odds with it who can see it most clearly. Right, excellent. Onwards and upwards. Onwards and upwards.

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