Disorder: Democracy lessons from Europe and beyond

We bring you a special crossover episode with Disorder, a show that explores the fundamental principles lurking behind today's most pressing global issues. Jenna Spinelle talks with Disorder host Jason Pack, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and author of Libya and the Enduring Global Disorder. They discuss the state of democracy around the world and why making America's government more like a European country might not be the solution to polarization that some democracy reformers hope it will be. 

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Jenna Spinelle
Hello and welcome to Democracy Works. I'm Jenna Spinelle. Today we have a special episode for you, a collaboration with the disorder podcast, a show that explores the fundamental principles lurking behind today's global issues. I'm joined today by disorder host Jason pack, who is also an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and author of Libya and the enduring global disorder. Jason, welcome to democracy works. Why don't you just kick things off by telling our listeners a little bit more about you and your podcast?

Jason Pack
Wow. Thank you. Jenna, it's really great to be with you. I also believe in civic engagement, and these days, given how little one is paid to work at a think tank or have a podcast, in a way, we are all volunteering our time to try to save transatlantic democracy one episode at a time. So a little bit about me. As you can tell from my accent. I'm American. I live in London. However, though, because there was someone who, back in 2019 asked someone else, would you do me a favor, though? And it was at about that time that I resigned my appointee level position in DC, and I thought, you know, grad school was really great in England. Wouldn't it be nice to figure out how to get a European citizenship? And fortunately, you know, I had enjoyed my time at Oxford so much, and I had my networks of British employees and British publishers and a British agent, and I managed to get a global talent visa. I have put down roots here. And I feel that although I have escaped and I can speak my mind more freely, it's not like everything is perfect. Here there are checks and balances where Boris was held accountable for party gate, and that's amazing. We can delve into how that works. You know, why is it that Jan six, you can't get anyone behind bars, but party gate a seemingly lesser offense, and the Prime Minister is turfed out, or Liz truss blows up the British economy, and she's out within 44 days, despite things that looked at from the American side of the Atlantic, it might look like, wow. Westminster is great at holding politicians accountable, and democracy really works. I have bad news to report, which is that seen from the inside, particularly since July 4, 2024 when Starmer got a landslide majority, we have not seen center left orderers, you know, fix the problems of the British economy, Britain's relationship to Europe, and I would say I'm a professional pessimist, Jenna, because the lessons that I learned from my time living in Syria, living in Libya, I now see those dynamics unfolding in the US and the UK as institutions fail and personality politics and corruption comes to be above what is the way things are supposed to work?

Jenna Spinelle
Well, and that's interesting that you describe yourself as a professional pessimist. I'm pretty sure I've described myself on this show or in other venues as a professional optimist or a perennial optimist. So we'll see how this plays off of each other over the course of the next you know, 40 minutes.

Jason Pack
Well, I got to this experience. So my day job is, I run a small consultancy about Libya, and the clients need to know, is it safe to dock at RAS la Nouf? Is the pipeline going to be closed? Can we go to the airport? What's going on with the militias? And the reality is, the chances are it's going to be bad, and then it's going to get worse, and then it's going to get even worse, and you may not even get paid. You've never been wrong by essentially just being a professional pessimist. So that's the thing, and the outlook that I've applied from before 2016 to Brexit and Trump. And I have to say, I haven't been wrong well.

Jenna Spinelle
And I mean, speaking of that, you know, things are bad and getting worse. I want to just start. I think we'll come back to some of those issues about the UK that you mentioned, but thinking about, you know, democracy, globally, more broadly, it will be no surprise to listeners of either of our shows that democracy and everything that comes with it, freedom, civil rights, civil liberties, are on the decline around the world. And I was in preparation for this conversation, I was looking back through the most recent report from Freedom House, one of the organizations. That sort of measures the health of democracy around the world, and one of their recommendations for how to combat this or start to move past it, is what they described as democratic solidarity, by which they mean investment in democratic institutions and sustained collective action. And so I just as someone who studies countries around the world, has lived in lots of different places. Do you see any evidence that this democratic solidarity is one out there and two on the rise in the way that the freedom houses of the world say that it needs to be?

Jason Pack
Well, I agree it needs to be. And I would say we don't see it at all. In fact, what Brexit has managed to do is to divide us from each other. You could say that there is an Axis of Resistance developing from Mark Carney through to Scandinavia through to the Eastern European countries who are increasing their defense budgets to support Ukraine, but the genius of authoritarianism and Neo populism is divide and conquer. And I am shocked the extent to which the Europeans squabble rather than make a united front against Trump like It blows my mind. So the tariffs are announced, and Maloney says, no, no, no, but we will do this. And then Macron is like, no, but I want to have this. And starmer's like, I'm going to go and I'm going to cut my own deal. I'm just going to go and have my own negotiation. And it's even contagious to our east Asian allies. Trump has essentially played the South Koreans and the Japanese off against each other. And from a game theory perspective, this isn't what should have happened when you try to upend the entire international system and take on allies and enemies in one go, which is what the tariffs did all game theory would have told you is that everyone will band together. Mark Carney will lead the resistance, and because Canada, even more so than China, is the Achilles heel in America's trading system, they will just drive an unbelievably hard bargain, and Carney will just say sorry, but the Europeans will do exactly as I have so instructed them. You will now back down, and then it hasn't happened is because there is no democratic solidarity and my show, the disorder program, every episode ends with an ordering the disorder segment where we propose real life solutions. So my real life solution is very easy. It's the Mega orderers Club whereby some principles would be articulated. Be it about free trade, be it about fair elections, be it about whatever, and so long as you were judged to adhere to them, you're a member of the club. And then what do they do? It's like g7 but for real democracies, they get together and they say, now this is how we're going to deal with this threat. And then if you had this, you could really push back, not only against Trump and Orban, but in a myriad range of situations, involving the Middle East, involving Putin, the extent to which the EU has just lied prostrate over ISRAEL PALESTINE issues and said, You're right. We don't have a united front because Germany is farther away from Spain on how to deal with Gaza then essentially Hamas is from Netanyahu, so they just can't even get off the couch to have their own policy. And I incorrectly was too optimistic. This is the rare instance where I thought like, Well, now that Trump is in again, we're going to see European mega ordering Mojo. They're going to create these institutions, the Democratic solidarity of Freedom House. And it absolutely has not happening. I mean, it is so depressing.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, do you? So there's an often discussed point in the American political punditry, is whether Trump is playing 4d chess or getting to third on an error to mix up my my sports and games metaphors there. But I guess with with regard to that, what you were talking about with, with the tariffs, do you think Trump and the people on his team crafting these policies knew or anticipated that there would not be this unified response from Europe, or was it just a happy accident that it ended up this way?

Jason Pack
It's a great question. Jenna and I wouldn't call it a happy accident, even for those Neo populists who are happy, there's both. I have written an article about how Putin is playing poker and not chess, and I think there is an extent to which Trump is playing schoolyard bully rather than poker or chess. By which I mean. He certainly doesn't understand the nuances of the choke points of the global trading system. He didn't realize the extent to which we were so beholden on rare earths that we would have to cave to the Chinese. But he realized something which people may have thought about, but never thought to use. And he's completely been a genius. I hate to use the word a stable genius, in his ability to weaponize the fact that America is the exceptional nation. It is the nation on which every aspect of the post world war two order pivots from the dollar to the Swift code system to the tech giants, to Google Search to AI. He had an insight which is not wrong, and he said, I am going to leverage this and I am going to make it look like I'm a complete genius able to do what Obama Biden and obviously, if McCain had won, he wouldn't have done this or w which is to just throw out the international legal order and use the raw power of America's position in the international system, financially, legally, whatever he has. Everyone buy the balls. He has Netanyahu buy the balls. He has the Europeans buy the balls. And again, I think that if we are going to try to be a resistance, we need to say chapeau, you have this great insight that Obama, when he had tried to achieve things, he didn't realize that you can squeeze Netanyahu and you can squeeze the Chinese and you can whatever. And he's miscalculated nine ways to Sunday, both with Putin, with the rare earths, with whatever, but he's always willing to squeeze and use his leverage a little bit more, and that may be some degree of genius.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah well, and he's, he got to take the victory lap for the ceasefire in in Gaza, right? And so that's, you know what? What has the reaction been to that from European leaders, right? Are people thinking that this should have been us, right? Or is it, regardless of how you feel about Trump and whether that was good or bad that he did that? What's What's the reaction been across the pond?

Jason Pack
No one is thinking that it should have been us. The reality is, Britain has so consigned itself to being a small island off the coast of a once great continent, and the EU is so dysfunctional, they don't even pretend to themselves when they're sitting in Brussels. Oh, we should have a global approach to these conflicts. I would be happy if they had the American response, which is like, Ah, god, we could have done this. They don't have that. I mean, I have meetings with the great and the good, both in Westminster and in Brussels, and they think about, how can we triangulate a response to one of the minor aspects of the migrant crisis. As people are transiting through Libya, they don't think, How can we reinvent our defense industries so that we can win the war against Putin, or how can we have a mega jamboree conference about the rebuilding of Gaza and that we can get the Qataris and the Emiratis to pony up the money at this conference. You know, at Wilton park or in Westminster, they don't think that. And they may not even think that they should be thinking it. And that is something which, again, I wouldn't have seen coming, the extent of the decline that I have seen from when I first went to Oxford in 2008 and when I first began briefing British MPs in 2011 when they thought, you know, we're a medium power, we can set the way that this Libya intervention, or a Syria intervention, is gone to now post Brexit, you look at a country that doesn't even think it can work with allies to shape the global agenda.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, so this, I was thinking about incentives as you were talking there, right? I mean people in power and those in elected positions respond to incentives, right? So what has changed about the incentives that led to this more myopic view that you've described, and this sort of inward shift that you've seen from when you were at graduate school until now.

Jason Pack
It's very sad and it's funny. I didn't think that we would end up talking about exactly this topic, which is the magic of podcasting is that you just put the camera on and. All of a sudden you're speaking about something else. I would like to do a disorder episode about a, why Starmer has failed, even though he has a nearly 80 seat majority and he's a good person. And B, why Britain has declined despite having largely good global values and having unique advantages over any other European country. It's not just the English language and the time zone. It's the Commonwealth of 50 plus nations. It's the special relationship with the US. It's the publishing industry. It's British media too many mean, there's no French equivalent of the BBC. France. 24 is not shaping global opinion. Britain has so much that it can bring to bear. It's a paradox, I would just say, sadly, the British electorate cares about I want my 200 pounds for my winter fuel allowance, and they do not care, and are not voting for British global leadership. And the British population, as a result, is seen as not wanting Britain to be investing money in convening major jamboree conferences, not only not about getting hostages from Gaza, but not even about climate change. Climate change. So climate change is something which is a bipartisan issue here. Boris Johnson, who is a Tory, a conservative, he did the most for climate change stuff, and Starmer comes in, and he's from the left, from the Labor Party, and he's not able to get anything done on that issue. So they have so many structural advantages, but I guess it comes down to growth. Jenna, and this is a very, very confusing statistic. I'm referencing myself because of my interactions with the UK when I first got into graduate school, the pound was 2.02 to the dollar. Today, it's at 1.31 when I first got into graduate school, the average Brit and the average American had about the same median per capita GNP. There were always wealthier Americans skewing the statistics, and there's a lot more poverty in America, but the median Well, today, the median American income is about 80,000 US, and the median UK income is like 45,000 pounds, which, in dollar adjusted terms, is not even 60,000 that's only in a 15 year period. And then I'm going to toss out one statistic that literally as depressing as all these statistics are, when I hit this one, my mind was blown. I'm going to ask it to you as a question, what you think a percentage of American households making more than $100,000 a year is

Jenna Spinelle
Somewhere around 15%

Jason Pack
So nearly 30% of American households make more than $100,000 a year. What do you think the percentage of British households making more than 100,000 pounds a year is,

Jenna Spinelle
Based on what you said before, 5%

Jason Pack
Only 3% so if you think about this and these changes, and these things have changed radically, from 2000 and from the glory Blair years to now, you can understand just when you don't have growth and when things are going in the wrong direction, people are bitching about the 200 pound winter fuel allowance, and they are not demanding that Britain set the tone on the hostages in Gaza. And I want to give Starmer and even Sunak and Johnson credit. They have been leaders on Ukraine, and I don't want to talk them down whenever Trump has been like, Oh, I'm not going to do whatever, Starmer flies over there. He gets him to re meet with Zelensky. Starmer essentially fixed that Zelensky Oval Office catastrophe. And the reason today that we don't have a situation where Zelensky and Trump can't be in the same room is Starmer. He's fixed it. So they do do things, but there is no ability to really lead on AI and climate change or whatever, because Britain's position in the world is as a declining power and that as a lifelong angle. It's just tough. It's really, really tough, because I would like to see a Britain, a Scandinavia, France, who can be defending democracy globally. But if you're in a position where you're sitting in the Elysee and you're on your ninth Prime Minister in X number of years, and you can't even hold elections that are seen to be free and fair and socracy has been trundled off to be in prison. The thing is that the West is so crumbling, our greatest allies are not in a position to push back against Trump. And again, this so hurts me, because I didn't see this coming.

Jenna Spinelle
Well, and so that that leads me to think a little bit about political reform, which is something I've been thinking a lot about in the American context for a book that I'm working on. And I think, you know, one of the things that I hear all the time is that the root of a lot of the problems in American politics, the polarization and division, is the two party system. Right? There's just, there's no incentive to do anything other than whatever the dominant parties want to do and that sort of thing. And wouldn't it be great if we had something closer to a parliamentary system of government? But from what I hear you say, there are certainly lots of problems with that approach. Also. It's not this like, you know, silver bullet that can cure all the ills of polarization.

Jason Pack
I need to jjump in here. Everyone wants a multi party system until they live in a multi party system. As soon as you've lived in either Italy or Israel or you see the rise of AFD in Germany or the svenska Democrat and in Sweden, until you've experienced those things, multi party systems sound fantastic.

Jenna Spinelle
How would you think about the MAGA movement in the context of what you just said, is that, you know, how might that movement have been, either fueled or maybe constricted, if there, if we had a multi party situation,

Jason Pack
I don't know. I really don't think it would be that different. And again, I'm a professional pessimist, but I want to point out some of the things that work in Europe is a response to this, and it's not the multi party bit, because if we look at the Israels of the world, where they have pure multi party democracy, that's what allows the settler lobby Ben gvir and Smotrich and the extreme orthodox Shas or United Torah Judaism, to always be in Parliament and say, We don't allow our guys to be conscripted. We want the Orthodox to not have to work and get to paid, be paid to study in yeshiva. That can't happen in a two party system, because if, for example, there is an evangelical group in the United States who says, we don't want to have to work. We want to just go to church all day. And we'd like to be paid for by the government, but we'll always vote for the right wing. The right wing will say, so what you can go try to vote for the dems. Do you know what I mean? Multi party system allow fringe movements to hijack them and to get started, because the electoral threshold for the Sven Democrat then, or for the AfD or whatever to get into the parliament is so much lower. So I just don't see it as a panacea. I think that that thinking that it might work is when you and I are harkening back to when Nick Clegg first came into power, right? So it was thought in 2010 when we first had the coalition government here, and this was the liberal Tory coalition, Cameron and Clegg. And Clegg said, I will join the government if we have a referendum on essentially multi party democracy, which is known as ranked choice voting, right? So this was the condition the Lib Dems will enter the coalition only if we have a referendum to move from first past the post Anglo American style voting to parliamentary continental European, Israel, Italy, style, multi party democracy. No one is talking about that now, because as soon as you would do that move, you would have the rise of reform BNP UK and the most insane anti migrant racists, and they would so dwarf the green and Scottish National Party voters per capita that it's not even an issue, so that the idea of multi party has gone from being something that the green Lib Dem voters want to something that the reform UKIP quasi fascists want, because across the West, over the last 15 or 20 years, we can't pretend that it has not happened, The cultural moment has become so much more reactionary that letting people decide by simply choosing well, they will choose ice squads to deport people, and here, if they were allowed to choose it, they would choose the Rwanda scheme and blowing up small boats and letting people die in the. Channel that's that is what is popular. We've been having a very interesting comparative discussion about democracy in the US and the UK, and there's a lot more to drill down there, but you mentioned the question of proportional representation, and I'd like to ask you about your research. Maybe we could think more about direct democracy the local level. Tell us a little bit about what you've been working on. Sure.

Jenna Spinelle
So I really came into my role hosting Democracy Works, not knowing anything about any of this stuff, I was, you know, pretty much your average American political news consumer, following what happens in Washington and all the headlines, but through the course of the show, I learned about all of these things happening, everything from, you know, campaign finance reform efforts to efforts to change the primary system and get people in dialog and conversation with one another. And, you know, I have various opinions about, you know, whether all those things work or are valid. But I think that the point, the main thing, is that, oh, there's this whole other world out there, people who are trying to make a difference and trying to do what they think is best to strengthen America's democracy, to give people more of a say to regain support for institutions, to, you know, mitigate some of the divisions and the polarization that we see here. And so it's this whole other narrative that is very different than the one that social media, mainstream media algorithms present, which is, of course, as you well know, fueled by outrage and division, and you know, whatever Trump is doing or these sort of singular figures, right? So my mission is to try to bring this world of reform out of the annals of nerdery, like some of the circles that you and I might travel in and bring it. Speak for yourself. I was looking for hope. I hear all the time that people want any kind of hope, and I don't like I'm not, I'm not so Pollyanna that I think that all this stuff is going to, you know, make everything better. And we're going to go back to some time that never existed. But I do think that it's an antidote, perhaps, or just getting involved and doing something is better for an individual and for society than just sitting and doom scrolling the news on your phone.

Jason Pack

One hundred percent and I think that there's a logic to this perspective, which is that America had slavery and the Civil War and then a civil rights crisis in Vietnam and Nixon. And democracy works when you know people are willing to organize and run for their school council and vote in PTA and then do what needs to be done, and therefore this is a deep hole. We're not going to pretend that it isn't, but we have a system which, you know, is meant to deal with that. So you were trying to be, I guess, a perennial optimist. Could you tell us about some things that are happening at the local level, at the state level, at the cultural level, that you might think that the average Doom scroller is missing that is worth understanding.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so one of the things that I've been most interested in is the way that direct democracy and ballot measures have been used to advance policy issues in the states that have them. Of course, only about half of US states allow for direct voting on on issues through initiatives and referenda. But those that do, I mean, they've seen everything from minimum wage increases to increases in reproductive rights to, you know, restoring voting rights for people who are formerly incarcerated to creation of independent redistricting commissions to draw the maps which gerrymandering is something else we can also talk about. But, you know, these are all largely grassroots, bottom up efforts. Now, there are lots of ways that this same initiative process is used, you know, top down by corporations and other actors who have power to sort of extend that power. Listeners might know about the case in with Uber in California, right? They spent hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that they don't have to treat their workers as employees and give them benefits and that kind of thing. So it's not a perfect system by any means. Yes, it did there. So Uber drivers are considered independent contractors, not eligible for health insurance or any kind of benefits. What about so it's not

Jason Pack

What's that? Do you know, in the UK or in France, are the Uber drivers? Yes, or it doesn't matter, because, no, I don't Yes, so this is not as much of an issue.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, yeah. But all that to say this is not not a perfect system, but it is one tool that that Americans have used successfully to point to lead to policy outcomes that are broadly popular but which would not have passed through the typical legislative system because there are not in line with the incentives and the agendas that the legislators and the legislatures have

Jason Pack
Cool so you mentioned direct democracy and referenda and stuff. California is like Switzerland. There's a gazillion referenda. What's the legacy of these things? Are California voters getting more what they want? Or has somehow this led to the Bill Maher issue? Of you know, it takes 20 years to get your solar panel installed because there's too many regulations.

Jenna Spinelle
One of the things that I saw, certainly in my reporting on this, is that there, you know, the system can be used to adjust itself over time, right? So, you know the three strikes law in California where you are incarcerated after your third felony offense, regardless of what those those offenses were, that passes in the 90s, and then there have been subsequent ballot measures to not completely roll it back, though some would would like to see that, but make make changes to it, or, you know, soften it A little bit. Same thing with the property tax measure back in the 70s that fundamentally changed the way that that property taxes are collected in California, and sort of spurred a national movement in that regard. Folks have also used the initiative to sort of roll that back a little bit. So I think that that's the way that, you know, people are using the tool to get something closer to what true majorities of people actually want, in the event that you know, it is used initially to get something that is not the case.

Jason Pack
Well, I wonder if Californians, though, feel that they are governed in a way which is closer to their wishes than a New Jerseyan Who has no referenda. Do we? Do we have an answer?

Jenna Spinelle
I don't have an answer to that. Maybe someone out there in the Political Science world does.

Jason Pack

The Swiss feel particularly in the smaller cantons, that they are governed the way that they want to be, that the Swiss canton based, referenda based system is thought to be a rousseauian ideal of democracy. I have my own issues with California, mostly cultural Not, not about its not about its referenda, and I just wonder about that in the US context. But maybe we will have another show and we will be able to follow up on that. I want to hear about citizens assemblies so you're working on or experimenting with some thoughts about citizens assemblies. How have you seen those working and sortition and things like that? 

Jenna Spinelle
So there's several groups here in the US that are trying to make that happen again, mostly at the local level. One in particular called healthy democracy that uses something they call the democracy lottery. It's sort of like Will the the Willy Wonka move me you get this envelope in the mail with a big gold star on it that says you've been selected to participate in the citizens assembly. 

Jason Pack
That's actually spam and throw it away.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, right. So I tell the story in my book of Petaluma, California, which used this process to decide what to do with the county fairgrounds, which might seem insignificant, but it is, you know, the cornerstone of the community. And was that sort of a crossroads of, does it continue to stay under city control or not? And it wasn't a decision that the city felt it could make on its own. So they use this process to get a wide cross section of voters in conversation about what their priorities are and what do they really want for their communities. Again, this is not going to solve the major global issues that. You and I were talking about at the top of this conversation. But I think it shows people, in an era when there is so much distrust in systems and institutions of all stripes, that look these processes can work. It's sort of maybe. One other example of this is there has been political science research showing that when people who are distrustful of elections when they are able to volunteer as poll workers, their opinions on that change, and they become more trustful. People who distrust the news when they sit in and in on newsroom editorial meetings and see how much care and deliberation goes into these decisions, their opinions change. When people have a say in how decisions are made in their local government, they're more likely to trust what other decisions that local government will make in the future.

Jason Pack
This is a very important point. I am not a fan of sortition, so I'm going to leave the sortition question aside, but I'm a huge fan of what we're talking about now, which is whether it's compulsive voting or national service or, you know, participating in the community. There are so many ways that we could try to order the disorder, to get people to be involved in these very processes that they are skeptical about. And I want to bring a Scandinavian and an Israeli example. Essentially, pretty much all Israeli Jews trust the IDF that it is trying to protect people, shockingly, obviously abroad and particularly in Europe, people do not trust the IDF about this. Americans don't necessarily think that the American army is this perfect institution, right? But Israeli Jews feel quite differently about their army. Well, what's the difference? Because they've all served in it, men and women, and they've all served in it, and the army is held at a level of respect, and therefore, when the Mossad chiefs and the IDF chiefs and whatever say we shouldn't have bombed Qatar, Netanyahu was wrong, that is just wow. This is something beyond the Joint Chiefs and some retired American general disagreeing with a US Army decision. And that's very interesting to me. And of course, you can't compare Israel in America. There's not like versus like, but the question of engagement, if all Americans did national service, or they everyone was forced to be a poll worker, I really believe it would have the IDF style effect, exactly of what you've said. If we had national service whereby all 18 year olds, they're either teaching in their schools or their poll workers, or they're doing other kinds of things, kind of bond government, you know, German model here, wow, I think you would see trust in public institutions go through the absolute roof.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, because it gives people that real world experience, it makes it, you know, much more difficult to believe somebody on social media or wherever making the case that these things are all corrupt and rigged when you've seen it with your own eyes. Now, the interesting question to me, from from a media perspective, is whether those conflict entrepreneur types would still try to make that case even, even in a country or scenario where everyone got to observe the election process firsthand, would there still be incentive enough for people to discredit the system and sow distrust in these institutions? 

Jason Pack
There would be, because people are going to always be able to make money by strewing discord. But it is interesting to point out that the even extreme Israeli left, they don't say, well, the IDF is corrupt. This is all about selling some AI chip. And again, I think that this is not an apples to apples comparison, but it is interesting to look at a major institution which can be so criticized abroad, but yet, there is a sense that because you've served in it and you're somehow connected to it, people accept there were mistakes made. But this is just human you know, this is human error. They're not like, well, the vaccine has a microchip that Bill Gates has implanted in it.

Jenna Spinelle
You know, something else I hear about a lot from the people that I talk to is, it's, you know, the American system is, is bad because it's just overrun with money, right? Our campaign finance system is out of control. Citizens United, and, you know, money as speech and all the rest of it. I guess, are there lessons from the rest of the world that could apply here, or is this the case that this is, you know, just like we were talking about before, things are not necessarily as rosy, even if you do have something closer to a public finance model, that's not the cure all. That I think people in this campaign finance reform world think that it might be a very important question. 

Jason Pack
Jenna, you might say that this is the most important comparative question we have had on disorder. Tom Burgess Peter Gagan, Oliver bolo, who have looked into all of the campaign finance violations here in the UK. And here's how I would distill it, the amount of money in politics in the UK relative to the US is infinitesimal. It's not 1/10 it's not even 100th It is fantastic that pretty much everywhere in Europe you have a party, you get a certain number of poll things, and you get your ads in the TV, and you can't buy more. It literally is fair, and that part works. So that's the good part. The bad part is that, because there's so little money in politics, it turns out that that allows Murdoch and Elon Musk to drop only a few 100,000 pounds and influence the election. You can have a dinner with the Tory leader, the person who is likely to be the next prime minister for 100,000 pounds, a private dinner in your own home and say, I want you to do this. That and the other. Boris Johnson played tennis with the girlfriend of Russian oligarchs for 50,000 pounds, and they said things like, oh, wouldn't it be nice if you made my buddy Lord ledbedev of Siberia, the cash for honors thing is real. And the difference is that in America, it would cost billions, and very few people, you'd need to be the top level interests Facebook and Google to get the things here. You can be a minor city trader who has barely any interest, or a two bit Russian oligarch, and you can sway policy. So again, it cuts both ways. Do you need more of an ombudsman? Do you need various other things? Yes, it's very, very tricky. And again, it may work a little bit better in Scandinavia, where there really is no money in politics, there's no money in politics. You can't buy ads, and that stuff works, but it's too late in America, I would argue the election for that was the 2016 one if we had gone with Sanders, which we obviously should have, for many reasons, and he had run on a uniquely unipolar platform of undoing Citizens United. I don't believe there is Trump. I don't believe that there is the oligarchic takeover that we've experienced without Citizens United, because what we've shown on disorder is that sham populism, from Javier Malay to Orban to Trump to AFD, is not really populism. It's fake. It's Neo populism is not populism. It is not popular. It is a low tax handout. I won't regulate the, you know, big business, and I will allow the oligarchs to get all these tax breaks. And that is not really possible to have come to power in a pre Citizens United situation in Britain, there are problems that don't exist in the US, which is the dominance of the right wing press. I mean, Americans may not realize how good they have it that the mainstream media, from the NYT to CNN is so engaged and so center left here, The Guardian barely has any readers, and whether it's the Daily Mail or sky, you are looking at an almost exclusively Murdoch dominated press environment whereby eight tenths of Britain's get their News from right wing media outlets in the mainstream media. So again, these things cut in these different ways.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and I'm glad you defined neopopulism. I meant to ask you about that earlier. So one last question, maybe we can sort of wrap it here. But does the if, if, as you argue, neopopulism is not actually popular. How does it hold? Or how long does it hold? What are the conditions necessary to either keep it in place or maybe to the point of what we're both trying to do to bring it down?

Jason Pack
Great. Well, Neo populism is only possible in our post post cold war era because of changes at multiple levels. One is the media landscape, right? The rise of social media, disintermediated media is a huge issue. Then there is the consolidation of wealth and power. That the tech and AI revolutions have brought about. And then there is the decline of Western hegemony. We are in a situation now where America is no longer a hegemonic power, and the West, although still top dogs, we're relatively declining. And all of these things allow for the rise of this Neo populist moment, and what I term the global enduring disorder. First I'll define the neopopulous and then the global enduring disorder. Neopopulists are not real populists. They're not real fascists. They're not real authoritarians. Putin has about as much in common with Stalin as Trump does with Hitler, and the answer is not a lot, right? Because Hitler and Stalin had real plans. They had real solutions to problems. They're very odious solutions, but they got the problem done. Trump, he doesn't have a vision of how global free trade is supposed to work. Oh, 15% I meant 20 Oh, it's a 90 day pause on the 20% No, no, but let's have it be a 5% and then, oh no, we'll take the tariff off if we get some more rare earths. Wait a second. But I thought that you were against free trade because you wanted to reassure American manufacturing. No. Neo populism doesn't have any actual solutions. He could have built the wall in the first term. He didn't want to build the wall because the wall might have actually stopped the migration crisis. Then he couldn't run on it. He had the ability, when Biden was in office, to let the Republicans back the bipartisan migration reform bill, but he didn't because he didn't want to fix the very problem that he says is the most important problem, so that he could run on that problem that's neopopulism. Putin is in the same position. He doesn't have an economic policy for Ukraine. He doesn't have an ideology of what is putinist ideology that they're going to impose in Kiev. It's the exact opposite of Stalin, where they are like, you know, you read your marks, you study your Lenin, you do this. And it works in Cuba as much as in Zaire as in Kiev. The only thing that he wants is there to be more disorder, and he doesn't even care if he wins or loses the war, I would argue. So what we need to understand is that it is not about opposing the supposed agenda of the Neo populists. And I'm not a creature of the hard left. I think that we need to fix illegal migration. We need to fix the small boats problem here in the UK, we should say the difference between us and them is we want order. We actually want to deal with migration and Ukraine and Gaza and trade and the American worker and whatever these clowns say that they want to and they do a range of things that is the exact opposite of what would fix these problems. Stephen Miller is not fixing immigration. Anyone who thinks that having, you know, a mass Gestapo, randomly deporting people they don't even know who they're deporting, that this is fixing migration. You know, needs to get their head examined. So the way to tackle that is to say we see that you guys are just buffoons, and we're going to adopt most of your issues and fix them. Why Starmer is not able to do things either on small boats or on jobs or on AI? It's very, very depressing, because he ran on a platform that is like, I am going to do it, and he's not doing it. And I wonder again, looking back at the Biden administration, I think that Biden didn't get enough credit. He did do certain things, he just communicated them very poorly. So we need a range of doers and communicators, probably of the Shapiro and Gavin Newsom style, with a little bit of Gretchen Whitmer and Pete Buttigieg mixed in, but that they're really going to contrast. This is not about democracy versus authoritarianism, I would argue it's about order versus disorder.

Jenna Spinelle
Well, maybe Jason, we can talk again once all those people you just mentioned have announced their candidacies for President in the US, and we'll see how effective that that messaging becomes. But I know I've learned a lot from this conversation. I hope our listeners have too, and I hope that they will subscribe to disorder and keep up with all that you're doing on the global stage will, of course, link to the show and where people can find you in the show notes. But thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure to have this conversation.

Jason Pack
Thank you so much. Jenna, I hope we can talk long before they announce their candidacies. I can't wait that long.

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