CSPAN - Conference on Liberalism in 21st Century

All Episodes

Previous Next

Aug. 15, 2025 10:24-12:15 - CSPAN

01:50:45

Conference on Liberalism in 21st Century

Participants

Main

bill kristol

14:29

Appearances

Clips

bradley bowman

00:05

greta brawner

cspan 00:02

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		To that message or is somebody going to tell you about that?
		I sure can.
		And your point, Greg?
		My point is, you're not non-partisan, you are showing your bias.
		Now, as to the guests, when guests, did you start calling balls and strikes, which you've said multiple times this morning?
		When did you start?
		Did you start in the Obama administration?
		Did you start in the first Trump?
		Did you start in Hunter's Dad's administration?
		Did you start since january 20?
		When got it?
		Greg got it.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We got your question, mr Bowman, thanks.
unidentified		Thanks for the call, um.
bradley bowman ▲ ● ▼		I, I think i'm doing that right now.
unidentified		Uh, I can.
bradley bowman ▲ ● ▼		I can compliment and criticize all the presidents you just mentioned.
unidentified		It would take too long.
		You can finish watching this program on our website, C-span.org.
		We're going to leave it to take you live to the second day of a conference on liberalism and the challenges facing liberal democracies.
		You're watching live coverage on C-span.
		Good morning, thanks to everyone for being here.
		As an immigrant and someone who's been writing about the issue of immigration since 1995, the subject of this panel restricting cross-border movement and liberalism naturally speaks to me.
		It is different from other panels because it has two panelists instead of three, and there's a reason for that.
		We wanted to set this panel up as something of a debate, even though Bill Crystal hated that idea sorry Bill.
		So we went out of our way to find two people who disagree on the issue to mirror the broader division in the liberal community.
		Some of us believe that immigration, controls and enforcement is simply not compatible with liberal democracy.
		Others believe that without controls and enforcement, liberal democracy will unravel.
		Our interlocutors today represent two opposite sides.
		Chandran Kukathas, who is skeptical of restrictionist policies, is a true citizen of the world.
		He was born in Malaysia to Sri Lankan.
		Parents studied and taught political philosophy in Australia, held teaching positions in many American universities before chairing the London School OF Economics political science department and becoming the Lee Kong Qian professor, chair and professor of political science at Singapore Management University.
		He's now in the process of retiring to Greece.
		He has co-authored, authored and co-authored several books, including the Liberal Archipelago, which is one of my favorites, Um Rolls, a theory of justice and its critics and, most recently and relevantly, immigration and freedom.
		David Goodhardt, who is less skeptical of restrictionism, is a writer and journalist and not a citizen of the world, but he is a devoted British citizen.
		His books include The Road to Somewhere, The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, and Head, Hand and Heart, Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century.
		He famously noted that the key political divide at our current moment is between anywheres or that mobile class of people who can plonk themselves in any place and the somewheres, people who are rooted in a certain place with strong kinship and cultural ties for their identity.
		He's there somewhere to Chandrans anywhere.
		Moderating this debate is Bill Crystal, who needs no introduction to this crowd.
		He's neither a somewhere nor an anywhere.
		He's everywhere.
		He's a thoughtful political theorist, an incisive political commentator, and a political strategist.
		He's the founding director of Defending Democracy Together, editor-at-large at the Bulwark, the host of the podcast Conversations with Bill Crystal.
		He has served in senior positions in the Ronald Reagan and the George H.W. Bush administration, and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.
		So over to you, Bill.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		Thanks, Shika.
		I should begin by saying good morning.
		If it is a good morning, which I doubt, but it is a good morning because I'm here with all of you, but this came from my rereading of many of Eeyore's excellent comments in Winnie the Pooh.
		Am I too stating myself?
		No one knows about this who's younger than us.
		Is that right?
		And Eeyore was a very deep thinker, you know, and very apt for the current times, I think, always seeing the worrying that things are worse than you think, and it turned out to be right.
		Anyway, it's great to be here.
		Good morning.
		Great to moderate these two genuinely thinkers I both have admired for years.
		David and I knew each other a little bit.
		David started a prospect in Britain when at the bottom we started Weekly Standard in the US and we had friendly exchanges and David was then on the center left, I think it's fair to say, and I was on the center right, maybe just the right, I don't know.
		Now, of course, I've moved to the left, David, so that's, you know, that's what happens as you grow up, right?
		You learn new things or unlearn things.
		And Chandra and I've really admired his work on immigration and democracy, among other topics.
		So I thought, yeah, just to explain the reason I objected to debate when Shika suggested a debate was just, I don't know, I've been in so many debates and debates are kind of point scoring as opposed to actually discussing and learning.
		This one won't be that way.
		Shika modified the title to make it a friendly debate.
		You know, whatever that means.
		And well, we will have a discussion and I really look forward to it actually into learning.
		And it's very interesting and complicated, I'm going to say, a topic, which I think, anyway, I look forward to learning about it.
		So what we'll do is I thought I would ask Chandran and then David to take just a few minutes to lay out what do we need to know about liberal democracy on the one hand and different immigration regimes on the other and their complex intersections.
		What basic points, maybe I'll ask a couple of questions of each of you after your five minutes or so, and then you all can argue or you could agree and just foil Shika's plans, which is always worth doing.
		It turns a fantastic agreement.
		We've resolved everything.
		So, Chandran, why don't you?
unidentified		Well, I agree that we won't agree.
		So friendly start.
		So I think I'll start by just laying out some thoughts about how I see the debate about immigration, because it's clearly the big topic not just in the United States, but in Britain, in Australia, and indeed in many other parts of the world.
		So I think the first thing I would want to stress is the extent to which the debate about immigration is not about a conflict between citizens or natives and outsiders.
		It's really a debate or a conflict between people within a society.
		The only reason you've got this debate is that people within the society disagree about what they want, both for themselves and for their society.
		So this conflict about immigration is not about us versus them, if the them is outside us.
		It's us versus them within the society.
		So the worry that I think most people have with respect to immigration is that somehow immigration is going to be harmful to not just their own particular interests, but to the interests of their fellow citizens and sometimes to the interests of their institutions.
		Maybe they're cultural, maybe they're political, maybe they're social more broadly.
		And the point that I want to emphasize, and I've done this in my book and in other writings, the thing that I want to emphasize is the extent to which the threat, if we see it as that, from immigration comes not so much from immigration itself as from attempts to control immigration.
		And the reason for this is quite straightforward.
		If you want to try to control immigration, you're not simply trying to control the movement of people, the entry and exit of people into a country.
		You're really trying to control what they do.
		What you want to do is you want to control, probably most importantly, the labor market.
		You also want to control the extent to which people come in and go to college, buy property, engage in society in various ways, stay for longer than you would like.
		So what you've got to do is you've got to control not just border crossings.
		In fact, most countries welcome people coming in as tourists and as exchanges in all kinds of ways.
		But what they want to do is control what people do.
		The problem there is that to control what those people do, you've got to control what your citizens do, because your citizens are all too ready to welcome people.
		A lot of the time because they want to employ them, they want to teach them, they want to trade with them, they want to rent to them, they want to help them open bank accounts.
		So all of these things will have to be controlled if you want to control immigration.
		So immediately there is going to be a cost that society will bear to the extent that your society is going to be more and more controlled by institutions and other people within your society.
		Now, I think one of the things that's maybe underappreciated is the difficulty of doing this.
		And that's because we are basically a kind of recalcitrant species.
		We don't take well to being controlled, and so we resist.
		So the more significantly you want to control immigration, the more vigorously you'll have to control your own citizens.
		And the short answer is that you can control in the sense that you can impose policies that will have effects, but it's another matter altogether to actually establish policies that will achieve your ends.
		Because immigrants' labor is just like capital in that regard, as we saw in the previous panel. people will find a way around things.
		So the more you want to try to control what people do, the more you'll have to ratchet up the extent of controls.
		So essentially what we're talking about here, I think, because I think neither David nor I are at extremes.
		I'm not arguing for open borders.
		I don't think he's arguing for zero immigration.
		What we're talking about is what we do in the middle.
		And what I'm trying to say here, really in a nutshell, is that the more you try to control, the more you will have an effect on the freedom of your citizens.
		So the question is, how far do you want to go?
		So the more you try to control, the more you will, in fact, end up affecting your citizens.
		The more you will control your employers, the more you'll control your university institutions, the more you will have to establish courts and police and laws and so on.
		And to the extent that you're worried about the success, the more you will be tempted to get around these institutions in order to achieve your ends.
		And the more society will in fact resist and the more difficulties you'll face.
		And at some point you're going to have to say, how far am I prepared to go?
		And my argument is that if we're going to look for an equilibrium, we should find one in which we're actually much more welcoming of immigrants because the cost that you're going to have to pay if you really want to control immigration is a much greater loss of freedom than you would like.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		Let me ask one question and then come to David because it's the obvious question that just want get your answer to on the table.
		I mean, I'm personally very sympathetic to the notion that the threats from trying to control immigration can often outweigh the threats from immigration.
		But it's also true that those threats, the attempts to more radically control immigration, do seem to come up when people have the sense, correct or incorrect, that immigration is out of control.
		Too high, too much, too illegal, too uncontrolled, right?
		So, I mean, just take a minute on that balance, because the obvious objection is, well, that's nice.
		I don't like, one could say I don't like what's now happening to crack down on immigration, but the reason we're having these attempts to crack down is that people were insufficiently concerned about mass immigration, well, just a sense of immigration being out of control.
unidentified		Yeah.
		So I think here the crucial thing to do is to actually look at why it is that immigration is, as you put it, out of control, bearing in mind that in a certain sense, it was never something that was in control, because it's not something you can really control in the sense that you will achieve the specific objectives that you've got in mind when you try to control these things.
		So I think what you've got to ask is, what are the factors that are leading to the increase in the number of people trying to move?
		What are the factors that are affecting the channels through which they move?
		And to give you just one simple example, why is it that so many people are now claiming asylum or seeking pathways through the refugee process?
		So much so that it's crowding out genuine refugees.
		Well, one of the reasons is you've asserted controls that make it more difficult for people to move through normal channels.
		You push out bulges in one way, the bulge is going to appear somewhere else.
		So simply saying we've got to control this is not sufficient.
		What you've got to talk about is what are the mechanisms that you've got in place.
		And here I think there are very, very few sensible ideas around because people simply think, or not everybody, but many people think that what you need is you need to somehow cut off the supply.
		Well, the problem is you've got a demand problem.
		There are all these people who want these people to come in.
		How are you going to address that?
		You can't even keep drugs out of a prison.
		How are you going to keep several million people out of the country unless you think about what are the sources of the problem?
		I think it's a helpful answer and lays the ground for David.
		Well, thank you.
		Well, I agree at least on one thing with Chandran: that we are arguing about that middle ground.
		Neither of us are extremists.
		I don't want no immigration.
		Chandran doesn't want open borders.
		I ought to just say, perhaps to establish a credential, I'm not only arguing against Chandran, I'm also arguing against my family ghosts.
		I'm actually half American.
		I've got two American grandfathers.
		And my great-great-uncle was a US Senator Herbert Lehman, who was one of the most significant voices behind opening up immigration act, wasn't it?
		I mean, he actually died in 1963, but he'd been a very powerful voice pushing for the end of that period of restriction, perhaps not coincidentally, the great sort of social democratic period in US history between the early 20s and the mid-60s.
		So I'm arguing against great-great-uncle Herbert as well as Chandran here.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		Can I just say that I did not have on my bingo card the close relationship of David Goodhardt and Herbert Lehman, as you know?
unidentified		I do.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		Who I remember growing up in New York as a very distinguished Liberal governor and senator.
unidentified		So I think that, and I think probably most people would agree with this, it's about quantities, that well-managed borders, moderate legal immigration, and the lowest possible level of illegal immigration is a really, really significant public good, one of the biggest public goods.
		Yes, it does require small, I would say, small infringements on freedom to achieve a bigger freedom.
		And we have such trade-offs in our public policy, in our social contracts the whole time.
		I mean, think, I mean, in the UK, we still believe in the state having a monopoly on the use of violence.
		We therefore, except in very exceptional circumstances, make it illegal for people to carry arms, something that perhaps many people in this country would rather envy.
		Similarly, on immigration itself, we live in welfare states.
		We have quite thick labour market regulations.
		We can't allow employers just to import anybody who they might want to import from abroad and pay them any wage.
		We also have rules for bringing in spouses, among other things, to stop trafficking.
		So, what is the bigger freedom that control and moderate immigration enables?
		I would say, in one word, it is security.
		Of course, we all believe, or at least almost all of us believe, in the moral equality of all human beings, but we don't believe that we have the same obligations to all human beings.
		We live, and liberalism thrives in bounded political communities.
		And I think most of us would agree.
		I hope Steven Pinker would agree with this.
		It's a pretty basic truth of human psychology that when we feel more secure, when we feel more in control of our lives, we're more likely to be open and trusting of others.
		That's why richer people tend to be more relaxed about large-scale immigration than poorer people.
		Poorer people, for poorer people, high immigration often means less security, more competition for housing, for jobs, for public goods.
		And high illegal immigration rewards bad employers and creates a pervasive sense of lawlessness in the inner city.
		So what has the immigration story been in recent years?
		It's been very high and it's been at best semi-controlled.
		The UK now about 16% of the population is foreign-born.
		The majority white British population in the UK, at the turn of the century in 2000, it was about white British population was about 90% of the UK population.
		It is now around 70% of the UK population.
		We've seen an extraordinarily rapid demographic change.
		The proportion of school children in London who are white British is 20%.
		I mean, in the US, I know the focus is much more on illegal immigration and on legal immigration.
		Your illegal immigrant population, no one really knows, obviously, but it's sort of anywhere between 10 and 20 million.
		You had 2.2 million people coming in in one year alone in 2022.
		This is incredibly unpopular.
		It's the biggest failing, single biggest failing, I would say, the political class both in my country and the US in recent decades.
		Possibly the biggest failure of liberalism in some way.
		It's led directly to Brexit in the UK.
		It's led directly to Trump 1 and Trump 2.
		The liberalism and the rule of law flourishes in high trust societies.
		High trust societies with at least some sense of national citizenship solidarity.
		Society is not a random collection of individuals.
		And when change happens too fast, people do withdraw, people do become resentful, people do hunker down, in Robert Putnam's famous phrase.
		Now, obviously, the control I'm talking about needs to be achieved legally.
		We shouldn't be going around breaking the law as President Trump is doing.
		But if laws don't allow us to assert this basic control, then we need to change the laws.
		I mean, for example, the laws on refugees that were drawn up, the international regulations on refugees drawn up in 1951 when virtually nobody had the wherewithal to move.
		So change the laws in the achievement of this great public good.
		Don't break them.
		Let me just finish, if I can, with a quote.
		I wrote an article about 20 years ago with the magazine that Bill mentioned that I founded and edited Prospect magazine.
		I wrote an essay in 2004 called Too Diverse, question mark, which was based then on the centre-left.
		The essay was republished in The Guardian, caused a bit of a furore.
		Lots of people accused me of being a racist because I was drawing attention to my friends on the centre-left to this tension between this tension between the progressive priority for diversity and solidarity, the fact that they are to some extent in tension.
		We need to think about how to mitigate that tension.
		I ended the essay saying this: people will always favour their own families and communities.
		It is the task of a pragmatic liberalism, nevertheless, to help to shape local and national communities that are open enough to include people from many different backgrounds, but not so open that they lose a sense of stability and familiarity.
		In the words of Jonathan Sachs, the late Chief Rabbi, we are striving to create a home, not a hotel.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
		That's very interesting.
		Let me ask one question.
		So you mentioned actual nations, the US and the UK, and somewhat assimilated their experience.
		And so the obvious sort of question or a bit of a challenge would be our histories are very different.
		The US really is.
		It's not just a cliche, a nation of immigrants in a fairly unique way, I think, in the world.
		And the UK has been with different attitudes towards immigrants over decades and centuries, but has basically been a reasonably homogeneous society, an island, of course, somewhat suspicious of all those people across the channel, you know.
		So isn't, I don't know, it seems like one could look at the analysis in your framework, which I think is reasonable, and say the trade-off would be at a pretty different place on the spectrum, so to speak, in the UK than in the US.
		And that's sort of on Chandra's point that you're giving up more in the US to go in a more restrictionist direction because you're cutting much more against almost a central ethos and something that is mixed up more with our civil liberties, which is not, I think, particularly the case in Britain, right?
		There's no Statue of Liberty exactly that sort of merges in our consciousness, I would say, a little more with other forms of liberty, you know.
unidentified		Yeah, I mean, but public opinion is still public opinion, I think, is historically more open to relatively high levels of legal migration in the US than the UK, although we're possibly the difference may be narrowing, but I mean, there's just as much anxiety, possibly more anxiety about illegal immigration in the US than in the UK, partly because there's just so much of it, and it is where most of the debate concentrates.
		But I think it is possible to be in favour of a very restrictive immigration policy as now probably 70, 75% of people in Britain say that immigration is too high or much too high.
		Probably nearly 40 or 50% of people say it's much too high.
		And yet, this is a very liberal country with very liberal people.
		I mean, 6% of British people say you have to be white to be truly British.
		I think 6 or 7% of people think that a man should go out to work and a woman should look after the household.
		I mean, we are a very, very liberal society.
		But we're also very worried about dramatically fast change in many of our towns and suburbs.
		Interesting.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		So, discuss.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		Chandra?
unidentified		Okay.
		Well, let me make one point that doesn't so much respond directly to some of the substantive points you've made, but maybe offers a kind of perspective on the way in which your points have been framed.
		And in a way, I think this is the way the debate is often framed.
		We think sometimes that there is a population which has a view and has interests, and then there is the policy and there's the discourse about this.
		And the assumption is we've We've got to figure out how we track those people's interests and their opinions.
		And of course, there is something to that, but at the same time, it's also true that the interests that they have, the opinions that they hold, also reflect the kind of debate that's going on, the kinds of claims that are made, including claims about immigration, about the nature of immigrants, about the nature of identity, and so on.
		And these things all get mixed up.
		So, you know, one of the things that I would like to do is not so much say, okay, what policy should we be framing in order to track people's interests, so much as saying, from a liberal point of view, what do we need to say to people about the way we should conceive or they should conceive our society so that this divide between citizens about a whole range of issues,
		including immigration, is not as polarizing as it is.
		Because I think part of the reason for the polarization may in fact be the debate itself.
		And the debate has its shape not just because of interests that are there in the citizenry, but also because there are people within the discourse who want to say we should frame it in this way.
		Sometimes it's because there are particular economic interests, sometimes there are particular ideological or cultural interests.
		They have an important role in shaping the debate.
		There isn't a kind of natural state of the country, a natural state of popular opinion.
		Let me not belabor this, but just give you one kind of example that might offer a little bit of insight into this.
		So at the end of the Second World War in the United Kingdom, Britain presided over an empire of somewhere between 500 and 800 million people, depending on how you counted them.
		All of these people, until the beginning, or until the Citizenship Act of 1948, all of these people had British nationality.
		But over the next 20 years or so, the nationalities of these people were slowly changed or eroded, if you want to say it, so that they became less British subjects or British nationals and they became nationals of their own particular countries, whether they wanted to or not.
		Now, in the 1940s, this was debated in the British Parliament, whether or not this was possible, this was defensible, partly because those countries who were going to cease to have British nationality were non-white countries.
		Many Conservative members of Parliament were very worried about this process of simply removing people's citizenship or nationalities, because there was no citizenship yet.
		And this was the context of that debate.
		It's not as if there was a kind of natural order of things.
		What people came to think about as British was also something that was fluid and transforming and so on.
		So this isn't to say this gives us a clear guidance on what the policy should be, but I think it does tell us something about the whole idea of thinking there is a kind of interest, there is a kind of opinion, and now we've got to think separately about how to track it.
		I think the two things are entangled in a way that is underappreciated.
		Yes.
		I mean, we go back to 1948.
		The main argument made then, and you're right, mainly by Conservatives, was that we should keep an open door to all the 600 million people in the Empire and Commonwealth because of the Imperial family.
		We were one big multi-ethnic family.
		This was not an idea that appealed to the supporters of Indian independence or any of the anti-colonial movements.
		I mean, this was an incredibly reactionary idea, but it did mean that we had an open door to 600 million people, much in the same way we had an open door when we were part of the European Union to all of the European Union people.
		Basically, anybody could come to Britain from India or Kenya or wherever and enjoy the full rights of citizenship up until 1962, when we joined the modern world, as it were, the modern world of modern nation-states.
		And I don't think anyone really regrets that.
		Yes, of course, these things change historically, but I think you're kind of getting a bit close to making an argument that immigration is sort of special and should be removed from the democratic argument, the democratic marketplace, because people don't necessarily, aren't necessarily very well informed.
		You know, their opinions are often based on prejudice or anecdote.
		But I mean, you can make that argument about any aspect of public policy.
		And I think there's a real danger in, and I think it is one of the reasons why there is a sort of sense that the anywheres, as it were, the people, the highly educated people who are mobile and comfortable with change,
		favour of openness, that their priorities have completely dominated this debate, which is why we've now had five, maybe even six elections in the UK in which political parties, aware of what people think, have put in their manifestos we are going to restrict immigration more.
		And then they've done the opposite.
		And that's partly because it's classic sort of pressure group theory.
		I mean, that there's a sort of generalized feeling in the country that things are changing too fast, that we want to slow things down, but there are these sort of specific interests, whether it's employers or universities, that have a very, very strong and immediate interest in maximizing the inflow of people.
		So I think we've just got to take democracy more seriously.
		It has been one of the areas that has been, as it were, sort of pushed to one side of the democratic conflict, and the result has been Brexit and Trump.
		Yeah, I'm not sure that you're right in suggesting that I want to say we should either take democracy less seriously Or that I think that the population is somehow misinformed or misguided or has a poor understanding of so many things.
		It's more that I want to say something about what we should say within the democratic process.
		And I think part of that is to recognize, as you've said, there are interests at work here.
		And I think one of the reasons why governments have actually behaved precisely as you've described, promising one thing and doing another, is that while the demos seems to have a view, and certainly you can tell from opinion polls and elections and so on, what a majority might think at any one time, there are still within every society very,
		very strong constituencies and interests that want the opposite of what the other parts of the society want.
		No government is going to be able to satisfy all constituencies.
		And so I think immigration policy in the end is a reflection of two things.
		One is attempts by governments to placate those interests that it needs to in order to achieve its own ends, to the end of getting re-elected.
		And the other thing is simply the sheer difficulty of achieving the goals that they've set with respect to immigration control.
		As you will recall, in the 2010s, Theresa May government, May's government promised to get immigration down to 100,000 net immigrants, and shortly after that it went up to 300,000.
		It was not for want of desire.
		The problem is how do you actually achieve this?
		And of course, at times they'll try to achieve it by fiddling with the statistics.
		Do you count students as immigrants or do you not count students as immigrants?
		Well, one day you decide you will because that makes things look better, and the other day you say you won't because it makes things look worse.
		They really caught in the bind.
		It's not so easy to implement the policies that you advise.
		No, I agree with that.
		And actually, to your example, I mean, they did actually have some success in the.
		It was actually the Cameron government.
		May was the Home Secretary.
	And she did have some success initially.
	I think she brought it down to like 130 or 140,000 net immigration a year.
	And then we had the EU crisis.
	And we were then still in the EU, we were subject to free movement.
	And tens, hundreds of thousands of young Spanish and Italian people came to the UK to work and the figures went through the sky, which again was sort of one of the sort of factors leading up to the Brexit vote in 2016.
	And I do think that the inability to focus on why it is that it has been so difficult.
	I mean, Boris Johnson, when he was elected in 2019 to get Brexit done, he did sort of get Brexit done, albeit in a not particularly brilliant way.
	And he promised again to restrict immigration.
	And then we had this extraordinary, I mean, after the COVID period, we had this extraordinary explosion.
	So we had net immigration of close to a million in one year, 800,000 in the following year.
	I mean, these are extraordinary figures.
	And you're right, I mean it is partly because they're insouciance about it, because it was not something that they felt in any way disadvantaged by or threatened by, you know, that that was something for sort of other people.
	They kind of went along with it because there was a democratic consensus.
	But I think that is why it was such a failing.
	and it is to do with a kind of economic short-termism so in the year when i think we had that immigration of about nine hundred nine hundred thousand people about three quarters of the it was now controlled People couldn't just come in the way that they could, Europeans couldn't just come in the way they had been able to when we were in the EU.
	You had to come with a visa, and we just started handing out the visas like there was no tomorrow.
	Three quarters of the visas were either for students or for people working in the health and care sectors.
	And in both cases, it's because there is also a kind of a very strong impulse in our societies to get things on the cheap.
	International students account for nearly 30% of the income of British universities, which allows our own students and academics, as it were, a kind of a free ride or a sort of semi-free ride.
	And the same with health.
	Nearly half, nearly half of our hospital doctors were trained abroad.
	I mean, this is absolutely appalling, many of them from very poor countries.
	I think there are said to be more Ghanaian health workers working in the UK than in Ghana.
	I mean, we do have to think of the other side of the equation when we're talking about immigration.
	I mean, the brain drain problem.
	85% of Jamaican graduates leave the country.
	Probably many of them end up in the US.
	I mean, there is another side to the balance sheet here.
	And we shouldn't just be using immigration as a way of supporting short-termism.
	We should jolly well fund the National Health Service properly and fund our universities properly rather than relying on immigration as a way of getting it on the cheap.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		Well, can I just add one maybe footnote to each of your points and then you can go back at it?
		I mean, this is very interesting.
		I mean, it seems to me the obvious challenge, Chandra, to your point, is I would like to have the discourse that you would like to have.
		But this is a democracy.
		There are always demagogues, democracies.
		And at some point, it's just empirically probably the case that if people see, maybe incorrectly, certain things happening because of large immigration, whether large legal or certainly illegal and border crossing type immigration, demagogues will flourish.
		And to be serious, and you are obviously about public, about policy in this sense, one has to take that into account.
		It doesn't mean one capitulates ahead of time, so to speak, to the demagogic instinct, but it means one doesn't get to wish it away, I guess.
		And I would make the sort of similar point from the other side.
		I'm not saying you're wishing it away, but that people sometimes do.
		We're putting aside all the unpleasant stuff that's happening because we don't like it.
		I don't like it either, but we do have to come to grips with why it might be happening.
		I'd say the same on the other side with you.
		I mean, if one could be too fatalistic in a sense about public opinion or democracy, I do think it's only that immigration maybe should have a slightly special status among different issues.
		We do set aside several issues from democratic, apart from democratic decision-making and democratic discourse.
		We do it explicitly in our Constitution and with our courts.
		Britain does it more informally, you might say, but there's always been an understanding that you can't simply let public opinion, which is always an amalgam of reasonableness and prejudice and misinformation and real information, simply govern.
		I'm not saying you're saying that, but I think there's a tendency a little bit to say, well, what can one do?
		Democratic statesmen, this is the flip side of the demagogue point, democratic statesmen have an obligation to educate and occasionally constrain public opinion.
		I remember talking to Jeb Bush after the 2016 election, which he didn't do too well in.
		And I remember he was so annoyed, but I thought touchingly so, someone he had been challenged, why didn't you see Trump coming?
		He said, I saw it coming.
		Why didn't you understand that immigration was such a potent issue and there was so much resentment at the border crossings and at Hispanics?
		And Trump, of course, exploited that and exploited the 2015 migration crisis in Europe.
		Very, very so central to his success.
		And why didn't he send Mexican judges and why didn't you somehow figure out a way to defend?
		And Jeb Bush has said, look, at some point, I wasn't going to say anti-I wasn't going to say racist things.
		I wasn't going to say nativist things.
		I wasn't going to pretend that these people are not contributing to our society.
		And so I'm sorry, you know, the public at this point wanted Trump.
		And I sort of slightly sympathetic.
		There's a little too much, I think, breastbeating about how could you let this happen when some of what one let happen was stuff that to not let it happen would meant joining in a sentiment that really perhaps ultimately is even more unhealthy than letting it than trying to and failing to resist it.
		So I mean I just both point, I mean that is, I think you're, this is the final point I'll say is that the practical points are very important too, I do think.
		This is like early, you know, in fact 50 years in the public interest or something.
		You know, the actual unintended consequences of policies matter.
		And people have to take responsibility for that.
		Those of us who are on the liberal side need to take some responsibility for, well, it did seem to work out badly in terms of those of us who believe in liberal policies.
		If you look around at what's happening in LA and DC right now, and that maybe it didn't have to happen, history's contingent, etc.
		I think on the other side, the same thing, that one has to really say what is one, what path is one beginning to go down when one starts talking about homes and derogatory as opposed to hotels.
		Isn't that really a slight, I mean, it's not, obviously it's an interesting metaphor and so forth, but it's giving a little fuel to a certain fire that maybe one shouldn't fuel.
		Anyway, enough for me, but either of you, I'm just curious.
		But you're both really, I think, big.
unidentified		There are some very nice hotels.
		We're in one.
		But I mean, I'd want to stick up for public opinion.
		I mean, the public are not a mob any longer.
		You know, racism is the biggest public taboo there is in the UK.
		As I said earlier, five or six percent of people have kind of semi-racist views.
		Although I do hear from black and brown friends that actually they have, for the first time in their lives, been experiencing prejudice, partly because this feeling that the level of inflow is so high and in the case of the cross-channel boats, so uncontrolled.
		But actually, if you look at public opinion on immigration, anxiety about it, whether you put it, how high you put it among your list of political priorities, has actually tracked the real inflows over time.
		If you look back over 20 or 30 years, public anxiety goes up when the numbers go up and it goes down when the numbers go down.
		Public anxiety about immigration disappeared after 2016 when we left the European Union and ended free movement.
		It disappeared for two or three years until we had what is called the Boris wave coming in in 2022 and then anxiety rocketed again.
		Again, I don't want to seem to be suggesting that we should disparage public opinion.
		And I agree with you, the accusations of racism are way over the top.
		And it's just too easy a way for people to just abuse their fellow citizens.
		Completely agree with you on that.
		But the thing that I'm interested in As a contributor to the debate, is not so much discounting public opinion as trying to reshape public opinion.
		Now, this is a contribution to the public opinion debate.
		And I want to say, look, to my fellow citizens and people everywhere, I think you should look at this whole question a little bit differently.
		And one way I think is important is actually in a couple of points that you made about the way in which the British state, for example, has responded inadequately to certain problems within the society that has actually led to greater immigration.
		You mentioned the case of universities taking in foreign students.
		Well, why does Britain take in so many foreign students?
		Not that I'm against it, but when I was at the LSE, I was told by the pro-director for finance that it cost us £11,000 or £12,000 to educate a student.
		We were only allowed to charge British students £9,000.
		So you had to make up that £3,000 shortfall.
		Well, what do you do?
		You can either increase the money that you charge your domestic students, but if the government says no, well, you can shut down, you can close your programs, or you can go abroad.
		Same with the NHS.
		If you're not training domestic doctors, of course, the institution is going to go looking for foreign doctors, looking for foreign nurses.
		Now, if this is the case, it doesn't seem to me that the solution is to say, well, we've got to stop immigration, because you need doctors, you need nurses.
		So, you know, this is one of those cases where the appropriate tool is not immigration control.
		The appropriate tools are domestic public policy.
		And to become less dependent on migration.
		Now, when I was making the same point that you made earlier, that one of the drivers of very high immigration in the UK is economic short-termism.
		Is the state not investing enough in universities and the NHS?
		And clearly, it should invest more.
		But, you know, the scale of demographic change in the UK, I mean, it's obviously something that we differ here from the US.
		I mean, the US, I mean, as it were, the ethnic majority in the US has always been, I mean, I guess white Americans, what's the phrase, non-Hispanic white Americans, are still just about the majority of the population.
		Not by a lot, yeah.
		Probably not that much, probably about 60%, possibly.
		I mean, but we have gone, as I said earlier, in 25 years from 90% to 70%.
		I mean, that is a really, really dramatic change.
		And you do not have to be racist to be discomforted by that.
		You know, if your whole neighborhood changes and fills up with people you don't share a language with or a way of life or a culture, the norms, kind of social norms matter.
		And if they change in your neighborhood too fast, then it's going to be very discomforting to you.
		And I think this is not only economic short-termism that has driven high levels of immigration.
		It is the insouciance of the anywhere class, if you like.
		I mean, I know you won't be a popular person here, but Christopher Caldwell's idea of the two constitutions, I think, is very powerful here.
		I mean, the first constitution being the basics of democracy and the rule of law and so on.
		The second constitution being the way that public life is sort of filtered through the courts, the media, sort of civil society, which tends to be dominated much more by kind of anywhere liberalism.
		And when the second constitution gets too powerful, then the first constitution hits back by electing Donald Trump.
		So we go back to this question.
		Unless you deal with this, the famous quote, was it David Fromm, who said, if liberals won't control immigration, then populists will.
		I think you may have said fascists.
		But so that's our choice, I think.
		Well, could I respond to that by just drawing attention to some analysis in your book, I forget what it's called, but Somewheres and Anywheres is the basis of the book.
		They wrote somewhere.
		Now, one of the things you pointed out was in the UK context that the difference between London and the rest of the country.
		And there are lots of things that go wrong in a way within the society when so much wealth and power is concentrated in London.
		But leave that aside.
		One of the things you pointed out was the extent to which London is really quite different.
		And most immigration tends to focus on London.
		I mean, that's where most people come into, although they do go to other parts of the other parts of the country.
		And you pointed out, I think, quite rightly, that, of course, the parts of the country that are most anti-immigrant are the parts of the country where there is least immigration.
		But again, your argument was that people outside don't see themselves just as being in Newcastle or Lincolnshire.
	They see themselves as British.
	But they see themselves as British in a quite different way to the way that Londoners might see themselves as British.
	Now, I think that analysis to me sounds very persuasive.
	But the question now is, what do you do about that?
	Because, okay, you've made the point that it's this particular class of people that are controlling things.
	I'm not sure that they're really in control.
	It's more that they're not in control of things that are developing in a way that they don't really have a way of managing.
	But if this is the nature of the situation there, how do you actually control that?
	I mean, it seems to me that you can certainly bring about policies, but you have to exert a kind of degree of control that I think is simply beyond the capacity of any state.
	And what worries me is that when there is this pressure to act, what the state will end up doing is actually focusing on much softer targets, because then you look like you're doing something.
	So you don't actually make policies or implement policies that have real effects in terms of reducing immigration.
	What you do is you have dramatic things that pick on targets where you can make a difference.
	You can pick on students or you can make it harder for some people to get visas.
	Or you can man the burqa or whatever.
	Yeah, okay.
	And there's a completely different thing.
	But we end up sort of talking about integration in a way, which is often what people do talk about.
	But integration in liberal societies is incredibly difficult to mandate.
	You can't tell people where to send their children to school or where to live.
	So I would say the best integration policy is a pretty restrictive immigration policy.
	Because we also know that particularly communities, say Muslims from Pakistan or Bangladesh, who tend to live pretty separate lives in the UK.
	We know that when you get beyond a certain critical mass, the pressure, as it were, to integrate reduces.
	You can live your entire life within your own community.
	You have your own media and so on and so forth.
	And that, and actually, the areas of Britain where immigration is most contested and where people are most uncomfortable isn't so much the places where there is very little immigration.
	It's the places like the northern mill towns in Yorkshire and Lancashire, where we have had Pakistani immigration since the 1950s.
	People were attracted in to work in the mills to try and combat competition from Japan, I think it was at the time.
	This was a time when the British economy was booming.
	There were lots of better paid jobs elsewhere, and the mill owners, one of the most disastrous, I think in respect, one of the most disastrous acts of British public policy since the Second World War, invited in tens of thousands of people from completely different cultures.
	And they have, it's not all been a disaster, but these are not immigration success stories by anyone's account.
	We have parallel lives in many of these places.
	You go to places like Bradford, they are completely transformed.
	And this has not been a good thing.
	I mean, how we deal with that over time, I think the hope is actually probably with the young Muslim women who will want to break out of the very controlling patriarchal, patriarchal culture that they come from.
	And I think over generations, there will be an integration, but it's going to be very, very much slower than is the case with many other groups.
	I mean, integration is just bloody difficult in liberal societies.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		I don't, but that's, I'll just say, that's a very British point of view.
		I do not feel that in the U.S.
		I came to Washington in 1985 and everyone was so worried, not unintelligently, about Hispanic immigration.
		They were going to one or two states, two or three states.
		They were concentrated together.
		They spoke Spanish.
		They had newspapers, you know, which certainly the U.S. has always had newspapers, different languages, and majorities of states in 1870 were foreign-born and were foreign-born in one place.
		And Iowa is now part of the United States, even though it was once 70% German and they read German newspapers and stuff.
		But the Hispanic thing for the U.S. is a very, and immigration continued at high levels from Mexico and then expanded to Central America.
		And I think it was all, just turned out that the melting pot in the U.S. is extremely strong.
		And a third of them marry non-Hispanics.
		And intermarriage is a very good solution.
		It's certainly a very good way to pass through assimilation, much more common in some societies.
		And it's much more common across certain different ethnicities than others, obviously.
		I think actually you both understate the importance of race from a U.S. point of view.
		I think we have almost no problem.
		I mean, the fact is there's very little problem in the U.S.
		And I think in the real world, I mean, there's very little evidence, I would put it this way, of immigration leading to what?
		Crime rates went down during this huge wave of immigration in the U.S.
		I mean, there's just race, I do think, is much more behind it in the U.S. Maybe race slash religion slash non-Christian immigrants is more behind it in parts of Europe.
		And again, that may empirically take longer and be harder for those people to assimilate.
		Though the ones who are fleeing and coming to these countries probably do want to assimilate, then you do have some interesting questions of why some of them don't and some do.
		I mean, I guess my final point, just if I could be on my sort of to the left of both of you, I guess, is, I don't know, is it so terrible that Jamaicans are coming to the U.S. and Britain and becoming nurses or other professionals?
		I mean, they don't have, no, it's not terrible for Japanese.
unidentified		It's not terrible for Jamaica.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		It isn't terrible for Jamaica because there aren't jobs for a lot of them in Jamaica.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		And there's very little, I know.
unidentified		Clever people keep leaving.
unidentified		No, Jamaica's GDP is actually, I don't know nothing about Jamaica, but I'm just going to stipulate this.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		I'm not so sure that Jamaica's GDP has grown less quickly in the last 20 or 30 years than it was doing in the wonderful days when everyone was just stuck in Jamaica and there was no industry there and no employment there.
		And in fact, there's a lot of evidence that you can combine pretty active out migration, pretty active out migration with the countries that anyway, I think this is Chandra's point.
		We're going to keep, stop people who really want to leave from leaving, stop them from contributing to the country that they're coming to.
		Same with the universities.
		Well, it's not so obviously terrible that Britain is educating a lot of people from outside Britain, that it's helping the balance of payments to the universities in Britain.
		The students seem happy enough to have foreign coasts students with them.
		The foreigners probably are learning a lot.
		It's probably mildly beneficial for liberal values around the world because they're hopefully at LSE getting a modestly liberal education.
		So I think you all are.
unidentified		But don't we want wealth and prosperity to be sort of spread out across the world?
unidentified		Not everybody coming to a few great centers.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		And a lot of them send money back.
unidentified		And it's not happening.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		This has empirically been studied a lot.
		It is just not true that Mexico suffers from having a lot of Mexicans in the United States.
		They all have relatives in Mexico.
		They send money back to Mexico.
		Many of them come temporarily and go back to Mexico.
		This is your point, that in fact you get more transient immigration, whatever the technical term would be, temporary immigration, if you have, in a way, a more relaxed immigration policy.
		If you make people come and ask for asylum, then they have to stay here and they can't go back and so forth.
		So I don't know.
unidentified		I think one thing that may be worth noting.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		I don't mean to just take this off track.
unidentified		With respect to the brain drain in particular, I mean, we often have the sense that when people move, especially people like nurses and doctors and various kinds of workers, what's happening is that they're turning up at the border or they're applying for visas independently and just arriving.
		Whereas in fact there's a huge network of international agreements between governments and governments, governments and private bodies, in order to supply their labor needs.
		I mean, think about the Philippines, for example, which is famous for sending out nurses all around the world.
		Well, you know, one of the things that the Philippines is very good at doing is actually producing nurses for export.
		This is an export industry.
		People go in not because they want to get jobs as nurses in the Philippines, because they want to have jobs as nurses somewhere.
		And there are agreements between hospitals and healthcare systems and countries.
		And it's not just nurses, it's domestic workers in Indonesia who are exported all around the world, whether it's to the Middle East or to Taiwan.
		So it's a very, very complex.
		This is sort of slightly sort of sui generis.
		I mean, it does have a whole political economy based around exporting people.
		But actually, I mean, this problem is partly going to solve itself.
		I mean, the brain drain problem is going to solve itself because there are going to be far, far fewer brains to drain because of the global collapse in fertility.
		And actually, a lot of countries that have been exporting a lot of people to richer countries, like Nigeria, are now starting to say, actually, we actually need the nurses here.
		And if you have a training, I mean, this is the point about Jamaican graduates, is the fact that they're graduates.
		They will have had a very expensive education paid for by Jamaican taxpayers, and then they'll have hopped off to New York.
		And this is not fair on Jamaica.
		And it's not fair on Nigeria that we take their doctors and we take their nurses.
		And so Nigeria is actually implementing a system where you have to, after you've had a nurse's training, you have to set stay for a certain number of years.
		That seems to me to be a reasonable compromise.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, this would depend partly on who's paying for their education there and whether it's true that they're sort of...
		I mean, there is some case, isn't there?
		I'm just going to ignore the move to Q ⁇ A here, which I think this is pretty interesting.
		And you guys can all criticize me later.
		I don't know.
		There is something to be said, though.
		There should be a slight preference, I feel like, as a starting point, that people should have some ability to go to where they want.
		All things equal.
		If it doesn't hurt the country they're going to, if it questionably, question, I suppose, whether it hurts the country they're leaving, if they're willing to pay back or their employer.
		And I think this is where the agreements come in.
		If the hospital system in the U.S. is willing to pay the Nigerian government for what they spent to educate this nurse, then it's all even, I don't know, I feel like being, it's a little, I don't know what.
		I mean, isn't there some prejudice for liberty here and for freedom?
		And in that respect, isn't immigration a little bit of a special case?
		It's not just a welfare state question of how you balance.
unidentified		This is, you know, in a way, a kind of bedrock position that I should share with you, that, you know, it's not right to say to people in different parts of the country, sorry, in different parts of the world, no, you can't move because you owe an obligation to stay where you are.
		Now, I completely agree that if you've been the recipient of public funds and you're told that you're obligated to pay some of that back, whether it's in cash or in service, that seems not unreasonable.
		And many places do do exactly that.
		I mean, if you get a degree in medicine in Malaysia, it's not that you can't leave the country without paying back.
		You also have an obligation to go to certain parts of Malaysia and do your service as a doctor in parts of the country because your education is being paid for.
		But at the same time, it's not as if in a free society you would say to someone, no, and you're stuck here forever because we need you, any more than you could say to an American, no, you're from Iowa, and I'm afraid, you know, there's a bit of a labor drain from Iowa to the cities.
		You've got to stay here.
		It may be too bad for Iowa and maybe better for New York, but I just don't think you can do that in a free society.
		Well, but the world is not a single country.
		We have nation-states, and I think nation-states are very important and are going to remain important.
		We've got huge challenges facing us that our political classes need legitimacy to tackle.
		We've got climate, we've got aging societies, we've got, certainly in Europe, we've got slow economic growth, we've got huge ethnic diversity in our societies.
		These need, all of these things will work better if we have a sense of a kind of degree of emotional citizenship.
		And that has to be bounded.
		That has to be bounded within nation-states.
		And we need moderate national feeling to enable our politicians to deal with many of these problems.
		And I think if your society is changing too fast, you erode that, amongst other things.
		I'm not sure I would agree with that as a generalization, because I think it's going to vary from place to place.
		I mean, if you took the UAE, for example, it's 80% or 85% immigrant.
		But it's not a democracy.
		So I agree that a different case.
		If you looked at Singapore, which is a democracy, you've got a population of 6 million, and 2.5 million of those are non-citizens.
		Some of them permanent residents, some of them short-term residents.
		It's a perfectly cohesive society.
		There's more than enough national sentiment to make the institutions work properly.
		So the question of how much you need, I don't think it's just a matter of numbers.
		It's a matter of what is the ethos that's shaping the society.
		Now, you could say, and I think this is a part of your thesis, well, what we need to do is to control immigration to develop that ethos.
		But I'm not sure that that's necessarily or even obviously the case.
		I mean, whether or not you have the right ethos may be something that's sourced from all kinds of other factors.
		In fact, if you have the right ethos, you could have a much greater extent of immigration and still be fine with your institutions.
		If you've got a very different sort of ethos, even a handful of immigrants would be a real threat.
		I mean, many years ago, I debated the immigration issue in a town hall in Prague, and there was great anxiety among the citizenry about immigration.
		But everybody agreed that no one wanted to immigrate to the Czech Republic.
		They were all using this as a route to Sweden or to Germany or to Britain.
		Yet there was this great anxiety that people would be coming through.
		And the numbers were trivial.
		Hardly anyone was stopping to make their lives in Prague.
		So what was it that's the source of the anxiety?
		Well, it couldn't be the immigrants, because there weren't enough of them.
		The problem was the way people thought about their society.
		So that, I think, is the issue.
		The result often flows from the form of immigration you have too.
		So I mean, lots of countries, Canada, I think possibly Singapore too, have been incredibly selective in who is allowed in.
		My point about Pakistanis in Britain, this was completely unselective.
		They were the poorest of the poor in Pakistan itself.
		And they brought their very clannish society to the UK and re-established it there.
		That is why there was an issue with integration.
		Muslim immigration in the US has tended to be much more Iranian dentists, not Pakistani small farmers from Mirpur.
		And similarly with Canada.
		Canada was seen as one of the great success stories of global immigration, but that's because it was ruthless.
		You had to have three PhDs virtually to get into Canada until quite recently.
		I mean, now more people have come through the refugee channel.
		And highly educated people who have good jobs make for good immigrants and can fit in quite quickly.
		But when you have much less selective immigration, then you have a much bigger problem.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		Final word on that.
unidentified		I'm not sure that Canada or Australia have been quite as selective or Singapore.
		And again, I don't want to defend the immigration policies of these places, including Singapore, because I think there are lots of things that are wrong with it.
		But I guess I would just go back to my original point, which is that it's very, very difficult to actually control immigration.
		It's very difficult to control it and get the outcomes that you want, even though you can put policies in place.
		It's very difficult to actually control a society without then infringing upon your citizens' freedoms.
		So the question is how far are you prepared to go?
		I think, David, your view is that it's actually not as bad as I'm suggesting, that there's a lot less infringement of people's liberties than that I'm fearing.
		I think you're mistaken about that, but this is probably a debate for another.
		Examples you gave in the New York Times, I didn't think really cut the mustard.
		I mean, employers, should they be allowed to import anybody they want?
		Should you be able to import any spouse you want without any controls at all?
		I mean, you know, one can argue about what the rules should be, but these are, you know, compared to the public good of a well-managed immigration system that means that your population, particularly the bottom half of your population, are not anxious about it and they're not voting for populists because of it.
		This is a very small price to pay, I guess, is my point.
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		But we should stop.
		I don't know.
		I don't think there's a lot of resentment about people marrying non-Americans, at least here in the U.S., and bringing them here.
		Obviously, sexual trafficking is an entirely different issue.
		So I don't see that that's really, I don't think you're importing spouses.
		People should have some right to marry.
		They should be encouraged to marry the person they want to marry, and it should be made easier, I feel.
		And I think in some of these cases, the downside is not that, I mean, what you describe as an employer importing a laborer is also a laborer choosing to work somewhere else, just to make that obvious point.
		So I don't, well, you're right that there can be exploitative situations, and also it can take jobs away from local people, but we've had pretty large immigration and pretty low unemployment here in this country.
		And so I don't know.
		I feel like this, I do think these countries, I just close with this since we're over time.
		I do think actually the more I hear both of you, these things are somewhat historically contingent and geographically contingent, or geographic is not the word, contingent on different countries having different histories and different economies and different societies and so forth.
		And so I do, I am slightly less of a, I think there's some case for really distinguishing countries and what the trade-off, as it were, is between the liberty-constraining and the security-threatening sides of immigration are.
		But this has been an extremely stimulating discussion.
		Thank you both for being here.
unidentified		Thank you.
unidentified		There's no Q&A?
bill kristol ▲ ● ▼		No. Please.
unidentified		Your check is in the mail from Lawfair.
		We actually don't have a whole lot of time, and we have a huge issue to discuss.
		So I'm going to dispense with a lot of formalities and of panels, things like introductory remarks of all sorts, and just go directly into a conversation with what is really an incredible panel.
		And Frank, I wanted to start with you and ask you, in our correspondence in advance of this, you said you wanted to address the assault on the deep state.
		And I think that's a great place to start.
		We have some people when we heard about mass layoffs before.
		I assume we have some people in the room who are affected by that.
		It's hard to have a room this big in Washington without that right now.
		How severe do you think it is?
		And what do you think is the relationship between that assault, if we will call it that, and liberalism?
		Okay, thank you very much, Ben.
		So I actually like the deep state.
		I think that any functioning political system has to have a civil service that meets these basic Niberian requirements of being non-partisan, expert, professional, and the like.
		And that has really been the target.
		We have the next panel that's about to start for you.
		Don't worry, we can keep the conversation going after this panel.
		We'll have some time.
		But we are starting the next one now.
		So this next panel on practical strategies for resisting authoritarianism is one that resonates a lot with me.
		And again, I'm Bernie Belvedere of the unpopulist and ISMA.
		But seriously, I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, toward the tail end of military dictatorship, or junta.
		Now, my family was able to get out from that, which is how we ended up here.
		But many others often don't have a way out of a state that is either careening toward authoritarianism or already neck deep in it.
		And of course, many don't want a way out because they want to help reform the place that they call home, which I think is a very noble thing.
		But what we all crave are practical strategies for resisting the maneuvers of authoritarians or strongmen, of illiberal regimes.
		And this panel will speak to that.
		They're here to help us understand the communication and electoral strategies that have proven effective in overcoming authoritarians or rising authoritarians as these figures seek to change election rules, stack the judiciary, commandeer media, even social media, defund and deplatform opposition and more.
		This panel features speakers who have had that success in thwarting such authoritarian movements.
		It's precisely why we at ISMA and the Unpopulous convened it.
		A global focus is one of our missional and editorial calling cards.
		So this morning, we have Alexander Sikorsky, founder of the Zaref Foundation.
		We have Leon Krautse, columnist for the Washington Post and editor of Letras Libres.
		And he and I are probably the two biggest soccer fans at the conference.
		We have that going for us.
		Sabina Trudic, MP in the National Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
		And the moderator for this panel is Yasha Munk, the brilliant founder of Persuasion and host of the Good Fight podcast.
		Yasha, the floor is yours.
		Thank you very much, Benny.
		So I think this panel is going to give you the seven secret trips to beat populists anywhere in the world.
		And as Benny said, you know, in order to give you those tips, we decided to invite representatives of all of the countries that have vanquished populism so that it shall never return.
		Unfortunately, those countries don't exist.
		So I decided that we should probably start by reflecting a little bit why the struggle is so difficult and why some of the countries that are represented on this panel haven't fully succeeded in beating the populists.
		And perhaps we'll manage to get to the seven secret tips to winning every election at the end.
		I'm not sure how convincing we're going to be on those.
		Leon, talking with you about Mexico, I know that one of the things that populists tend to be extremely strong at is dominating the media landscape and setting the terms of a political debate.
		How is it that AMLO managed to do that so successfully in Mexico and why is it that the Mexican opposition hasn't really been able to compete with that?
		Thank you, Jasha, for the invitation and for the question.
		I'm delighted to be here.
		I think it's very significant that we're here to talk about lessons from abroad.
		I sometimes get the feeling as a Mexican journalist, Latin American journalist and an American journalist as well, that there's this sense, this peculiar notion in America that somehow this threat to liberalism and to democracy, this authoritarian threat, has only happened here and hasn't happened elsewhere.
		And the truth is that it has indeed happened elsewhere.
		Latin American history proves it.
		Latin American liberals have been fighting against autocracy for 200 years now in many forms and shapes.
		The region has seen many of the very concerning dynamics that we are seeing here today.
		And sadly, and Mexico is an example, many of them have played out with far more definitive and pernicious consequences than those that we're seeing in America.
		So I'm grateful for the opportunity all of us are going to have today to talk about the lessons from abroad.
		I think some context is necessary, Jasha.
		Mexico is indeed not a success story.
		The fight for democracy and liberalism has mostly failed.
		A populist autocratic regime is taking root.
		In the seven years since the Lopez Obrador project began, it has entrenched itself as a new hegemonic force, very reminiscent, even worse, I would say, than the PRI, which ruled Mexico for more than 70 years under this anti-democratic system of political succession that Mario Barragasiosa precisely, correctly, painfully christened, called the perfect dictatorship.
		During those seven years, Lopez Obrador and his project have amassed unprecedented power.
		I'll give you just a few examples.
		It dominates the legislative.
	Morena controls both houses of Congress.
	It has almost total control of the states, governs the states where 72% of Mexicans live.
	It has dismantled and captured the complete judiciary.
	This is one of Donald Trump's wet dreams for sure.
	Lopez Obrador actually managed to do it, the judicial reform that abolished the existing court structure completely, from the first judge at the local level to the highest Supreme Court justice, just erased and replaced by elected judges, the vast majority proposed and promoted directly by the ruling party.
	It has dismantled institutions and watchdogs.
	It has intimidated and harassed the media on a daily basis.
	And now the last piece, I would say the coup d'etat, which is actually pretty precise, it is planning centralized control of the electoral process, a proposed electoral reform, which would return control of the elections to the government, effectively dismantling the National Electoral Institute, which has guaranteed electoral fairness.
	That's where we stand.
	Like Jasha was saying, The battle for the daily narrative has been key to this project.
	López Obrador established a daily narrative through morning press conferences.
	He didn't miss one day over six years.
	Las Mañaneras, he said the national agenda intervened everywhere, became the narrator-in-chief of Mexican public life, intervened in electoral processes, although it was prohibited by the law.
	The goal was clear: marginalize opposition voices and position the presidential narrative as a sole framework for interpreting reality.
	I once took a very distinguished colleague of mine from the Washington Post to Mexico.
	We were having breakfast early in the Lopez Obrador term, and we were having breakfast surrounded by television, and all of a sudden Lopez Obrador appears and he got really ashen-faced, completely terrified, and said to me, What's happening?
	A national emergency?
	And I said, No, this is every day.
	This happens every day.
	Every television station, every news site is broadcasting these three hours every single day.
	And he told me, Well, this is North Korea.
	And he was right in many ways.
	The lesson there, and I'll wrap up with this, is that the opposition never mounted an effective counter-narrative.
	They failed to produce a figure who could respond in real time or any time and did not consistently challenge the president's lies.
	By the way, over 90,000 lies during the six-year term, according to independent fact-checkers.
	So, not challenging the media narrative has played a big role.
	The media, the official narrative, has played a very clear, big role, crucial role, in the consolidation of Mexico's current autocratic turn.
	One of the questions that I think the opposition in the United States faces at the moment is: how do we talk about very concerning developments in a way that speaks to ordinary people, in a way that warns about real dangers of autocratic erosion without sounding historical, without sounding like you're saying stuff that just doesn't seem realistic to a lot of ordinary people?
	And how do you do that without feeling like you're being elitist, like you're speaking about stuff that just doesn't matter to everyday people in a straightforward way?
	I know that in your political context, you've been thinking about how to deal with that.
	How do we speak about the danger of autocracy in a way that actually connects to the lives of ordinary people?
	I come from a political party that, given our political structure, both systemic and normative, should not exist by any means because we are the only truly multi-ethnic, truly liberal, progressive political party located in Sarajevo.
	The only party located with a headquarters in Sarajevo that had non-Bosniak presidents of party, like a third president of a party with a headquarters in Sarajevo, and so many more other examples.
	For example, when I was elected to the federal parliament, 63% of our elected officials were women.
	We are the only party whose election lists were rejected by the central election committee because they didn't have enough men on them, considering our law stipulating 40% of less represented gender, and so on and so forth.
	However, we do exist, we are growing, we are in the government, we've had the prime minister of Sarajevo Canton, which due to our heavy decentralization, is actually an economic hub that has a budget greater than one of the entities, half of the country.
	And how was that possible given all these restraints?
	And I'm not trying to paint a picture that's unrealistic.
	Still suffer from all the other obvious setbacks that you expect from a deeply divided country.
	Just to illustrate, we're now a country of 2.7 approximately million people with 14 governments, 14 governments, with all the governmental structures within them.
	So we are still very sectarian, we are divided.
	We still have ethno-nationalists or extreme right-wing people leading extreme right-wing nationalist parties that are still big players.
	However, in the past months, our institutions have been resilient in finishing a court case against one of those oligarchs and who will be now, as a result of the judgment, forbidden to participate in the political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the next six years.
	Milara Dodek will not be participating in the political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
	But how did we get there?
	How did we get?
	Why did we survive and why are we growing and why do we remain on the scene?
	I think there are no shortcuts.
	I wish I could tell you now there are three ways you beat oligarchs because it seems to me that in the United States, the only way to get your point across, you need to enumerate it for some reason, and ideally there would be three.
	So I was trying desperately to come up with three ways, but I'm still struggling.
	Work with me here.
	But one of the ways, and for sure, you simply need to deliver.
	And what we did, there was a huge gap, huge opening space for quality of life measures in a country that's deeply in symbolic ethno-nationalist debates for the past 30 years.
	Over 80% of our policies and politics are symbolic ethno-nationalist politics.
	And one of the criticisms, and I'll finish with that and then I'll come up with two more as we progress.
	One of the great things that we use is that the weapons used against us, we actually turned it against our critics because they said, you know, you're not big policies, you're not national policies, you're not foreign policy people, you care about cats and dogs and human rights and organizing a parade in Sarajevo and so on.
	And then the surveys actually showed that in a deeply conservative, deeply divided country, people were more than willing to vote for young people, to vote for women, to vote for progressive policies because they felt that on the local level where we captured the audience through delivering things like public transport by including in three months since when we got in power, we managed to completely abolish waiting lists for early education in the Sarajevo canton.
	And I will have to here agree with a rather, and I'll leave you with that controversial statement, which I see is not very popular in this crowd, but I think that liberalism, our form of liberalism, similar to liberalism around the world, or particularly in the United States, has been to some extent victim of its own success, similar to like vaccine.
	And in a way, because it presupposes constant progress and constant re-evaluation of where we are, we forgot to take stock of where we got and forgot that it also contains in itself mechanisms for self-regulation and development and questioning all these things.
	Did we pay enough attention about the environment?
	Did we pay enough attention about the non-believers and so on?
	So in that sense, that has been, I have to say, a winning ticket for us so far.
	Alexander, I think until three or four months ago, it would have been obvious why you're on this panel, which is that Poland is one of the few countries that managed to win after eight years of rule by a far-right populist party with a moderate democratic movement winning the parliamentary elections there about two years ago.
	With a big ray of hope.
	I think since then you've lost some of the justification for sitting on this panel because you've lost a very important presidential election against the very forces that seemed to be on the retreat.
	What went wrong with his election?
	Why do you think that populism has proven to have such staying power in Poland?
	Well, I worked on both the 2023 election, which we won, and on the 2025 presidential election, which we lost.
	And I think there were a few factors that helped us win in 2023.
	We had, after eight years of law and justice government, of an authoritarian-style government pushing us towards a dictatorship, there were simply structural problems, which, because of COVID, because of high inflation, because of just endless corruption, made people sick of the government and more likely to vote for an alternative.
	In addition, the opposition, for the first time, managed to truly cooperate during the election.
	And both the center-right, the center, and the left-wing opposition groups, though not forming into a united coalition, managed to run a campaign that was coordinated so that different topics were taken by different parties and they were able to gather a majority of the voters.
	On top of this, and this is something that I have to disagree with Sabina on, it's not enough to just simply deliver.
	You also have to constantly communicate that you are delivering.
	And this is something I think that Lopro Savrador and many other populists understand perfectly.
	Daily press conferences, walking up and down the length of New York City, AI videos every single day about your remigration plans in Germany.
	You're not really disagreeing with me, you're just adding to my argument that in addition to delivering, so just to make a small correction.
	You're disagreeing about disagreeing, how very little.
	But this constant communication, it's not enough to just be good at government, you have to constantly communicate.
	And in that 2023 election, we did have a leader who was constantly on social media, constantly communicating what needed to be done.
	And then the past few years have, I think, been a mixed bag in Poland in terms of what the government has actually achieved, what it hasn't achieved.
	I think one of the mistakes of the campaign in 2023 was we made 100 promises for the first 100 days of ruling.
	I believe maybe a dozen or two or a few or 15 or so of those policies have actually been passed.
	And that has come back to haunt us two years later.
	Although I actually, when it comes to the 2025 campaign, I actually don't think that there are huge structural changes in Polish society, that the far right is on the rise.
	I actually, my personal belief is that we lost that campaign because of specific bad decisions made by the campaign team that ran the election campaign.
	Such as not focusing enough on new forms of media on social media, on TikTok, on Instagram, where I was just looking at the statistics.
	In the United States, 75% of people under the age of 30 are on Instagram, 62% of people under the age of 30 are on TikTok.
	That is where young people now are.
	You cannot rely on traditional media.
	You cannot rely on newspapers and TV shows.
	You need to be there.
	And I think that the Liberal campaign completely underestimated that in a way that it didn't in 2023.
	I think it was too certain of itself.
	I think there were also mistakes made when it came to spending campaign funds, advertising.
	And I think these small decisions made by a handful of people had a big effect on Poland's democracy in the future.
	And that it is, you know, the government needs to do a good job, but you also need to be good at winning the communication battle during election cycles and throughout your term in government.
	Leon.
	I could not agree more.
	I mean, going back to the Mexican example, six years of this daily torture, and the other side had nothing.
	Complete silence.
	And when I see what's happening in the United States, and when I hear these debates among some of my friends in the Democratic Party, some of them advising people not to react, stop reacting to what Trump is saying.
	My reaction to that advice is: please keep on reacting.
	React more forcefully.
	Respond forcefully.
	Clarify as much as you can.
	Because Trump is learning.
	The first time around, he rarely held these impromptu press conferences.
	Now he does it very often.
	We saw it yesterday or the day before yesterday.
	The part about immigration was full of lies and misrepresentations.
	He got no reply, no disciplined reply by anyone in the Democratic Party.
	That's why, frankly, and I'm not referring specifically to the figure as a presidential candidate or his own political future, but someone like Gavin Newsom or LA Mayor Karen Bass gives me hope.
	Because at least there's a response there.
	They are trying to respond to the narrative, to the way Trump and the Republican Party own the new cycle, even if politically it might make no sense, who knows, to redistrict, to reply, to clarify, to exhibit Trump and his narrative as what it is in a daily basis is, in my opinion,
	absolutely crucial to keep that narrative from taking root and taking hold of the American conscience.
	Because if you don't do that, if you take the high road and stop reacting and only think of vision, then you one day wake up and find yourself in a situation like the one Mexico is in where narrative no longer matters much because power is in the hands of a very specific set of people, very deeply entrenched.
	And who knows if they will be able to be dislodged democratically from power in the near future.
	I frankly doubt it.
	I think being silent is not a good strategy in politics and we can all agree on that.
	But it also matters whether you have something to say and whether the thing you have to say actually accords with the views of most people.
	And when I look at the challenge from the United States, I fear first of all that too often those who are standing up to populists don't have enough to say.
	I didn't personally have a sense of a Democratic candidate in 2024 actually knew what they want to do with power if they were elected.
	And that's one of the reasons why they were reluctant to go on shows and podcasts and so on where they'd have to speak at length.
	And too often the people who are opposing populists just don't speak for what most people believe on a whole set of economic and cultural issues.
	So great, let's go out there, let's be on social media, let's do counterprogramming.
	But how can we stand for liberal values in a way that actually is compelling, that feels like you have a reason to speak and that connects with the views of most people.
	And no disrespect to all of my wonderful panelists here, I'm going to ask the only practicing politician about how to do that first.
	I do have to say, I disagree.
	I think speaking up in a way that you maybe just evoked, speak up, speak more, point out, in effect, has probably has the effect of demonstrating impotence rather than political power.
	And I think voters are not drawn to that.
	So if we are simply pointing out what's shocking about what is going on without offering credible alternatives, and by credible alternatives I mean calm, convincing, deliberate alternatives, I think we are feeding into that and we are also becoming populists.
	So the challenge is how do you fight populism without becoming a populist?
	How do you remain a liberal?
	And how do you remain emancipatory force for your voters, for your party?
	And for me, the challenge is always finding a perfect recipe in terms of the ingredients and percentages involved in representing my voters and emancipating my voters and leading my voters.
	So in that sense, what I refuse to do is engage in this politically incestuous relationship where I observe on social media exclusively what my voters want and then I deliver it and then I feed it back to them and then in the end we create this rather sick creature that's that's directionless and inspirationless.
	So I don't think we need to shout.
	I think we need to, besides delivering, to point out, this morning I woke up at 6 a.m. and I was met with crazy media theories in Bosnia and Herzegovina that I'm actually not here.
	It was actually under the headline fake news.
	Sabina Chuodic did not have a panel with Steven Pinker and Francis Fukoyama because they somehow found that there is this panel happening and that it was fake news and that I'm misrepresenting it and they actually that the photo we took last night that I posted is AI generated.
	And you wonder, do you fall into that?
	I can confirm that this is a hollow ground.
	If somebody from Bosnia calls, I'm in Alaska negotiating with.
	So how do you engage with that?
	Do you fall into that trap of engaging with that kind of news regularly or do you keep marching on your own path?
	I think marching on your own path and I really appreciated the summary of the previous, the previous panel, this morning's panel, when simply as liberals pointing out what's wrong with the existing system does not inspire me to begin with.
	Does not get me out of bed in the morning, let alone large numbers of people.
	So it needs to be credibly explained in terms of interests.
	I think this is a really important point.
	So what populists are trying to do is to polarize the whole political system around them and to dominate every conversation.
	Now perhaps the worst answer is to be silent in such a way that they just get free reign to do whatever they want.
	But I suspect with Sabina that the second worst answer is to play into a polarization where they are setting the agenda and the non-populist opposition is simply saying that is bad, not that, not that.
	We're responding each time.
	So how is it that opposition parties can actually set their own agenda?
	How is it that they can fill the political space, not cede all of it to people like Amlo and Kaczynski and others, but do it on their own tops?
	Very quickly, I'm not advocating for Jasmine Crockett.
	I'm advocating for a response like Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass.
	This is not outrage reaction.
	I hate the heritage.
	I think there's probably mixed feelings in this room about somebody like Gavin Newsom, I imagine.
	Well, I get it.
	That's why I but What do you see as a strategy?
	Especially recently, he has chosen to react to the idea of redistricting in Texas by opening the door to possible redistricting in California.
	He has done that, and he has also obviously explained why Texas steps in the middle of a decade is a clear political move.
	that endangers American democracy because of these following reasons.
	He has done so forcefully, which matters in the current political environment.
	Force and strength matters.
	I remember what Stephen Fish said in this particular stage last year that has stayed with me, the importance of saying things forcefully, which doesn't mean yelling, being outraged.
	It means being forceful, showing decisiveness and leadership.
	And he has chosen other topics, for example, the importance of the rule of law, the exaggeration, to put it mildly, that was sending the National Guard into LA.
	I was there during the protests covering them.
	And Newsom did a great job, along with Karen Bass, in explaining to the American public that no, LA was not on fire, that there was vandalism and violence, circumscribed to a 0.5-mile space in America's second largest city, and then immigration.
	Clearly explaining not only why deporting people the way the government is deporting people is absolutely outrageous and immoral, but also explaining very clearly why immigration is important for California, the fifth largest economy in the world.
	So he has been, I am not vouching for him as a political field presidential candidate, but he has not gone to the rafters and shouted, I hate Trump and the only thing I am is anti-Trump.
	He has played a role which is more productive.
	And I think that is the model that somehow the Democratic Party has to arrive at.
	Maybe it's not only him, maybe it's a group of people.
	The bench is so deep with governors and mayors and senators.
	My point is this, briefly.
	The Democratic Party and liberalism has to find a clear voice, not only of outrage and reaction, but of proposition and ideas, vision, of course, but it has to be forceful.
	And in my opinion, from the Mexican experience, coming from a country that's falling apart, because we have stayed silent, again, my role here is to share with you the Mexican experience.
	From my experience, silence is much worse than outrage reaction, Josh.
	Much worse.
	I buy it words.
	The question is, what's enough?
	And I'm not sure that just outrage is enough.
	Sabina.
	We heard today, we listened to the debate on, for example, my migration and where does liberalism fit in and so on.
	And I found myself in many of these categories mentioned.
	I'm a former refugee.
	As a child, I was a refugee briefly from, you know, Sarajevo to a neighboring country.
	I'm Muslim.
	I'm a woman.
	I got a scholarship for the United States in high school.
	Then I ended up studying here in college and so on.
	And what I don't see in this discussion, for example, between the Democrats and Republicans, I see exactly that reaction to, for example, the forceful evacuation of people.
	But what I don't see is a decisive leadership and an argument in favor of people who came to this country, how it also shaped the interests, both domestic and foreign interests of this country.
	For example, my entire leadership of my party, they're all foreign educated, whether they were as migrants, whether they were as refugees, whether they got scholarships and so on.
	Half of us have foreign, I'm not one of them, but half of them have foreign citizenship, dual citizenships, and so on.
	There are interests, there are foreign policy interests in taking people in, educating them, reshaping the global scene.
	The intervention that happened in the Western Balkans, I feel like it's the, no, I don't feel, I believe, and it is, you know, the greatest, the last greatest liberal institutionalist intervention in the world.
	It was under NATO leadership led by the United States and the United Kingdom.
	These successes are not celebrated enough.
	USAID, I was giving that example last night.
	The job that it was doing actually changed tremendously, not just the lives on a sentimental level, but it was actually in the interest of the United States.
	What the United States is currently doing, it is literally an octopus cutting off its own tentacles because these tentacles were deep in our systems through organizations such as USAID.
	And now you see somebody literally taking a block and, you know, chopping block and cutting off their own hands.
	And the Democrats are sitting aside and thinking, kind of apologizing and explaining, but no, those were not condoms in Mozambique.
	They were condoms here.
	There is no decisive explanation why these policies mattered, why they brought so much interest to the United States and the world.
	And in that sense, I find it devastating that something that I bought into, now I turn towards the people who disseminated that information and those policies, and I find them lacking confidence to explain why they did it in the first place.
	But this seems to me to be the fundamental point.
	And it's the fundamental point of this conference, right?
	How do we actually talk about the importance of liberalism, which I do think makes a giant difference in the lives of ordinary people in a way that is fulsome, accurate, and communicates to people?
	I'm very struck by the fact that when the leaders of some of the greatest educational institutions in the history of the world had a chance to explain their mission to Congress, not a single one of them was capable of talking in a commonsensical way about what the purpose of Harvard University of MIT or the University of Pennsylvania is.
	Exactly.
	And it's the same when it comes to something like USAID.
	Like why in the last seven months have we not been able to make a case for why that institution was important and did something positive for the world?
	So Alexander, you talk a lot about the importance of social media and I agree with you that one of the venues in which we have to explain that case is on social media.
	But I worry that if we just focus on the medium, but we don't have a message, we're not going to succeed.
	The problem, in my view, moderators, abusing moderators' privilege, with Kamla Harris's campaign was not that she didn't have good enough social media, is that all of her smart, well-paid social media consultants didn't have anything to communicate because she didn't have anything to communicate.
	So how can liberals stand up for their values on social media, but in a way that actually speaks to a deeper message?
	So one thing is defending the institutions that we think are important, defending the policies that we think are good, and defending the values that we think are correct.
	Another thing, and I think I agree with you on this, you have to constantly communicate that.
	But a different thing entirely is also going on the attack and making sure that you are not just responding to whatever the Trump administration or whatever.
	I don't want this to be too US-centric.
	This is supposed to be a panel about, not the US, but defending whatever the authoritarian is attacking, but also finding wedges within the authoritarian's own base to try and create your own news, doing investigations, like who in the authoritarian's family or closer supporters is stealing money.
	We were talking last night about the Epstein list.
	Like this is an issue that divides the extreme Trump loyalists and the extreme MAG ideologues.
	That is a venue of attack that you could, that is an anti-pedophile message is an effective message.
	I mean, if we have to sacrifice some Democrat donors to bring Trump down, I think that's a good trade.
	So not just defending the institutions, but finding new forms of attack, new messages that divide the basis.
	This is something one of the successful messages in 2023 in Poland was actually on immigration.
	Because it turned out that while the law and justice government was extremely anti-immigration, extremely anti-refugee, used very hateful and racist rhetoric towards them, had actually overseen not just the greatest increase in legal immigration into Poland in its history, but also had been selling visas, corrupt visas for cash to help immigrants from Asian and African countries come to Poland.
	And the opposition used this as a wedge issue.
	Like, went, we are going to be against immigration, against mass immigration, but we are not going to do it in a corrupt and racist way like the government is doing.
	And this was a successful issue that divided those voters.
	And finding those wedge issues, finding scandals or lifestyle topics that you can use to attack the authoritarians is also important.
	You have to put them on the defenses.
	Let them explain why their friends are, you know, why they're incompetently putting people into group chats, or journalists putting into group chats or selling visas or maybe on a paedophile list.
	Make sure that you're also on the attack.
	One of the things that I find striking is that it's often difficult for moderate politicians to speak fulsomely.
	We always have this concern that we need to explain the subtleties of some policy issue, that we can't talk too much about corruption scandal like that because perhaps it somehow communicates that we're anti-migrant and we don't want that.
	Often we're worried about parts of our own political coalition, where we speak in plain terms, some part of our own political coalition may get angry at us.

▲