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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good afternoon Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm feeling a little dictatory of the world. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: Really?
N. Rodgers: I don't know if that's an actual position.
J. Aughenbaugh: Is this in contrast to your usual claims where you basically say you're going to be the President of so and so and you're going to be an agency head so you feel even more authoritarian?
N. Rodgers: I do. I feel even more arbitrary and capricious than normal. I'm thinking that I need a base for power of that. I'm thinking Dictator of the world.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, Nia, it's fortunate that you feel this way today because listeners joining us. Okay, is our colleague in the Political Science department, Professor Chris Saladino. He's going to talk to us about various and sundry international relations, comparative politics, terms and phrases. Because Chris has been teaching at VCU even longer than I have been. Which some of our listeners are like.
N. Rodgers: No, it's not even possible.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's not possible.
N. Rodgers: Some of them we're thinking.
J. Aughenbaugh: Chris, welcome and thanks for joining us for this episode.
C. Saladino: Well, thanks for outing me as being maybe 14 years old. I appreciate that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Checks in the mail, dude.
C. Saladino: I'd like it to be on the record that my 23 years here started when I was seven. I was seven years old.
J. Aughenbaugh: Excellent.
N. Rodgers: Child prodigy at VCU. Actually, can I start off with the questions Chris? If you mind if I read?
C. Saladino: I don't mind. It's your podcast?
J. Aughenbaugh: [inaudible] hold on. Stop that right now, Chris. Nia is already thinking that she's going to rule the world today.
C. Saladino: I thought that was the entire subject of the day.
N. Rodgers: That's right. Pipe down over there in the corner Aughenbaugh. Actually one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you about is because in the modern media, words get thrown around as if they don't have meaning. As if they have these weirdly generalized meanings that we all think we know. For instance, I'm exhausted of people who refer to other people as Nazis because Nazi has an actual meaning. Those are actually people of a certain party.
C. Saladino: Of a certain ideology, et cetera.
N. Rodgers: Your average John Aughenbaugh, when you go get around Nazi, he's not a Nazi. That's ridiculous. I wanted to start off by asking the question and the reason I say dictator is because I have aspirations. But is there a difference between dictators and authority. In the modern media a lot of times they are interchangeably referred. That's so he's a dictator and you'll hear another media person say he's an authoritarian. Are those the same thing?
C. Saladino: Now we have a three hour answer. Let's be fair to put it into the format. I'm not going to put up a PowerPoint and talk about different scholastical Nazi stuff scholarly distinctions. Because I would be able to then say, well, Juan Lynn says yes, but Seamer Martin lips made an entire career saying not really. Let's get it to where it makes sense to people who are going to listen. A lot of these terms are interchangeable broadly, so how are we using the term? A lot of these terms are entirely not interchangeable and yet people seem to make the same generalization. That's probably where thinking people like the three of us for example start to cringe a little bit. Term by term it's going to matter. One of the better terms that we see misused besides Nazi, and to be fair to call someone a Nazi today isn't impossible because there are self identifying Nazis today. But they have to be those people. For example, when the protests which turned into riots which turned into a horrific disaster in Charlottesville place, there were legitimate Nazis there and in fact, the people who promoted the march for the right, or whatever that thing was, literally had to say to the actual Nazis, you guys are welcome, which is a terrible thing to say to Nazis. But we'd like you to march in the back because your presence isn't good for the media. Our guys are just wearing khakis and polo shirts. You guys, so they said this to both clan and to effectively. We don't really have an American Nazi Party, but people who were supporting swastikas and had T shirts that said, Hitler wasn't wrong and stuff like that. Now, if you're supporting a swastika and you say Hitler wasn't wrong, but you don't have a party affiliation, I'd still call you a Nazi. I'd feel comfortable with that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Particularly when they go ahead and start talking about what they believe and what they think the role of the government is and who should be included versus who should be excluded. Then you can start going ahead and saying, okay, these folks fit the definition of being a Nazi.
N. Rodgers: Even if they don't personally refer to themselves Nazi.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
C. Saladino: Maybe it's better to say Neo Nazi. Maybe it's better to say, okay, they're not members of a party but they're Nazis in almost every respect. Now that's an easy one, right? Swastik is a very identifiable thing. Citing the worst guy ever to walk the Earth, is a very identifiable thing. Whether they say it or not, they're taking a pretty strong stand. Similarly with the Ku Klux Klan, right? Now, what the Klan's ideology is, or whether we call them, one of these isms that are big for today's topic. It's an identity that's, you're wearing a sheet.
N. Rodgers: You're burning a cross.
C. Saladino: These things sadly still happen at that event where people said, well they're Fascists, they're Nazis, well they're whatever. In bits and pieces, there was truth there. But to generalize, we have a problem and I think to Nia's question, what we'll see is really strong condemnation from one side of a political spectrum. That strong disagreement with people on the other side makes them Fascists, Nazis, whatever. How deeply can I go into the George Carlin words here?
J. Aughenbaugh: Go ahead.
N. Rodgers: We do not use the F word or the MF word.
C. Saladino: Yeah, I know. That's cool.
N. Rodgers: We don't use those words on these [inaudible] .
C. Saladino: I used the N word a lot.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, you can say that.
C. Saladino: A lot of times from a frustrated political position of strong disagreement, Fascist, Nazi, authoritarian, etc, is just a metaphor for asshole who I disagree with and it may be effective, it may be a good rallying cry. But I think what you want today is to see what some of these definitions really mean. To be fair, there's enough crossover that you can use them.
J. Aughenbaugh: A lot of different ways. But nevertheless, sometimes when somebody goes ahead and says, so and so is authoritarian. You don't mean authoritarian, you mean something else. Again, kind of sort of precision in words. Because Nia and I spent a lot of time in our various episodes talking about what words mean or what a particular government document means. Or what so and so actually said in the Declaration of Independence versus what we frequently mythicize, Chris, back to Nia's question. Is a dictator a form of an authoritarian regime?
C. Saladino: Mostly, yes. A dictator, to be a dictator has to have the power and weight of an authoritarian regime. Because otherwise, if there are other institutional or public actors endorsements. Then you're looking at something that's a little bit closer to a democracy or an institutional state, which doesn't necessarily care about democracy as much as it cares about the institutions of government running on time and doing their thing and the blending, or what we today refer to as hybrids of these things are overwhelming in terms of a historical legacy. Sometimes it's very hard to go that state is this began that way, ended that way, period
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm sorry, go ahead Nia.
N. Rodgers: Authoritarian or any other regime are spectrums or move along a path, right? I was thinking, I know this and please correct me because I got two political scientists in the room. But it used to be that Greece was an actual democracy where every single person voted, way back in ancient Greece. Every single well, every single citizen voted.
C. Saladino: A small percentage of the actual residents. But every citizen, yes.
N. Rodgers: Whereas democracy now can refer to this sort of indirect thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, it's representative democracy. Where the government can make a whole bunch of decisions and never seek the input of the public and the only time the public may have input is when they get to vote in an election. But it's still technically a democracy. Chris, correct me if I'm wrong. A good example of what he just described is, there have been nation states that we're communist, but many of them evolve away from communism into nationalist states. Where the focus is not so much on communist ideology, but more on the fact that the nation itself, becomes the most important, if you will, unifying factor in that nation state.
C. Saladino: That helps if you have a certain set of conditions on the ground. The point that I make there is simply that most places that have authoritarian leanings or are explicitly authoritarian, what that's going to look like specifically is going to have a lot to do with the party, the identity of the citizens and also the identity of the citizens relative to events in the world, relative to critical junctures within their own domestic political recent history. In other words, context matters a ton to how different regimes start out and how we assess them over time. Because we assess them oftentimes as well, you are these even though constitutionally and in their own rhetoric they're saying, well, that's not what we are.
N. Rodgers: That was going to bring. Thank you. Because that is going to be my next question, which is, just because we call Russia an authoritarian nation, does that make it one. Mean, it has a parliament? It has a Duma. They have elections, they've elected Putin several times to be leader of the nation.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because Russian will claim and Russian government officials, particularly in international forum will go ahead and claim that they have a democracy. But many democracies will go ahead and say, but you all don't operate like a democracy.
N. Rodgers: Is this one of those things that's relative to the viewer?
C. Saladino: Well, I think because everything is relative. Especially in a modern world where in order to justify your relative position, you can dial into the media source and to the facts that you want and say, see I'm right because I just went to the center left, right middle of the Internet and I found all the truth. But there's plenty of people who have said, listen, it's important for us to understand that something isn't something because it's called it, but because it exhibits the characteristics that we tend to expect. A really good example of how this transpired was in the rise of something called Democratic Peace Theory. Democratic Peace Theory was this idea, that the more countries were democracies, the less likely they would be to fight wars against each other. It's an important distinction, because originally the philosophical idea was that, okay, democratic peace theory says because states embrace democracy, that means they believe in pluralism and they believe in the rule of law, and they believe in cooperation and institutions, they believe in working things out, they believe in collective action. All these sort of liberal democracy things that because states were liberal democracies, therefore they wouldn't be very warlike. But empirically that was a bit of a problem. Because the United States was considered a democracy and Great Britain was considered a democracy, and France was considered a democracy. They were the three most warlike nations on the earth. That is, they fought the most amount of wars, and so people went, oh no, wait, democracies aren't peaceful and that's counterintuitive. It doesn't seem to make sense. Rather than toss out the logic, they amended the logic sensibly to say, democracies don't tend to fight wars against each other. Empirically, that was a brilliant characterization, because we don't fight against England, or we don't fight against non democracies. If we have to paint them as
N. Rodgers: Not a democracy.
C. Saladino: Yeah. Authoritarian, fascist, Nazi, evil.
J. Aughenbaugh: Think about the number of times Nia, you and I've joked about going to war with Canada.
N. Rodgers: That's not going to happen so long as Canada is a democracy. Because it makes us look bad. Another democracy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because part of its effectiveness as a joke is, beyond the fact the people of Canada is, Canada is a democracy. It's an import trade partner. It's one of the elements of democratic peace theory.
C. Saladino: If we're a democracy, any state that's democratic fully in nature, if not fully in practice. Struggles to go to war against peaceful democracies. Because we have enough rule of law. We have elections somewhat sufficient, at least to say Joe Biden or Donald Trump can't just go look, we're going to war with this country and you'll just have to deal with it. Unless that country can be vilified in a way using ethnocentricity, using nationalism, using national interest, using any number of things. But the more we do that with nations that aren't in violation of democratic norms, the less democratic we look or sorry, the less democratic we are. It is always possible for a democratic nation to no longer be a democracy. That's a thing. To answer it even with the example I was looking at, with democratic peace theory there's a guy named John Owen who wrote a book called Liberal War, Liberal Peace. I only mentioned him because, well, he taught a bunch of classes I took at UVA. But it really was a big book. What it said was, look, people who are saying democratic peace, means that two states won't fight wars against you either because they're democracies. But start looking at countries and going well, Russia's called a democracy, therefore, they're missing the point. We've got to measure just how democratic they are. They've got to be democratic politically and electorally. They've got to have a peaceful transition of power. They got to play by international rules, because that's internationally a democracy says, okay, we sign on international law, we'll tend to try to obey it. They need to engage in other liberal practices beyond simply voting and then one of those was to engage in capitalism. Liberal democracy in an international political economic sense is to say, okay, I'll trade goods with you, you trade goods with me, I won't shut you out. In John Owens world, the more states did the breadth of those things, the more of a liberal democracy they actually were, and then empirically the very less likely they would be to ever fight against people who were like them. That theory is logical and it measures out. Numerically, it's almost absolute. You got to meet standards. You can't just go, I'm the fascist dictator. You might be a dictator, but hey, how many people are going to go up to someone to go listen, I know you're the boss and you're the dictator. But I just want to point out, you're not actually a fascist. You're probably going to have me killed now. But it's not as the fascist that you're going to have killed.
N. Rodgers: And that brings me to another question that I want to ask, which is, do dictators know that they are dictators? Does Putin think that he's doing the right thing for Russia? If he does, then I mean like I don't know that Idi Amin thought he was an evil person. I don't know that Hitler thought he was an evil like himself. I'm not sure Paul Pot was like, hey, today I'm going to wake up and be even more evil than yesterday. I don't think that's how the people work.
C. Saladino: I mean Dr. Evil because he is in fact evil. That's the character. Yes, but Putin says he's acting on behalf of Mother Russia and Paul Pot was acting on behalf of Marxist Leninist, Maoist principles to bring the Camare people together and to exclude others. Everybody has their, constituency, if you will. How easy is it to simply say, look to make an omelet, you got to break some eggs. Sure people's lives were destroyed. People were killed. But in the most classic form of international relations realism. Headley Bull talked about order like you can't have a state without order. You can't have order without getting rid of disorder. And getting rid of disorder is in the state interest. Well, that's a sweeping justification of just about any action.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Including authoritarianism.
C. Saladino: Well, and ultimately that leads too. I mean, if you don't check that with institutions and elections and strong democratic norms, pluralism, etc, you will end up with it. This is why, smart people on the left in the United States had their fears of Donald Trump articulated far more in these Isms than we've ever seen before. I mean, people on the right didn't like Mitt Romney, but they didn't call him well, some did, but very few thought of him as evil, A Nazi, a Fascist. They were just like, look, I don't like his stance on guns and abortion, so I'm not voting for him. And maybe in a heated debate they were like, he was an asshole? But it would be really hard to equate Mitt Romney or Al Gore as any fringy threat to democracy. When people really didn't like what Donald Trump was doing, the vast majority of it should have been driven by a dislike of Donald Trump's policies. But Donald Trump did some things unilaterally and said some things because he was he shot from the hip and nobody checked his speech, like most of our presidents, where their speech is not just checked, it's written by somebody else that suggested, no, I don't give a shit. I'm happy to say I don't like those people. Smart people went, well, that exhibits a tumbling towards or a tumbling away from democratic norms. Where we define some of our democratic norms as like how we engage in discourse, in domestic politics, or how we talk to people diplomatically. We don't go look, I don't like him. If he says something I don't like, I might threaten to blow him up. President Trump said those things and people, to be fair, that's what I want to hear granted. But other people said, well, wait whether you're right left or whatever, that's moving towards some sense of authoritarianism that we don't like. Now, what happens if somebody says something like that in what appears to be a robust democracy? They say very sort of undemocratic things. But their party, which has also been democratically elected says we're behind 100%. Can you have authoritarianism without a dictatorship? Sure you can. But the more authoritarian you become by definition, the less pluralism and especially the less democracy you have. We typically say democracy versus dictatorship. We're talking about leaders, but type of state, we're talking about democracy versus authoritarianism. As far as the trifold goes.
N. Rodgers: You got the next question. Go?
J. Aughenbaugh: The next question is, in this next one drives both knee and I bonkers.
N. Rodgers: Which is really in fairness, Chris, not very far drive. It's really just around the block. But anyway.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because we hear folks on both sides of the ideological spectrum use this label to tar and feather their opponents. That is they accuse their enemies, their opponents in a policy debate, the other political party. Somebody who disagrees with them just about politics in general as fascist.
N. Rodgers: Always. If you're not a Nazi you are fascist.
J. Aughenbaugh: I've stopped on a personal level from like trying to correct people because after a while they're just like. If you challenge my using that term, then you must be a Fascist. I'm like, I'm pretty sure at this point you have no idea what Fascism actually is. Could perhaps you provide some education here on what Fascism or a fascist state. What are the characteristics of fascism or a Fascist state?
C. Saladino: Unlike authoritarian or autocratic, or those broader terms like fascism. Fascism can represent ideas that exist on the left wing. But to get to be fascist typically is seen as far, right-wing. Now that means that some of their policies might jibe with what today we would look at as far left politics. But to get to that type of authoritarianism and that type of ultra hyper nationalism. You need extremely centralized government. You need extremely powerful command and control of the military to achieve your domestic objectives as well as in your international objectives. But what you really need is this uniformity of thought in the state that evolves around the state as the all-existing thing that you believe in and its ideology and its expansionist international politics. That all others are subordinate. By all others, I mean all other nation-states, all other ideologies, perhaps broader interests that your citizens have. Everything is trimmed back to this very centralized, very hyper nationalist, autocratic militaristic core. It's typically embodied in a single leader. Also, the problem with fascism is that there really are historical constraints on fascism. Benito Mussolini is a Fascist because he started the Fascist party. Fascism, that's Italian. Francisco Franco had a Fascist party in Spain. Nazi Germany was a Fascist party after that. First of all, the types of authoritarian dictatorships don't resemble fascism. Second of all, because it's not from that core of the fascist era of the 1920s and '30s and '40s, we tend to want to call it neo-fascism. That's not just going, let's put a neo on something, that's intellectually more accurate. It doesn't help somebody who's super pissed off at a keg party, at somebody who said, I don't know. I think gun control is stupid. It's really hard to go, you neo fascist. Fascism even the hard f, it's got a strong condemnation. That being said within the literature, if you will, there are people who want to say, no, fascism is fascism. People want to say, no, neo fascism is always this. Therefore, we need to separate from the original fascist movements in pre-war Europe, etc. Also, there are people who want to say, why fascist regimes arose have a lot to do with whether or not they really are fascist.
N. Rodgers: Are there fascist nations now?
C. Saladino: No, not particularly. I always say that because there are better terms for similar behaviors.
N. Rodgers: Okay. Because you were describing China there a little bit in the sense of around one figure, consistent government, central government is everything. I was like, you're describing China a little bit, at least my perception of China.
C. Saladino: There's a weird tension or maybe it's more of an odd juxtaposition between fascism and communist movements. Because communism, which centers around some idea of the Marxist Leninist logic and ultimately, therefore, some sense of socialism is the enemy of almost all fascists. Italian fascism was entirely anti communist, German fascism, Nazi fascism, maybe more than the Jews as a problem politically. The Jews were a problem in terms of an identity.
J. Aughenbaugh: Socially, economically, yeah they were the enemy.
C. Saladino: But Hitler saw Jews as part of a Marxist, Leninist, Communist, Russian plot. It's a bit of a paradox. That being said, China evolved pretty dramatically away from what was a hyper centralized. I mean, Mao but the long marchers, those venerated individuals who survived the '30s and won the Communist revolution in 1949 and ran the country into the ground in the 1950s and 1960s. You couldn't publicly say, maybe these guys aren't doing a good job. Because China was insulated, and because China was for at least Chinese political purposes, 99.9% Chinese. Not true at all. But nevertheless, that identity allowed this sort of notion of autocracy. It was a small group, if you wanted to think of Li Peng and Chen Li as well as Mao and even Deng Xiaoping who became, a bad guy but also made China the most prosperous nation on earth. Flash ahead in 1975, Mao dies. There's some messing stuff with the gang of four and Deng Xiaoping emerges from almost house arrest to become the venerated leader and actually deflect from himself, not to his detriment he did find, but deflects from himself by saying, listen, this country could do a lot better and hold onto our Marxist, Leninist, Maoist ideals if we just maybe let the economic thing happen a little bit. Well, that happened a little bit by 1980 becomes the Chinese economic miracle by the 1990s. China today, the citizens of China don't pay homage any particular leader and Xi Jinping is going nowhere. He is an absolute leader, but he's an absolute leader who travels around the world in an Armani suit and talks about business relations as much as he talks about not tolerating his enemies in his own country. China has if in fact they were fascist in some sense, they certainly were a strong authoritarian dictatorship. But they have evolved away from a strong authoritarian dictatorship to what some people today even might look at as a branch of what some people called Asian authoritarianism, which really originates in Confucianist thought. It's old and whatever and talks about the way countries were away before democracy. But in the 1950s and '60s and 1970s, we see in the country of Singapore, we see Lee Kuan Yew literally write a book that says soft authoritarianism is how my country is successful. I don't tolerate stuff, but I'm benevolent. The more you do, as I say, the more I give back these goodies but I'm still absolute.
J. Aughenbaugh: Benevolent dictator.
N. Rodgers: That's what I want to be.
C. Saladino: Sure it's what everybody wants to be.
N. Rodgers: The benevolent dictator.
C. Saladino: Everybody wants to be a benevolent dictator. Because if you're a benevolent dictator nobody knows you're a dictator.
N. Rodgers: Right, if you do what I say and it all goes well, I'm going to reward you.
C. Saladino: Also, because I think there are so many now, academic intellectual reinterpretations and offshoots of these singular terms, and because governments have splintered into so many different sub-sets in terms of how we look at them, finding a purely fascist state. There may be some regimes that if I said, I don't know a lot about, fill in the blank, Benin, but I'll go take a hard look and maybe after six months of study, I'll go, no. That country is fascist. But ultimately people have looked at Belarus and said, well, it's a fascist state. But what that does is it also makes it less intellectually appropriate to say fascist as much as it would be better to say, look, that states displaying characteristics of authoritarianism, of militarism, they're cracking down on human and civil rights. There's a lot of systemic racism. They're authoring other nations, all those things collectively add up to something that doesn't have to just be fascist, but it can be dangerous. Our emphasis on, especially in a modern media world, of using these terms for today's news, as opposed to generalizing things that matter to us over a long period of time is, I would agree with you guys, I think, problematic and wrong.
J. Aughenbaugh: Is there an ism Chris that drives you nuts? You hear people use it and you're just like, stop using this.
C. Saladino: Fascist is usually my one that people use to criticize on the right. On the left, calling people communists seems to be the new flavor of the last couple of years. I think this is a product of the Trump administration and that's okay. Obama was a communist and he espoused all these communist things and he infected the White House and the country with communism. That's why this other guy is a better choice because Obama was a communist. Well, if I take out my Mark Lennon reader, which is over there for senior seminar and I go through anything, the 11th Primera of Louis or anything whatever the Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital or something. A letter home to his mother. I just don't see Barack Obama emerging. But why do we call Obama a communist if we don't like Obama? Because now communist seems to represent this collectivized notion that, you know, if you're on the left you're in league with the Communist Chinese Party and that you want to give everything away to undocumented immigrants. I mean, it becomes just a term that represents all the things you don't like about left of the center, and it's the least appropriately used term in all of this critical nonsense that we've been experiencing for the last six or seven years. But there's plenty more.
N. Rodgers: I'm fascinated by the use of socialist in a similar fashion of what you're talking about. When they don't go as far as communist, they're almost always saying that person is a socialist.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
C. Saladino: Well, they hate [inaudible].
N. Rodgers: Right, exactly. When they say Barack Obama is a socialist, I'm like, well, you are closer to accurate than when you say communist.
J. Aughenbaugh: Obama is Communist. But you're still inaccurate.
N. Rodgers: You're inaccurate, but I'm mildly amused because some of socialism you like.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure.
N. Rodgers: In America, it's fascinating to me when people say, [NOISE] grumble socialism, and I'm like, okay, well then we won't send old people any checks. Good luck with that. Right now you have to take care of your old people on your own because we're just not going to have that. Am I correct that Social Security is, basically, a socialist?
J. Aughenbaugh: Social welfare programs. [OVERLAPPING]. Yeah, social welfare programs. Hell, even public education is socialist in nature.
N. Rodgers: Right. Pay to educate your children. Good luck with that, individually.
J. Aughenbaugh: The idea of public goods is rooted in the idea that some goods benefit everybody in society. That it should not be available to only those who can afford the good. That by definition is socialist, because you are doing something for the collective. Not for the individual, the collective. That's right. We have elements writ large in almost every modern western democracy that is rooted in socialism. Nia, you and I did an entire podcast episode about economics and economic terms. The issue for most western democracies is not whether or not the government will have a role regulating people's economic behavior and choices. The debate is over how much and in what areas. That's the debate.
N. Rodgers: Chris, that brings us to a question and I'd like to wrap up this. But would you be willing to stay with us for another episode? Because I have other questions. But I'd like to wrap up this one with something with actually that brings me to a question I was going to ask, which is, can any nation be defined as any one thing ever? Are you a little bit this and a little bit that and a little bit melty potty.
C. Saladino: It becomes the problem of classification and for what purpose, and then it becomes the problem of who's doing the classify. Then it becomes the problem of who disagrees with them and says, no, you're wrong. Everything has some would say evolved, I would say devolved into a debate over whether the sentence you just said was even right before we move forward. This is why an example of what Dr. Rogenba and I experienced an hour ago in a particular meeting where we came to two very quick conclusions and said yes to them, without debating whether or not the words were in the right order. If period should be question marks, that has become a sport. To put that editorial comment of my own on top of your question, is the United States democracy? Well, on 25 different categories, the answer is unequivocally yes. But if that's not what you're measuring on, if the only thing you're measuring on is social equity, if the only thing you're measuring on is immigrant rights, if the only thing you're measuring on is safety from gun violence. Whatever it is that your issue might be, to determine democracy, and this speaks to the idea that we live in a world of single issue voters. The only thing I vote on is this, so are we a democracy? Well, because the only thing I vote on is this, and that doesn't look good to me if the answer is, no. But is the United States a democracy pretty much? Yeah, we're democracy. Western European nation states are buying large democracies, are they different kinds of democracies? How procedural do we want to get from single actor? First pass the poll, Republicanism to British Parliamentarianism. We have an idea of something called consociational multi-party democracy. For whatever reason, I can't say the word that's in my notes in front of me, so I'll just move on. If you look about Indian democracy, Indian democracy was set up knowing fully well that there were so many interest groups and stakeholders, that it would always have to be coalitional politics. They put in protections for those groups that didn't achieve majority votes in districts so that there would be enough representation, so that people in India would feel like they had some representation. We would have some order in the country. This wasn't just appeasing the masses, but it was making sure that the government functioned properly. On the other hand, if you go to North Korea and say, look, you guys are the bad guys. You guys are the evil guys. Your leaders, they're cocoa for cocoa puffs. You have no democracy. You have none of these things. North Korean citizens would tell you, you're wrong. I'm not talking about people who live under oppression, and I would argue that North Koreans live under oppression. But North Korean responses to these kinds of questions are often, no, we don't. It's very difficult to say to somebody who says, I live in a type A, no, the book says, you're a neo fascist, you see, the book says that. That doesn't mean that some of these things aren't obvious though, they're obvious. Canada is a democracy. Oh, I would argue that, okay, you want to argue about, what nation is right.
N. Rodgers: Or whatever, in those microscopic areas, not microscopic, that's incorrect, in those single issue areas. They may not be the perfect set of democracy, but overall they have been recognized as a democratic regime.
C. Saladino: The important thing is that in the world, when someone says the United States is obviously a whatever, a nation state in opposition to the United States is going to say as their politics, no, they're not. They're going to point out the politics in the United States that add up to them as a strong case. In the United States, we're not exactly pro-Russian. I can think of some people who I think might actually be pro Russian, but I'm not going to save them. But is Putin an authoritarian leader? But there are people who are going to go, he is an absolute authoritarian leader. I mean, Putin got a lot of power, clearly, but his power comes from somewhere.
N. Rodgers: He's beloved by many people. It's hard for many Americans to grasp.
C. Saladino: If there was a coup tomorrow and he was overthrown, suddenly Russians were getting real information about the war in Ukraine. Suddenly Russians were getting real information about why their loved ones didn't return home one night. Whatever it is, whatever stuff on Putin was publicly released and the regime, I should say, does a remarkable job of limiting information to citizens. But if all of a sudden went up and they were out in the streets, much like they were in 1991, and the regime flipped, a lot of people who said it's not authoritarian would then go, oh yeah, of course it was authoritarian. Not just to cover their own asses, but because of a different perspective. In a different context.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because a lot of times where you stand on how you define these terms is where you sit. If where you sit changes, then all of a sudden, like Chris just mentioned, in regards to perspective, you're like, oh yeah, we used to live in an authoritarian regime and now we no longer do.
C. Saladino: You can measure this right here in this country in an instant. That is, four years ago, Liz Cheney was the most despised, despicable, harsh, conservative Republican ever, and today there are Democrats who are calling for Liz Cheney to run for President. The same people.
N. Rodgers: Right, and who are declaring they would vote for her.
C. Saladino: Is she less conservative?
N. Rodgers: Heck no, she's Liz Cheney.
J. Aughenbaugh: Come on now. There isn't a Cheney that's existed in the United States.
C. Saladino: Conservatism has changed, much like authoritarianism has changed, Fascism has changed, communism has changed. Socialism was a thing that nobody was, particularly, afraid of because they were afraid of communism, not socialism. Then we had these multiple red scares. That was a problem, Eugene Troni was the president of CU for forever, and people didn't realize that he was a decent historian. He wrote a pretty smart book about the first Cold War, about the United States taking on the Russians after the Russian Revolution in 1919. By 1922, the United States was basically saying, this will come to no good end. That the Communists are bad, and this created red scare mentalities in '22 and '29 up until the stock market crash. Even in the recovery period, there were people who were nervous about the new deal because it sounded red, but it produced enough green that people who were afraid of red went, I like green better and my ideology changed pretty dramatically to, hey kids, we're eating tonight.
N. Rodgers: Prosperity has a great way of being like, this is not so bad. Whatever this thing is, is not so bad because we're more prosperous than we were before. On that note, I'm going to wrap us up for this episode, but do you mind Chris staying with us for another episode? Or coming back for another episode?
C. Saladino: Yes, of course, Nia, that would be amazing. Thank you so much.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thanks, Chris.
C. Saladino: All right, guys. Thanks for having me on.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure.
N. Rodgers: Thank you.
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