Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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. Hey, Chris.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hey, Nia.
N. Rodgers: We're back for the second part of this set of podcasts because I wasn't done asking questions yet because that's the nature of my person. Then Aughie came up with questions, and he wants to ask, too.
J. Aughenbaugh: Just real briefly, listeners.
N. Rodgers: Who are we talking to besides me and you?
J. Aughenbaugh: This is a two-part episode where our guest is Professor Chris Saladino from the Political Science department here at VCU. We asked Chris, because of his extensive knowledge in international relations and comparative politics, to have a conversation with us about these various terms and concepts that oftentimes get used in political discourse today. Nia and I weren't always entirely sure that they were being used, shall we say correctly, precisely. We weren't always entirely sure if those who were using the words actually knew what they meant.
N. Rodgers: That's the question I want to ask about. Chris, you know recently, Donald Trump announced that he would be dictator for the first day of his presidencio. First of all, I wondered, is that enough time? That was my first question to do all the dictatory things that one would want to do. Let me back up and tell you, Chris, a thing you don't know about me, but you should know about me. My favorite movie in all the world is The Princess Bride. My favorite line from that movie, even though it's almost the entire movie, is my favorite line, but there's a particular line where one of the character says, "Inconceivable," and the other character says, "I do not think this word means what you think it means." I find myself saying that mentally, at least twice a day. I do not think this word means what you think it means. Should we take seriously that Donald Trump knows what a dictator is, and could even act like one? Would the institution even allow for that? Or should we just say that that is the normal Donald Trump hyperbole in the same way that he had eight billion people at his inauguration, and probably he's dated every supermodel that ever lived? All the stuff that he says.
C. Saladino: All those things. Because we're being specific to Trump, there's one answer. But generally, there's an important answer there. Let's be specific to Trump. Does he know what the word means? Well, he certainly should, but we've probably said that about, I don't know.
J. Aughenbaugh: Five thousand times.
C. Saladino: Eighty-nine of the 91 different indictments he's facing, and yet there's a necessary ignorance packed into his rhetoric. Maybe it's the most strategically pre-crafted thing ever. Hard to say. But to be fair, what a dictator needs is only one day. Because if you're a dictator for one day, you can be a dictator for until you're removed because you're the dictator. The bone-chilling piece of that statement isn't, it's just today, it's that there's some sense that even in a joke, I could be a dictator for some period of my presidency. That's not anywhere in the United States Constitution. It's not anywhere in any modern evaluation of any form of democracy. That being said, are there 100 million people in the United States who think it's a good idea? Because if there are, then that makes it more possible. Do they have any idea what the word dictator mean? To your point, I don't think you know what that word really means. Now, Aughie and I grade papers where in the old days we would take out a red flare pen and write, I don't think this word means what you think it means. Today, we just use the shorthand expression, H-U-H? Which usually is responded to by a student saying, I was reading the grade on my paper and I wonder what this word means.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
C. Saladino: The irony is not lost on us. Let's make a real important thing about the meaning of words in terms of the dictionary, and the meaning of words in terms of how it's used in context, and the meaning of words in terms of what I really meant to say. If you get all three to overlap, it's a miracle. Fair enough. But, if somebody means to say you're a terrible, shitty person, you have no right to be in government. I hate your policies. You treat people horribly, and you don't care about the people you don't represent, and they used the word fascist. I don't know what they mean.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a shorthand for all those other statements.
C. Saladino: When you look at a dictionary definition, there's never a single definition. As increasingly we start to take what used to be called slang and today is known as street terminology and crafted into our dictionary definitions, we should be maybe less. Well, we're all over 30, so we're going to be tough to retrain, but we probably shouldn't freak out about it as much as I do, at least. On the other hand, I think you're a terrible person or is it trying to classify you as something that in fact is so deplorable, intolerable, that you're unqualified, that we should take dramatic steps to remove you from office, that we should leave you off of a ballot, etc. Supreme Court yesterday in terms of how they asked questions regarding the interpretation of the 14th Amendment for Trump being on a ballot or anyone being on a ballot, for that matter. Even the liberal minority justices seem to interpret in a way that said, well, this guy's probably still going to be on the ballot. No. That doesn't mean that they decided at that point in time that Trump's rhetoric did not help to incite a thing that we all saw happen. But rather their interpretation of something was, I would say, probably mostly legal, but maybe arguing to a agree a lot contextual in terms of are we going to be the ones to start the slippery slope of keeping people off of presidential ballots?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, there was definitely a political context that informed a lot of the questions.
N. Rodgers: Well, and you may not know this, Chris, but we discussed this briefly in an episode we did about this case when Colorado first declared this.
J. Aughenbaugh: Removed.
N. Rodgers: First removed President Trump and we both agreed, you don't take away people's right to choose badly. I don't get to say to you, Chris, you have a choice between these two beers. This is a really good beer. This is really bad beer, and I nudge the good one towards you more. That's fine. But when I take the bad one off the table, that's not really a good situation democracy-wise because you may really like bad beer. You may [inaudible] for a bad beer.
C. Saladino: It's a little bit anti-democratic.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure.
N. Rodgers: It's a weird situation.
J. Aughenbaugh: In part of the difficulty here, Nia, and your question brings this up. Chris, I don't know if you agree with me about this, is that when you have a situation where you have an elected official, whether it be Trump here in the United States, I'm reminded of Fukuyama down in South America. They come into office, and then they go ahead and say, I'm going to go ahead and do X.
C. Saladino: Fujimoto.
J. Aughenbaugh: Fujimoto.
C. Saladino: You're citing our dear colleague, Francis Fukuyama.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
C. Saladino: Who has a thing to say about this?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
C. Saladino: You're going too far ahead.
J. Aughenbaugh: But nevertheless, it does beg the question of, on one hand, do you minimize the claim made by this elected official because you hope that the institutions that exist will do their job, will mitigate the damage? Or do you just go ahead and write off the person who made the claim because you've basically concluded that, at best, they don't understand what they're saying?
N. Rodgers: That they're mistaken.
J. Aughenbaugh: They're mistaken. Or that at worst.
N. Rodgers: They're evil.
J. Aughenbaugh: They're evil. In that, enough of the public when they have a chance to vote will conclude that they're evil and send a message with a clear voting result that removes them from office. Either way, you're still banking on, you're still assuming or hoping that either the institutions will mitigate the damage or that the public in a democracy will. That's where you start seeing others who get fearful say, well, Trump is a fascist. Because they're afraid. They're not entirely confident that the institutions will do their job. As we've already seen in 2016 and 2020.
N. Rodgers: Right, they're not confident that their fellow voters.
J. Aughenbaugh: The voters will do their job. That's a difficult thing to go ahead and come to grips with when you are a citizen in a democracy, right?
C. Saladino: But then some of those people who are fearful have no problem with what appears to be an end around which is, let's get the guy off the ballot. But that creates the same fear in that other half of the electorate or that other percent of the electorate that says, see I told you, I have no faith in these processes, that's why I'm voting for this guy in the first place.
N. Rodgers: What do you do if you do that is you add to those people's fear that the deep state or whatever controls elections and doesn't allow fair democratic elections.
C. Saladino: It's the Uniparty.
J. Aughenbaugh: I mean, because, Chris, what you just went ahead and mentioned there is something that Nia and I talked about in that previous podcast episode when we looked at what Colorado Supreme Court did, which is, and I said this rather specifically, if you do remove a candidate, then the supporters of that candidate have their narrative further bolstered or supported.
N. Rodgers: Reinforced.
J. Aughenbaugh: That becomes extremely dangerous. But Chris, I wanted to go ahead and mention something. This question gets at something that specifically came up last semester when I taught my politics in film class. I showed a number of films that discussed populism and a whole bunch of my students equated populism as a necessary and sufficient condition for fascism. It caught me off guard because I wasn't entirely sure that the two isms were connected and I got to admit I was even caught more off guard by how confident they were in their assertion.
C. Saladino: Say it again.
J. Aughenbaugh: Populism either leads to or is a necessary and sufficient condition for fascism.
C. Saladino: Is populism helpful for a fascist state?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, I conceded that point.
C. Saladino: Before we called it populism, we tend to make more of a philosophical, a Max Weberian reference to a charismatic.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: I'm sorry, to a charismatic?
C. Saladino: Max Weber said there are different types of states, and what he hoped for the most bureaucratically was a legal, rational state. But preceding that on a developmental curve was a charismatic leader. He's talking about politics as a vocation and that people who are qualified ultimately is who he likes. But then if you could appeal to people, you could be a leader and that wasn't his first choice. The more we saw charismatic leaders emerge after the stock market crash and the Great Depression, the more if you would subscribe to that idea of the world, the more you should be leery because charismatic leaders appealed to people because of their charisma and then their policies would follow, meaning, hey, you guys love me so much as Donald Trump said, I could shoot somebody in a street and wouldn't lose any votes. Now that became a joke that became true.
J. Aughenbaugh: But think about it, Nia. You and I discussed this in one of our favorite episodes where I went ahead and talked about All the King's Men. The book and the movie was loosely based on Huey Long, the kingfish, former governor, US senator from Louisiana. Huey Long was a populist. In the terms of Max Weber's typology, he was a charismatic leader and he basically said to the citizens of Louisiana, the elites don't have your best interests at heart. You pick me and I will make sure that this state puts you first. How do you know that the state has put you first? Because of my policies. Huey Long becomes basically equated with the government of Louisiana. If you're against Huey Long, you're against not only the people of Louisiana, the government of Louisiana.
C. Saladino: This idea that populism causes fascism. Maybe populism could be seen as one of a few necessary conditions. But I would argue it doesn't even have to be there, because fascism doesn't have to be the party that says, we're all about this and then it comes to be. Fascism can emerge from significant, critical junctures. Terrorist attacks on a country, for example.
J. Aughenbaugh: A terrible economy.
C. Saladino: A terrible economy. Coup d'etat. From that could emerge something that looks very much like fascism, we could probably call it fascism. It's autocratic, it's centralized, it's militarized, it's all those things and the populism is enforced by aggressive rule of law, a police state.
N. Rodgers: I was going to say, I have this gun. Don't you like me? I do. I like you a lot while you have that gun.
C. Saladino: There are people who argue that's North Korea. The people love the leader, but they don't have much choice and so it's like one giant Stockholm Syndrome. On the other hand, you can't argue the fact that in 1935 and 1936, people were sieg heiling Adolf Hitler before Germany was in a war, before the final solution. I mean, Hitler was a bad enough guy, but not for most Germans. For most Germans, as pointed out in our class the other night, the trains ran on time. As people in the states would say, a chicken in every pot, like people were doing better. The problem becomes when the populism that enforces your autocratic leader or your fascist leader is based on a premise that's not just errant, but completely wrong. I'll use Trump in the United States as a great example because Donald Trump improved the lives of lower middle class people in the United States to the tune of pretty much nothing. That the balance of good and bad turned out to be not necessarily negative, but certainly not in the positive. Oh, look at all the manufacturing we got back. Well, we got some back and we lost a lot. Look at all the jobs that we increased, but the jobs were increasing and then with Trump, they went down. Joe Biden's created more jobs than anybody in the history of the American presidency. I hate that idea, okay, but it still doesn't change it as a data point. Everybody's got some good and some bad. But you've got a strong populist movement behind Donald Trump that says anything he touches is better for the country and for me. I'll give you an example of how much bullshit that really is because it's a problem, because that's what a charismatic leader can do. That is problematic for a guy like Max Weber who said, no, we want qualified people. We don't want movie stars, we want well trained public servants. I was doing some research on food security, broadly conceived, and I interviewed a whole lot of farmers in Southeastern Virginia like Waverly, Wakefield, where the peanut farmers are and stuff like that. I was talking to people who had grown soybeans in small farm patches. They basically sell their goods to a station agent, a guy who represents a big buyer who comes field to field and says, this is what soybeans will get you this year. My guy will come, harvest your soybeans, minus the cost of his gas, his tractor. Here's the check I'm going to write you, and I'll see you in six more months for more soybeans. That's the story. These are small farmers. They don't make a ton of money. They voted for Donald Trump 99%. Now Donald Trump put tariffs on Chinese goods in excess of what anybody else would have done and said he was going to do it. These farmers supported those tariffs and said somebody's got to stand up to the Chinese. The Chinese retaliation was to stop entirely buying American soybeans, 99.9% of the soybeans we produced with these small farmers got packaged up in a processing plant and shipped to China. Their market was gone, their livelihood was gone. They were going to have to take mortgages out on the farm. They were going to have to sell the farm equipment eventually because they lived in places that nobody wanted to live. They couldn't even sell to developers. Their kids who had gone to Virginia Tech and we're living in Richmond, were like, I'm not coming home and working on the farm. Like a third of these people literally lost their entirety of existence, livelihood, future gone. When I asked them, was it worth it? They were like, well, yeah, because President Trump is going to save us all. I said except you, you're not saved. I mean, you're explicitly hurt by this. They didn't see themselves as sacrificial lambs. They saw themselves as part of this thing, that this guy who said he'd save us all was going to save us all and they believed him because everybody else was fill in the blank, a communist or whatever. Meanwhile they're SOL, they are done, they're out. That's the big threat of a charismatic leader, that they can smile at you and tell you, don't worry, it's all going to be okay as their policies dismantle your future, your retirement, your land, your tractor, your way of doing business. This is why people like Aughie and I who can disagree on certain political issues, have always agreed very powerfully on the notion of having people with historical qualifications take on jobs. We would never hire airplane pilots the way we hire politicians. I can't fly it, but don't you guys want to have a beer with me afterwards?
J. Aughenbaugh: That's why, for instance, VCU would never hire us to teach med students how to do brain surgery. Why? Because Chris Saladino, and I don't know a damn thing about how to do brain surgery.
C. Saladino: I'm ready.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: Listeners can't see this, but Chris is holding up a butter knife. Just in case you were wondering about his readiness for brain surgery.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: I'm going to civilly disagree with the two of you all.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: And say I agree with you on the whole that a person should have some qualifications, but I think that there could be a mixture of those qualifications that might still work. Like if a person has had executive service, meaning they've been a governor somewhere, that's a pretty clear line through. If they've been a long term serving senator, that's actually a pretty clear line through to the presidency because you've learned to deal with other people in their crap and you've learned to negotiate and compromise. You've probably been in the Oval Office multiple times to argue your case.
J. Aughenbaugh: You've gotten briefings on what's going on around the rest of the world and etc.
N. Rodgers: I think where it gets gray or where it gets complicated in terms of people having experiences, I would say that being a UN ambassador would actually be a useful experience. But I know some people would not say that. Now you're getting into what counts as useful experience that's not executive service.
J. Aughenbaugh: But Nia, I don't think you're necessarily disagreeing with Chris and I as much as you think because where I think Chris and I were pointing out in regards with former President Trump as an example, is something that you and I have already talked about in a number of previous podcast episodes. Where a lot of people have said they supported Trump, is that he was a "successful business person" and assuming that that is true and we could probably spend another podcast episode on whether or not.
N. Rodgers: Arguing about that.
J. Aughenbaugh: But Nia, you and I talked about the fact that skills that would serve one well as the CEO in the private sector do not necessarily translate well as President of the United States because the government is different. Government processes are different. Navigating the institutions and the Constitution and the law is different.
N. Rodgers: I think it depends because if somebody was in charge of a multinational where they did have to do those things. Donald Trump was in charge of a real estate empire in New York. He didn't go out of New York for the most part. He's done a few buildings in various places, Dubai, yada, yada. But for the most part, he had one government that he dealt with. One set of circumstances that he dealt with. I agree that he's limited, but I'm wondering if an international and I can't believe the words are going to come out of my mouth, Tony Hayward ask, not him because he is a jerk, but a person who had done that with multinational, maybe that would be a person who could make that transition from business.
C. Saladino: I would argue that there's a fungibility of skills in a lot of different sectors of private and public life. If you're highly successful, you may have some of the inherent skills to lead, to take good advice, to make good decisions. I think my spin here is maybe a little bit different. I'm not as stressed about qualifications in terms of measuring them. My thing is this rejection of qualifications that we're seeing that the Trump campaign really honed in on. Donald Trump's suggestion that the Generals couldn't do their job, he could do their job, what did they know? Well, they know things. This really trickled down into the public, and especially the voting public that we typically think of as the Republican base that says they reject expertise. A rejection of expertise. Well, you might see that there are people without expertise who might make good leaders and be able to explain why, but I'm not rejecting anybody who isn't an expert. Whereas this new idea seems to reject expertise, as we talk all the time now. In previous elections we didn't worry that much about whether voters were college educated or not. It was always a data point, but today we say, listen, the voters who are not college educated vote this way. Why? Well, because there's someone telling them, these people with all this knowledge are the ones that are somehow screwing you over. To me, to sell that message requires a populism or a charismatic leadership that says whatever that guy says, I'm going to believe it and if they're an expert or they're not. If Donald Trump was a 20 time governor but said those same words, I would still be very, very leery of that type of populism.
J. Aughenbaugh: Which is not to say Nia, that the experts are always right, or that the experts do a very good job explaining to the public why the public should believe them. Again, we've done a couple of podcast episodes where we've been very highly critical of the "government experts". What is unusual that at least for me, that Chris really touched upon, and it really informs so much of what we've been discussing in both of these podcast episodes with Chris, is this idea that certain people because of what they do in their job, should not be trusted because they're "elites". Okay?
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, this goes back to one of the fundamental, when I hear for instance, liberals go ahead and say that Republicans are fascists, I'm like, are they fascist or do they have a worldview that you don't like? When I hear conservatives say liberals are communists, well, are they actually communist or do they have a worldview you don't like?
N. Rodgers: Exactly. The polarization is making us say things.
C. Saladino: You have to adhere to one or the other.
N. Rodgers: That are untrue and unnecessary.
C. Saladino: You have to either be a fascist or a communist to survive in the modern American political environment and that's ridiculous.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a false dichotomy. It's so much of a false dichotomy and it's quite all right to go ahead and say this government agency didn't do a good job with X. To me that's a legitimate criticism. But when I hear a candidate, whether it's Trump or anybody else, who goes ahead and says an entire, if you will, government apparatus,
N. Rodgers: Should be done away with.
J. Aughenbaugh: Should be done away with, is failing you, etc. I'm like, okay, but again, that's wrong. That's verifiably, measurably, empirically wrong.
N. Rodgers: But now you're talking about facts, and to use Chris's words, facts are fungible.
C. Saladino: Let me be left for a second. They are.
J. Aughenbaugh: Facts are fungible.
C. Saladino: You can have your own ideas and your own facts now.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, that's another, if you will, merch line.
N. Rodgers: A merch line, facts are fungible. That's right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. We will cite you, Chris, on our T-shirt.
N. Rodgers: If we ever sell anything.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
C. Saladino: I want a penny per unit. From the left, what we saw over the last few years really, it spurred on by the election of President Trump in 2016, were people who ran for office under a similar set of auspices. They were going to reject the status quo, they were going to primary moderate conservatives or go after moderate Democrats and win in districts that leaned and we saw the rise of these relatively high-profile people with zero government experience whatsoever. Let's list a couple of them out and just see how they're doing. This is shooting fish in a barrel, I get it, but it makes an important point. We look at George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert. Enough already. These people came in on a wave of rejecting expertise, rejecting you know it alls and just being loud and brash and they've either become polarizing or ineffective, or both. There may well be more of those people on the left. Now, on the right they would say, that's AOC, but it turns out she's been a relatively effective legislator for her district. She's still a communist. She's still not liked, but she didn't act inappropriately in a movie theater. Attached to this rejection of expertise and skill is a flip side of the opposite of expertise and skill, which is no skill and not knowing what to do. I would argue that no matter whether that's right or left, that's not what we want in government, whether it be local, state, national, or international.
N. Rodgers: I agree with you on that. I think that that I'm in full agreement, and I also think you make a point there that's really good and it's going to have to, I guess, be the last point because we're going to have to wrap up soon. But I did want to say that I agree with you that in some senses, what didn't work for those people worked for Donald Trump because he has some magical fairy dust of personal connection or charisma or something where people who like him really like him. They are not kidding. If they got a chance to hang out with him, they would. They're not reluctant Donald Trump supporters. Some are. But the vast majority of people who support him, truly support him, are not reluctant. They want to support him because they like him charismatically.
C. Saladino: He's a rock star to them.
N. Rodgers: He's a rock star. Thank you. That's an excellent way to put that. He's aspirational, he's all these things to them and I'm like, he's their Taylor Swift. In some ways, you have to almost, no, I would say not almost, you have to admire his ability to corral that.
C. Saladino: That's why he's the Teflon Don. Could you be that charismatic and carry indictments on 91 counts, 173 lawsuits and he's had over 220 personal lawyers in 30 years?
N. Rodgers: And still raise an enormous amount of personal pack money and all that other kind of stuff for support.
C. Saladino: Has been accused of sexual assault by over 25 different women over 25 different years in 17 locations. It's not that one time. All of those things. Then said it admittedly, I could literally shoot somebody and women went, that's okay. I'm going to go buy a $400 dress emblazoned with Trump logos and $375 high-heel shoes emblazoned with Trump logos. This woman was like, yes, look what I'm wearing. I'm not a fan of the former president.
N. Rodgers: That's pretty clear.
C. Saladino: But I don't understand it unless I go back to my political theory roots and look at that charismatic leader, that kind of populism. But my problem with that is that that populism doesn't breed particularly good government.
N. Rodgers: There's a lot of rock stars I'd love to party with, but I wouldn't want them to be president.
C. Saladino: You want Mick Jagger in the White House?
N. Rodgers: No, but I would love to party, well, actually I couldn't keep up.
C. Saladino: He's 81, you probably could.
N. Rodgers: I don't know. He's got a lot of years of ability ahead of me.
C. Saladino: He's got a three-year-old, so who knows?
N. Rodgers: Chris, do we need to wrap up or do we have time for one more question?
C. Saladino: My wife's not here yet, so I'm not getting in the car, so I probably have about four or five minutes.
N. Rodgers: Let's do one last question, which is fashion. I'd like to ask you about fashion, and not the current fashion that you're wearing. Listeners cannot see, but Chris is clad in lumberjack plaid, which is the best kind of plaid.
C. Saladino: I am often in plaid.
N. Rodgers: But do governments run in fashions? Is democracy like, oh, we're all going to be democratic now and then people start sliding and they're like, we're all going to be this thing now. Are they doing what all the cool kids are doing?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm going to be a little bit more of an academic with this. Chris, a couple of years ago, I read an article that said there was a recession in democratic governments and I've actually assigned this to my senior seminar, but it gets at your question, Nia. I assigned the article to my senior seminar students, which led to a really interesting discussion, but would you agree, disagree, are there particular trends in regards to, are we getting more democracy, more authoritarianism, more nationalism?
C. Saladino: When it happens that way, we then note the wave.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
C. Saladino: It's not a necessary condition for democratization or for democratic decline. But we did see, for example, in the aftermath of the Cold War, we had a pretty significant, critical juncture. Many of those states became democratic states, some of them didn't stay that way. But so suddenly we looked at this uptick in democracy, went aha, and that's when democratic peace theory came around. We went, well, the more democracies there are, the better the world will be, and so big, wealthy powerful states tried to make not-so-democratic states into democracies and that didn't go so well.
N. Rodgers: I was going to say did that work?
C. Saladino: Iraq.
N. Rodgers: You will be democratic. No, we won't.
C. Saladino: I would say since the first Russian incursion into Ukraine in 2014, I think with elections starting in Hungary, with the inability to really push Venezuela out of its mildly autocratic socialist path and then powerfully Brexit, the election of Trump, that hyper-nationalism started to adhere pretty well. That states started to question the more global cooperative mode of the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization, and peacekeeping operations, and collective action and all that kind of stuff. They began to question what was in it for them in certain types of things, like for example, global environmental cooperation, and they started to pursue their own individual paths, and in doing that, people who said in those states, I'm looking out for us, began to exhibit a little bit of that charismatic leadership mentality. You got Boris Johnson in the UK, you got Donald Trump in the United States, you got Viktor Orban in Hungary. These people became, whether they were fully authoritarian or not, charismatic, strong men. They bred more charismatic, strong people. They began to populate fascist-like parties that had previously been more dormant social organizations and they came to prominence in places like Italy, in Brazil, in the Philippines.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or even in some of the Scandinavian nations where you saw these far right parties that for years, barely did well enough to get any seats in the parliament.
C. Saladino: We hit them like crazy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now there are major power brokers. You're like Sweden, what's going on?
C. Saladino: Marine Le Pen in France.
N. Rodgers: Well in the new guy in Argentina, doesn't he fall into that category, the guy with the hair?
C. Saladino: Well, and we'll see much the way the election in Ecuador was supposed to be this outrageous leftist and now he's settled back to the mean, Argentina, we'll see, but those were the promises that were made.
N. Rodgers: Or they were going to go to the American dollar, they were going to do all kinds of [OVERLAPPING].
C. Saladino: On the other hand, Brazil was supposed to be right wing fascist down the line. Brazil is a tough place to talk about. But they voted that guy out.
N. Rodgers: Was that Bolsonaro?
C. Saladino: Yeah, Bolsonaro was voted out. People were like, well maybe there's a backstop. Donald Trump was voted out. But is it very clear in the United States that that means that democracy is back with a flourish? I think the reason that trends are going to be less obvious is because attention spans politically are so shortened. Yesterday you had three significant news events in the United States that displaced the other one within an hour. The Supreme Court, the special counsel's report that said Biden won't be indicted but then 100 pages later it said, Biden is some doddering old fool. Each one displaced the previous one.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
C. Saladino: That's how fleeting it is to organize around these ideas. I'm an international politics guy, so I'll say, but what about what's happening in the Rojava in Northern Syria and Northern Alliance forces have basically fallen apart and people go, there's still people in Syria? Which understandable, it's not in our face. Why had CNN on today and, would Donald Trump calls communists and left wingers call fascist, which means they're probably doing something right. All over these three stories, they have four reporters on each of these three stories, they got four people in the studio talking about each of these three stories. I'm like, how are you ready for this? What stable of like dormant, sleeping experts do you have in a warehouse at back? You guys were able to get me because nobody else wants me. But if you were CNN.
J. Aughenbaugh: Do you have cots lined up out back?
C. Saladino: It seems.
N. Rodgers: Well, part of what drives that is the need for something fresh, clean, new, because they have a 24-hour news cycle.
C. Saladino: They need the content.
N. Rodgers: They need content, it sounds like generations.
C. Saladino: But there's plenty.
J. Aughenbaugh: There's not enough time for reflection. All three of us, individually or just collectively, we've all remarked in different forms that GNP being able to pause and just go ahead and say, so what is actually going on here? It's almost impossible today.
N. Rodgers: Well, and Chris said something really powerful just then. Trump was not reelected. Does that mean democracy is flourishing? That question, it's four years, how do we know if democracy is flourishing or not? We're not going to know. We may not know in our lifetimes. Sorry listeners, but we're all in our 50s. We may not know in the next 30 years before we croak, whether this was a flourishing of democracy that was coming back or not because trends don't happen. The trends are not fast fashion. They don't happen overnight, there is this longer world view that you have to take.
J. Aughenbaugh: Chris used the metaphor of a wave.
N. Rodgers: Which is a slow rolling thing. Wave so go, splash on you. Anybody who's ever been to the ocean, that's not how waves work, anyway. Are we doomed?
C. Saladino: I have to put my stuff in the car and drive to Carrboro, North Carolina. But I'm happy to come back anytime. You could talk about this 17 episodes. We'll never get to the end of it. I will say, this.
N. Rodgers: I'm going to cut this part so let's do a wrap up. Chris, you have any final thoughts for us before you go for this time?
C. Saladino: Yeah, too much to say and I don't have time to say it, but it's important that people talk about these things in real terms and conceptually. I think if you just talk conceptually, people glaze over. If you just talk in real terms, you just get back into the red meat of what they believe and what they've been told. I think sometimes when we attach some logic to how people think, I don't teach students they should think right, left or center. I think that if they say fascist, I'm going to make sure that it has the meaning that somebody suggests is real. That way, if they can't use it and they tamper it to something that's more accurate, I may not agree with what they're saying and who they're saying it to, but I can agree that they're using terms appropriately in such a way that we can counter them. Because when people say he's a fascist or she's a communist, the only counter is to, Nia's point earlier, which is, I don't think you're using that word correctly. That's like when people are fighting in the comments on Twitter, ripping each other to shreds, and you have nothing to say to them and so you just go, it's T-A-T-I-R, not T-A-T-R-A. Its like you just won some symbolic battle and eject, and don't look back. It's the best that we can do.
J. Aughenbaugh: You make a really good point. In part, you want to encourage people to go ahead and use their brains, think about the logic of what they're saying and how they're using it. But thank you very much, Chris, for your time for both these episodes.
C. Saladino: Pleased to be here. I'll see you guys again.
N. Rodgers: Thank you so much. We have to have you back soon.
J. Aughenbaugh: Take care, Chris.
C. Saladino: Bye.
J. Aughenbaugh: Take care. Nia.
N. Rodgers: Bye.
You've been listening to civil discourse brought to you by VCU Libraries. Opinions expressed are solely the speaker's own and do not reflect the views or opinions of VCU or VCU Libraries. Special thanks to the Workshop for technical assistance. Music by Isaak Hopson. Find more information at guides.library.vcu.edu/discourse. As always, no documents were harmed in the making of this podcast.