AR&IO: Pessimism about Democracy (China, North Korea, Vietnam…)

you will notice that in the background
it's not my usual t-shirt this is a t-shirt we very memorably picked up at a street protest in Vancouver British Columbia Canada a very earnest very small protest I posted photographs of it on the Internet of Vietnamese refugees asking why can't Vietnam also become a democracy with voting the freedom of speech to criticize government dissent pluralism really we mean pluralism of political opinion here multiple party competition all those things we take for granted in the Western world why not why not Vietnam also in the year 2019 or 2020 or as soon as possible why not and then of course in the Canadian context why can't the Government of Canada make some sincere efforts to encourage this kind of political change to happen it is very very easy for people to sink into pessimism about democracy about the potential for countries like Vietnam and North Korea and China countries around the world to make the transition from dictatorship to democracy and the purpose of this video long story short is to argue that that pessimism is misplaced in a pause now for a brief sort of channel update I've hinted repeatedly that what I'm doing with my channels plural what I'm doing on YouTube is about to change very fundamentally dramatically that change I would say has been delayed by about one month because we're right now in the process of packing up and moving to Taiwan we're moving from Canada to Taiwan with Taiwan being our home presumably for the indefinite future for as long as the future lasts we will see so this video like the majority of my videos about politics is gathering together and reflecting on the accumulated research of the past 20 years really more than 20 years in my life and that's not what I want to do on YouTube I want to start really creating original content for the audience that's based on active research ongoing research by learning new things am i challenging myself and where it's not really a process of me making videos that I would find interesting but of me trying to form a trying to serve a public service by really providing information that the world can't easily get because I'm aware of just how poor political analysis on YouTube through podcasts through radio even through print media by I paid for subscription to FP FP abbreviates foreign policy magazine whoo we were going through a really really dark period for journalism even on the most mainstream of questions in politics let alone I don't know really fundamental questions like the future of democracy in Vietnam in China those shouldn't be trivial concerns but that they're treated as incredibly marginal obscure topics as if they're not of interest to I don't know a billion people both on the left and on the right I encounter a great deal of pessimism about parliamentary democracy so many of my videos to talk about the contrast between democracy in a deeper sense going back to Athens and Aristotle and so on and so forth this video were instead dealing with the contrast between outright dictatorship whether that's communist dictatorship or fascist dictatorship or just air SATs military tea up the contrast between dictatorship and shallow modern parliamentary democracy not the higher ideals of democracy we've inherited from the ancient Athenian tradition or those other more philosophical questions the left wing and the right wing are both incredibly cynical about the potential for parliamentary democracy in the 21st century but it's interesting to note that their cynical for completely different reasons when I talk to right-wingers all over the world including for example a meta right winger who was part of the dictatorship in Haiti so that was the Papa Doc Duvalier dictatorship followed by his son his son was nicknamed baby doc Duvalier the son of the older develop Haiti had a series of dictatorships and uh you know I remember when I was first meeting and in fact interviewing that guy I thought wow I never thought I'd come face to face with the supporter of that regime it's incredibly notorious dictatorial regime and he was a true believer he was an earnest right-wing supporter and he was typical of both the right-wing and I don't know hardline conservatives in that the most fundamental reason for why he supported the dictatorship again keep his mind left wingers totally different reasons for making the same excuses different motivations different objectives his fundamental reason was that he did not believe the people were capable of anything better that if you allowed them democracy they would collapse into something worse than the citator ship now communism is one example of something worse anarchy just violence lawlessness in the streets whatever various things are imagined that poverty would get out of control of course they imagine it's worse if the country gets four they also imagine it's worse if the poor rise up and kill the rich etc and said are there all these fears but the pessimists vote democracy and the excuse for supporting dictatorship was based on the assumption which is ultimately racist and deeply elitist that only some people in the world somehow are equipped for democracy like that there's something special about the Swiss though there's something special about the Danish or the Scottish this is kind of oddly parallel to Bernie Sanders now asking the question Bernie Sanders goes around and confronts other American politicians and says what do you think the Scottish have that we don't have why is it the Scottish can have health care cheap University not free but cheap in Germany it's free you know other countries in Europe have free tuition or very very low tuition what is it that special about Canada that Canada can provide health care for the poor in the United States cannot what do you like what is the what is the inadequacy in the American people what is it in us that you imagine and of course you know it's it's just challenging the absurdity of those assumptions now people on the far left tend to reject the potential for a democracy real world practical parliamentary democracy non-ideal democracy for completely different reasons they will for example sometimes construe that if the people had democracy that would only result in the rich exploiting the poor that that would never represent the interests of the majority ironically because mature democracy is all about majority rule and the hard left the real communists will basically try to create a scenario in which the only solution for the problems the country is in is revolution is class war because the central philosophy of Marxism which has passed on into socialism and communism is the idea that the only way history makes progress is through class war and anything else is an unwanted describe distraction so hilariously it really is hilarious you can read communist propaganda from Thailand in the 1970s and 1980s now again Thailand is not paradise but on a shallow level okay so these people under the palm trees and on the rice farms of Thailand trying to sincerely publish and pass out communist literature saying like oh these problems with government they can never be solved unless you have this terrible violent you know revolution zone and anyone looking at the pragmatic situation in Thailand and Thailand is not that far away from Cambodia and Vietnam corners that became communist could say no no no no these problems can be solved whatever it is corruption you know police bribery in hook time and had problems but you know what I can think of better ways to solve them than getting rid of democracy maybe it's making democracy more more robust to what have you there is a great deal of utterly insincere anti-democratic pessimistic sentiment and this is a new school of it now I would call this the kind of I don't know final stages of neoliberal ideology this is a book you can actually guess just in the title and subtitle this is one of my professors at University of Victoria wrote this will go on globalization against democracy a political economy of capitalism at risk ultra the basic thesis of this book is that neoliberalism has created a situation in which there is no advantage for China or any country to transition to democracy or maintain a democracy that somehow the socio-economic and free market conditions of the era when you're living and encourages the world to organize itself into a bunch of capitalistic cater ships along the lines of China and some other strongman nations that there there is no sort of force of gravity pulling them down to to democracy and in the late neoliberal era and this is all very insincere and is strangely uninformed by real-world examples so what I've talked to both left and right wingers in person face-to-face and I've asked them about actual real-world transitions to democracy it would not be an exaggeration to say they are flummoxed okay fascism sounds very scary how did Spain make the transition from fascism to democracy I think I first researched this it may be 14 years old it's such a distant memory you know I'm really not clear on it and as you can imagine at that early age and this is before the internet email existed but the Internet in its current form didn't exist you couldn't just ask a question and get a wealth of information like that you know it was going to kind of very basic history books and encyclopedias and trying to find out okay so what happened what happened when Spain went from being a fascist dictatorship to a democracy and these accounts were so brief and so bland the answer seemed to be nothing happened there was no revolution there was no blood in the streets there was no hunting down and executing of the fascists there was this transition that was forgettable and the whole world has forgotten it and that's exactly the most important kind of transition for us to study and learn from and that is what's possible for Vietnam that is what's possible for North Korea they can make the transition to parliamentary democracy just as smoothly and just as easily as Spain did or better I believe the record holder for the most rapid transition to real democracy in this sense parliamentary modern maister nobbut I think the record holder is Mongolia and again when I talk to people even professors with PhDs specialized in the political history of Asia they are flummoxed like Oh didn't you know there's this enormous part in the of Asia in the middle of the map that made a bloodless transition from total communist dictatorship I mean it was it was just as brutal as any of the other comedy ships it really was to basically total democracy again it's not paradise after that democracy there's a lot of corruption but you know where they have elections and a free press and debate and a parliament and all the other features of democracy and like the United States people tend to complain that it's the millionaire's who keep getting elected to keep one flesh you know people like Mongolia is equivalent to Donald Trump you know I mean but nevertheless they made this transition and they even you know put some of the put some of the old communist leaders who were guilty of crimes against humanity on trial they had you know their equivalent in Nuremberg trials and they did it in months they did it so rapidly and you guessed what happened again I know more about both these examples this is a brief youtube video but in a sense nothing happened right this is the problem people want to deal with history as a series of moral fables you know like Little Red Riding Hood what a dramatic twist in the tale our memories and minds naturally latch onto the most salacious and most extreme examples right people talk about learning the lessons of history in this very facile very shallow way but history doesn't show that the transition to democracy is something difficult to attain or difficult to maintain it shows paradoxically that it's easy and I've had to challenge people in this face to face just as before I was saying Bernie Sanders asks look what's the difference between Americans and Scottish people do you think Scottish people have a higher level of education do you think they're Superman Imams do they have a higher level of wealth what do you think it is what's why do you think the Scottish can have health care for the poor and Americans cannot you have no idea how devastating it is to an ethnically Chinese professor of political science when you what do you think Mongolians have do you think Mongolians are smarter than you as Chinese people do you think Mongolians have a higher level of education do you think they're wealthier than you do you think they're more technologically at events why do you think Mongolians were able to make that transition and you were not it's not the only question you could ask of course Asia has its handful of other successful democracies Taiwan being one of them that's why we're going to Taiwan Japan product of unique historical circumstances each country it's the part unique historical services is another but the point is the transition from dictatorship to democracy need not involve an atom bomb and for the most part pessimism about it whether purely academic or motivated by left-wing revolutionary sentiment or the right-wing sentiment of making excuses for client holistic dictatorships set up by and maintained by American interests that pessimism really is misplaced