Hosts
Jeremi SuriProfessor of History at the University of Texas at Austin
FEMALE 1: This…
MALE: …is Democracy.
FEMALE 1: A podcast that explores the interracial, inter-generational, and inter-sectional unheard voices living in the world’s…
MALE: …most influential democracy.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today is part 2 of our two-part holiday package. We have some more reflections and collections of voices from the last year. This is another mosaic we’ve put together for the holidays. If part 1 really focused on race and identity, part 2 is much more focused on some of the broader dynamics in democracy, and some of the broader legacies as we get to the new year.
Zachary: Yeah. We’re already discussing virtue and poetry, and how we can find a beautiful future and beauty in our present struggles to find a better way.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: I like that so much, Zachary. We live in a world that’s often filled with ugliness, but there’s also so much beauty. That beauty is connected not simply to the politics of democracy, but to the lives and experiences of so many of us. We’re happy to share these beautiful voices with you.
Zachary: We’re going to continue to keep exploring democracy in the next decade.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: In the next decade which begins very soon. So please listen to this mosaic of our thoughts and ideas and reflections from many of our guests. Let’s all get some rest and get ready for the new year and more episodes of This is Democracy, starting soon. Zachary, what’s the title of your poem?
Zachary: “To the Rest of Humanity.”
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Well, let’s hear it.
Zachary: I think I first wondered about diplomacy, driving on a dirt road near Agra, and cows bathing in the river, and I think I thought of it as that bouncing between the seat cushions and the T-stands and do graphs on the side of a highway, knowing the ancient fort on the other side of the bridge in which water is safe to drink and plastic chairs clustered on the lawns of humidity. The international feeling between the Japanese Toyota, the American tea drinker, and the Uttar Pradesh afternoon breaking over the hills like sunrise. But at 4:00 o’clock when you still have to get to J Pool before dark, speeding through the trees like you’re flying into Roger Stan, and I think we’re all like this at one point in our lives. The Hindu-Jewish great, great grandson of immigrants sinking into endless metropolises and Taj Mahal’s like the solid wonderment of adolescents finding meaning. I can’t tell but sometimes I feel like Saleem Sinai Midnight’s Children. I can feel my generation of humanity like the typeface of my life, and sometimes I’m not sure if it’s Comic Sans or Times New Roman, but we are drawn to each other as if by candlelight. Often I wonder if we are like every other generation, the lost ones and heroes, the saintly ones are the ones tearing through decency with giant shears. I bet we all want to find some token of goodwill in the middle of the night, in the dumpsters behind the high school to hand over to birds or to the wind, knowing we can find someone like us.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: What is your poem about, Zachary?
Zachary: Well, my poem is really about human connections and how particularly as Americans and people who come from all over the world, we feel like the world is very small, like we know so many different cultures, but at the same time, we often get caught up in our daily lives and what’s going on in our own bubble, and we forget the connections that we have to other people and other people’s suffering.
FEMALE 2: Particularly, I study South Africa as Dr. Suri mentioned and South Africa in Rhodesia, after Rhodesia collapses in 1978, South Africa really becomes the last bastion of white rule and they really fixate on it. That ends in 1994 as a marker of what a white state could look like. Then you see this outpouring of violence. I don’t think those things are unrelated, right?
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Interesting.
FEMALE 2: The last fall of the only real “white supremacists inscribed government” collapses and you see this upsurge in violence. So you have this sense especially in the ’60s, that these gains that I was talking about them trying to protect her starting to evaporate. The sort of global consensus that they had seen whether it was through colonial empire, informal colonization that seems to be disappearing for them. In the ways that Southern segregationists or modern conservatives were able to adapt and perform respectable civil rights positionality where it was not incredibly threatening to their pace, but it wasn’t overwhelmingly inclusive.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.
FEMALE 2: White power activists never tried to do that. So they are very unique in the fact that they had to kind of segregate themselves, no pun intended, but that they were pushed out of the acceptable spectrum of conversation in the United States particularly after the Civil Rights Movement, where conservatives and liberals alike, both Republicans and Democrats, sectioned off acceptable specters and parameters of discussion.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Sure. Right, this famously happened in the Republican Party and William F Buckley and others said, “We don’t want to be associated with the John Burgess.” That seems so different from where we are today.
FEMALE 2: Right.
MALE 1: I would always say that there’s no trade-off. These are complimentary to each other. You may actually think that in the short term, you may sit in the game and then you would get carried away by the fact that democracy may hamper your development but in the long-term, you have the example of United States and India has got an incredible democracy.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.
MALE 1: I’m sure that that’s India’s strength. Even in terms of the economy, how to be inclusive and how to actually bring the interest of the larger group, and sections and the marginalized into the development story and we have been doing very well, but having said that, we need to learn a lot of the things from other developed countries and who got to try it, and to give one example.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Please.
MALE 1: India started off as an agricultural society. Most our GDP used to come from the agriculture sector in 1950s. From there, we transformed into the manufacturing. But that process, we couldn’t actually handle well. So India didn’t become a big manufacturing center, unlike China which could leverage that. But today, in case of the service sector, and the leapfrogging we are doing in the service sector. I remember that when I was a child, to get a telephone connection somebody has to wait for one year or two years.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: I remember that too. Yes.
MALE 1: Yeah. Today, India has got actually the largest internet connection after China.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.
MALE 1: How from not having the telephone connections to having universalized telephone internet connection to the whole society? That’s an incredible story. So we need to now take that to the next level. For that, the most important thing is actually, how do you leverage your human capacity by providing the greatest education to them and the skill to maneuver those things in the world.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.
MALE 2: The cost system, intrinsically in its classic form, it was undemocratic. It placed people into a hierarchy of status and sometimes a hierarchy of occupation that they were supposed to pursue. The occupational part fell away at least a century or more ago, but the hierarchy of status persisted. It also persisted in forms which were outlawed quite early on under the Indian republics such as the practice of untouchability, excluding people from particular areas, excluding them from the use of common wells or water sources and so on. Those occasionally now still occur in practice, but they are illegal and they can be, and are prosecuted. As far as since, the cost of identity has in fact become more prominent in the same way, perhaps as ethnicity has become more prominent in many parts of the world. In fact, I wrote a book in which I argued that, that the shift towards social classification as identity has superseded the role of the economic and the functional roles of cost as hierarchy. Now it’s more like ethnic blocks competing, many ethnic blocks competing.
FEMALE 2: Republicans in 1866 certainly by that time, it was already evident that Johnson was not going to implement any of the Republican agenda, which was to have a reconstruction in the South that would safe guard the rights of the newly freed slaves. Public opinion at that time was very much with Johnson’s opponents because most of these southern states, with Johnson’s permission, had passed these Black Codes which really did reduce African-Americans to a state of semi-solitude. So in the North, there was a real reaction to this and that’s how you get that super majority in both houses. Just like the 2018 elections where the Democrats won over the house as I think somewhat of a reaction to what was happening, you had that in the North. So public opinion in the North certainly was very much with Johnson’s critics with his Republican opponent. In the South, Black people at Southern White unionist, who you would think was Johnson’s [inaudible] because he was a unionist. They opposed him too.
MALE 3: One of the things that is most controversial I think, the casting it in terms of the first amendment set some people off. But the big compromise, the big political compromise in Buckley was using the first amendment framework, and what as it turns out criterion would be needed to be met in order to infringe on the first amendment. Got you well. That turned out to be corruption or the perception of corruption.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: We’re going to open, of course, with our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. What is your poem titled today’s Zachary?
Zachary Suri: Nothing.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Nothing?
Zachary Suri: Yeah.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Okay.
Zachary Suri: It’s titled “Nothing.”
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Okay, let’s hear something about “Nothing.”
Zachary Suri: Nothing. Cities don’t take long to sink underwater into the ominous depths. When the waves come to Miami and New York, what would they do with the leftover concrete? Seas don’t take long to become desert and dry sand. When the clouds leave the arrow forever, what will they do with the leftover salt? Houses don’t take long to fold in heavy winds. When the hurricanes wash along the coastlines, what will they do with other plywood in the streets? Leaders don’t take long to forget all the suffering people they’ve met. When promises and obligations are forgotten, what will we do with all the empty words? Why are we left just taping jumbled letters to construction fences? Just to see some meaning in the words. The sounds and smells of the sand blown from the dump trucks in the wind. Why do we keep finding ourselves taping prayers to the roofs of our minds to send our worries into some invisible electrical signal, to some hire power in boats across the Mediterranean? What will we do when the UN is flooded by the East River? When Brussels in the winter feels like Barcelona. Where will they go to do nothing when you can’t ski in the Swiss Alps, in mountain resorts where they do nothing? What will we do with all the pages they put on PDFs for us to read so they can forget them. It doesn’t take long to lose a planet, to lose a home, when we’ve destroyed it all, where will they meet to do nothing?
MALE 4: One thing that in the long run that would be helpful in improving the quality of government, and therefore of democracy in general, a big deal in Latin America, but in other places as well. Would be to work to elect people and into agitate politically extra voting. The other ways that we participate in democratic politics. For something like a global wealth tax or some international effort to eliminate tax shelters that would reduce the power of oligarchies. I think that would improve both the quality of right-wing governance in Latin American countries. I think that it will also improve the quality of a left-wing government that often emerge in out of response and frustration.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: From my perspective, I see a vibrant free enterprise system and our democracy in the U.S. being absolutely directly and integrally connected and mutually supportive when all is working well. I think our free enterprise system operates as well as it does because of the democratic environment in which it’s based. I think our democracy is as strong as it is because of that free enterprise system.
MALE 4: The one informed policy today like foreign policy, many countries have multiple traditions.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.
MALE 4: I will talk about two. The dominant would be the traditional called, Khomeinism, the legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini. But there’s also a more pragmatic tradition in contemporary running foreign policy-making. Ayatollah Khomeini really is the founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran and had a deep impact on the Republic’s foreign policy. There’s several founding principles for his foreign policy vision. One was a genuine nonalignment. There were plenty of leaders in the Cold War who called themselves non-aligned. But Khomeini took that more seriously, took that power than most did.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: We’re overwhelmed with information. But what does that information mean? You have to make sure that you’re cultivating through your news feeds in a way that you have something thoughtful to take away and understand about them. So therefore, people’s views are not pushed on you, but you have an ability to think about them creatively. That’s point one. Point two, what can you do? America is a very involved, non isolated country. It doesn’t matter if we have oceans, our trade flows are very much marked up. You looked in our demographic composition, it’s more and more international, more and more multicultural. So one of the things that’s important for Americans to do is understand the world. That means getting out and traveling. I can tell you I have a wife who’s an American diplomat. I am currently living abroad. There is nothing so educational for an American as to spend a little bit time over abroad. One, because it allows you to see your own country with a different set of eyes. It hasn’t diminished in any way. What I think about the United States for my love for the United States, It’s actually grown it.
MALE 4: Sure.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: But thinking about it, talking about it, thinking about how other societies do things, what we could learn, what we could teach them.
Zachary: Right.
MALE 3: What they can teach us?
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Absolutely, I think this is a real key ingredient because as the 21st century takes off, as you, Miranda, get to play more of a roll on this. If you don’t have the fluency, if you don’t have the ability to understand things from other people’s eyes. You’re going to have a less of an ability to shape things.
Paul: So you have already, a rhetorical and words matter. A rhetorical set of images that Americans believe, at least they’re fighting for. Now, of course, on the battlefield, men are fighting to stay alive and to keep their friends alive. But in the larger sense, this war is already being depicted before the United States enters it as a war to extend democracy and to preserve and to keep it safe.
FEMALE 2: I would say if I look back on my own research, which has compared the way that presidential administrations in particular, have looked at international religious freedom abroad and the different strategies at the United States takes to promote religious freedom elsewhere. I think I’ve come up with two overarching lessons that might have something to say for our current day and our domestic contexts. Because the connections between our foreign policy and our domestic policy in this area aren’t that separate.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right?
FEMALE 2: So first of all, is that we have to known the religious context in which we’re operating in.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: So Paul, is that really what these debates are? They’re just reality TV.
Paul: I don’t know. I don’t really understand what they’re for anymore. I really think they are so not useful for the party in opposition right now, and people can disagree with me. They want more democracy. No, it’s kind of like, we can have new representative democracy and everybody gets a say. It’s like Rousseau times 250 million people.
MALE 3: Right.
Paul: Great. For me, the way we used to do this as the people went out and they campaigned. Jimmy Carter campaigned a lot over and Iowa and he caught on and he won. I don’t think that Barack Obama did well in Iowa because of the debates with him and John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, he caught on because he was a really good candidate. So being a good candidate is not the same thing as winning a debate with 20 people. It’s not the same thing where everybody gets like a couple of moments and you’re trying to figure out a canned lines, which almost always sound bad because there are canned lines that you memorize.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Exactly.
Paul: For the life of me, this is a heck of a way to nominate somebody.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Well we’re going to focus on Turkey today. Speaking of cultural confusion. We’re going to begin, of course with a scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. What is your poem titled today, Zachary?
Zachary: “Images of Turkey.”
Dr. Jeremi Suri: “Images of Turkey.” Okay, let’s hear it.
Zachary: Turkey, you are eating doner kebabs, and in Oxford side alley 10 years ago. You are the family friends from bus trips across the entire state of Wisconsin. Names that are hard to pronounce to our American tongues. You are some mythical interpretation of Hercules at the Dardanelles, Xerxes and his bridge. You are the last creations of Ilium, the namesake of Billy Pilgrim’s urban America. You are built upon the bones of myth, upon the ruins of the walls of Poseidon. You are that time I stayed up late in the dark listening to the news of a military coup on a bridge from 5,000 miles away. Turkey, but of so many poultry jokes, too many gobble, gobbles. Learning about your siege of Cyprus, and the travel anchor on the DVD. Turkey, my parents trekked across you in their half feet rental car for their honeymoon. My feet so float across the rug they bought in the morning, and now it is stained with hot chocolate and dust. The devil or of Bosnia, catalyst of Viennese triumph and pastries, possessor of Palestine. Turkey, Ottoman partaker in world war, collapsed empire doubling in democracy. NATO member taking in refugees from Syria, and Baghdadi was just killed along your border. It is surreal that you are in-between it all. Neither Europe nor Asia, not completely Middle Eastern. Split [inaudible] between continents, loosely defined. Split, a longing soul of so many writers between freedom and tyranny, mixing and mixing like the way the wheel spin on Hercule Poirot’s train headed west from Istanbul. Turkey, there are images of green conflict zones on live maps of Syrian dissolution that traced back to you. There are pictures of you languishing under a sweet full moon in a rooftop restaurant on my mother’s dresser.
MALE 4: I think more than any other lesson I got out of this book and having the privilege to spend a lot of time with a lot of whistleblowers. Although their difficulties are extreme, and their ability to actually fix problems is sometimes limited, the fact that an individual, one-person armed with facts can step forward, take on a multi-billion dollar, multinational corporation or an entire government agency, and prevail. It’s a really uplifting thing. I mean, the voice, the power of the truth is remarkably strong. I think that empowering that voice further is something that will undoubtedly bring us closer to a more just society. It’s uplifting to see these people say, “Look, I had to do it because that’s just the way I am. That’s the way Americans are.” I think as one of my whistle-blowers said, “We’ve forgotten how to be Americans,” and they may help us remember how.
MALE 5: Actually came to a new appreciation of America, of our resilience of the unity we’re capable of as a country. Knowing that that’s possible, knowing the fact that we were targeted rather than so many other countries are all partly because of our virtues. I do think, which are inimical to the perverse jihadist vision. So in that sense, it actually gave me a certainly the outpouring of interest in national service and public service once afterwards and that’s not just about military.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Firefighters for example.
MALE 5: Yeah, exactly. Do you know a policemen, educators? It was a painful shock to the national conscience that also reminded us of living for something larger than ourselves. I don’t want to lose that.
MALE 6: I think there’s a danger that the pendulum on Human Rights has swung too far in the other direction. If you think of it as a pendulum over the last 15 or 20 years. I think you’re right in describing it, that there was a moment at which it seemed necessary to vindicate these ideas all over the world by any means. The United States had the means to do that. That way of thinking about it I think was too extreme in one direction. I think we’re at a moment where there’s a danger of the pendulum going too far in the other direction of being too restrained, too pessimistic.
MALE 7: Isolationists.
MALE 6: Too isolationist, exactly. What can citizens do in that context? I think the one answer, one way to think about it is to try to modulate those swings of the pendulum to stay committed to the dream, the common flag of human rights, to that vision while recognizing the trade-offs. So to exercise a moderating influence, and to hold people who are making these decisions to account.
MALE 7: Yes.
MALE 6: Saying at a moment like this, whatever is changing in American domestic politics, whatever is changing in international politics, nonetheless, it is necessary to think about these principles, and to try to uphold them in ways that are possible, even while recognizing that we may not get to that perfect vision. Nonetheless, I think it’s the job of any citizen in a democracy to hold people to account, and to keep that vision before them.
MALE 8: Well, it wasn’t an easy task. Believe me. Just being a human being is not an easy task because of the way we are built and put together. But some of the things that helped me really get through was my religious belief. Because I wasn’t always a practicing individual when it came to having some insight into a higher being. The reason for that is because of the area I came from. It’s very rare in this country, areas like what they describe as the ghetto and the hood, it’s very rare that people have the notion they even want to seek out consciousness because they dealing with so many problems.
MALE 6: Of course.
MALE 8: But that very factor became what my life hinged upon while I was incarcerated. Not so much as to church, but religion. The idea of a higher power, and you can call on that power. Even though it wasn’t explained to me exactly how I could call on it then, and who to look for. But that was the core of me actually surviving the psychological trauma because of being in prison. Like I’ve said, “I go on a number of vacation.” You had to be a special type of individual to go through that, and then come out, and assume a position like myself, and have some sanity. Now I’m not saying that I’m the most perfect sane man, but the crisis in the hurdles that I had to jump over, that’s rare, that’s very rare.
FEMALE 3: I think one place that could take more of a leadership role than they’re doing our universities, and our Greek life in particular. There’s a lot of education that needs to happen. A lot of consequences that could be imposed within a university environment. Some of that can be done by sororities saying, “We’re not going to have parties with you, unless you’ve had this training.” There are levers that people can use to get people to have the difficult conversations. I think that one of the challenges we have, and this is pervasive within academia, is that we have people who have no concept, no understanding, no knowledge of the trauma of sexual assault. You are asked to make policy about sexual assault on college campuses. Were they too really have a true understanding of the depth of the problem on their campus, and have real tools to be able to address it? We might be able to get better results on our college campuses. The education has to start young.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Zachary, what’s the title of your poem?
Zachary: “To the Rest of Humanity.”
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Well, let’s hear it.
Zachary: I think I first wondered about diplomacy driving on a dirt road near Agra, and cows bathing in the river. I think I thought of it as that, bouncing between the seat cushions in the T stands, and do graphs on the side of a highway. Knowing the ancient fought on the other side of the ridge, and which water is safe to drink on plastic chairs clustered on the lawns of humidity. International feeling between the Japanese Toyota or the American tea drinker and the Uttar Pradesh afternoon breaking over the hills like sunrise. But at four o’clock when you still have to get to jeep before dark, speeding through the trees like you’re flying into Roger Stan. I think we are all like this at one point in our lives. The Hindu Jewish great grandson of immigrants sinking into endless metropolises and Taj Mahal’s like this solid wonderment of adolescents finding meaning. I can’t tell but sometimes I feel like Saleem Sinai had been nice children. Like I can feel my generation of humanity like the typeface of my life. Sometimes I’m not sure if it’s Comic Sans or Times New Roman, but we are drawn to each other as if by candlelight. Often I wonder if we are like every other generation, the lost ones and heroes, the saintly ones are the ones tearing through decency with giant shears. I bet we all want to find some token of goodwill in the middle of the night in the dumpsters behind the high school to hand over to the birds or to the wind knowing we can find someone like us.
MALE 9: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
MALE 10: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lempke and you can find his music at harrisonlempke.com.
FEMALE 4: Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives on democracy.