Hello, good evening everybody at home on your devices wherever you are welcome to making sense of the digital Society, you know the joint venture between the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and the BPP the federal agency for civic education the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung This series now this show has been running for more than three years Actually, and we're planning as of today for more dates in this pandemic 2021 of course like everyone else we hope that we can do this with a live audience with some of you in Course of this year, maybe in fall we will see but not today We're a very small team here at Auditorium Friedrich Strasse and it's just two of us I'm going to introduce you to our main guest in a minute and a small technical staff So for the regulars, you know how this is going to roll out pretty much It's just going to be a talk first of maybe about 35 or 40 minutes We're going to have a conversation the two of us maybe for 20 minutes Afterwards and then it's your turn. There's a participatory tool called Slido I think you see it on your screens wherever you're watching on alex TV. Welcome there on our respective websites of the BPP and Humboldt Institute you see it there. You can ask your questions anytime They're going to be voiced by Christian Graufoel who mounts this event and has been mounting it for quite some time He's going to be the advocate so to speak of your questions later on Okay, so today's renowned guest will talk about two modern institutions that have undergone and still do undergo radical change We're talking about political parties and professional media, which he calls critical infrastructure of democracy He's a professor for political theory at Princeton University in New Jersey. He currently, however, does research here in Berlin So we're lucky. He's with us tonight actually live here on site He's also the co-founder of the European College of Liberal Arts, ECLA today. It's called Bard College, Berlin So on one hand our scope is broader than all things digital today But also very concrete because when we talk about political parties and professional media We talk about effects on democracy, which of course are at the core of so many Discussions we have had in the series in the past three years two things the series also has continuously touched on an International take on Europe so our guest fits in perfectly here since he brings with him and at least Transatlantic view on the changes he's going to discuss with us Not only because he's a German teaching in the United States, but you can see it in his books, too I will name just to he asked me explicitly actually to be brief here into introduction So it's just gonna be two books One of them Holding into the camera here was published in the English original in 2016 What is populism very well known and subsequently was translated into many other languages? And let me just point to his next book coming out in May. The English original is called the democracy Rules what a wonderful pun there in the title the German title is a little bit more Verdi as is the German language It will be out at Zurkamp Verlag and called Freiheit, Gleichheit und Gewissheit wie Schaftmann Demokratie Very glad he's live with us tonight to speak about such is the title of his talk the critical Infrastructure of democracy, please welcome Jan Werner Müller the stage is yours Thank you very much for this very kind and indeed mercifully brief Introduction I thought a title of two words in English becoming three words in German was still relatively good Could have been could have been more given common expectations about the German language. I Guess ladies and gentlemen, it's become a common place that opinion About the internet in general and social media in particular has swung wildly From one extreme to the other in the last decade or so From a view according to which the revolution wasn't going to be televised after all instead it was going to be tweeted During as you all remember the Arab Spring to the view widespread today as a distinguished colleague in history put it recently that Facebook equals fascism this wild swing from one extreme to the other Might be an indication of the fact that we have just been inventing golden ages That we don't have our history as far as media is concerned, right or or it might be an indication that we lack normative criteria for really judging the development of media or to invoke a classic work in this area a structural transformation of the public sphere What I would like to offer you tonight is a reconstruction of The two institutions that were indeed considered to be absolutely indispensable for the proper functioning of representative democracy ever since the 19th century namely political parties and professional Media to offer you in the first chapter of my talk a brief reminder of why people thought this and in particular which three functions Observers considered to be absolutely central as far as these intermediary institutions were concerned for democracy in a second chapter of my talk tonight. I want to suggest to you three normative Criteria for how to judge the quality of such institutions This is by no means an exhaustive list in particular and I flag it right away in particular the very much very contested question of whether such institutions Should be accurate should be sticking to some form of the truth, etc I will leave aside for the moment But I'm happy to talk about it in the Q&A in the discussion later on if you if you like And after that second chapter about criteria I will try to in the third and last chapter apply some of these criteria to the much debated world of social media and I'll finish with an open-ended question about that much debated world Allow me purpose one brief footnote about the particular title of tonight's talk why critical infrastructure. I Mean infrastructure in a very basic way. I'm really talking about what it means for people to reach others and To be reached so infrastructure for instance in the sense of public transportation But maybe less obviously what I'm also trying to allude to is the fact that for citizens in a democracy to make proper use of their basic political rights such as Free speech and free assembly to name just two obvious ones one needs Organizations, it's one thing to be demonstrating all by oneself on a big street It's one thing to be let's say sending chain emails to one's family one's friends Unsuspecting strangers. It's another thing to use established intermediary institutions to multiply One's views to multiply whatever one thinks one has to say in the democracy That's a specific sense in which I'm using infrastructure for the purpose of tonight's talk All right on to my first chapter three central functions of So-called intermediary powers and political parties and professional media in particular first and maybe rather obvious these institutions offer representations of society to society itself and in particular they structure ongoing conflicts and cleavages in a society they offer what Pierre Bourdieu once called a vision of divisions I Underline this perhaps rather pedantic observation because it's essential to understand that this kind of representation of a society to itself politically is Never just a kind of mechanical reproduction of something that is already there No, it always has a creative Dynamic element. It's always a matter of choosing How to present how to structure conflicts in a particular way Rather than representation being a kind of mechanical reproduction of something that is already there Be it interests or ideas or even identities for that matter We should rather think of representation as a dynamic process We're all kinds of actors But in particular political parties whose traditional job it has been but also to some degree professional media essentially offered to a potential constituency a conception of Their identities their interests or whatever else it might be That these Self-selected representatives think has not really been represented yet And I belabor this point partly because in many democracies today There's a prevalent view that representation is much more like this kind of mechanical process Where then people end up talking about things like a representation gap particularly popular Notion in Germany where people say ah something is happening because such and such as constituency is Unrepresented empirically that might often might often be true, but it's not as if there was a kind of objective lack Much more often. It's a question of Representational entrepreneurs if you like basically first discovering that there might be people who might be responsive To a particular presentation of their identities interests and so on But it's a much more contingent process than is often thought of All of which ladies and gentlemen should be fairly obvious in the case of political parties It might be somewhat less obvious for the case of professional media who after all when they Offer some form of political coverage Simply tend to follow what poker parties are already doing what they're saying about themselves and what they're saying about Society, but it's not always the case after all it used to be fairly normal In fact, sometimes still is the case that professional media themselves Start certain campaigns for instance on the basis of Investigative journalism where media also say look he has a problem That hasn't really been understood. He has a constituency that hasn't really been represented He has a form of discontent that hasn't been properly Articulated in what Bourdieu called a vision of divisions. So the first point is about structuring representations second point is about both external and internal pluralism External pluralism I think should be fairly obvious No such thing as a democracy without party pluralism But also no such thing as a democracy without Media pluralism the real problem is usually that scholars Journalists practitioners have found it fiendishly difficult to develop precise criteria For when we have media pluralism and where we might not have it But in principle in general theoretically this is almost too obvious to point out Internal pluralism is a somewhat less obvious and maybe more contentious demand in the case of parties Those countries which essentially say look a party Has to have internal structures to allow Deliberation to allow conflict it can't be a kind of one-person show Even though as some of you are probably well aware this exists as well So just a very glaring example. Gert Wilders is a right-wing populist party in the Netherlands Literally is a one-person show. Well, not quite It's a two two member show because the party has Wilders as a member and then it has a Foundation as a member, but you will have guessed it The only member of the foundation is no prizes for guessing Gert Wilders himself Or if you allow me one other example Nigel Farage's Brexit Party, which on its website claims to be a people's party with a large Following of a hundred and a hundred thousand supporters If you look more closely, you realize it's actually a limited liability Company which also means everything is public in terms of who's really in charge and Surprise surprise if you look into the company register There's only one person of significance as the legal terms term goes and you will have guessed it that one person happens to be one Nigel Farage Some countries some democracies have a massive problem with this kind of approach In fact, they wouldn't even allow parties like this Germany as one obvious example It's one country that in its constitution basically prescribes an Internal pluralism for poker parties Why because the thought is partly that a party that is autocratic on the inside is Also much more likely to be autocratic on the outside or to go down some kind of authoritarian path if it ever gets into power Less obviously and on a more normative note I would add that internal processes of party democracy fulfill the important task of habituating people to Disagreement even disagreement on the basis of shared principles Because obviously parties have programs they function on the basis of ideas and principles that people share but principles never Somehow implement themselves. They always need to be debated. They need to be argued over people have different views about this And yes, and yes, it's true that all of that can sometimes be very annoying Very tiring some of you may remember Oscar Wilde's famous quip that the problem with socialism was that it took too many evenings Anybody who has attended these sorts of party meetings knows what he was talking about and yet and yet Being able to deal with this kind of disagreement getting used to the notion that the other side In a conflict could possibly be right is actually crucial in the democracy Because why would you ever accept somebody else to win in an electoral contest to be governed by somebody else? If you're not willing to at least entertain the thought that the other side could possibly be right so far Parties and their internal procedures. What about media? It's much more difficult some countries again, Germany is a good example actually in their legal systems also tend to exempt Media from a certain degree of internal pluralism. They consider them what is locally called Tendence betriebe which means that for instance Workers don't get the same amount of power and representation that they would get in a different kind of enterprise Let's say a car factory because the thought is that the media is perhaps dedicated to particular ideals Which should not be subverted by those who work on the inside Nevertheless even here There might be an important normative case for saying that having a variety of opinions on offer Even within a media that might broadly be dedicated to pursuing a particular line of inquiry or even that might be one That is identified with a particular set of ideological beliefs is important to habituate audiences to the need for legitimate Disagreement, let me add one more word about something that perhaps is also not exactly very obvious When it comes to intermediate powers and their functions What I'm talking about as a third function is the need to structure political time Parties do this arguably in the same way that democracy at large does it there are set moments There are focal points if you like when citizens ought to pay attention when its election time when it's campaign time Where an important decision is about to be made and when then also Importantly and maybe less obviously those who may have lost in a contest Can use time as a predictable resource to Recover from their loss think about new ideas Basically orient themselves to the next focal point when they might have another chance to win at the ballot box Some of us might think of a recent example of somebody who didn't really concede a loss Somebody who didn't follow this idea of well You may lose once but you have a couple more years to recover and then maybe you try again Obviously if like Donald Trump you've effectively made your party into a kind of personality cult and Forgive the ageism if you are in your mid to the mid 70s or so you might not have the same time horizon You might not have the same Broad view of what might happen in a couple of years if you use time as a resource wisely as other parties might With the media I Think the function as for a structuring time is concerned is a little bit different Although arguably here as well. It's very much about creating a focal point and in particular of Basically concentrating attention in a particular kind of way some of you may remember Hegel's famous observation about how newspaper reading had basically become the prayer of The modern bourgeois how it was essentially what he called der realistische Morgan zagen in the early 19th century in the 20th century some other observers had different ideas about this So Marshall McLuhan for instance famously said that people don't actually read newspapers They treat them as if they were stepping into a hot bath But arguably the underlying thought that this was not primarily even about the transmission of information But that it was a kind of ritual that concentrated intention was somewhat similar Arguably that function was already being dissipated in the course of the 20th century So Adorno for instance already held in his famous essay about television as an ideology that the kind of cultic element of Television some of us may remember those days when the whole family gathered around the eight o'clock news that that was already Disappearing that this sort of linkage to all the notions of rituals was no longer quite there But it seems self-evident that nowadays in an age of seemingly total Availability of news not just around the clock, but absolutely everywhere of not being tied to a particular place This ritualistic function of intermediary powers might be something that we've perhaps lost conclusively more on this in just a few minutes allow me first of all to open my second chapter and very briefly suggest to you a number of normative criteria of How to judge the quality of such intermediary institutions partly in light of the functions which I've already outlined in the first chapter? first and maybe rather obvious again it matters whether intermediary powers are broadly speaking accessible whether you can Join a party whether you have access to media as a consumer, but perhaps even somehow as a Producer this goes back to the notion. I was trying to make plausible to you at the beginning of the talk that this is really about multiplying the power of individual basic Democratic rights such as above all free speech Secondly It seems to me a plausible criterion to say that such institutions have to be Autonomous By which I don't mean that they somehow have to be impartial that goes without saying in the case of political parties case of media There's nothing wrong I think with media even being partial or partisan as long as long as Everything is out in the open and you are know that you get let's say a distinctly conservative View on the world some of you may know that for a while the famous or of course for many people infamous Fox News Branded itself as presenting to the world a working-class Conservative view whether that's really true or not I think the working class is very well capable of deciding for itself all I'm flying to you is that you can be Partial and openly partisan even as media what matters more is whether you are autonomous or Whether there are hidden powers whether you are for instance the plaything or the front of a particular business In an affair as way example many of you will remember Sylvia Bellos coni's Party for to italia, which is of course still around which was more or less created by marketing experts Which more or less functioned like a fan club for a soccer slash football team and One might be forgiven for thinking which was basically just a tool for the cavaliere to stay out of prison and to pursue His personal interests by other means This ladies and gentlemen is what I'm trying to get it when I talk about the need for autonomy Intermediary institutions should not be the tools or the fronts of something else that is Invisible or maybe just barely visible Thirdly and this to some degree sums up the two criteria I've already given you Such institutions also need to be what the British philosopher on Nora O'Neill has called Assessable by which see by which she means these institutions Should be transparent enough Such that those who look at them can at least get a rough sense of Who owns them who's behind them how decisions are made sort of what one eventually is getting if one Let's say by certain media or if one joins a particular political party Note that this is not some utopia of total transparency No institution is ever going to live up to an expectation of total transparency it's basically a Kind of good enough criterion such that one would say okay There are certain things I won't know but I know enough to understand who's responsible Where people are coming from and also if there are any complaints or concerns? I know who to turn to so in the case of media for instance This is what in the old days when these things still existed for instance at the New York Times Someone like a public editor would have done that if readers would have said look we're confused about what's going on It's not clear who's made certain decisions What did the editorial board think when it? Basically came to a particular judgment or when started to open a particular investigation or for the matter didn't investigate something in particular Such a person would have been responsible to provide some kind of some kind of answer All right, I'll close I'll close this chapter as flacked earlier There are more criteria what could think about certainly one could think about Accuracy as an important criterion I'll leave that aside for the purposes of this talk tonight But if any of you want to come back to it I'm happy to engage in the discussion with you if you like later on For now allow me to open the third and last chapter which as promised concerns the much debated world of social media Allow me to very quick preliminary observations as far as this debate about social media Is concerned I think some of our colleagues are right to say that by now This has generated what they call a moral panic By which they mean that certain particular seemingly self-evident phenomena such as disinformation the spreading sometimes viral spreading of fake news extremism etc Have become so seemingly obvious That all the attention is there that these phenomena are deemed inner of themselves to be undermining Democracy that they've also in a sense given license to Liberals in the broadest sense of that term Essentially to indulge all the good old prejudices of 19th century mass psychology, you know the people are so irrational They're all just waiting to be seduced by the great demagogue Look, you know if you present people with accurate information, they even double down on their prejudices all these sorts of things I think on the one hand a Certainly phenomena for which you can find some empirical evidence Even though by now it also seems that at least some of these particular Diagnoses in particular the actual spread of disinformation the actual prevalence of echo chambers is not nearly as significant as Early diagnoses made them out to be But the important point is that an exclusive and somewhat panicked focus on these phenomena might distract proper attention from much larger and in a certain way more important structural transformations if all one cares about is The latest Extremist tweet one might for instance not pay sufficient attention to the de facto death of local journalism In many parts of the world Arguably a much more important phenomena than isolated individuals indulging in lying in fake news Etc. Etc. So I think that's an important preliminary remark to make the second preliminary remark That I wish to offer you is to say at least one word About where social media might be located Within this larger conceptual frame. I was trying to offer you at the beginning when I was talking about critical infrastructure and Some of you will know this much better than I do and I'm willing to be criticized Certainly as far as my very rough maybe very crude way of setting this up is concerned But the way I would put it is to say that at the bottom So to speak of a proper understanding of where to locate social media would be good old physical Infrastructure so we tend to think of the internet as wireless But of course, you know, we're still de facto looking at actual cables fiber optics and and so on and so forth None of that as many people have rightly pointed out Means that this kind of physical infrastructure is somehow Neutral or that there are that there aren't important choices that have been made about how to lay out this infrastructure But still this is still primarily about technology Then at a kind of intermediate no pun intended level you would find intermediaries such as platforms that of course are not purely a product of Technology either but that also don't quite conform inner of themselves to Intermediary institutions that I was talking about earlier on in terms of people making conscious decisions About how to represent a society to itself. For instance, we don't we don't see a Kind of leadership that would make editorial decisions when it comes to to platforms and yet and yet And I'll go back to that point in a second and yet. It's of course also not true that these are somehow Not engaged in making particular choices that then affect citizens at large And then at the third level, I would place the traditional Intermediary institutions as I was talking about them earlier. So political parties and professional media in particular So with this very rough very crude tableau in place Allow me to say just a couple of words About where social media might come out in a very broad sense in light of the criteria I was trying to make plausible to you just a few minutes ago accessible well on one level of course individually very easily accessible but Themically and institutionally of course almost impossible to access If you allow me to think back to a political parties for just a second There's a difference between entering one particular political party, which may or may not be difficult for you and For a party to become part of a party System as an institution, which may or may not be particularly easy In the case of social media as everybody knows the monopoly power of the institutions Makes it virtually impossible at this point for new competitors to enter at the systemic level Secondly as far as autonomy is concerned you might again say well, it's kind of a mixed bag on the one hand with many of them you might say well It's not obvious that one would think that they are really just the front's or the more or less nefarious tools of Hidden interests at the same time as everybody also knows You might say they're not truly autonomous as institutions because at least some of them are literally controlled by one Individual and if the core normative intuition behind autonomy is that you don't want to be at the arbitrary will of Powerful actors then social media on this score clearly come out pretty badly Moreover and maybe less obviously even though there's a lot of talk about Viral this viral that at least some empirical studies seem to suggest that Broadcasting in the old sense in other words those who basically are already in a position of relative institutional power and who can broadcast on that basis relatively widely retain an important advantage even on social media which means that we can't really think about social media in isolation from traditional media and more importantly journalism as a practice which as most of you might agree is In a deep crisis today Because in its confrontation with new political phenomena Trump being the most obvious most recent one. It has been to say the least Very much fall into turmoil about what really constitutes some of the core elements of journalism as a practice That also qualifies the point about autonomy and it means that unless we pay more attention to these more traditional Institutions, we might also not be able to come to a clearer normative understanding of what might or might not be going wrong with social media Thirdly and lastly accessibility well, I'm gonna tell you things that you already know as Ordinary citizens as ordinary users.  Yes, it's true More media literacy would help according to some surveys only about 29% of Americans and British citizens understand that something like their Facebook News feed has something to do with an algorithm and isn't just somehow objectively Objectively the news as such but even if even if we became better able to read some of these phenomena There's a hell of a lot that we wouldn't be able to truly truly truly Understand so as for instance the scholar Erica Kish has put it We're a little bit like in the Middle Ages when some people could actually read the Bible And some people could only look at the pictures and everybody understood something about what was going on the Bible But the difference was clearly very vast alright as Promised or maybe as threatened at the very beginning I simply want to leave you with a question that perhaps can also help us to enter a particular discussion about social media in particular At least to me as somebody who as you may have become painfully aware by now Who is not at the center of some of these discussions who doesn't study social media from any sort of Empirical maybe even not even conceptual point of view remains a question To what extent? The question that Walter Benjamin Famously asked and then answered about film has yet truly been answered about social media Remember that Benjamin in his famous in his famous essay about art in the age of mechanical reproduction Essentially said that the new apparatus of filmmaking Kind of tested people and selected people for particular abilities There was this famous point where he said look the parliaments are emptying out the theaters are emptying out this apparatus is Essentially replacing the old-style parliamentary politician by the dictator and it's replacing the old-style theatrical actor by the movie style Now for some of you that might seem like it's a technological determinism There might be a lot more leeway, but of course there have been plenty of observers who in recent years have been tempted by the thought That for instance Twitter itself might somehow be as some people have put it explicitly an authoritarian medium or even Somehow a populist medium, whatever that might mean exactly I don't see conclusive evidence to think that But the question is certainly there and I hope that we can perhaps make some headway in trying to answer it in a Collective discussion from now onwards. Thank you very much for your attention. I look forward to your questions Comments or for the amount of criticisms. Thank you. Thank you so much Jan van der Müller this very concise talk and Thank you for being so brief too. I know that you're in a clock usually runs at 50 minutes or more The academic 50 minutes You really stuck to our time frame here that helps a lot Let me start with the notion you picked up in the first Third I think of your talk when you Explored on the ritualistic function lost that traditional media have you Sort of dropped some quotes here by Hegel who talked about the morning prayer by Marshall McLuhan He was talking about the bath in the morning. I don't know thinking about the family gathering in front of the TV set at home and so forth and The question is really easy. Do you mourn that ritualistic function that this will be a be would be isn't there a whole lot of ritual of How we cope with our smartphones in the morning? I mean, there's this one Investor in this I think horribly deterministic but very well-known movie the social dilemma That says the question is do you check your smartphone before or while peeing that's pretty much the only question There is to answer in the morning that looks a lot like a ritual to me So do we mourn that ritualistic function? I should it come back in some way and don't we have it actually in our faces every day? Yeah, good. We're just to say difficult question. So Yes, we can think of certain patterns that we follow in terms of how we structure the day but at the risk of engaging in what some might see as Communitarian kitsch the old style ritual did have a communal element And it wasn't just about you doing something on your own and kind of staring at a screen But it was a kind of gathering together Now I don't idealize this I mean you can still of course think of both in Germany and the US You know the kind of Sunday TV shows which still matter at the same time at the risk of saying the obvious It so much depends on the actual quality of the content of the ritual that you may also say look especially in the age of Trump It had become obvious that yeah, the ritual was still there but the inability to actually get politicians to answer questions properly to I mean most recently to get Republicans to appear and actually say something about January 6 basically meant that yeah, you could sit there of course on a Sunday morning and kind of feel that oh Yeah, this is the moment when we come together and think about the same issues But the actual to put it in a very pretentious way forgive me the actual epistemic value in terms of okay Are we learning something here? Is this at least new information or can we look at somebody's character in more detail all that? You know may disappear for other reasons which have to do with the development of journalism Which again are not is not really about technology as as such so very clear answer. Yes and no Let's stick with social media for one moment before I'd like to go back To the beginning of your talk again when you talk about accessibility and accessibility actually two very different things You said well one is yet given the social media. It's very accessible, of course But it's not very accessible at all. You cannot see what's going on in the back We don't know the code of course. We don't know the algorithms We don't know what interests are being catered to and so forth. That's we all know this Is there a way of this is a very European perspective? I'm aware of that to regulate this Would it be a good idea to say well social media are intermediary? Infrastructure they are intermediary powers. We should treat them as publishers so to speak and this would give Regulation a whole no grip on things it's still very open What that grip would look like in the end, but it would be one take do you think that will be a good idea to Treat them as intermediary powers or would that be the wrong lead? I'm glad we have about five hours left to approach even a tentative answer to this to this question So let me say three things First of all as everybody knows there are now attempts to go down this path I mean the the awareness said yes, this is a problem that we also have some kind of body in place Which both makes it clearer what the underlying Decision-making mechanisms actually are what the possible algorithmic biases might be and so on Is happening you might not like you know the the oversight board that Facebook put in put in place But from the little I understand if nothing else in its judgments in its attempt to get more Information about how certain decisions are made why certain things were taken down or then put up again and so on It's going to become clearer what some of the underlying Concepts that play a role in decision-making such as what is a hate group really you know?  Transparent now that's not really the answer. I think ultimately I think we need we need Not private institutions that are sort of benevolently sort of you know allowed by Basically the owners of these of these platforms But in terms of having a structure that engages with these questions that draws on Existing laws although from what I understand It's very unclear on what kind of human rights law that particular board is really drawing or can really draw Seems to sort of be operating in a vacuum up to up to a point Is all the kind of right is all the kind of right right right direction? And as some of you know at in in in the local context here in Germany people have talked about platform Councils somewhat comparable to councils that look at public media that might have all kinds of experts all kinds of worthy public figures that basically Not just keep it and keep an eye on these institutions, but that also suggests broad outlines That basically make these institutions more accessible But then also ultimately become a question of public law and I'm not sort of just operating in a vacuum So that's point number one point number two is that of course different democracies might come to very different conclusions I mean, it's it's a complete cliche to say that What people think about so-called free speech in the US is different from what people think about this in other countries It seems to me that's all a Matter of a reasonable pluralism such that democracies can come to somewhat different different conclusions here of course that in and of itself is an issue for Platforms or for companies that that basically operate internationally So I can of course still find all kinds of Nazi stuff online even if within Germany It's you know officially officially prohibited So, you know, it's a nice sort of normative point to make it might it might be much more much more difficult to To implement in all kinds of in all kinds of ways and then thirdly Again at the risk of saying the obvious. I know this is a very again very hackneyed sort of sort of sort of argument It clearly does matter to what extent People acquire some basic skill set in reading these institutions and having a sense that okay What you see is not always what you get what you get is not always, you know What is objectively happening around us and so on and and and and so forth and There by now plenty of very good Suggestions for how to do this in schools There plenty of particular Pedagogies, you know, which one could draw on to do this Again, I know this is a very sort of obvious obvious point to make But it's one that people have been making for quite some time And we haven't made a hell of a progress and actually implementing some of these some of these schemes Yeah One of the many things I found very interesting in your talk if I got you correctly There is your skepticism of the very notion of echo chambers and filter bubbles that this again probably would refer to a rather deterministic Technical model and you were at the beginning of her talk now again in defense of partisanship Actually of papers and of course The older among us like us do remember those times when we pretty much exactly knew what we were buying When we were buying this paper or the other paper so to speak in our youth and then maybe we were young adults That was pretty much clear that started to change in the 90s I would say pretty much before that it was clear-cut even in, you know, small towns 20,000 people there were three papers and so forth. So that's what we got at that time now Long story to make it a little short Partisanship is something that doesn't really have a good reputation at the moment. I'm thinking about the Obama administration He went through great pains To make bipartisan meetings and he really wooed the Republicans Didn't do him much good I think it almost it was very difficult in his first term actually and now Joe Biden wants to do the same thing I mean he's going down the same road. He's talking about bipartisan meetings and I don't know Is he going to be successful? What happened to partisanship? Why does partisanship has such a bad name in politics where it's actually at the root of something? You've wrote in one of your articles a political party is not a debate club Allow me to just slip in one point about echo chambers or what some of our colleagues now call echo chambers about echo chambers Okay, where this point is endlessly repeated that yeah, people are in their filter bubbles and This is why everything has gone to hell from what I have learned from colleagues such as My friend Andy gas at Princeton who studied this empirically is that it seems At least plausible to think that actually in many instances people have more diversity of opinions and contacts and sources of information online and they have Offline and when you think about it sort of seems almost commonsensical because you know How many sort of friends or even acquaintances do we usually sort of hang out with who really have radically different different views and by Contrast how easy is it to all of a sudden online come across a point of view that really might not be ours And yet we might you know give some second thought to you know fight worth engaging with and and and so on I mean this is the kind of thing where as also many people have pointed out It became very convenient to say oh the problem is technology the problem is echo chambers when in fact There were long-standing social problems poker problems And rather than addressing those we simply sell with the internet now is to blame is to blame for For for everything so that was just a preliminary primary point about partisanship so Some of you might disagree with this, but at least in my view democracy Not entirely but to an important degree is about conflict if we didn't have divisions If we didn't have conflicts, we wouldn't really need Democracy we would have some sort of kumbaya world of automatic automatic consensus Hence also the kind of very prevalent lamentation of oh society is so polarized. We're so divided etc Etc. Isn't entirely wrong, but you got to say a bit more than simply oh Society is so divided has always been divided and we've always used democracy to deal with our divisions in a piece Full and mutually respectful way and that's the crux It's one thing to be partisan It's another thing to deny the legitimacy of the other side and that's what some Parties and in particular those which I would call right-wing populist parties have done So in the United States contrary to what you know We read all the time the problem is not that there is some more less God-given Predetermined quasi-natural culture war between you know the supposedly real America or fly over the country the Midwest Conservative people who live in rural areas versus you all know these cliches, you know liberal Bicostal elites and so on and so forth No, that's not in and of itself the problem that hasn't always been the case the problem is that one of the two parties in The 90s essentially began to deny the legitimacy of the other side It was Newt Gingrich who in a famous campaign in the mid 90s basically Nationalized certain conflicts culturalized certain conflicts and some of you may remember even handed out a list of words which Republicans always had to use About the other side such as Betray traitor sounds familiar sounds like this could have possibly paved the way to January 6 2021. Yes. So partisanship is what is entirely normal in a in a in a democracy Bipartisanship might occasionally be The right thing to do. I think there's no context independent answer to this. It's not like oh bipartisan It was automatically better depends on what challenges you face what kind of Your own understanding of your craft as a politician might be I mean, these are all things to which political theory as a normative enterprise is not going to deliver Any sort of abstract context independent answers? But to go down the path of denying the legitimacy of the other side of Also suggesting as right wing populace also do that some citizens Don't really belong to you know the real American people in this in this case That is the problem and that has certainly happened in the US. It's happening in a number of other democracies That's where both conflict goes wrong. That's where you no longer have civilized normal mutually respectful ways of dealing with it Now you gave if I understand you correctly pretty much a definition of populism how you explore on it a little bit longer in your populism book I was referring to in the introduction, right? Let's stick for one more question to the Problem of partisanship or bipartisanship when we apply it To the media and not to a party and let's look At Germany Of course, it's a different system. We have more than two parties competing with each other We have a government that usually Has to govern in a coalition most of the time which is very different and our US does it But it's also very different in the media at least it Different than it is now in the US especially in broadcasting the idea of Bipartisanship is very powerful. It's actually in the law and from the Rundfunks Staatsvertrag It's called the German Interstate Broadcasting Treaty. I quote I quote in English now. It's my translation In fulfilling its mandate Public service broadcasting must take into account the principles of objectivity and Impartiality by partisanship of reporting diversity of opinion and the balance of offers and programs now this is pretty clear-cut and Many people argue about this all the time because it's an objective that is very hard to maintain In everyday media work and in broadcasting, but it's there and it causes a lot of problems also Do you think that's still justified nowadays to actually put that into law or into an interstate treaty as it is called? Or should this be changed? So I realize that this is a very boring pedantic answer to everything, but these questions are highly context dependent so I think the If for lack of a better term the prescription for how to quote unquote fix the media in the US is very different From what one could possibly say in Germany in a case like Germany. I would say Move very slowly and don't break things It's not broken as it is. There are things you can criticize There might be mistakes that have been made but don't fall into the trap that Again, if you permit the term, I think right-wing populists are very good at creating some of these parties and movements have been very good at sometimes mobilizing counter-publics on the internet to put pressure on so-called established media on Basically journalism as a practice as it exists and say look we know that you're all Lefty liberals and We're gonna put pressure on you We're gonna make you think that you first always have to prove to us that what we say about you isn't true in the United States, this has been going on for decades and I think this trap really worked well again in the age of Trump when for a long time for a long time journalists did not know how to deal with a situation of Asymmetrical polarization when as I was hinting earlier basically the Republican Party has gone in an extremist direction You might not like the Democrats You might find that you know their program has become too leftist in certain ways You might not like the new Green Deal blah blah blah blah, but these are all normal disagreements within a democracy What Republicans have done is in many ways not normal Journalists who basically had been laboring under the shadow of the accusation that they're all prejudiced and Journalists who have been trained to think that oh, I'm gonna prove objectivity By basically talking about both sides and saying this side is saying this and that side is saying that For a long time We're following a model which with all due respect was clearly Inappropriate for the age of Trump where they ended up saying things as recently as last September Along the lines of all the two parties now live in different realities Again, the point is not to say all that you know the Democrats have everything right and you know their plans are correct obviously not but One party when it came to the pandemic for instance was clearly not really living Within the reality anymore that most other people saw as the decisive decisive reality So if I can give any more specific answer to your Question about about about Germany. I don't see anything as fundamentally broken I think there is something to be learned from what has gone wrong in other countries There is of course always room for self criticism as always room for checking oneself and and and you know asking whether one perhaps as Occasionally crossed the line between reporting an opinion etc etc that but that standard that standard fair But that's not a reason to think that institutionally anything has gone wrong has has gone fundamentally wrong Well, maybe something has gone wrong after all even in Germany and I say this said this goes really against my grain against my Would I think was a justified? Reaction or not what happened in 2015 the so-called refugee crisis I always flinch when I heard crisis because it was not a crisis for Germany was a crisis for the people who had to flee A war in the country, but that's the term. It's been used a refugee crisis the flüchtlings krize the so-called Because you also talked about pluralism of course and in your forthcoming book you talk a great deal about internal and external pluralism so to speak now If you look at 2015 There was virtually as I remember it no big media outlet or publisher who strongly opposed the opening of the board And for quite some time actually I was surprised at the time even the build side there There was very little opposition that changed after a while for good as we know But some people argue now and from a political Perspective I would like to ask you this that this facilitated the advent and certainly the growth Of the AFD a populist party from the book so to speak as you define it and you quoted to or you refer to it all the time In your book since anti pluralism is at the core of their identity And I think this is actually somehow what happened in 2015 that there was no big media outlet who said well We don't think it's a very good idea and there were many people of course From the German population who thought this is probably not a good idea and their voice was not being heard And at the time I was glad it was not being heard. I think oh wow Germany is doing a great job here in the first few months, you know And then after a year after two I thought was it really was it really a good idea not to have this outlet for Not for right-wing extremism, but just for a concerned right-wing voice, which again it goes against my grain But it was not there. There was no pluralism Wasn't that dangerous actually or could it be dangerous at a point where actually there is no external pluralism or Very little external pluralism in the media in situations like these Maybe I miss remember, but I think there were plenty of voices in 2015 including very prominent intellectual voices who Articulated not just discontent, but you know very specific criticisms of what was happening So remember debates like slaughtered like in Safran ski versus our colleague. I mean I say for instance Now, you know, it's it's one thing to say or there were these debates It's another thing to say well media maybe in general were tending in one particular Direction, I Also don't quite see that what I do see though And this is partly based on looking at how some of the representatives of some of these institutions and later talked about it Was actually goes back to one of the things I was trying to articulate in the talk It was not very clear how they came to these decisions Was it very contingent? Was it a matter of oh? The editor-in-chief of built just happened to be Vacationing on a Greek island and he sees a couple of refugees and he has an epiphany and he realizes They're just like us. They're just like my family. We have to help them Whereas, you know couple of a couple of years earlier all the Greeks They're lazy not none of our euros for them and so on oh for sure Yeah, I think there's a kind of substantive point But there's also a procedural point and I think it was it was it was it was perfectly right then and it's perfectly right now To press as I was trying to say in the talk editorial boards or have somebody who is sort of answerable Who then you know you can address and say how come that you kind of took this view and not that view? Having said that I think it's also maybe worth clarifying that while you're certainly right that this was the decisive breakthrough for a party which You know by the early summer 2015 seemed to be on the verge of self-destruction for all kinds of way This was obviously the decisive breakthrough At the same time from my point of view and again some of you might disagree strongly with this a Party that opposes immigration is not somehow automatically Dangers for democracy. This is a matter of reasonable pluralism. It's not my personal view You will have guessed but I think it's fundamentally wrong to say that somebody who says we want in broadly speaking less immigration is Automatically doing something anti-democratic It's another thing if a party is basically linking an anti-immigration statement with the Insightment of hatred against minorities in the country and of course very often that happens I mean even Trump said famously or infamously, you know There might be some good people to remember in 2015. Also. He was talking about. Oh, you know, Mexico sending us not their best people But there's some good people too But everybody understood what he was really trying to really trying to say and there's a difference also between somebody who says look You know our immigration policy is like this But we're not making any statements about particular religions or particular cultures which again I don't think this as such anti-democratic as it stands the difference between that and somebody who says There's a secret plan by Angela Merkel to replace the German folk with Syrians And as you know, that's a real-world example from the IFT as well That's that's sort of the dividing line and it's not always entirely clear Of course granted and some of these actors have become very savvy at sort of dancing around this line and of course Engaging in a fair amount of dog whistling even though sometimes the woof-woof is loud enough for everyone to hear So I'm not saying it's an it's an easy thing to easy easy thing to decide But I think if you if you systematically shut down a debate around certain issues and say oh, that's always already Anti-democratic right-wing populism. I think that's not good for the health of a democracy overall I realize this wasn't entirely what you were asking about but I hope it was interesting anyway Thank you so much. I think it's time to open up For you at home or on the road for your questions. I do have a couple of more, but it's been so interesting I think we should open up Christian Are you ready? What do you have for us? well It's on it's on okay Yes, we have a couple of questions online on Slido Maybe start with a few and then We see where we take it. So the first question is regarding The fragmentation of the public sphere Magali asks isn't the real problem with regards to political parties and media fragmentation Former big parties are losing electorates making it harder to find common ground whereas fragmentation of publics is taking place No common language and truth Again good. We're just to say difficult difficult question Fragmentation certainly can pose problems if Belgium Takes more than 500 days to form a government Because there are so many parties. There's so many fractures It's hard to argue that this is somehow great because it's more diversity or it's more options to to express yourself Nevertheless, I think the kind of sometimes almost automatic assumption Especially prevalent in the country where we're right now that the decline of people's parties is in and of itself Assign of what people often refer to as a crisis of representation. I think is mistaken societies change and Parties change alongside them Yes, it can make life more difficult But as we've seen in a couple of countries where what used to be kind of duopoly or as some critics would have put it Where you had basically cartel parties in the old systems where these sort of systems have fragmented much more It was possible in the end to find reasonable coalitions just to give one brief example For a while during the euro crisis people said oh look at southern Europe crisis of representation Populous parties everywhere series are five stars put emos etc etc From my perspective the real crisis of representation would have been if the old systems with two you know large Supposedly center-right and center-left parties as in Greece as in Spain would have continued forever Both basically always implementing very similar policies Both pretty corrupt in some in some cases. I think people had very good a very good sense that this is you know Not proper democratic politics and in retrospect It's almost miraculous that you know young people would found a party like Podemos Which again you don't have to like I'm not saying that you know It's in and of itself a great thing, but the fact that they they form a new party they go out they vote for it The party loses They go back home, and they say we'll try again is not something that can be taken for granted in a democracy Just think back to the 1970s when young people who said the system is totally blocked This isn't working for us sometimes had somewhat more radical ideas about what to do what to do next So in that sense I think fragmentation again, it's very context-dependent, but in many cases can actually I think be a good thing in a Inevitably in certain ways more fragmented societies Now the other big thing truth So you will have noticed that I was kind of skirting around around this around this issue in the in the in the talk I'll just give you a very quick answer to this and if anybody wants to come back to it. Obviously, I'm happy to say say more about this Yes, there are obvious cases when political actors are denying Facts, but at the same time it's also true. No pun intended that as Hannah aren't famously observed Politics is not as such as sight for truth Because if you can claim the truth It potentially becomes despotic in a pluralistic Democracy we're seeing this at the moment when I think mistakenly occasionally Science is invoked as if it's simply delivered a truth about what to do politically and thereby displace a legitimate debate in Light of different values different experiences different assessments of what certain risks and threats really mean So as our end also pointed out politics is properly the site of judgments and opinions These need to be constrained by facts for sure, but the facts themselves Let alone the truth is not going to answer political questions What we have to do about an impending climate catastrophe has to be constrained by what scientists tell us but what we actually do is still a political question and If you are part of the let's all have a good time now And we'll just hope for some technological breakthrough in 10 years party You're gonna have a different take but not necessarily totally legitimate from the party that says look We got at least think a hundred years ahead to our grandchildren These are different moral judgments, but they might both be compatible with an agreement about basic facts I've put all this very crudely But I think it's been in and of itself a problem that in the past couple of years Liberals again in the widest sense of that term have sometimes thought that the best way to respond To the rise of so-called right-wing populism is to simply say oh But you know what they say is always a lie. It's always fake news We always know in advance of whatever they say is probably made up stuff and we can dismiss and we have the truth And that is only a step away from a sort of typically technocratic point of view where you basically end up saying We own rationality and if you don't agree with us You basically reveal yourself to be irrational and in most cases that's not how democratic politics should work So I'd like to put it even more crudely actually fragmentation is not necessarily a threat to Democracy and in politics truth can be that is partic Category so to speak as you said with honor Is there more in this vein or are there other topics that were popping up on on Slido Christian? What do you have for us? There's another question about that at an adaptability of the democratic political system I'm trying to summarize question a bit asks Doesn't the democratic political system have to adapt to technological change and economic developments in order to exist and function permanently? What adjustments needs to be made? For example, isn't it time to start exploring alternatives forms of citizen participation in public decisions? Again, let me give a very clear answer. Yes, and no, so of course democratic systems need to adapt they constantly face new challenges There's nothing automatic or automatically Advantages about democracy in terms of being more flexible I think for a long time after the end of the Cold War there was a kind of assumption that Yes democracies make mistakes all the time, but we are automatically the learning system all the Authoritarians are basically stupid. They're all going to end like the Soviet Union in 1991 I think from the vantage point of 2021 that looks very naive this by the way It's not about the end of history or this kind of cliche stuff, which I think nobody ever really believed But this sort of sense that democracy is have a kind of inbuilt Epistemic advantage. I think that was very widespread and there's still a sort of sense that yeah We kind of we kind of make mistakes, but we know how to correct and that maybe isn't always true And I think I think the the the questioner is completely right to push us more in this in this direction More specifically though on different forms of citizen participation Yes, there are plenty of things we should think about more and people are thinking about these things more So randomly selected citizens assemblies, especially for issues which parties find very difficult to decide because they concern basically The institutions from which parties currently benefit so classic example Should you should you decide to have a smaller parliament? This has been an ongoing debate again in the country we're in right now For obvious reasons many parties don't want to do that because it was it would cost them themselves these sorts of institutional issues I think are very good candidates for being handed over to citizens assemblies as many of you know They're very good examples from Ireland in particular, but also from Iceland where basically so-called crowdsourced Assemblies did much better than sort of elitist liberals would have would have would have expected Having said that I don't agree with some of my colleagues who think that we should perhaps even replace elections or the whole party system with Something that looks much more like this sort of direct citizen decision making Because they think that you know parties are too conflictual is too much partisanship. It's too irrational Too much friction, you know so much energy is wasted and so on and so forth and obviously in some cases You know these not not unreasonable criticisms, but I would highlight One important function of elections that a lot of these other institutions don't have and I'll put it in the very crudely realist way, but I partly Do that Because it might be interesting food for thought in light of what we have witnessed in the United States recently as In particular the political scientist Adam Shavorsky has pointed out elections At least initially when you had process of democratization Always operated in the shadow of civil war if you had basic conflicts in a society an election was also a Way for different parties to a conflict to basically flex their muscles to show their strength and Once you had figured out who was stronger and you were the weaker part You probably had good reasons to say okay We're not going to win this at this at this point and we're not going to destroy all our infrastructure in the process Even if even if we might have a marginal chance and we're just gonna wait for the next election We're gonna use the time to convince people of our program or to you know, somehow recruit more adherents and so on so elections have a very important communicative elements element for losers in particular and If you had even the best design citizen assembly and it produces an outcome that you don't like What do you do? How do you go against it? How do you mobilize? How do you do that thing that I was trying to talk about at the beginning of my talk in terms of Structuring conflicts and offering new representations if you dispense with party politics all together At least for me It's very hard to see how you would do that and that's why at least from my point of view at least some of these innovations Are very worthy, but they occasionally Occasionally have a technocratic flavor as if this was simply about finding the singularly You know responsible and rational Solution to a particular problem and then we then we move on and we simply tell the losers. Sorry guys You're irrational and again, that's not how democracies work and that's not how they should work Coming back to the topic of truth or trust and Sven Zekert asks The etymological origin of the world true of the word truth is trust today We are often talking about a lack of truth, but isn't it more about trust which Democratic society should be based on In terms of some of the processes I was trying to make plausible to you earlier such as being partners to a Conflict in such a way that you can fight for your side But at the same time you can trust that the other side doesn't end up denying you legitimacy Doesn't potentially start to enter a cold or God forbid one day real civil war Yes, trust matters in all kinds of ways That's why what I was saying earlier about democracy being about conflict was obviously a one-sided exaggeration You do need some agreement about certain basic rules and certain procedures But again, not just in a technical sense Because unless these rules and procedures can be tied back to ideals that you really share at the end of the day And in particular some basic understanding that this game is about freedom and equality for all. Yeah It's not going to it's not going to work at the same time There are also limits to trust trust is not I would say a particularly Democratic sentiment or virtue You trust your elders you trust elites you trust your betters your trust the government to do the right thing a I would say in certain ways important political theorist of our day once said that democracy is not about trust It's about effort that observation was made by Edward Snowden who I think was getting at something important That if we simply say, oh, let's just trust, you know the institutions that just basically sit back in certain ways I think we're missing an important element of democracy and I realized that this all sounds like civics 101 Especially for those who are tuning in from the Buddha since I put she built and they're gonna say this is so damn obvious Of course, it's about making an effort. Of course. It's about participating and going out there and so on So I'm not claiming to say anything anything new But I'm simply trying to provide some balance to the trust talk and The effort bit again is related to the willingness to engage in conflict in a certain way And not to be misled by the kind of communitarian kits propounded by those who say that democracy should all be about agreement about Mindshafts in not too much identity politics because that's divisive all this kind of all this kind of stuff. I Always wonder just to get in here real quickly is where this effort should be Applied and I think there's a big change going on if we like compare legacy media or traditional media as they are sometimes called Here in Germany traditions meeting and if we talk about new media or social media, so to speak because I Was thinking of Alvin Toffler when you mentioned Newt Gingrich because Newt Gingrich was so fond of Alvin Toffler of a future shock A third wave very influential popular books not only in the United States in the 70s and in the 80s It was a lot about that tech is going to be You know the next society and so forth But one important change that Toffler really foresaw was the you know often cited pro-sumer So that the consumer is becoming a producer Also, and this is definitely one of the I think main traits that digitization brought about and that people You know comment re-comment repost retweet and so forth, but the problem is where I mean Is it like on a global scale all the time or is it at a local level? I mean back in the day you would write Letters to the editor maybe otherwise you didn't really engage that much with your local paper You just read it if you wanted to engage with politics you entered a party and did local political work And if you're living in a small town you actually were made to join a party and do some ground work Because there was just people needed to do that and it's very hard to find them nowadays in smaller community That's one of the reasons they you know They fusion Ian in English and lost They fuse yeah, they sort of grow together and Sometimes I wonder if we need a new notion of participation. They're in digital age that That participation at the basic level should always be local Actually, and it's fair that it's very hard to participate or to sort of co-decide on issues of you know Nationwide importance on a global scale and so forth and that's something we were trained to do in the last 20 years Or this I think sometimes where I go do I really have an opinion on the Conflict in the far East I Don't I probably should shut up, but do we have opinion was going on in my hood so to speak This is something entirely else and something. I think it's really it's really hard to sort of fix that That participation is a very good thing and we have the tools to do this actually But probably we should start at a local level where the effort is Much needed but very hard to very hard to do So let me say two things about this so on the one hand and at the risk of sounding like one of these naive Early 90s enthusiasts for the internet. I think there is still something to be said for what I was trying to describe in the talk as accessibility linked with this notion of Putting yourself forward as essentially a self-appointed self-selected representative of People of ideas of identities of interests that might be out there and that haven't found their proper representative yet So if you had told me a couple of years ago that virtually overnight a hitherto Unknown Florida teenager Emma Gonzalez one of the survivors of the parkland shooting Could have more followers on Twitter in the National Rifle Association One of the most powerful lobby groups in the US. I would have said no way now has that changed everything? Of course not and yet it may have formed a particular public it may have allowed people to kind of recognize each other and as the largely forgotten French sociologist Gabriel Tart pointed out when publics form eventually also actual crowds might then Emerge from those publics on the ground and we saw a bad example of that on January 6 But we also saw good examples of that when all of a sudden people went out there and marched on the basis of what had been sort of Pure internet publics and I know there's a tendency to dismiss all this as click-to-vism and so on But I would still air on the side of saying no It is important that somebody puts a new if you like representational offering into play now to your actual question Yes, the local matters a great deal and that's exactly the reason why the emergence of so-called news deserts and the and The basically loss of of local journalism for in the case of the US literally millions of people is such a big deal It's not true that oh local is always easier I mean anybody who's ever had a proper fight with their neighbors or it lives in the eigentume of the mineshaft knows that again This kind of communitarian kitsch only goes only goes so far, but it's still true that in an age when Even you know when when even when local newspapers somehow survive They're usually nowadays filled with national news So actually news agencies have become more important because these local newspapers are simply filled with Content that is it's not the content isn't bad, but it's basically just national stuff That fills the pages and at least in the US forgive me for being so American or centric at least in the US What does national mean? Well, it probably is gonna be culture war stuff that riles people up and reinforces partisan identities in the wrong kind of way and Deepens polarization, etc. Etc. Whereas yes, there are plenty of local issues that people again might not necessarily agree about But where they're not gonna say, you know, I end up hating you Just because we have a different view about the local sewage problem and how it should possibly How it should possibly be be addressed So yes the kind of the disappearance of local of of local public spheres is a major issue The inability to make good on promises which as far as I'm concerned were always good promises of public journalism Citizen journalism. A lot of these I think were very good ideas But they didn't in the end as far as I can tell produce the kind of engagement that really would have made up for the loss of Proper engaged Local journalism that kept an eye on local counsel debates decisions and so on and that eventually Eventually drew people in and your point just to for those who are particularly interested in this maybe is worth saying Really has a lot of empirical backing. I mean, it's clear that if if local news disappears voting goes down It's much more likely that incumbents are confirmed Fewer people want to stand for office corruption goes up because nobody is looking closely at what is being decided and so on So this has real tangible Consequences for the quality of politics Thank you, maybe one last round Christian before we close this up. Do you have some more or do you want me to to close? I have one one last short question, which is I know if it's easy to answer probably not but maybe to finish Coming back to the question of intermediary powers. Why do you think it will never be possible to have a hundred percent transparent institutions? I think it touched upon that earlier, but as soon as you make something transparent Whatever was going on in the dark previously is going to find a new place and Whatever was going on Inside a is then gonna go on inside inside B. So let's say you make you make all the committee hearings public They're still gonna be back room or back room deals. They're just now gonna happen in a different venue They're gonna happen in the parliamentary bar. They're gonna happen in the restroom. They're gonna be they're gonna be happening somewhere Because again, this is partly what greases the wheels the wheels of politics. This is somehow politicians I think legitimate Desire for a room of maneuver of testing things out of occasionally, you know working within What they generally take to be the principles of their party Such that they don't want to have somebody immediately say, oh, but I you know, I filmed you saying this and This will be a video a tweet whatever forever after and will be held will be held against you That's why I think it's it's better to have a sort of set of modest expectations and say look it is important that Something that you think is one thing isn't something totally different So it just in terms of what we were just talking about in the US There are occasionally now newspapers that look like genuine local newspapers, you know with Genuine-sounding names and people eventually discover that these are basically financed entirely by party or by some political group And I mean, that's a very obvious example, but that's the kind of thing where you realize Okay, it matters if people just fail completely to understand what's going on Not because their own fault or because they're stupid or irrational But because there are not proper mechanisms for making them understand what something actually is So I'm not denying the importance of this, but I worry that in some of our discussions Transparency is a bit like education. It's always the answer to everything, right? Again, I mean, I maybe shouldn't see this for the Buddhists entirely for British ability I'm not going to be invited again if I say anything skeptical about education. Of course, it's important But a hundred percent transparency a I think is not an attainable ideal and B needs to be qualified in a way that actually education doesn't have to be qualified in terms of say, you know They can be legitimate dark slash gray gray areas because that may well be part of the politicians craft as as well So I'll finish on this maybe overly Machiavellian note I'd like to finish on a little lighter notes to at the at the very end actually because if we Distance ourselves from ourselves now for a little bit to 50 year old white men talking about the decline of journalism of local journalism the Effect on and on politics it has we're talking about professional traditional parties so to speak I don't think it was very alarmistic, but at the other hand We all know that we live in a very politicized time where especially younger generations are as politicized as they haven't been for probably half a century on certain issues on particular issues most of the time and Most of them. Maybe this is too crude to say But I think it's also safe to say for the moment most of them do not join traditional parties It's different sort of networks and their digital networks, too that allow them to Put quite some pressure on what we call the may hide scissor shaft here in Germany It's not just hate speech. It's not just echo chambers. It's not such particular interest It's changing quite a bit in a very short amount of time yet The channels they use are not the traditional ones. We've been discussing now in the last an hour and a half So that also puts a lot of hope and not not so much a Machiavellian notion You were stressing now that I share too, but I just wondered do you think that this generation that is as politicized as I think if that's correct? It's going to join parties five years from now ten years from now Or are we going to see this ever-changing network of particular interests that actually are able to exude quite a bit of power? So I generally don't make predictions, especially not about the future I know scientists don't like predictions. I would as one final thought offer the following So Clearly prima facie Yes, it's good if if young people I mean always sounds very patriotic young people I mean all kinds of people are engaged and join movements and so on Again, and maybe this sounds overly pessimistic for you But I don't mean it that way if you look at some of the experiments that have happened in recent years in terms of new forms of parties including so-called platform parties which basically Tried to to some degree imitate the platform model from the internet and translated into something like Podemos We're basically just click and you join no fees. It's just like Facebook. You don't even have to pay for it. It's great a Lot of them eventually moved in the direction of more traditional party structures That's even true I would say of what in many ways was the most radical experiment in this regard namely the five stars movement in Italy Which actually officially was against both of the intermediary institutions? I was talking about today They always said we're not a traditional party And less obviously griddle of the founder always said journalists professional journalists are all corrupt Use my blog talk to me directly telling what's really going on. I'll be the amplifier and so on by now They've become a pretty traditional party in certain ways And I'm not sure that's a bad thing because it's made them more accountable in certain ways it has actually made them More accessible for people who might really want to be part of it in the long run as opposed to Just some kind of you know brief engagement and then out again in the way that the party and the movement itself initially said Okay, we don't really want professional politicians So I'm not saying this proves anything in terms of all the conservative side is going to win And that's great thing too and so on I'm simply trying to highlight the fact that from a normative democratic theory point of view there is still a lot to be said for some of these perhaps old-fashioned structural elements and Eventually people might say yes movements and parties can coexist putting pressure on parties is good transforming movements into new types of parties is good as well and There's To finish hopefully on a halfway optimistic note. There is a good kind of pluralism in all of this Thank you so much. I'm gonna Miller for joining us for this rare live event at least For the two of us for the technical staff for Christian Graufel. Hope to see you soon We don't know exactly when our next event is going to take place, but we'll inform you through the usual social media channels and Other newsletters we have and I hope this is going to be possible with the live audience Maybe sometime this year as I said, but now thank you again very much Jan van der Muren was a pleasure to talk with you Cheers


At an 8th Air Force fighter base on the invasion coast of England, the commander of a combat wing pins DFCs on Thunderbolt pilots. They won those medals in the Battle of Germany, escorting our bombers to their targets. Ramrod is the fighter's name for an escort job, and Ramrod begins at Bomber Command. The route and the plan for the job comes over the scrambler phone into the combat ops room at Fighter Command. The time is late afternoon, October 1st, 1943, and the mission is Ramrod to Emden tomorrow. Let's draw it on the maps, have a look at the job. It's to be a big deal, almost 400 bombers. And here's their route into the target and out again, 300 miles and more each way. And where do they want fighter cover? Where are the rendezvous points? That's the key to a Ramrod job. And so the details are sorted out and boiled down into the field order by A3. The deal is all wrapped up, but still General Kepner, fighter commander, must check before he gives the final OK that releases the whole complex machinery of another attack in the Battle of Germany. From Fighter Command through Fighter Wings, the field order goes by a teleprinter. And finally, at about 2100 hours, the order clatters over the printer at the base of the 56th Fighter Group. The same Ramrod order reaches the group ops room. And here is where words are translated into a weapon, translated into the Ramrod to Emden. First, draw down the bomber route to the target and home again. And then the route of the Thunderbolts of the 56th Group. And all important, the rendezvous point and the rendezvous time. Always that emphasis on time. Because time is gasoline, and gasoline may make the difference between success and failure of this mission. 90 seconds is your margin for error at the rendezvous point. But in those 90 seconds, a whole group of fortresses can be wiped out if fighters miss the rendezvous. Early on the morning of October 2nd, the S2 officers prepare the maps for briefing the pilots who will fly to Emden. In this room, the attack order that began at Bomber Command completes its journey down in the Fighter Group. In another Nissan hut, a group operations officer reaches for the telephone. Briefing at 1330 hours, got it? Briefing at 1330 hours, Roger. It's a belly tank job, so get them on. And the same order goes out to the ops officers of the other squadrons in the 56th Thunderbolt Group. And in each squadron now, the pilots are taking it easy. And they know a job is cooking. And take it easy now, boys, because soon the tension begins. And soon the pilots will know which names are down for each team on today's ramrod to Emden. Each squadron commander knows his men, and wise as a football coach, he lines up his team, flight by flight. Out around the field, the ground crews put on the belly tanks that the Thunderbolts will need today to do their job. The name of this slugger is Little Cookie. And the two crosses record the huns that have been blown to kindling by the eight guns and the wings of these rugged fighters. Two things these fighters can do better than any hunt. They can dish it out, and they can take it. They have to do plenty of both. The guns are loaded, the tank is on, and finally the gas. The precious gas. Back at headquarters, the group CO studies the job in the ops room. A veteran of more than eight emissions, he knows full well what these lines on the map mean to planes and pilots. Like a Tascannini or a Benny Goodman, he must absorb and memorize the music, because he leads the job today. And next, let's check with Stormy, the weather officer. Over the sea to landfall, six-tenths cloud at low altitude. The Dutch island should be open for a landmark. But expect an overcast in the target area. The wind clocks at 110 miles per hour at 30,000 feet from the west. So get down low coming home or you might not get home. And then the S-2 officer checks the flak map. Those red areas up there on the Dutch coast spell danger. Any aircraft guns are down below that reach up to 30,000 feet, so look out. Now in the briefing room, the S-2 officers in the ops officers wind up the job of laying out today's mission on the large-scale map. And outside now, from scouted corners of a station that is sprawled all over the English hills, carefully dispersed to guard against sneak raiders, the 50 or more pilots who will go out today in thunderbolts, arrive at the briefing shack on battered bicycles and some in the always reliable jeep. If it weren't for the bikes and the jeeps, you'd have to spend half of each day just walking between the places. You have to go on the average fighter station in Britain. The bomber crews were briefed hours ago for today's ramrod to Emden. A fighter briefing is plenty serious. 50 or more pilots for the day's job file into the briefing hut and there they sit down. The CO comes in and the briefing begins. Well, here it is. The big friends are pasting Emden today. We're to give fighter cover from Zood Camp over the target and back out again to the sea and then part way home. The 56 will lead the show in. We escort the lead box of bombers. We've got to give them headgun cover. Nothing must break through. The fourth fighter group covers the tail of our task force and there should be over a hundred of us. The B-17s will be in three boxes of 60 each, altitude 25,000 feet. The course home is 249 degrees magnetic. And remember, our rendezvous with the bombers is at 1548 at Zood Camp. They'll be to the north of us. Start engine at 1443. Takeoff 1449 to 1458. Set course 1503 at 3,000 feet. Course out, 80 degrees. Target 89 degrees, 1600. Course back, 249. Land at 1722. On the back of his hand, each pilot writes down the dope on the day's job. And now back to the CO again. My wingman, White 2, will relay messages and work on the bomber channel. For the takeoff, I will lead the 61st off runway 5. The 62nd will queue up on runway 6. After I take off, the 63rd will move into position and be ready to shove as soon as the runway is cleared. And now the dope on the enemy flak and fighters for the day's job from the S-2 officer. The flak map shows you where you may have trouble today. Heavy flak around a mutant in Amsterdam and over the target, so open up. Stay out to sea on the way home. German fighter strength is heavy here. Look out for twin engine rocket ships. They'll be below you. Keep your eye out for them and don't let them through to the bombers. And now the dope on the weather. Weather will be important today because the bombers are going to hit the hunt through heavy cloud. And the weather officer takes over the briefing now. You'll see just about enough ground today to know the earth is down below. The target area and the whole stretch of the Zijdersee and Holland will be pretty well covered. The front over to the west of us won't affect the base for your return. There'll be scattered cloud winds above 110 miles per hour at 250 degrees. Con trails are possessed at 31,000. And now with a time check, the briefing will come to an end. This moment is dramatic in its tension and important. 4,000 men will be in the air on this ramrod to Emden. All 4,000 must be synchronized to the second. Okay boys, good hunting. Jeeps will carry pilots to the planes. In England as in Burma or in Italy, general mud hangs to your feet. And like everything else in every army, the jeep must carry twice the load it was designed to do. 54 pilots ride out to 54 planes. None of them know what lies ahead. They aren't worried because so far this group has shot down huns at the rate of four for one. The crew chief helps the pilot into his chute. The crew chiefs worship their planes and their pilots. And they always say, good luck sir, see you later. And sometimes they may say, how about lending me a pound until tomorrow boss? And now the time for start engine year. Six minutes after the first engine starts, the first squadron must begin to take off. Seven minutes later all 54 planes must be airborne. Chiefs ride the wings to guide the pilots into the tight packed lineup on the runway. Remember, no seconds can be wasted now. These thunderbolts will need every thimble of gas to get to the target and fight and then get home again today. Sprinters at the start has gone. Make a slow turn and then before he finishes a half turn of the field, 16 planes of his squadron plus two spares must be airborne and in position. The first squadron is off and the second gets away from the other runway. The third squadron moves into readiness where the first squadron took off two minutes ago. One slow climbing turn, all three squadrons will assemble and form into a huge V. The lead squadron in the center, the spearhead. The flights fly in a four-ship V, eight aircraft operating as a section. The trailing section flying 500 feet above the other. The two spares of each squadron struggle behind. Now the whole group sets course on 80 degrees. A slow climb to the Dutch coast, then open up into battle formation. Three hours from now, home again if you're lucky. Other fields, other fighter groups take off. Thunderbolts and lightning. In the Battle of Germany a fighter's first, last and only job is to protect the bomber. Thunderbolts must climb the high cover positions above the bomber. Climb slow and compact and then open up. Each squadron to its planned position. Throttles are kept pretty well forward so fighters must weave in orbit to cover the slower bomber. Sometimes our fighters will pull out five miles ahead to break up the frontal attack by the hunts. The Thunderbolts operate like interference in football, taking out the attackers. And it's a sight he didn't begin their slashing attacks through the bomber formations. The Thunderbolts are on top of the attackers. See those two flares? Green-green distress signal. A bomber needs help. And here come two Thunderbolts. A sticky string of lightnings moves into the battle. They cover the bombers on deepest penetrations into Germany. Keep on his tail and to the pinpoint, targets down below lips cannot take evasive action until they must forget his nose guns now and concentrate on that bomb site. Through cloud of clear skies, those eggs must go down and find the target. See those eggs on targets like these. On some missions, all the bombers go for a single target. On other days, several task forces will hammer different targets. Thunderbolts are on that island.