Former students filed into CEMEX auditorium Saturday, Oct. 14, as Michael McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, led a panel discussion on the global surge of populism, titled “The State of Democracy, at Home and Abroad.” McFaul was joined on stage by Senior Fellows Francis Fukuyama and Anna Grzymala-Busse as well as Research Scholar Didi Kuo, with the aim of the discussion being to gauge “the scope of the problem, causes of the problem, and then prescriptions.” The event was held as one of the University’s “Classes without Quizzes” Reunion Homecoming weekend events.
“We are in the twelfth year of democratic recession worldwide,” McFaul said at the start of the discussion.
Kuo focused her remarks largely on what she considers a shift from identity politics and democracy during and after Trump’s election. She emphasized the role and responsibility of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook in facilitating the spread of “fake news” from organizations in Russia to the people of the US. She also described the consequences of political gridlock in blocking the US government from progressive policies.
“You have a lot of devolution of policy making to branches of government that are not tasked with policy making in this way,” Kuo said.
Meanwhile, Grzymala-Busse portrayed the increasingly populist political landscape in Europe, looking at Poland and Hungary. She explained how “support for populism more than tripled” and how some countries aimed to combat collusion in elections by reverting to paper ballots (in the Netherlands) and through campaigns against “fake news” (in Finland).
“Europe is in trouble,” Grzymala-Busse said. “The most immediate cause has been the failure of mainstream parties.”
Finally, Fukuyama broadened the context to include autocratic regimes like those in China and North Korea. He explained that the number of democracies worldwide leapt from 35 to 120 by the end of the 20th century but started declining in the mid 2000s. He also emphasized his concern that major challenges to democracy are “now arising from countries we thought were democracies.” Furthermore, Fukuyama drew attention to America’s wavering status as the symbol of democratic success.
“Chinese students might not go back to Beijing saying, ‘We want this gridlock, partisan warfare, and inability to pass laws,’” Fukuyama said.
Shortly after McFaul opened questions to the floor, he realized only two minutes remained, so most questions received no answers. McFaul tried to hurry along some of the audience members but paused for one question in particular.
“Do you ever question whether you are on the right side of things?” an audience member asked. “You’re trying to normalize a progressive analytical state, and it may not be what everybody in this country wants, so you may be on the wrong side, and my question is whether you’re asking yourself that question?”
Many in the audience laughed at the question, but McFaul grew noticeably taken aback. He and the rest of the panel spent most of their remaining time dispelling the notion that they serve some partisan agenda.
“The reason I reacted to that is, to assume that we have debates here at Stanford that there’s just two sides to, there’s like 25 sides to everything, and that’s what makes us great,” McFaul said. “These are analytical debates, not political debates.”
A one-hour discussion on the state of global democracy could never comprehensively cover the topic. While the four academics offered immense insight, a lack of time left many questions unanswered.
Holden Foreman is a freshman events reporter at Stanford Politics.