- Democracy is under attack in the former Soviet-dominated lands of Eastern Europe, in Turkey, Brazil, India.

And yes, even in the United States of America.

Today's guest urges us not to look for leaders to whom we can ascribe blame, but to look at ourselves and discern our own role in the weakening of America's democratic institutions.

He's Tom Nichols, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(relaxed music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with "The Providence Journal."

- Each week, we talk about big issues with great guests: authors, journalists, artists, and more to make sense of the big stories that shape public life in the United States today.

This week, we're joined by an acclaimed author, strategist, and scholar, Tom Nichols, who is one of the world's great Twitter follows.

But he's also the author of a new book, "Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy."

Tom, thank you so much for being with us.

- [Tom] It's great to be back with you guys.

- so the book really is remarkable, "Our Own Worst Enemy."

Can you just give our audience sort of that 30,000 foot overview of what the book is?

- Sure.

Liberal democracy is in trouble, and it's in trouble in the United States and around the world because people no longer believe in liberal values like tolerance, secularism, civic mindedness, stoicism, and we've had a tendency for years to blame others.

That we blame globalization.

We blame the elites.

We blame technology.

We blame foreign countries.

And the central theme of the book is that as members of democracy, the responsibility falls on us.

We are our own worst enemy.

A lot of the problems that we face in the late 20th and now early 21st century, These were all within our grasp to solve, but we prefer to blame others.

And we're becoming a very uncivic culture, and you can't sustain a democracy on narcissism, selfishness, intolerance.

And so basically the book is an argument that we need to look at ourselves and think about how to rekindle civic reengagement to support the kind of citizenship that liberal democracy requires to survive.

- That's not a simple argument to make.

And you were candid before we started taping that you have some anxiety about how this is gonna be received.

- Yeah, I mean, it was a hard book to write because it's difficult to turn to your fellow citizens and say, look, I think you're the problem.

We're the problem.

I'm the problem.

It's always easier to blame somebody else.

It's easier to say, well, it's the Chinese or it's the oil companies in the '70s or it's the internet.

As if we have no agency or freedom or responsibility for anything that's happened over the past 40 or 50 years.

And it's very anxiety-producing to say, I think I've figured out why this is happening, and it's you and me.

And we have to take responsibility for this.

That's not an argument anybody ever likes to make.

- So can you break down some of the root causes of what you describe as a descent or an evolution or whatever the word is into an uncivic society?

I mean, obviously, there have been a lot of changes in many things: technology, politics, and whatnot.

Give us the root causes.

- Well, There are three things I identify (clears throat), excuse me, in the book.

One of them is that we've basically come to expect peace, affluence, and a very high standard of living.

And of course, to go back to Jim's question about why that provokes a little anxiety, when you say we live in a time of peace and prosperity, inevitably somebody says, no, we live in a time of forever war and poverty and misery.

When in fact all of the evidence suggests that we live in the healthiest and best time in human history.

Even the poorest among us live a better life than they did 50 years ago.

Now, there's a lot of inequality.

The very wealthy are much richer than they once were.

The rising tide has not lifted all boats equally quickly.

But there is this weird nostalgia for a time that people think was better, When in fact I think, to go back to your question, Wayne, the three main things that have driven this are the end of the Cold War and the advent of a long period of peace, punctuated by military conflicts that have been outsourced to volunteers, frankly.

A time of great affluence, even spreading down into the middle and working classes, and technology providing us with a very high standard of living that has produced, there's a phrase and I use it in the book, that sociologists use called hedonic adaptation where the level you're living at becomes kind of the base level.

Like if you've always had a king size bed, all other beds seem small.

If you've always eaten hamburgers, hotdogs seem cheap, and on and on and on.

And I think we've just gotten used to that level of entitlement.

And so when anything goes wrong, we say, well, things change.

Factories close or industries move.

And therefore the government and the world and society is at fault.

And I'm angry and I'm not to blame.

Somebody has betrayed me.

And again, you can't sustain a democracy on this constant sense that everything I do is right and everything everyone else has done to me is wrong and I'm a victim.

- Isn't that really the essence of narcissism?

- Well, the underlying, the thing I was gonna say is that all of these are predicated on, we're taping this remotely.

The first time I'm not in the studio with both of you.

We're taping this remotely during a pandemic, and yet the real pandemic, the one that's been going on for over 40 years is a pandemic of narcissism.

And it's rampant in the United States, but it's spreading in other countries.

There's a lot of data on this over the past 40 or so years, since about the late '70s, that narcissism has really become a wildfire out of control in Western societies.

And there's a lot of reasons for that.

Again, high living standards, the ability to do a lot of things without having to interact with other people.

The fact that we have fewer children, the baby boom is over.

And so we're not as woven into some of those middle-level institutions that children kind of drag us into.

We live in more living space and further away from each other.

There's a lot of reasons for it, but we have become an incredibly narcissistic society where if any of our wants are not satisfied, forget about needs for a moment.

I mean, even if our wants are not satisfied, we assume that someone has screwed us over and betrayed us and that the government is failing to meet our needs.

And it is poisonous.

- So yeah, I wanna go in a million different directions on this.

But I remember at some point learning, I think it was a Benjamin Disraeli who said that a democracy is a race between education and disaster.

Is the solution to restoring civic virtue education?

How do you stop people from being narcissistic?

- I don't know.

And I probably shouldn't say that because there's supposed to be a big solution at the end of the book.

(Jim laughing) It's one of those things where I'm supposed to say, ah, buy the book and I'll tell you in the last chapter how I figured it all out.

- [Wayne] Spoiler alert, spoiler alert.

- It's ironic for the guy who wrote "The Death of Expertise" to say that education is not the answer.

In fact, universal education as I argued in my previous book, has actually increased this narcissism because people think they know more than they do.

And I didn't go too deeply into this, into the book, But the other problem with universal, I wouldn't say universal.

Universal high school education and very high levels of college attendance is that we are hollowing out working-class towns that used to be full of people who did things like be plumbers and contractors and electricians.

And we basically now have kind of an unskilled labor pool, and then people who went to college who or angry that their degree in the humanities isn't creating a six-figure job for them.

We are overproducing, there's a professor at Yukon who has a great expression about this.

"We are overproducing elites who don't have anything to do."

We are creating all these kinds of college-educated folks whose educations aren't really that relevant to earning a living, and now don't know what to do with themselves.

So I don't think education is the answer.

I actually believed, and when I spoke to both of you last about "The Death of Expertise," I thought a disaster might snap us out of this and force us to collaborate with each other, like a pandemic, exactly.

And actually it's just accentuated those narcissistic differences between us, which I think is a real national tragedy.

So I'm not quite sure what does it.

I'm left with a certain amount of hectoring to tell people, I think tough love between ourselves as citizens, where we stop encouraging these narratives of victimhood and displacing responsibility from ourselves.

One of the things that struck me writing the book, and then I'll get off this soapbox, is how much we do not respond to things as adults anymore.

We've become a very permanently adolescent culture.

We are quick to take offense.

We nurture grudges.

We believe that we are always victims.

We think that anything that doesn't go our way is somebody else's fault.

As a kid who grew up in the '60s and '70s, it really strikes me how I live in a society that doesn't seem to have adults in it anymore.

And I think that's part of the narcissism problem.

- So you talk about the wildfire of narcissism.

Explain if you can, and I'm sure you can, the role the internet has played on that, number one, and then the role of different news channels from "Fox" to "CNN," to sort of the mainstream, the old-fashioned "ABC" and whatnot.

Those have played roles of course.

- Oh, the internet takes narcissism and injects just this massive jolt of steroids into it.

And I'm sitting here saying this as part of the problem.

As I say in the book, I'm part of the problem.

We are too hyper-connected to each other, said the guy with a half million Twitter followers.

But I think, someone had a great line once about Twitter, and I wish I could remember who said it.

That every tweet amounts to a declaration, a demand to acknowledge that I exist.

- [Jim] Oh, that's beautiful.

- Yeah, it is.

Every tweet is a declaration and a demand.

Acknowledge that I exist.

And I think social media encourages something that was already becoming a problem earlier on.

In the '70s, the social critic Christopher Lasch, and I point this out in the book, Lasch said, "We have become a performative culture."

We don't do things for their own sake or because they are virtuous or good.

We do them because everything we do is a performance for other people where we then demand gratification.

Social media allows you to perform for hundreds of millions of people every day, every hour of the day, all day long.

And the media, Wayne, to link this to your point, the media, because we have an unlimited amount of bandwidth for media, the media stovepipes itself.

And of course the media is now a money-making venture instead of a public service on the public airwaves.

The media tailors everything to you and to generate your attention and your sense of importance.

All of these Chirons, And I talk about this in "The Death of Expertise," and I link it to this in our "Own Worst Enemy."

It is all day sitting with your fight-or-flight syndrome.

Something terrible is happening and you're in the middle of it.

And you have to make a decision and the world needs to know right now what you think.

In the book, there's a lot of nostalgia of my own in the book about pop culture.

People of a certain age will remember "Lost in Space" that had a robot that was always walking around with its arms flailing going danger, danger, Will Robinson, danger.

And I said turning on your cable TV now is like living with that robot all day long shaking its arms at you and trying to get your attention and telling you that you're in danger.

And it is absolutely maddening, and it demands that you make a decision.

You right now, you are so important that this story cannot go on without you.

And for reference, someone pointed this out to me just the other day on social media ironically enough, that when the Apollo 13 disaster happened, it happened at about one in the morning Eastern Time, Walter Cronkite goes on the air.

He stays on the air for three or four hours and then says, well, our next update will be in about three hours.

We'll come back on at about six o'clock in the morning.

And there was this sense of, no, we're not sitting here all night just constantly reviewing that these three men could die.

We've told you what we can.

Mission control has given us all the information they have.

You have to get some sleep and go to work in the morning.

We'll see again around seven o'clock.

And if there's anything else, we'll come back on.

But until then, we don't expect any news.

And the idea of doing that today is unthinkable.

It is unthinkable that in the middle of a crisis that a newscaster would say, all right, we all have to get some rest.

You go get some rest and we'll see in three hours.

Now, it's this constant narcissistic gong-slamming that you are the most important person in this story.

And without you, this won't get figured out.

And that's insane.

And it keeps people in a constant stew of stress chemicals in their body.

- You make a point in the book that this is not just happening in the United States.

That in fact, the trend towards illiberal democracies, and we might wanna define what that means for the audience, but that illiberal democracies are actually growing in number around the world.

- Yes, and one of the reasons that I shied away from making more economic arguments is that the economic arguments about this fall apart when you look around the world.

There are people who've argued for example that the United States has this problem because we have great income inequality.

And yet, as other people have pointed out, some of the most illiberal regimes such as Hungary, I mean, Hungary is an European nation.

It's a member of NATO.

It's part of the European family.

Is one of the most illiberal regimes and has very low income inequality.

Poland has developed a serious anti-Muslim movement in a country that has almost no Muslims in it.

This is manipulation by political entrepreneurs who have figured out that keeping people scared and angry is a path to power.

And by illiberal democracy, it almost seems contradictory doesn't it to say, well, it's a democracy but it's not liberal.

And illiberal democracy is just a majoritarian tyranny.

It's where 51% of the people get together and say, you know what?

51% of us have decided that women shouldn't be able to vote.

51% of us have decided that gay people should be put in camps.

51% of us have decided that there should only be one religion and it should be the state religion.

I mean, technically, it's democratic and that a majority decides, but it's a majority deciding based purely on ideas that are intolerant and in the end undemocratic.

And you can see this happening in the United States when people say things like my elected representatives shouldn't do what he or she thinks is best or what the Constitution is about.

They should just do what we tell them to do.

Well, that's not democracy.

That's mobocracy.

That's majoritarian tyranny.

And the Constitution, the American Constitution was written specifically to avoid that outcome.

- I wanna get back just for a minute to the root causes of the behaviors, what you're describing.

And the term instant gratification comes to mind.

And you're talking about people not acting like adults.

And when I think of a toddler, a three- or four-year-old wants something, wants it immediately, doesn't get it, throws a tantrum.

Is that part of what's happening as well?

- Yeah, and there's an added problem here which is boredom.

And I talk about this in the book.

It's not just that a toddler wants a particular toy.

It's a bored, tired, cranky toddler who wants a toy.

Boredom, back in the early 1950s, there's a classic book by a writer named Eric Hoffer.

And Hoffer warned us 70 years ago.

He said there is no signal that a society is, there's no better signal that a society is ripe for a mass movement, an anti-democratic mass movement, than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.

And so we have this kind of bored toddler-like citizenry that if the wifi goes out, they lose their minds.

If air travel isn't cheap enough and comfortable enough, they punch the stewardess.

Flight attendant, sorry, I just showed my age by saying (muffled speaking).

They punch the flight attendant.

That if they have to wait in line in a sporting event, they lose their minds.

But partly that is the result of affluence.

We don't have to pull together.

We generally don't have to wait for things we want.

We have 140 channels of everything to keep us entertained.

We have grocery stores bulging with foods that, I just had this conversation with a friend from Massachusetts the other day when we were talking about strawberry season.

The idea that you would say to someone now, well, there aren't any strawberries in the store because it's not strawberry season.

Go to a supermarket now, and you can have anything you want anytime of the year, year round.

The idea of waiting and saying, well, I eat strawberries between, July and September.

That doesn't happen anymore.

- [Wayne] There'd be an online petition saying give us strawberries.

- Or why are you keeping the strawberries from us.

- Yes, why are the elites, exactly, why are the elites hoarding strawberries during the winter months?

- [Wayne] It's so true.

- And people just don't understand, before the show, Jim, you and I were talking about that Harold Macmillan quote.

In 1957, Harold Macmillan said, "Our people have never had it better."

And I don't wanna sound like Harold Macmillan, but there is this problem that when people say the 21st century, I have students say this to me all the time.

These are the worst times ever.

And democracy has failed.

And that's what made me write the book.

These are not the worst times ever.

These aren't even the really bad times.

I mean, I graduated from high school at the end of the 1970s, I think a demonstrably worse time than the one we live in.

And democracy has not failed us.

And if you think democracy has failed, then democracy relies on the behavior of its citizens.

And if you really believe that, you need to look in the mirror and take a good, hard, long look in the mirror.

- So Tom, I don't know that we can have this conversation without talking about January 6th, 2021 and the events of that day.

Can you put the events of that day into the context that you're talking about in this book?

- Oh, absolutely.

Who were the people who start in the Capitol?

Were these the downtrodden and the poor and the people who had been left behind?

No, these are people that took private jets.

They chartered flights to go to Washington.

This was a giant anti boredom-party that got out of hand and became, well, got out of hand for some people, but was an intentional insurrection and seditious attack on the United States for others.

And yet one of the things that you see with all of these people, especially now that they're entering their pleas in court.

Well, I'm a realtor in Texas and I can't do time.

I have houses to sell.

And I didn't really mean to uproot the government.

I was trying to establish my cigar brand.

Someone actually said this in one of their filings.

Well, I was hoping to become a podcaster and establish a new cigar brand, and so I was just promoting my brand.

people attacked the seat of government of the United States of America while filming themselves and instagramming it.

If you needed any more evidence of a bored middle-class, a bored lumpenbourgeoisie as it's been called in the past, relieving their narcissistic boredom and having a tantrum, January 6th was the perfect example.

Except that some of those people are and were exceedingly dangerous.

But this notion that somehow this was about rights and about voting and about the Constitution I think really has been shown to be utter nonsense.

These were dangerous but unserious people if that makes sense.

- So you close your preface, I'm gonna read a couple of lines here, by writing, "We do not have to remain slaves to our anger and our fears.

We do not have to destroy our own traditions and institutions out of rage and resentment.

We do not have to live this way."

I agree.

How do we live another way?

- I think first of all we have to start speaking truth.

Not to power, but to each other.

I am a big fan of speaking truth to power.

I worked in the Massachusetts State House.

I worked in the US Senate.

I've worked for the military for 25 years.

I'm used to telling people in power things they don't wanna to hear.

And that's great.

But when this kind of malfunction at the very grassroots starts to happen, we have to turn to each other.

We have to turn to each other and we have to recapture some basic notions about shame and virtue and civic responsibility.

That when someone says, well, I think the Italians used communist voting machines provided by the ghost of Hugo Chavez.

You need to turn to that person and say, listen, you're wrong.

And shame on you.

And you need to stop mainlining propaganda that makes you feel better.

One thing in the how to stop all this, Wayne, people like to blame "Fox" or "RT" or the Russians or Facebook, and all those are poisonous influences on our society.

But we never talk about the demand side.

"Fox" is feeding people what they want.

The reason that Facebook algorithms work is because people enjoy the rush of being angry.

And the first step is for people to sit back for a moment and say, am I a better person for doing, am I comfortable with what I'm becoming?

Should I maybe just take a walk?

Should I call a friend, call my son or daughter?

Should I pet my dog for a moment?

Because this is these algorithms and the way that these programs are constructed are addictive.

But in the end, part of breaking an addiction is you have to recognize you have a problem and you want to quit.

And this notion of, well, if we could just shut off "Fox."

this makes me crazy when people on the left say, well, we should just shut down "Fox."

That is an illiberal solution as well.

You don't shut down "Fox."

you stop watching "Fox."

There's a difference.

And you make a decision that you're not going to simply take a big swig of rage every morning and sit for four hours.

I mean, I am paid to have opinions by major newspapers and journals.

And even I don't watch four straight hours of programming every night.

There are people who do.

- Tom, unfortunately, we're out of time.

But the book is remarkable.

It's "Our Own Worst Enemy," and he's Tom Nichols.

You wanna check the book out.

That's all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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