Vice Chancellor's Democracy Forum

The War in Ukraine – Vice-Chancellor’s Democracy Forum, UTS
(Edited transcript)

 
Opening remarks
Professor Andrew Parfitt (Vice-Chancellor, UTS):

Welcome to UTS and to this important occasion. My name is Andrew Parfitt and I’m the Vice-Chancellor here at UTS. It’s a great pleasure to welcome a very distinguished panel to talk about one of the topics of the moment – the situation in Ukraine and its impacts on democracy.

Let me begin by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the owners of the land on which our campus stands. They always have been and always will be the Traditional Owners. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge all the work that’s happening across the community to give our First Nations people a voice and to support self-determination, as we look toward a future Australia that is better than the past.

Thank you again for joining us and for taking the opportunity to engage in this conversation with our panel.

Let me particularly welcome today our distinguished guest, His Excellency Vasyl Myroshnychenko, Ambassador of Ukraine to Australia and New Zealand. It’s a great pleasure, sir, to have you here with us to engage in this conversation.

Welcome also to our panellists, whom our moderator Dr Olga Oleinikova will introduce shortly.

This is the fifth in a series of forums we’ve hosted – the Vice-Chancellor’s Democracy Forum. It covers a range of issues around citizenship, democracy, the public purpose of institutions, social cohesion – all the things we value in our society as we strive for a civil and just world.

Educational institutions like universities have a major role in that. At UTS we encourage our students to engage with a wide range of issues, not just those within their immediate area of study – many of which are highly technical – but more widely, so they can become both professionals and citizens as they move forward in their careers.

At UTS we also see our role as an educational and research institution as contributing to public discourse: creating stocks of knowledge that can be used to progress society and, importantly, making a social impact. I particularly want to acknowledge our Social Impact Technologies and Democracy Research Hub, which partners with 170 associates across 16 countries on technology, diaspora, politics, migration, and how these intersect with democracy – particularly in Eastern Europe.

Eastern Europe might seem a long way away, but the world is a very small place. Things that happen in one part of the world impact all of us. It’s incumbent on us to make sure we’re informed, engaged, and prepared to take a position.

Tonight you’ll hear from a panel of experts. We are acutely aware of the threats to democracy that exist; we know that human rights are under attack in many places, that extremism has drastic consequences for communities. These are important issues.

Our focus on social justice at UTS is not only about our local community and equipping our students for their roles in the world. It’s also about taking a stand on issues that matter. We have a social impact framework to hold us accountable, and we are not afraid to take a bold stance where we need to.

Conversations like tonight’s are important. I thank you for coming to engage in it, and I’ll now hand over to Olga to introduce the panel and get the conversation started.

 
Setting the scene
Dr Olga Oleinikova (Moderator, UTS):

Thank you very much, Andrew, for the introduction – to me and to the whole event. I’m very honoured to be MC’ing this important forum.

Tonight we will talk about a very important topic: the war in Ukraine. We’ll discuss how the war affects everyday lives – our own here in Australia as well as Ukrainians in Ukraine. We’ll look at how it impacts the global democratic order, and we’ll talk about the future of democracy in general, and the future of Ukraine in particular.

I’m sure we all feel that modern democracies – both established Western democracies and emerging democracies – are failing to prevent wars, financial crises, energy shortages and climate change. There is a great deal of uncertainty in our everyday lives.

I’m delighted to be joined by amazing speakers tonight. I’ll introduce them all and briefly outline their biographies. I also want to highlight that all of our speakers are connected to Ukraine – not only by professional interest, but often by family history and personal ties.

It is my pleasure to introduce His Excellency Vasyl Myroshnychenko. He assumed the role of Ambassador of Ukraine to Australia on 1 April 2022, just after the start of the full-scale invasion – a very difficult time for Ukraine and a huge responsibility for him.

He briefly served as an adviser to the Minister of Defence of Ukraine in March–April 2022. Between May 2021 and July 2022 he was a member of the Supervisory Board of the Ukrainian Institute, a cultural diplomacy platform of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Prior to joining the foreign service he was an active business and civil-society leader in Ukraine. He is co-founder of the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, an NGO set up in early March 2014 – again, a crucial time – aimed at amplifying Ukraine’s voice internationally. He has led numerous projects and campaigns between 2014 and 2019.

Next, Misha Zelinsky. Misha is a Fulbright Scholar, economist, lawyer and author. He spent most of 2022 in Ukraine, covering Russia’s invasion from inside the country for the Australian Financial Review. He’s personally sanctioned by the Putin regime. Misha is an expert associate at the ANU National Security College and a regular contributor to outlets such as the BBC, ABC, Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph, Foreign Policy, Times of London and Financial Times. He also hosts one of Australia’s top political podcasts, Diplomates, on geopolitics.

Thank you, Misha, for joining us.

Our next speaker is Dr Sara Meger, who has come from Melbourne especially for this event. She is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She joined the school in 2017, where she teaches international security and gender in international relations. Her research lies at the nexus of international security and global political economy. Her work has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Globalizations, Postcolonial Studies and many other journals. Her recent work focuses on the relationship between gender and political violence in contexts including the war in Donbas prior to the full-scale invasion.

Thank you, Sara, for coming up from Melbourne.

And finally, Zoya Sheftalovich. Zoya is a contributing editor at POLITICO. She’s currently based in Sydney and has written extensively about Russia’s war in Ukraine. She is a regular commentator on the war in Australian and international media, and editor of POLITICO’s Brussels and London Playbooks as well as a regular author of its Global Insider column. Zoya is also a UTS graduate – she studied journalism and law here – so welcome back to campus.

 
Ukraine’s fight for democracy
Olga Oleinikova:
I’d like to start with a broad question to Vasyl that sets the tone for the evening. Tell us about Ukraine’s fight for democracy. Where are we now? What is happening, and what do you see as the near future?

Ambassador Vasyl Myroshnychenko:

Thank you, Olga. That was a very good introduction, and it’s a great pleasure to be at UTS. I’m glad we can interact and have this panel, and I’m very pleased to see such a large turnout. It means interest in the topic is still strong, even though we understand Ukraine is no longer on the front page every day. We might be on page two or three, but as long as we’re still in the news and people see Russian aggression against Ukraine as important, that helps us generate the support we need to defend democracy.

The theme of democracy and where we are is very broad. You’ll hear a lot of insights from the other panellists, but my take is simple. The fact that Ukraine had a vibrant democracy is one of the things that emboldened Putin and motivated him to invade – among other reasons.

Putin became president around 1999–2000. For the past 23 years he has run Russia. In that same time Ukraine has had four presidents. Every time we don’t like our president, we elect another one. That’s a sign of democracy – and it’s something Putin did not like.

Despite all the propaganda, it’s hard to hide from your own people that there is a country next door where leaders change, where the political landscape is dynamic, where Ukraine is improving and signing a free-trade agreement with the European Union, where Ukrainians can travel to Schengen countries without visas. Ukraine is changing.

Our democracy has not been perfect – we know that. But we have been working to build independent media, a plurality of opinion, and regular elections that bring new faces into government. Everyone could see that, and for Putin it was an existential threat to his regime.

Yesterday the Ukrainian parliament voted on a term we’ve coined: “rashism” – to describe Putin’s regime in Russia: an authoritarian regime with no effective opposition, no free media and very little freedom, led by a dictator who has started the biggest war in Europe since the Second World War.

This morning I spoke at a ceremony organised by the Dutch Embassy for Dutch Liberation Day. The topic this year was trauma – specifically intergenerational trauma. I was asked to speak about Ukraine’s history in the 20th century. In many ways the entire history of Ukraine in that century is about trauma: trauma we inherited, which is now being reinforced by what Russian forces are doing.

We see mass graves, torture chambers, executions of civilians. It’s extremely difficult for Ukrainians.

To understand where Ukraine is now, you need to understand that history. Between 1917 and 1921, after World War I and the collapse of empires, Ukraine briefly became independent. In 1921 the Bolsheviks destroyed that independence. In 1932–33 Stalin’s regime organised a genocide against the Ukrainian people – the Holodomor – a famine that killed around five million because Ukrainians resisted collectivisation.

In 1937, many intellectuals, writers, composers and cultural figures were killed as supposed “Ukrainian nationalists”. During World War II, 8–10 million Ukrainians died. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, Ukrainians overwhelmingly celebrated: 93 per cent voted for independence in the 1991 referendum.

In the 1990s we discussed, mostly in theory, the possibility of Russian invasion – but we never really believed it would happen. Then in 2014, Russia invaded Crimea and Donbas. That was the civic awakening. We asked the free world for help. The reaction was weak. Sanctions were imposed, but not strong. The EU kept building Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2. That emboldened Putin.

He invaded Georgia in 2008 and paid little price. In 2014 he invaded Ukraine and again the consequences were limited. He concluded that the West depended on Russian energy and would never go very far in supporting Ukraine. He believed he could take Kyiv in seven days.

I was still in Ukraine when the full-scale invasion started. I was in Kyiv like many Ukrainians. I had to flee with my family – my five-year-old son and my 18-year-old daughter. A little later, in mid-March, I was appointed ambassador to Australia. We crossed the border on foot, like many refugees, and I arrived here on 27 March. So it has just been a year in this role.

Australia is a great country. I feel very blessed to be here, and extremely thankful for the support we’ve received from the Australian people and government.

 
War and democracy
Olga Oleinikova:

Thank you, Vasyl, for painting that broad picture of where we are.

You’ve already mentioned three words that keep coming up: Ukraine, war, democracy. Academically, these are big concepts. Scholars of democracy, post-revolution societies and social change have been asking: can war and democracy coexist? Are they compatible? How do they work together, if at all?

My question is to Sara. You study political violence and democracy – what is your take on the relationship between war and democracy?

Dr Sara Meger:

Thank you. The first thing I’d unpack is what we mean by war or political violence. Academically it’s useful to think of political violence as an instrument. Ethically we might dislike violence, but analytically it’s an instrument that can be used for different ends.

Violence can be used legitimately, for good purposes, or illegitimately, for bad ones. War or political violence can be a tool of repression and oppression, or it can be a tool of liberation.

So to understand the relationship between war and democracy we need to think about the nature of the war and the politics that emerge from it.

As an international security scholar and a feminist, my concerns are less about violence in itself and more about the culture of militarism that can accompany it. What happens when societies become reliant on military means as the primary instrument for political ends? What does that mean culturally, socially, politically and economically?

We have an international normative framework – embedded in the United Nations, in the UN Charter – which recognises that the use of force can be legitimate in self-defence or for a just cause. But even where there is some legitimacy, we worry about the flow-on effects of militarisation.

Long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine we were seeing a global creep of militarisation. Threats to security – globally and domestically – have been framed as growing and existential. States around the world have increasingly retreated from democratic values and norms, and instead embraced the logic of “security”.

In international relations we talk about “securitisation”: the political process whereby an issue is framed as such a serious security threat that it is lifted out of normal democratic politics. It becomes beyond debate, beyond full disclosure to the public. Under the guise of existential threat, extraordinary powers are handed to the executive.

I’m not saying that is never legitimate. But we have to ask: what happens when states repeatedly use security as justification for anti-democratic or non-democratic actions?

Right now we face increasing threats to security. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put the entire world on edge. We see that Russia’s ambitions may not be limited – and that highlights our vulnerability and the fragility of the institutions we’ve relied on to secure a liberal democratic order.

In responding to these threats, we must remain aware that security responses can themselves pose serious dangers to democratic principles and civil rights domestically.

For feminists in particular, there has long been concern about what militarisation means within societies: how it can valorise certain ideas of masculinity, normalise violence, and correlate with higher rates of violence against women and repression of minority groups.

So yes, the military can be a legitimate tool in the face of acute violence, as Ukraine faces. But we need to approach the broader project of militarisation with caution and remain attentive to its implications for democracy.

 
Global implications and democratic decline
Olga Oleinikova:

Thank you, Sara.

Misha, turning to you: clearly what happens in Ukraine has global consequences. You’ve been on the ground, you host a podcast, you’ve spoken to many people across Europe and beyond. There are new research centres springing up, especially in Europe, trying to understand how the war in Ukraine is reshaping the continent and the world.

What impact is the situation in Ukraine having globally? What challenges does it pose for the democratic order – not just in Europe, but in Asia and elsewhere?

Misha Zelinsky:

That’s the big question: is the war in Ukraine “just” a conflict in Eastern Europe – a territorial dispute far away – or is it something much bigger?

Vasyl has already touched on it, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine comes after nearly a quarter century of democratic recession around the world. In 2000, when Bill Clinton’s presidency ended, the prevailing expectation was that democracy would flourish globally – liberal democracy, liberal economics – an unstoppable force for good.

Fast-forward 20 years. Joe Biden becomes president saying the number one challenge for democracy is proving that it can still deliver for people. That’s a remarkable shift in just two decades.

So Putin’s invasion is, in many ways, the logical consequence of that democratic recession: fewer democracies overall, democracies becoming less democratic internally, and bad behaviour going largely unpunished.

Vasyl listed many examples: Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, interference around the world. Each time the response was limited. Understandably, many wanted to avoid conflict, but the effect was to encourage worse behaviour – culminating in the full-scale invasion and the horrors we’ve seen in Ukraine.

To simplify, the struggle boils down to two groups that threaten free societies.

The first is the “dictators’ club”: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and their friends. They literally formalised this with their “friendship without limits” declaration in February 2022. They want to make the world safer for authoritarianism.

The second group – and in some ways more dangerous – are those inside democracies who want to pretend this isn’t happening. Those who say: “It’s nothing to do with us, it’s far away, let’s not get involved.” I understand the instinct – nobody wants to live in a world of great-power conflict – but denying reality doesn’t change it.

So what does this mean for democracy and for a country like Australia?

Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, visited Ukraine and said, “Today Ukraine, tomorrow East Asia.” He was talking about Taiwan. Are these things connected? Absolutely. If big authoritarian states can decide to eat and destroy neighbouring democracies they dislike, that is a very bad world for a country like Australia – a middle power with 25 million people that depends on rules and on alliances.

We can’t survive in a world where might makes right and democracies don’t hang together.

That’s why I think it has been right for Australia to send support and weapons to Ukraine. The safest way to avoid more wars around the world is to make sure Putin loses this one. The best lesson to teach any would-be aggressor is that wars of conquest are bad ideas – costly, unsuccessful and regime-ending.

So yes, we should be sending Bushmasters and other kit to Ukraine so Ukrainians can defeat Putin as quickly as possible. That’s our best insurance policy in the Indo-Pacific too.

But there’s another side. Democracies also need to deliver for their own people. One reason for democratic decline is that too many citizens feel the system doesn’t work for them. Democracies are, in a sense, in a results-driven business. You can’t promote democracy abroad if it isn’t delivering at home.

We didn’t “win” the Cold War because people in Eastern Europe suddenly decided Milton Friedman had better arguments than Karl Marx. They looked across the wall and saw that West Germany was richer, freer, better to live in than East Germany.

Right now, regimes like the Chinese Communist Party say: “We can give you economic growth without all the messy democratic politics. Look at those democracies – they can’t govern themselves.” That is a powerful narrative.

So to win this broader struggle we need to do two things at once: resist aggression and defend the rules-based order and make our own democracies work better – reduce inequality, tackle corruption, deliver decent living standards. Only then can we credibly argue that democracy is still the best system.

 
Media, information and Ukraine
Olga Oleinikova:

Thank you, Misha.

You’ve both mentioned the global decline of democracy over the past 10–15 years. Many scholars talk about “democratic doom”, questioning whether representation works, whether elections work. Democracy is not just about elections; it is about values, equality, rights – and yet elections themselves are under strain.

At the same time, many people have been watching Ukraine closely, especially since the Maidan revolution. Some scholars saw Ukraine as a potential new model of democracy – with strong activism, volunteering, new forms of participation.

My question now is for Zoya. What is the role of the media in this modern Ukrainian context? How is media being used as a tool in Ukraine’s fight for democracy, and what has changed over the last year?

Zoya Sheftalovich:

It’s a big question – there’s a lot to unpack.

First, in terms of media inside Ukraine, one of the big challenges for journalists is how to report on what’s happening domestically without either whitewashing problems or, on the other hand, handing ammunition to Putin.

For me this is personal as well as professional. I was born in Ukraine and spent a large part of my childhood there. I feel this war very deeply. That means I’m constantly asking myself: do I publish this story? Who does it serve? What are the consequences?

In normal circumstances, the role of the media in a democracy is clear: expose corruption, fraud, hypocrisy; hold administrations to account. Ukraine is a fledgling democracy with well-known problems – especially corruption. Yet when you’re at war, you find yourself asking: if I publish a story about corruption, does it help Ukraine clean house and move toward EU membership, or does it help Russia?

There have been some recent investigations about people close to President Zelenskyy, or about collaborators in the lead-up to the invasion. In some cases publication has prompted Zelenskyy to sack officials and tighten things up – which is exactly how accountability should work. But each time you weigh that against the risk of undermining the war effort or fuelling disinformation.

So there are no easy answers. Often it’s a case-by-case judgement.

Another issue is language and context. I speak Ukrainian – badly – and Russian – very well. I can listen to Putin in the original and understand the subtext. Many foreign reporters can’t. When Putin announced a “special military operation” on 24 February 2022, a lot of outlets simply repeated that phrase. They treated it as if it might be something less than a full-scale war.

I was on shift that day. I watched the speech live and knew immediately it was a declaration of war. I wrote the story that way, woke my editors in Brussels, and we ran it as a full-scale invasion. Then I looked at some competitors and saw headlines parroting “special operation” language or repeating Kremlin talking points about “de-Nazification”.

I started doubting myself – had I over-interpreted? But within hours the tanks crossed the border and the truth was obvious.

This matters, because language shapes public understanding. If you headline a story “Putin says Ukraine is full of Nazis” without context, many readers won’t grasp that it’s propaganda. You’re inadvertently doing his work for him.

Another challenge is that I’ve also been the journalist “parachuted in” to a story in another part of the world, without language skills or deep context. It’s easy to swallow spin in those circumstances. But in this war, mistakes are incredibly consequential.

So, for journalists, there’s a lot of soul-searching. Most of us are trying to do our jobs well. No one wants to do them badly. But in the fog of war, it can be very hard to figure out what “doing the right thing” really looks like.

 
Russian information warfare and Ukrainian resilience
Olga Oleinikova:

Would you like to comment on what’s been happening more broadly in the information space – the media strategy around the invasion, and Russia’s long-term information war against Ukraine?

Vasyl Myroshnychenko:

To really understand that, we have to go back decades.

Russia has been undermining Ukraine for a long time. We’ve been exposed to hybrid warfare, “active measures”, direct influence. Putin’s plan was to install a pro-Russian government in Ukraine that would voluntarily give up sovereignty and join his Eurasian customs union.

That was the plan with Yanukovych. He had committed to joining the customs union. The idea was to formalise it in 2014 or 2015, in Kaniv, a city in central Ukraine, on the birthday of our most famous poet Taras Shevchenko. They built a special palace with helipads for dignitaries from across the former Soviet space.

To support that, the Kremlin undermined Ukraine from within: corrupting officials, funding parties, buying TV channels, installing agents of influence. The idea was to get Ukraine to “choose” Russia.

People resisted. They protested on Maidan. That is something Putin did not expect. When he couldn’t get Ukraine voluntarily, he used force: Crimea and Donbas in 2014. Fourteen thousand people were killed in that first stage of the war.

Russia didn’t stop its information operations. For example, Viktor Medvedchuk – Putin’s personal friend and oligarch – bought up TV stations in Ukraine and used them to push Kremlin narratives. Zelenskyy eventually shut those channels down. That reportedly infuriated Putin, because it closed off one of his main levers of influence.

But that’s exactly what had to be done. Imagine if China came here and bought three major TV networks in Australia. You wouldn’t tolerate it.

The problem for democracies is that we have freedom of speech and press. Authoritarian regimes know how to abuse that openness. They exploit our commitment to pluralism to spread disinformation and undermine trust in government and media.

The goal is clear: once you don’t trust your government and you don’t trust the media, you become vulnerable to conspiracy theories and radicalisation. One day you’re anti-vaccine; the next day you’re storming parliament. That’s what we’ve seen in many countries.

So the question is: how do we build resilience? How do we improve media literacy, regulate platforms, and protect open debate without allowing it to be weaponised against democracy?

Zoya Sheftalovich:

If I can add a personal note to that.

I was born behind the Iron Curtain, in a town affected by the Chernobyl disaster. When Chernobyl happened, the media was so tightly controlled that we had no idea anything had occurred. My grandmother, who was a doctor, was quietly told by a patient that something was wrong and that she should take the children out of town. That’s how we found out – not from TV or newspapers.

Later, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, things loosened. We started listening secretly to Radio Free Europe. The Soviet authorities tried to jam the signal, but we persisted. That information – about what was really happening – fundamentally shook our faith in the system and contributed to the push for independence.

That’s exactly what Putin fears. It explains why he clamped down on independent media in Russia and why, today, there is effectively no free media left operating openly inside the country. We at POLITICO have a reporter in Russia whose name we can’t publish because of safety concerns.

By contrast, in Ukraine this war has become the first true “smartphone war”. It’s not just Zelenskyy’s masterful communication. It’s 40 million Ukrainians with phones, documenting everything. They’ve dominated the information space from the ground up.

That’s crowded out a lot of Russian disinformation, because facts have made a bit of a comeback. In war you can’t spin your way to victory. Your tanks are either in Kyiv or they’re not. Your soldiers are advancing or retreating. Body bags are either coming home or they aren’t.

The Putin regime, for all its propaganda, is being mugged by reality. Russians do still access independent information – via VPNs, Telegram, outlets like Meduza – and they can see, at some level, what is happening.

The good news is that truth still matters. The bad news is that Russia and China have been very successful in pushing their narratives in the “global South” – in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America – where there is more scepticism about Western motives.

So the information battle is far from over.

 
The future of Ukraine and democracy
Olga Oleinikova:

Thank you. We’re nearly out of time, but I’d like to finish with a forward-looking question. What does the future look like – not just in terms of the war’s outcome, but democratically? Short term rather than distant future: what do you see ahead for Ukraine and for democracy more broadly?

Vasyl Myroshnychenko:

As I was preparing a speech this morning on trauma, I came across an interesting comparison between Russian and Ukrainian societies.

Russians, generally speaking, are fatalists. They don’t believe they can influence their fate. They see things as predetermined. If you read Russian literature – which I grew up reading – it’s very dark and fatalistic.

Ukrainians, by contrast, have hope. That hope is what will help us overcome the trauma we’re living through now. If you ask Ukrainians whether we will win the war, around 90 per cent say yes. That optimism may not be fully “rational”, but it tells you where we stand.

It’s crucial that the democratic world does everything possible not to allow Putin to win. He must be defeated and forced to withdraw from all Ukrainian territory, including what he seized in 2014. Otherwise the signal to other authoritarian regimes will be disastrous.

People often talk about China in this context. Xi Jinping is watching closely. If Putin’s regime collapses after defeat in Ukraine, that is a problem for Xi, because it shows that brutal authoritarianism can fail. So China will do what it can to prevent a complete collapse.

How exactly this plays out, I don’t know. But I’m convinced that Ukraine can prevail – and that matters not just for us, but for democracy everywhere.

Misha Zelinsky:

I’ll try to be brief.

To be blunt, the fastest way to a better future is democracy defeating Putin. Vasyl has set out the stakes.

I actually think the most likely way out for Russia is not diplomacy but internal politics. At some point, people around Putin will realise the only way back to normality – to trips to Saint-Tropez rather than Crimea – is for him to go. He’s already made himself a war criminal. As long as he is there, Russia is a pariah.

The best way to hasten that is to ensure Russia suffers reverses on the battlefield and feels real economic pain. If Ukraine’s coming counter-offensive succeeds – if they liberate Melitopol, threaten Crimea, push Russian forces back – I don’t think Putin’s regime can survive indefinitely.

We’re faced with a choice between bad options and worse options. The bad option is to keep supporting Ukraine, even at significant cost. The worse option is to let Putin win. We have to choose the bad option.

Dr Sara Meger:

From a more academic perspective, the real challenge post-war will be democratic consolidation.

Historically, many democracies falter at the point of demobilisation – when mass mobilisation, militarisation and nationalism collide in the aftermath of conflict. You can see the rise of ethnonationalism, scapegoating and attempts to roll back women’s rights.

What gives me hope in Ukraine is the strength of civil society, and particularly of feminist civil society. Time and again, when the state has failed – after Euromaidan, for example – civil society has stepped in. If international support focuses not just on rebuilding infrastructure but also on supporting civil society and inclusive institutions, I think Ukraine has a strong chance of consolidating a robust democracy.

Zoya Sheftalovich:

For me, one of the ironies of this war is that it has been the biggest own goal for Putin.

For two decades he has funded far-right and far-left parties across Europe – the AfD in Germany, Marine Le Pen’s party in France, various Austrian parties, plus networks in the UK and US – all designed to weaken democracies from within.

On 24 February 2022 he blew all that up. Overnight it became politically toxic in most of Europe to be openly pro-Putin. Parties that had taken his money have had to distance themselves. Years of influence operations and millions of euros of funding have gone down the drain.

That creates a huge opportunity. Not just for Ukraine to consolidate democracy, but for the EU and other democracies to clean house: to close loopholes, kick out Kremlin-controlled media like RT and Sputnik, regulate foreign funding, and so on.

I’ve lived in both an autocracy and a democracy. The great thing about democracy is that when you’re unhappy, you can vote, you can protest, you can speak. No one disappears you for it. That is precious. I think a lot of people in Europe, the US and Australia have been reminded of that by watching Ukrainians fight – literally – for those freedoms.

So amid the horror, there is hope. Something good can come from something terrible, if we seize the moment.

 
Olga Oleinikova:

Thank you all for your insights and for such a rich discussion. There is much more we could say, and many areas where Ukraine needs support, but we’re out of time.

Thank you to our panellists, and thank you to the audience for your questions and engagement. I hope that at a future Democracy Forum we’ll be talking about Ukraine as a successful case study – a country that defended its democracy and emerged stronger.

Vice-Chancellor’s welcome
Good evening everyone, and welcome to UTS. My name is Andrew Parfitt and I’m the Vice-Chancellor here. It’s a great privilege to be hosting my first UTS Vice-Chancellor’s Democracy Forum for 2022.

Before we begin, I’d like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which our campus stands, and pay my respects to Elders past and present. They are the custodians of knowledge for this land.

As this week is NAIDOC Week, it’s a particularly important time to celebrate the contribution our Indigenous colleagues make to the life of the university. With the pathway now clear from the Uluru Statement from the Heart to constitutional recognition, we have a moment in time to properly recognise First Nations people in our Constitution and our community.

Thank you for joining us this evening.

This event is the third in a series of annual talks and discussions focused on democracy, engaged citizenship, public purpose and social cohesion. These are themes of deep importance to all of us at UTS. Personally, I believe strongly in the role universities play as public institutions delivering public benefit to a wide cross-section of the community. Many of us here also see universities as agents of social transformation.

We encourage our students to be active participants in their communities, to become global citizens who are grounded in their studies and careers and who create positive impact.

A quick note before we begin: our next Democracy Forum event will be held online by Zoom on Tuesday 12 July with Professor Lea Ypi, a political theorist from the London School of Economics and an adjunct associate professor of philosophy at the Australian National University. You can find details and register via the UTS website.

Turning back to tonight, in a moment I’ll hand over to Emeritus Professor Roy Green, who will introduce our guest speaker, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, and our discussant, Professor Michelle Baddeley, Associate Dean (Research & Development) in the UTS Business School.

Together they’ll explore the role of government in shaping post-COVID recovery, innovation and social outcomes in Australia. The pandemic is still very much with us. Our health system, communities and economy have been severely affected. Jobs and labour force participation have not fully recovered, and we continue to experience acute skills shortages. As always, the poorest and most marginalised in our communities feel these impacts most strongly.

On top of that we face climate change, geopolitical tensions and resource depletion. We urgently need conversations about how to move forward, address inequality and future-proof our communities.

Australia’s economic recovery has to be a collaborative effort between governments, industry, education institutions and communities. As a university of technology, UTS is particularly conscious of the way COVID accelerated digital transformation across almost every sector. Technology is now central to how we work and live, which only increases the demand for technological skills – an area where shortages are already significant.

An ambitious technology agenda allows universities like UTS to draw on our strengths in research and innovation to contribute to a more sustainable future. We are a public university of technology recognised for our global impact, and at the heart of that impact is our commitment to social justice and social change.

These are values we share with our speakers tonight. Professor Stiglitz’s work has never been confined to narrow specialisations; he has consistently sought to maximise the socio-economic benefits of his research for individuals and communities.

This evening he’ll deliver a keynote address, followed by a conversation with Professors Baddeley and Green and then questions from the audience.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce our MC for tonight, Emeritus Professor Roy Green – my Special Advisor on Innovation and former Dean of the UTS Business School. Roy chairs the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Hub at the Port of Newcastle, sits on a number of innovation and manufacturing boards and advisory councils, and is a widely respected commentator on public policy.

So who better to lead tonight’s discussion? Please join me in welcoming Professor Roy Green.

 
Roy Green – introduction of Professor Joseph Stiglitz
Thank you, Vice-Chancellor, and thank you all for coming.

We’re very privileged to have with us Professor Joseph Stiglitz who, for most of us, needs little introduction. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Professor of Economics at Columbia University.

He is Co-Chair of the high-level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute. Previously he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank and as Chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Among economists he is known for pioneering work on asymmetric information, and his research spans income distribution, climate change, corporate governance, public policy, macroeconomics and globalisation.

He is the author of numerous books, including People, Power, and Profits, Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy, and the influential Globalization and Its Discontents and Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited.

You don’t want to hear from us – you want to hear from him. Joe, over to you.

 
Joseph Stiglitz – keynote address (edited for clarity)
Thank you very much for the introduction.

I want to talk this evening about the role of government in technology policy. I’ll make five main points.

1. The importance of innovation
First, we need to remind ourselves just how important technological progress and innovation are. For most of human history – certainly up until around 1750 or 1800 – standards of living changed very little from one century to the next. Then, in the late eighteenth century, everything shifted: life expectancy, living standards and many measures of wellbeing began to rise dramatically.

Why? Because of science, technology and our ability to organise complex societies to deliver the benefits they make possible. This was the legacy of the Enlightenment – a change in mindset that recognised progress is possible. The Enlightenment also brought values of tolerance and democracy. Those values are now being challenged; in the United States, our democracy is in a fragile state, and the basic principles of tolerance and truth are being questioned by one of the major political parties.

So advances in technology are deeply intertwined with our economic wellbeing and the health of our democratic institutions.

2. Innovation is endogenous
My second point is that innovation is endogenous – it doesn’t fall from the sky like manna from heaven. It’s the result of people devoting effort and resources to understanding the world and figuring out how to do things better. Because of that, we can’t take innovation for granted. We can accelerate it, shape its direction – or undermine it – depending on the choices we make.

3. Markets alone don’t deliver efficient or socially desirable innovation
The third, and perhaps most difficult, point relates to markets. Since Adam Smith, many economists have argued that markets, driven by individuals pursuing their own self-interest, lead – as if by an “invisible hand” – to outcomes that are good for society.

The work of Arrow and Debreu in the 1950s showed that this is true only under extremely restrictive conditions: no externalities such as climate change, perfect information, perfect risk markets and very strong competition. In the real world, those conditions clearly don’t hold.

My own work with Bruce Greenwald demonstrated that markets are not generally efficient. There is no presumption that unfettered markets will deliver outcomes that are either efficient or socially just.

When you look specifically at innovation, the assumptions behind the invisible hand are even further from reality. Arrow and Debreu’s models assumed no technological change. Yet we know innovation is vital, and that it is shaped by how we allocate resources.

We asked: are markets efficient in the amount of investment they direct to innovation, and in the direction of that innovation? The answer was unambiguous: no. There is no reason to think that the outcome of unfettered markets is efficient.

Schumpeter argued that the drive to become the next monopolist spurs innovation. There is some truth in that, but it doesn’t mean we get the right kind of innovation, or the right level of R&D. Markets may spur innovation that increases monopoly profits rather than social welfare.

One way to see this is to think about where innovation is directed. We can pour resources into labour-saving technologies in economies that already have high unemployment, or into technologies that reduce carbon emissions and help save the planet. From a societal point of view, the latter has enormous value, yet for a long time we under-invested in it because private returns were higher elsewhere.

The same pattern appears in health. Pharmaceutical companies have poured money into “me-too” drugs or treatments for relatively minor conditions with lucrative markets, while neglecting diseases like malaria that kill millions of people but primarily affect the poor. The social return to research on malaria is huge, yet the private return is limited.

The core problem is that private returns often diverge sharply from social returns. That’s why markets alone don’t allocate R&D efficiently – either in scale or in direction.

Markets also struggle with large, risky innovations. Capital markets aren’t well designed to finance highly uncertain, long-term projects. Information asymmetries make it hard for innovators to raise funds without exposing their ideas to appropriation.

4. The public sector’s crucial role in innovation
When you look around at the most important innovations of recent decades, many originated in the public sector. The internet itself was funded by the US government. The first web browser was funded by government.

During COVID-19, mRNA vaccines effectively saved the world. Who funded the underlying mRNA platform? Government, working through public research institutions. Private companies played an important role in the final stage of development and manufacturing, but they were standing on a foundation built with public money.

Knowledge and basic science are what economists call public goods: once created, they can be used by many people at no additional cost. As Thomas Jefferson put it, knowledge is like a candle; when one candle lights another, the light of the first is not diminished.

Because of this, efficiency requires that knowledge be shared as widely as possible. But if it’s shared widely, it can’t be fully privatised. That’s why government must play a major role in funding basic research and creating platforms on which private innovation can build. In a science-based economy, this implies a larger public sector, not a smaller one.

Critics of government innovation policy often point to failures – projects that didn’t work out. But if there were no failures, that would simply mean we weren’t taking enough risk. Research is, by definition, an inquiry into the unknown; some projects will fail. The key question is whether, on average, public investment in R&D generates high social returns. The evidence shows that it does – often higher than the private return on R&D.

A good example is Tesla. The company only exists because government provided substantial early support. The real failing wasn’t that government backed it – it’s that government didn’t take an equity stake and therefore didn’t share in the upside.

5. Steering the direction of innovation – industrial policy
My final point is that government not only needs to fund basic research; it also needs to steer the direction of private innovation. Every country already practices industrial policy, whether it admits it or not. Whenever governments decide where to build infrastructure, how to regulate finance, or how much to invest in education, they are steering the economy.

If you don’t make these choices consciously and transparently, they tend to be made by special interests. In the United States, for example, policy choices helped steer the economy towards an oversized financial sector and risky derivatives – contributing to the 2008 global financial crisis.

We need to steer the economy toward a greener, more inclusive future: toward innovations that reduce carbon emissions, support good jobs and enhance wellbeing. We have many tools to do this – research funding, education policy, regulation and, importantly, tax policy.

At the moment we tax labour heavily, which encourages labour-saving innovation and higher unemployment, but we impose far less cost on carbon emissions, which discourages innovation that would help save the planet. That’s the wrong way round.

More broadly, there has been a shift in thinking. After four decades of neoliberalism and hostility to industrial policy, there is now growing recognition – even among many conservatives – that active industry policy is necessary. We see this in the United States with recent legislation on infrastructure, climate and technology.

Underlying all of this is a simple idea: the goal of economic policy is not just to maximise GDP, but to maximise societal wellbeing. These are not the same thing. In a world of scarce resources, we need every dollar of public money to advance multiple objectives: climate action, inclusion, equality and shared prosperity. Technology policy, properly designed, can be a powerful part of that broader wellbeing agenda.

That, in essence, is why I believe a proactive technology policy – one that promotes innovation aligned with social goals – must be central to government policy.

Thank you.

 
Conversation and Q&A (very briefly)
After the keynote, Professor Roy Green invited Professor Michelle Baddeley to join Joseph Stiglitz for a conversation on themes including:

the relationship between efficiency, inequality and economic performance
how economists have historically sidestepped distributional questions, and why that separation no longer holds
the power of vested interests in shaping both markets and policy
the erosion of trust in both government and large corporations, and the challenge of misinformation
the role of education, transparency and regulation in rebuilding trust and protecting democracy.
In the audience Q&A, questions ranged from the military–industrial complex and its influence on innovation, to whether public investment is shifting toward health and climate-related research. Stiglitz argued that while defence spending historically drove many important innovations, the existential challenge of climate change – along with growing concern for health – is increasingly redirecting public R&D toward civilian priorities.

The evening closed with thanks to Professor Stiglitz, the Australia Institute, the Vice-Chancellor, the UTS Events team, and all those who attended.

 

UTS Vice-Chancellor’s Democracy Forum – Professor Jason Stanley in conversation with Dr Anna Funder
Inaugural Forum

 
Welcome
ATTILA BRUNGS (Vice-Chancellor & President, UTS)

Hello, my name is Attila Brungs and it’s my great privilege to be the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Technology Sydney.

Today it is my honour to welcome you to the inaugural UTS Vice-Chancellor’s Democracy Forum.

Before we begin the proceedings, and on behalf of all of those joining us, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. It is upon their ancestral lands that the UTS campus now stands. We honour and recognise their place as part of the oldest continuing cultures in the world.

I also pay my respects to Elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land that we are on.

As the title suggests, today’s event is the first in a series of annual talks and discussions focused on the critical themes of democracy, engaged citizenship, public purpose and social cohesion.

I’m extremely passionate about these topics – both personally, and because this is a core part of a university’s contract with society:

to be a place where students can learn to play an active role in the world
where they, and the wider academic community, are free to discuss and debate ideas
to share and generate knowledge about the world in which we live.
So I think it is very fitting that our inaugural speaker is Professor Jason Stanley.

Professor Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the author of many thought-provoking and important books, including How Propaganda Works and, most recently, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

Jason will be interviewed today by Dr Anna Funder, one of Australia’s most acclaimed and awarded writers. Her novel All That I Am, about the earliest resistance to fascism in Germany, won the Miles Franklin Award. Her non-fiction book Stasiland, about resistance to the East German dictatorship, won the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction published in English. Both books are international bestsellers, published in over 25 countries.

Anna is also, I am very proud to say, a UTS Luminary and a current Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow.

Thank you again to all of you for joining us today. And now, over to you, Anna.

 
Opening remarks
ANNA FUNDER

Thank you very much, Vice-Chancellor.

It’s my great honour to welcome Professor Jason Stanley to this, the inaugural Vice-Chancellor’s Democracy Forum.

I am speaking on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I’d like to pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. In particular, I recognise that Aboriginal peoples of my country have deep and painful experience of the kinds of politics Professor Stanley describes – of being made “other” and lesser, of being criminalised, and of suffering through the erasure involved in our nation’s mythological white past.

In a 2005 commencement address, the writer David Foster Wallace began with a parable which I’m going to steal. It goes like this:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
The two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
This is a parable to alert us that we don’t know the element we’re in. We are the fish – or the frogs – and the water is getting hotter.

The Swedish group Democracy Without Borders recently noted that authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. Only 87 of 179 states are democratic, and that number is declining. Their report ranks Australia as the 14th freest nation, the US as number 36, and China 174th of 179.

I’m very pleased to be discussing today some of the ten pillars of fascist politics that Jason Stanley identifies, and also where we find ourselves today – both in the USA and in Australia. Jason and I will be speaking for 45 minutes or so and then we’ll take questions for about 15 minutes.

My first question is about normalisation.

Fascism, Jason, if I may, is a loaded term. It comes to us with connotations of the jackboot and the Holocaust, against which most other societies appear benign.

You write about how, at the same time that our societies normalise, for instance, mass incarceration along racial lines or the brutal treatment of refugees who are concealed from public view, the word “fascist” has acquired a feeling of the extreme – like crying wolf.

Are we seeing a rise in fascist politics at the same time as it remains taboo to name them?

 
What do we mean by “fascism”?
JASON STANLEY

Absolutely.

We can’t just look at Europe – at Germany and Italy – as the only examples of fascism. We need to distinguish what we’re calling “fascist”.

Toni Morrison gave a brilliant commencement speech at Howard University in 1995 called Racism and Fascism. In it, she said that the United States has often preferred fascist solutions to national problems. She wasn’t declaring the United States a fascist regime; she was talking about the way the United States dealt with its social problems of deep racial inequality with fascist solutions – for example, massive incarceration of our Black population.

So when we talk about fascist solutions, fascist tactics and fascist movements, we’re not necessarily saying “fascist regime” – that’s often the end-point of a long process. A fascist regime is what happens after a lot of fascist tactics and fascist solutions have been normalised.

Take immigration. What would a fascist solution to immigration be? Nicholas Wachsmann, in his book KL, talks about the Nazi concentration camps in the 1930s. They were not death camps yet; they were used to get the regime’s opponents to self-deport – by arresting them, torturing them, treating them brutally, and then releasing them so that they would leave the country.

Dachau, for example, was used this way. In November 1938, around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, sent to concentration camps and brutally tortured. The idea was to encourage them to self-deport.

So if a country adopted a policy of deliberately brutalising immigrants as a way of sending a signal to get them to self-deport, that would be a fascist solution to a national problem – even if the country is not yet a fully fascist regime.

In the United States today we face not just fascist tactics, but a fascist social and political movement: Trumpism. There’s a very good case to be made that Trumpism is a fascist movement. That doesn’t mean the US is already a fascist regime. The Nazi Party was a fascist social and political movement long before Germany became a fully fledged fascist state.

So when people say to me, “You’re being alarmist”, they often quietly change the definition – they say, “Fascism only means a fascist regime”. But we need to be concerned about fascist tactics, fascist movements and fascist solutions long before we get to that endpoint.

 
Fascism, patriarchy and gender
ANNA FUNDER

You define fascism as an ultra-nationalism, represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who separates people into an “us” and a “them” along ethnic, religious or racial lines. That’s incredibly succinct and useful.

Within this, in all fascist mythic pasts, you write that an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme. Patriarchy, you argue, is strategically central to fascist politics.

So a two-part question:

Why is patriarchy so central to fascist politics?
Are measures to increase gender equality in a society protective against fascist politics?
JASON STANLEY

On the second question, the short answer is yes – gender equality is protective.

We see, all across the world, far-right and fascistic regimes attacking what they call “gender ideology”. When Judith Butler visited Brazil in 2017, she was literally burned in effigy. These regimes unify around attacks on feminism, LGBTQ+ rights and gender equality.

We often think of fascism as being “about race”, and it is – but race and gender are deeply intertwined. Racism is built on patriarchy. Ida B. Wells – one of my heroes – saw this very clearly in her 1892 work Southern Horrors. She analysed lynching in the United States and the ideology behind it.

The core of fascist racism is representing the racialised “other” as a threat to “our” women. The Black man as a threat to white women is the classic American example. Wells showed that this ideology is patriarchal:

It represents white women as unable to make their own choices, needing the protection of white men.
It represents Black men as a sexual danger.
She pointed out that many lynchings were in fact a response to consensual relationships, recast as “rape” to justify violence.

This structure repeats across contexts. To vilify immigrants or minorities, fascist movements claim they are a danger to “our women”. That’s patriarchy. You need a strong leader – the father of the nation – to protect “his” women from the racial other.

Fascism is therefore a cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed threats by immigrants, leftists and minorities, and positions himself as the only solution. Wilhelm Reich, in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, and many others have shown that this is about patriarchal authority.

So yes: the first power grab in fascist politics is often the patriarchal one – the man over the woman – and then, by extension, the leader over the nation.

And to your second question: measures that seriously advance gender equality, that challenge patriarchal authority and broaden who counts as a full citizen, do make a society more resistant to fascist politics.

 
Mythic pasts, damaging myths and how we tell history
ANNA FUNDER

You write that fascist politics repudiates any dark moments of a nation’s past. Fascist leaders appeal to history to replace the actual historical record with a glorious mythic past tailored to their political ends.

In Australia, the founding myth of the nation was that the land was empty – terra nullius. This myth was then enshrined in law. It denied the existence of Aboriginal nations and enabled expropriation of land and the decimation of Aboriginal peoples.

Another persistent myth concerns innate gender differences. In Australia, more than any other OECD country, working mothers are penalised by tax laws and a privatised childcare system. We see the feminisation of poverty and the masculinisation of wealth. These are realities that follow from damaging myths.

You describe this as “the displacement of truth and reality by power”.

What are the institutions and methods within a society – ours or yours – by which we can best identify these kinds of myths and repudiate them?

JASON STANLEY

I was struck, as you spoke, by the link between Australia’s myth of an empty “virgin land” and the patriarchal vocabulary around conquest – the “savage” on “virgin land” to be taken. Race, gender and land are all woven together.

The key battleground here is education. Fascist ideologues always fight over the education system.

In the United States, President Trump explicitly promised to bring back what he called “patriotic education”. We’ve long had a struggle over how history is taught, because for decades history was taught not as fact, but as a way of papering over the crimes of the past.

A healthy democracy has history that includes:

labour history
women’s history
Indigenous history
the history of slavery and colonialism.
Fascist politics calls this “divisive” or “unpatriotic” – it claims that teaching real history is “shaming the nation”. Instead, it wants history to be about glorious military conquest, exploration, national greatness.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) ends with a chapter called “The Propaganda of History”. He denounces how Reconstruction was being taught – including in the textbooks I grew up with – as a story of Black people “not ready” for democracy, thus justifying their disenfranchisement.

Whenever you hear that line – “these people are not ready for democracy; we must rule in their place” – you are hearing the mythic past being weaponised.

So:

We need education systems that present multiple perspectives, including those of the most marginalised.
We need public institutions – schools, universities, public broadcasters – that are not beholden to corporate profit and can afford to tell complicated, uncomfortable truths.
When you shift history from a narrative of conquest to a narrative that includes the experiences of those who were conquered, dispossessed or enslaved, you’re doing exactly the work that fascist politics wants to stop.

 
Universities, public institutions and democratic education
ANNA FUNDER

If we’re talking about education, we’re talking about universities. I’m speaking from a university that is deeply concerned with real history and social justice.

In Australia, though, universities are under attack from government. They didn’t receive the COVID “JobKeeper” payments that other sectors did. They are being defunded by around $2 billion, and fees are being raised for humanities courses relative to vocational ones.

The other major institution that functions as a kind of truth platform is public broadcasting – the ABC and SBS – funded by taxpayers and free of corporate interest. They, too, are under attack: there have been funding cuts and even police raids on the ABC.

Medicare – our universal healthcare system – is another institution that protects dignity; it’s less under attack at present, but these things feel related.

In a society where universities and public broadcasters are under sustained attack, how would you gauge the “temperature of the water”?

JASON STANLEY

It’s a very bad sign.

Attacks on universities and public broadcasters are characteristic of authoritarian and fascist-leaning regimes.

On universities: a liberal arts education is supposed to teach people to be democratic citizens. You go to university not just to get a job, but to learn critical thinking and to encounter multiple perspectives. That’s dangerous for any regime that wants passive subjects rather than active citizens.

When you raise fees, cut funding and frame universities as “ideological” or “elitist”, you create a material basis for resentment. People get angry at universities because of the debt they incur, and then politicians can weaponise that resentment to cut them further. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle.

We’ve seen this in the United States; we’re seeing it in India; we saw it in Brazil under Bolsonaro, where universities were attacked as hotbeds of “gender ideology” and “cultural Marxism”.

The same is true of public broadcasters. A healthy liberal democracy needs:

well-funded public media, independent of corporate profit
well-funded public universities that are accessible to a broad population.
When those institutions are weakened, the information environment becomes more polarised, more profit-driven and more susceptible to demagogues.

 
Conspiracy theories and the information space
ANNA FUNDER

You describe how attacks on universities, journalists and historians help create an “atmosphere of unreality” in which conspiracy theories flourish.

You also argue that conspiracy theories are emotionally satisfying for people, even if they don’t literally believe every detail.

Could you explain how that works – perhaps with reference to Pizzagate or QAnon?

JASON STANLEY

QAnon is essentially a contemporary re-working of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was the conspiracy at the heart of Nazism.

These conspiracies function like traps. For example, they claim that there is a vast leftist conspiracy controlling the media and universities. When the media denies this, that denial is taken as further proof – “of course they won’t admit it”.

You then layer on sexual depravity: the idea that “they” are paedophiles, running child-sex rings in pizza shops, drinking children’s blood. QAnon, Pizzagate – it’s the same pattern.

The point is not that everyone literally believes these stories. It’s that they create a mood – a vague dread, a sense that “the other side” is fundamentally evil. Once you have that, factual corrections don’t matter. Whatever your opponents say is dismissed as part of the conspiracy.

Meanwhile, your own lies are justified: you’re lying for “your people” in a war against absolute evil.

So conspiracy theories don’t just misinform; they reshape the information space so that democratic deliberation becomes almost impossible.

 
Fascism as a recurring pattern
ANNA FUNDER

You describe the rise of National Socialism as a textbook example of fascism in play. You then look at contemporary examples – in Hungary under Orbán, in India, in Russia, in Trump’s America.

Sometimes it feels as though there is a kind of “fascist playbook”, even though, as you’ve said, leaders like Trump don’t read. The methods are remarkably similar.

What accounts for that universality – the same moves to centralise power, create an “us and them”, attack institutions?

JASON STANLEY

There is a pattern.

Plato already described part of it in Book VIII of The Republic: democracy, he says, can lead to tyranny when a demagogue uses the freedom of speech and the openness of democracy to split the society, generate fear and present himself as the only saviour.

Modern fascism is a 20th-century form of that process, informed by nationalism, racism and mass media.

One key feature is the cult of loyalty. Hannah Arendt and the Frankfurt School noted the parallels between the fascist leader and a mob boss. The mob boss doesn’t want competence; he wants loyalty. So he replaces experts and professionals with loyalists, cronies and family members.

Trump obviously fits this: at the Republican National Convention four of the six prime-time speeches were given by his children. In his administration, people who weren’t family were constantly hired and fired; no one had secure standing except relatives. That is not an accident – it’s a loyalty strategy.

So you don’t need to be an intellectual to follow the “playbook”. You just need to value loyalty over truth, power over institutions, and be willing to frame politics as a struggle of “us against them” in which anything is justified.

 
Questions from the audience
ANNA FUNDER

We’ve had several questions submitted, so I’ll put a couple of them to you.

Question 1: How do we counter the use of “national security” as a tool to control discussion and free speech?

JASON STANLEY

That’s a profound question.

In the US, we’ve seen this with the Department of Homeland Security, created in the “war on terror”. It was designed to monitor immigrants for suspected terrorist tendencies; now we’ve seen attempts to turn those tools inward, towards political opponents and protesters.

This is a classic fascist move: institutions built for external threats are turned on internal enemies.

The problem with expansive “national security” powers is that they are like a loaded gun left on the table. Even if one government uses them judiciously, a future government may not.

So we need to be very cautious about laws and institutions created in the name of “security”. We must ask:

Are they time-limited?
Are there strong oversight mechanisms?
Can they be rolled back?
We cannot continually trade freedom for a vague promise of safety. At some point, if you’ve given up enough freedom, there is nothing left worth “keeping safe”.

 
Question 2: How does the “whiteness” argument work in non-white countries? For example, India has psychological wages based on religion and caste. Are you missing the deeper underpinning, which is about retaining power?

JASON STANLEY

In the US, Du Bois’s idea of the “wages of whiteness” explains a lot – the idea that whiteness itself functions like an extra salary or status benefit, which people will defend even against their material interests.

In other countries, different identity structures play a similar role – caste in India, for example, or religious majorities. Some theorists argue that Hindutva in its current form is strongly influenced by European racial ideologies, including Nazism. Historically, there were explicit links between Hindu nationalist organisations and European fascism.

But you don’t need “whiteness” specifically. You need:

a dominant group that is told it is superior
a story that ties that superiority to the nation
a scapegoated group (Muslims in India, for example) portrayed as a threat.
Members of the dominant group are then offered psychological and sometimes material “wages” for aligning with the authoritarian project. So yes, it’s about retaining power – but power is mediated through these identity structures.

 
Question 3: How does the liberal press fit in? Are there vested interests there too?

JASON STANLEY

Of course the liberal press can make mistakes and be shaped by interests. In a capitalist system, media organisations need to make money. That pushes them towards sensationalism – “if it bleeds, it leads” – and towards amplifying demagogues who are good for ratings.

Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent makes this point: when media depends on advertising and profit, its structure biases it in particular ways.

That’s why publicly funded media is so important. A liberal democracy needs:

public broadcasters funded by taxpayers, with strong protections for editorial independence
local newspapers and outlets that are not dependent solely on market forces.
When you only have profit-driven media, you get exactly what we’re seeing: platforms that amplify conflict and fear because it sells, and that can be easily captured or bullied by powerful interests.

 
Closing
ANNA FUNDER

In the final pages of How Fascism Works, you appeal to our common humanity – to compassion and empathy – as the way out of the “us and them” thinking that is so basic to fascism.

Thank you very, very much, Jason. That was a brilliant discussion.

And thank you to everyone watching and sending in questions.