Discussing populism and threats to democracy key, we don’t know we need it until it’s gone

I think we made a mistake after 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and the socialist system in Europe collapsed, “now democracy has won.” We all know what happens when you are overestimating your capacities. There is going to be a way to problems.

Now we have faced rather substantial problems, not only in Europe but here in the United States as well. Democratic institutions are not working like they should. Trust in democratic institution is on the low level.

Sometimes, democracy is like health. When everything goes fine, we don’t give any value for that. The day when we are starting to recognize that something goes wrong, hopefully, also with democracy we start to understand that we have to work for that. We have to improve the performance of democratic institutions.

I’m optimistic as well. I believe that we are able to improve our efficiency and democratic systems. To be honest, we are now challenged.

I’m going to ask you a question now. This audience is almost exclusively, not just American, but United States, North American. I want to ask and take this question and put a very fine point on it. Hopefully, I will at least one of you in trouble with the president of the United States by asking. He will be watching right now and monitoring closely. Everybody watch President Trump’s Twitter feed.

Last week, Tom Friedman at the New York Times wrote a . He felt compelled to do this even though it was not his time to be in the newspaper. He went home and wrote this column in a bit of a fever and posted it on the Web. It went crazy viral. It became the most read Tom Friedman column of all times, and one of the most read columns in the history of the New York Times.

That column began with the sentence, “Our democracy, meaning the United States, is in serious danger.” It ended with the sentence, “The biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office.” I’m pretty sure that’s a reference to Mr. Trump, and not to Hope Hicks or Jared Kushner.

I ask you all, none of you citizens of this country, but all close observers of it. We can’t recapitulate the entirety of Friedman’s column, but on the question of the health of democracy that you see here in the United States right now with President Trump in the Oval Office — I’ll start with you, Jorge — are we in trouble?

JFQ: If you want to switch places, be my guest. It’s not so bad. I come from a place where we are in real trouble. We’re copycats of Venezuela. I know that you can complain for a long time. If you want to get me in trouble and deported, I’ll say the following about the US.

Generally, in Latin America we’d always be asked (about a US election), “Which one do you prefer, Democrats or Republicans?” I would ask for the blender. Generally speaking, Democrats were more open to our people, not our products. Republicans, generally speaking, were open to our products, not our people. Lo and behold, here we are. I got the blender. [laughter]

For the first time ever, we have someone who doesn’t want our people or our products. That was a heavy-duty campaign platform. [laughter][applause]

I’m going to be deported now. It hasn’t been delivered on, but it’s certainly worrisome, particularly if you consider that in 2018 we have a heavy-duty election cycle in Latin America. In Mexico, Brazil, Colombia. We have elections. We’ll see what the denouement of what at least was proposed in the campaign, vis-à-vis trade and migration.

It is difficult. I almost got in trouble one time. I came to express those concerns. I was asked at a fine American university to not name any names. I did not. But I said I was worried about T-R-U-M-P, a proposal based on taking out — deporting — 11 million Latinos, remittances that could be seized in the U-S-A, and the “Muro,” the wall, the first one in the history of humanity that has to be paid by the aggrieved party — the Russians were nice enough to pay for their own wall — and P, protectionism.

I think it is a worrisome agenda and it could create friction. The sad part is, it comes at a time when in this city you have American leadership of the corporate kind that is admired in Latin America. The soft power that’s represented in rooms like this, the low cost of energy, the integration. There’s plenty of opportunities.

But I think Winston Churchill was always right. America will always do the right thing after exhausting all the other alternatives, so, hopefully, you will [laughter [applause]

Whoever’s doing security in the back, tell the ICE agents to wait until about half an hour. Then he’ll be free at that point. Luis, I’m going to stick with you, just to stay in the Americas. I’ll get to the Europeans in a moment. Trump, how big a problem for the state of American democracy, if any?

LA: The article you referred to refers specifically to the involvement maybe of Russia in the electoral process. Then we have to talk about the electoral integrity of any process in the continent, especially in the United States. So far, we don’t have enough elements in order to have a definition like the one you’re trying to have.

What I’m trying to say is that, for us, for Latin Americans, it is always a challenge. First of all, we are experts in foreign involvement in our elections [laughter]

That is a trademark of the continent. Second, our situation always, when there is a new American administration, is to re-adapt to accommodate the best possible that we can do, always trying to help, if possible. If not, we try to defend our interests in the best possible way. In fact, what we have is that the new administration doesn’t have such a distance with the previous administration.

Maybe, the speech is a little bit more rhetorical, but the Obama Administration deported more people than any other previous administration in the United States of America. Already it’s 600 miles of wall that costs the lives of 500 Latin Americans every year. Those are facts. They have always existed, and they are there.

On the contrary, what we see with this administration that they have been very committed to defend democracy in Venezuela and in Cuba. So far, that is a partner in order to reveal some democracies in the continent. I hope they will stay committed to that. In fact, my first option is always trust and move in that direction.

Vaira, I want to ask you this question. Trump does not exist in a vacuum. His election was surprising to a lot of people, including me. It’s the case that we are seeing around the globe, in Europe and elsewhere, an uprising of a certain kind of politics that’s populist politics, nationalist politics, protectionist politics, often nativist politics.

This is not a uniquely a Trump phenomenon. It’s happened in France. It’s happened in other places. Generally, not leading to someone capturing the presidency or the prime ministership, but there’s these movements that we see in many Western advanced democracies.

What explains that, at this point in human history, that suddenly those kinds of attitudes and that kind of politics seems to be finding traction in so many advanced, Western, rich democracies?

VVF: I would say that we should consider them seriously as symptoms of an underlying malaise. People will not follow leaders that promise them the sky and then don’t even give them the ground to stand on if they didn’t feel insecure on where they’re standing.

I think Prime Minister Aho was quite right that the end of history that we thought, with the collapse of communism on the European continent, did not mean that there was a definitive victory of democracy in the world, that we could all go home, relax, and do nothing about it.