YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Ignatieff

lines on the record: 50
first: 2023-07-03
most recent: 2023-07-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, that's a question you must ask yourself because you've been incredibly successful at a range of different things, but you're exposed to what I get exposed to, which is Jack of All Trades, Master of None. And all you can say to that is this is about who you are, your deepest temperament. It's just who you are. I mean, I often wish I'd sat in a monk's cell for all of my life and written some absolutely beautiful masterwork, but I didn't because I'm not a monk. I didn't want to be in a cell. I want to get out and see the world. The key point is provided you're prepared to pay the price, whatever the price is for doing a lot of things. And part of the price is people being envious or jealous or saying, well, he's really not very good at that. But are you prepared to pay the price, the full freight? Fine.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know what I would say on the success side is that I lived my damn life. I lived it. I didn't sit around. I lived it. I took some risks. I took some shots. I wouldn't judge it in terms of success or failure. All I would say is I lived it. Hopefully with both hands and full heart. That's all I feel about it.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's plead that it's still an open question. This is a new question in politics never asked in my lifetime. It goes back to what I was saying before. We had a conservatism which built the world we live in. And we've lost that conservatism. I'm much more worried about the conservative end of the argument than I am my own political family.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Key question in French politics will be Will Marine Le Pen respect the Constitution of the Fifth Republic? Yes or no? We don't know the answer. Will a Trump president in 2025 respect the Constitution of the United States? We no longer know.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The suspicion of Europe is a hundred thousand-year-old tradition in Britain. And there's some good reasons for it. But I do think the turning away from Europe was a catastrophic cultural mistake, let alone economic mistake. And Europe is extraordinarily enfeebled by the British departure. And it results in something that's just amazing to me. I live in Vienna here. I'm talking to you from Vienna. Everybody in Europe speaks English. It's the lingua franca of a continent that you just left. That just seems tragic to me. Why the conservative party has gone that way is not just a question of a Britain. It's a question about what's happened to conservatism across the world. The central problem of democratic politics to me now is the ways in which conservatism, and you see this particularly in the United States, is at the edge of the constitutional order. In France, it's at the edge of the constitutional order.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never thought you would ask me that question. Since you're one of the living worlds, living experts on that one, I think some of it is top line stuff. I'm so struck by the difficulty Britain has had to accept a post-imperial reality. I mean, I just see from the coronation on, I love Britain. I lived there for 20 years. As a Canadian, I've always admired your institutions because we borrowed them all and stuff. But I feel a tremendous decay of your institutions. I feel a kind of enfeebling nostalgia that is at odds with the other side of Britain, which is a very post-imperial country with innovation everywhere. Go to London and people love London precisely because it's so post-imperial and so modern and so 21st century. But the party is, I think, trapped in a kind of imperial nostalgia, which is tremendously disabling. And I think that then produced a desire to escape from Europe.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've watched British conservatism go into some extraordinary places that I just never thought possible. And you see this across Europe.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conservatives after the Second World War, we basically supported the welfare state. And you think about Europe, the Christian conservative tradition basically created that the modern Europe with social guarantees for everybody. It wasn't a left or centrist achievement. It also involved this constitutional conservatism that built our world. And it's not my family. I'm not part of it. But in Canada, we call it a progressive conservative. Well, there are no progressive conservatives left. This is why Polyev is an important phenomenon. He's a kind of grade B Canadian imitation of DeSantis. And that's terrible. We had an indigenous conservative tradition, which was progressive conservative, more fiscally conservative than us liberals. But part of the idea of building a country around a broad center, that's gone. And I think it's gone in most countries.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my successor as leader of the party is an incredible politician. He fully inhabits the role, and I mean that as praise. I never inhabited the role the way he does. He just is completely in the role. He's unpopular in Canada because he's been around for a while. He's, I think, haunted by the shadow of his father, who was the great politician in the 20th century. And he never quite can manage up. Justin Trudeau is a formidable political actor. Probably you're right more respected overseas than he is at home. I don't know. As for Polyev, I think, and this allows me to say something that I think is generally a crisis in Western democracy, which is that a lot of the world that I grew up in was not built by liberals and socialists and social democrats. It was also built by conservatives. You think about, you know, Macmill and Harold McMillan.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get the message. We're on a hiding to nowhere if we stick with fossil fuels indefinitely. But this is where I'm frankly glad I'm not in politics. This is a really tough issue in our country. And we're going, I think, as fast as we can, but we're not there yet.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“not less. As for Canada, Canada is right in the middle of this because we pump just about as much oil as Saudi Arabia. We're an energy superpower and we're pumping some very dirty oil south and our income, our national income depends crucially on it. The issue divides the country deeply because all the oil is pumped out of Alberta and the rest of the country prefers to virtue signal and say we want to have a nice free green future when in fact we're all sustained by the petrodollars we earn from Alberta. So energy policy is a national unity problem in our country in a way that it is in many other places and frankly I just don't know how we're going to solve it except to persuade Albertans one Albertan at a time that we have got to move us into a sustainable future and there are some signs in Alberta and other parts of our country that we're beginning to”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never believed this stuff about the need for an authoritarian solution to the climate change crisis. It's been around for 50 years, by the way. I remember hearing it in the 1970s. I didn't believe it then. I don't believe it now. What I see around me in my lifetime has been a vertical climb in public consciousness of the environment, a vertical climb in the search for alternative technologies. We're in the middle of an epical energy transition that has been basically driven by markets. I'm a big believer in markets and their capacity to signal and allocate demand. I don't have an anti-capitalist bone in my body because I think it's the most efficient marked signaling system in the world and beats authoritarian systems every time. The problem is it's not happening fast enough. But I don't think this climate change should give us an excuse to limit democracy. We need more democracy.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simply, no question, but this is, you know, I'm a 60s Canadian liberal. I believe in the purpose of democracy is to keep capitalism from destroying society. You know, I'm not a socialist. I'm a liberal centrist, but I think you have to regulate and regulate. And even now these big guys who run ChatGPT and all the artificial intelligence are basically begging governments around the world, particularly the democracies, to regulate a technology that they know could destroy us all. So nothing encapsulates the necessity of government, the importance of government than the AI problem. And nothing vindicates, it seems to me, the ways in which democracy for all its failings, I think, can get in there and regulate capitalism before it gets out of control.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boy, challenging stuff. I fundamentally disagree. The thing I think that makes democracy and capitalism necessary and essential twins is that democracy is the one system that allows you to correct mistakes and we're bound to make mistakes. The Chinese system has enormous difficulty reversing mistakes. Just look at the amount of capital poured into housing that's just vacant. Look at the total failure of their demographic policy in terms of their way below replacement rates. The society's central authority just is too rigid to change. Democracy can change much faster. It's much better at admitting its mistakes. It's much better at going into reverse. So that's the positive side of democracy on the economic front. On the capitalist side, there's”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the 80s and 70s to plug the holes. And that's why I don't hear a new synthesis, and I'm suspicious of one because the problems are so large that what I like is incremental success anywhere I see it. And so I don't know, I'm picking an example at random. When I hear that the Norwegians are about to ban or have nothing but electric cars by kind of 20, 25, 20, 20, 30, I think hooray. Now let's get another country to do that and begin to scale as we get more electric chargers. Because Carl Popper said, you know, he didn't believe in big plans. What he believed in was piecemeal social engineering. And I think I've become that way too, simply because I don't see a new Keynesian synthesis, for example, that would Solve the problem that Rory, you rightly want to address. I just don't see it.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Persistent, bold experimentation, as Roosevelt said, at which you try one little thing, and if it works, you make it bigger and you try and scale. I think we're flying blind in terms of knowing what will actually fix this problem. And one of the biggest problems, which is eating away at the legitimacy of politics worldwide, but particularly in Britain, is the sense that the determinants of the economic fortunes of the citizens of Great Britain are determined outside Great Britain altogether by a global economy that just raging around and reallocating advantage thousands of miles away and stripping jobs out of Sunderland or scripping jobs out of the Northeast and plopping them somewhere else. And politicians desperately trying to use industrial strategy, old nostrils,”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rory, you have to be right. I mean, I look at the numbers. I simply look at distribution of income in most Western societies since the 1970s, and you see that. And I look at my children having to struggle to get a foothold in the 21st century. And I found it effortless to get a foothold in the 20th century. I'm sure you're right. What I'm skeptical of is the idea that there's a new economic settlement. What I'd like is”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm supposed to say at this point in the proceedings because I'm an intellectual that we need more ideas. I'd like to see competence. I'd like to see just steady incremental delivery so that people have more confidence that politicians know what the heck they're doing. Every time we have a victory that is every time, for example, COVID is well managed. incrementally boosts or deals with what I think is the salient problem, which is the gulf between the political elite and the electorate, this enormous sense of suspicion, which is fed by social media. I'm not sure good ideas are the solution. I think that the solution to me, maybe this makes me an unimaginative incrementalist, but I just think every time a politician, anywhere in the world,”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think back to one of the most dramatic transitions of all was Franklin Roosevelt dies in early 45 as the war comes to an end. And this kind of Nondescript mediocre senator from Missouri becomes president overnight and has these earth-shattering decisions to take with no preparation. And he turned out to be, I think, one of the great residents. So I just think that's maybe intrinsic to politics and it's a little technocratic to think, okay, let's design a political system that will prepare people for the burden of office. The burden of office is always unexpected and frightening and scary and tests you to the limits, which is precisely why over and over and over people seek elected office because they want that challenge.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never got close to running the country. I was in opposition the whole time, so I never actually knew you actually got around the cabinet table and Allie helped to run a government for a decade. I didn't get close. So I don't know what governing would take. But I sense that you're right. I found opposition didn't prepare me for anything other than getting used to getting beat up all day. And that wasn't bad. I mean, don't cry for me, Argentina. It toughened me up in a way that I think was useful. But I think you're probably right. Our political system does not train us to govern. I think I remember Tony Blair saying when he came in in 97, it took him the better part of a decade to understand how to actually govern a country well. And I think that's a real problem. But I think that's always, I think it's an intrinsic problem. I mean, if you think...”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even enjoy it. And I just wasn't cut out for that. I'm actually, I think, a pretty tough guy in a way, pretty resolute, but I really found that difficult. And I admire people who can put up with that and above all retain their sense of humor. I got very humorless about it towards the end. The great politicians laugh it off and it's really wonderful and life-enhancing to see them do that. But I just got over serious about it and uptight about it. And fundamentally, just to conclude the thought, I didn't like what I had become. And I like myself. I mean, within limits, I like myself better now that I'm out of it.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I learned I'm not bloody good as a politician. That's what I learned. I mean, I think, and I came out paradoxically with much greater respect for the few people who really are good at politics, who don't find message discipline painful, who aren't always yearning to express themselves, who don't really, this is the key thing, who don't really care at some inner level what other people think of them. I mean, the great enormous strength of a great politician is that he can endure months, even years of attacks and criticism and carping and bitching.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just don't want to be seen because defeat is very humiliating. But it was interesting because I remember vividly walking to the liquor store and seeing an enormous cement truck go by with a seat guy driving the truck and he was wearing a red turban and he kind of slowed down and rolled down his window and waved at me and it kind of affectionate greeting and I thought this is going to be all right. So God bless that seat cement mix driver because I think he brought me back to reality. And the reality is most people don't care. I mean it's a dramatic, horrifying, shameful loss for you, but most of the public either doesn't care or they think something interesting, which is you tried to do a dirty job, you got defeated, but it was honorable to put your name on a ballot. And that is where I've come out. I've come out thinking, you know, there are a lot of things worse than defeat in politics.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, this was the worst defeat in Canadian history. We went from number two party, the opposition to three, and it took Mr. Trudeau to get us back into government five years later. So it wasn't permanent damage, but it was pretty devastating. And I lost my seat. And I woke up the next day and thought, now I know what my obituary is going to read. I thought, that's it. That's the end of my life. I mean, I might as well die tomorrow. I soon recovered because I've got a fantastic wife. And the other good thing is that I have a profession. I'm a history teacher. So I went back almost immediately into the classroom. I think if you don't have that, if you don't have somewhere to go, you can really spiral down. But I did have days when I go to the liquor store to buy a bottle of wine and I think I better put a bag over my head because I”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I made the elementary mistake in politics, which is not to come right back at them with a counterpunch. I paid the price. And they were, it was wonderfully effective. And I still beat people who say, oh, you're just visiting. When I come back to Canada, they say, oh, you're visiting. Nice to see you.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Passport other than Canada ever. I never will. And I was attacked by people who it turned out much later held American passports. So it was pretty disgusting.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was devastatingly effective. It was the largest campaign spend in the history of Canadian politics directed at a leader. And I made a couple of fatal mistakes. One of them is because I'm an elite patrician and a snob, I thought I'm not going to dignify that with an answer. Ali, you would have been the first to say that's the stupidest mistake you can possibly make in politics. And I made it. I didn't dignify this. I should have fought back because essentially Stephen Harper, the conservative leader, was saying, I get to define who's a good Canadian, who's a bad Canadian. You know, there are two or three million Canadians living outside the country. I was merely one of them and attempting to target me as a bad Canadian because I actually had some pretty interesting jobs in other places. I'd never held another.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because politics used to be governed by the codes of civility that determine everyday social intercourse and everyday social intercourse is kind of holding together. I doubt both of you folks are famous people, but I doubt that people are screaming at you in public. They may give you a hard time on the internet. You know, they're polite, and the civility and politeness of contemporary life is still just intact. But underneath it is this digital world, which is just completely out of control.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like everybody else. I mean, to give you the flavor of it personally, my wife would say to me, there's one thing, Michael, you are not going to do through your entire political career, which is to look at your social media feed because you won't want get out of bed. And that was true. And the paradox, which we need to remember is that in five years of politics, which wasn't very successful, I must have shaken 30,000 hands and I never with three exceptions met anybody who was personally offensive. Whereas in the digital sphere, it was offense and malice and viciousness the whole time. In many ways, the key feature of modern politics has been digital disinhibition, the ways in which because on the internet, as they say, no one knows you're a dog, you can behave like a dog on the internet. And that's had a terrible effect on politics.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I hope you're wrong, Rory, but I fear you may be right. It's clear that the tectonic plates are moving and that the kind of centrism that I've lived by is under enormous pressure at a time when we need what I said much earlier, we need politicians who can get the deals done that get us successfully to tomorrow morning. That's not what people want. They want people with big answers to big questions, even if they're the wrong answers and the wrong questions, because we all feel the tectonic plates shifting. And the social media element means that we're looking for enemies. We're looking for memes. We're looking for discourses that explain things to us, even if the explanations are completely false. I am a bit worried by what social media has done to politics.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was very difficult to run a university where your founder is on every billboard in town, on every billboard in the subway, on every billboard on the roads to the airport, everywhere. There was a billboard that said, don't let George Soros have the last laugh with a smiling picture of our founder. And if you said to people, look, don't you realize that in the 30s, the Nazis had one steady theme throughout their campaigns against the Jews, which was don't let the Jews have the last laugh. And so, if you said to Fidesz people, don't you realize you're reprising anti-Semitic tropes from the 1930s, they were stunned, baffled. So this is the vicious new mix of 21st century politics that I saw firsthand and it's extremely dangerous. And God, I pray that it doesn't spread to the United Kingdom or anywhere else.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He would angrily deny that he's anti Semitic. So it's 21st anti-Semitism. Anti Semitism without anti Semites, and it's anti Semitism without Jews, since most of the Jews in Hungary were exterminated. So it's a very vicious phenomenon.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think set up something that has now, I think, spread more widely. Orban has become a kind of leader of a global conservative internationale that includes DeSantis, that includes Kaczynski and includes Marine Le Pen, to whom he's given a loan. So it's a big deal, and conservative politicians from the United States make a beeline to Budapest to learn from the master because he's been in power for 13 years and he's perfected all these anti-liberal, anti-intellectual, anti-Jewish tropes. The thing about the anti-Semitism, though, Alistair, is that its antisemitism that denies that it's anti-Semitic. If you went to Victor and said, hey, come on, what is this? This is a complete vulgar anti-Semitism. He would say, he would literally say some of my best friends are Jews.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who left Hungary after the war, went to London and then New York and made a fortune as a hedge fund investor and speculator. And is famous in Britain because he bet against the British pound in 1990 whenever it was and made a huge amount of money. He's a consistent supporter of progressive liberal left-wing causes. extremely generous philanthropist, but is widely hated by pretty well everybody from the right wing onwards, is the Betmoir of the entire global conservative movement. And he is the founder of the university that I was asked to lead in Budapest and then Orban Led a campaign against him, which eventually led to our expulsion.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, some of it, I think, was frankly anti Semitic. There's no question. They came after Central European University because it was funded by George Soros. Orban came after Soros because he had to win the 2018 election and he needed an enemy. This is one of the key things about populism. They succeed electorally by defining an enemy and then going after that enemy relentlessly.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The populism of the right gets you precisely nowhere. I've taken a long time to say that, but that's my. I respect the anger that populism has picked up in our political system. And if our political system was responding right, it would do something to address that anger. But the populace of the right are not doing anything about it.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is tapping into. The problem, obviously, and I think this has been said by lots of other people smarter than me, is that populists have no solutions. If you ask a populist of the right, a Viktor Orban, a Donald Trump, a Kaczynski in Poland, what he does about the inequality, the gap between the haves and the have-nots, their only solutions to cut taxes evermore. There's no solution there. And then if you ask Ron DeSantis what he wants to do, populace from the right, what he wants to do about these problems, he picks a fight against some obscure Florida university because it sends the right signal to his base. But if you ask him what he does about inequality, this is a guy who went to Yale, who went to Harvard Law. He's as elitist as the next guy, but he continues that phony attack on elites.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The positive thing to say about populism, because there's a populism of the left and a populism of the right, some of the populism of the left is very positive. It says let's shake up these elites. Let's replace these elites. And it reflects a lot of impatience and anger with the fact that, you know, almost the biggest fact of my adult life has been the steady increasing inequality since the early 70s. I grew up. I'm a baby boomer. I grew up in the 50s. And, you know, Thomas Piketty will tell you, you know, the inequality was very, very compressed. I grew up in a vanished world from the 70s onwards. Inequality soars. Some of the people who benefited most from that inequality were people like me who went to fancy universities. And it's opened up a chasm in our societies. And so to that extent, I'm sympathetic to the anger that populism.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These liberal elites who've had a pretty good run from the 60s onwards often did some very good things, understood the economy in a way that had never been understood before. We've had better economic management from the mid-60s onwards than in any period in history. So the liberal elite can be kind of proud of that in a way. But it's generated enormous resentment at our privileges, at our entitlement, at the way we speak, at the way we talk down to people, the way we seem to have an answer to every bloody question. And in a way, I think...”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's complicated for a guilty reason. I'm somebody listening to me would think, oh, he's just a member of the liberal elite, Harvard, you know, Oxbridge father was a public servant on and on. So when we look at populism, what we have to understand is they're coming right at us. They're coming at us.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weirdly against all my instincts, is Joe Biden simply because he got deals that nobody thought could be done. And it's the deal maker that we've got to, I think, Bring back and respect. And all these soison philosopher kings, you know, and I include myself, I wanted to be a philosopher king, we need less of them and more people who could just get the deal done. And so that would be my view of it.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very interesting yesterday I was talking to a friend in France and I said what do you think of Makram? And she said very shrewdly, she said, the problem with sky is that he isn't a politician. He isn't fundamentally a politician. He can't, which means he couldn't go into the ensemble national and get a deal on that pension reform. And there was too much on MTN, you know, on one hand, on the other. There's too much kind of Jupiterian presidential, let me lecture the French people what is in their interest. He wasn't a politician and a great politician doesn't give people lectures. A great politician understands his businesses to find that narrow place down the middle where you can get just enough votes to get by till tomorrow morning. And everybody despises politicians these days. But those are the politicians I really admire. And so if you had to ask me someone I really admire at the most.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either you have to know what you think, which is usually the message, and you just stick with it. And then if you actually are unsure, you don't want to show that part at all. So you kind of skate it. And this conflict between these two positions is very difficult to maintain. And I found myself often wanting to think aloud. But it's not what people want to hear.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. I mean, one of the great skills in politics is what we call in Canada skating. You ask a tough question on a really important public issue and you absolutely don't know what your bloody think about it or you haven't worked it out. So you skate. You kind of circle around the ice or to use another Canadian metaphor, you rag the puck. That is, you take the puck and you kind of circle around. You just hope they'll kind of go away. Whereas if you think aloud, you actually go at the question and you're trying to answer it. And you say on the one hand, on the other hand, you do what an academic does, which is to measure up the probabilities, the consequences you try and think it through, which is what academics are very good at. That's lousy in politics. People don't want to hear that in politics. What they want to hear is leadership. They want to hear what you think. So in politics, you have two difficult choices.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'd notice you and recognize you. And then you'd start thinking this dreary thought, is she with me? Is she not going to vote for me? You know, you start measuring every human encounter by whether they support you or not. And I found that very difficult. And I found it very difficult to be with my wife and want a little downtime, a little quiet time and a little cry on her shoulder time. And you were never off. You were always in public view. And I found that stuff slowly became more and more difficult to support. I understand how kind of whiny this sounds, and I don't want to sound whiny. I love being in politics in a way, but let's be honest about the price it exacts. And it began to exact a higher and higher price.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'd spent a lot of my life when I was doing those interviews with News Knight that you saw. Speaking just in my own name. You know, the only person I was representing was my own view of whatever the question was. Suddenly I had to represent the view of a party. I had to speak for a movement. I had to speak for thousands of people. I had to watch my P's and Q's. I had to censor my brain every time to keep myself, as they say, on message. I found message discipline very, very difficult. It made me overcautious. It made me shut myself down. So that was problem number one. Problem number two was that I'm, you know, I'm a pretty vain guy. I'm pretty ambitious, pretty vain. And I thought I would like being famous. And here's the weird thing. I really hated being famous because you get on a plane in Canada, because in Canada, if you're in politics, you travel all the time because it's such a big country. And you'd sit in the plane and people would be coming on board. And every time they saw you,”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A suit, I was very kind of my hair was quaffed in a new way. I was speaking in perfect sentences. I clearly become a different person than I'd been when we knew each other at Harvard. And I thought you were kind of uneasy about that. And I think you saw something about me that I didn't see, but which over time became the real problem for me in politics, which is that I became a different person and I wasn't terribly happy with the guy I'd become. That's the real cost in politics, I think.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any favors? Let's put this to a vote. I eventually became the candidate. So from the get-go, it was absolute bloody shambles. And we got through it. And then we had an election and I campaigned for 55 days. Canada is, our listeners may know, is a little cold in the winter. And this was a winter election, so it was absolutely freezing out there. But we knocked on 10,000 doors and we won. So from the beginning, it was combat. And that was extremely exciting. But when you saw me, I think you noticed something that I didn't see at the time. I think you found me a kind of swarmy.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I had to fight my way in, and that's an important part of it. My nomination meeting for my seat was at the wonderfully labeled Valhalla Inn near the airport in Toronto. And I arrived at the Valhalla Inn to face a really howling mob. I don't exaggerate. A lot of Ukrainians, God bless them, because there were a lot of Ukrainians in my writing who didn't want someone with a Russian background to be the candidate. And then a lot of people who I think quite rightly had real objections to the position I'd taken on Iraq. So I had, you know, the left coming at me. I had the Ukrainians coming at me. And I had to cut through a really howling mob and then had to fight for my life and stand up and say, you know, I've got the right to run. I'm not asking for.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but that's precisely why you go and do it, isn't it? Because you get tired of living in the precious cozeted world of academics. And so you want to throw yourself into the rough stuff. And then, of course, you discover how little you know about yourself and you discover, in fact, that, ouch, it really hurts when you get bitten and you get attacked. So on balance, I think Weber may be right. I'm not sure academic life is the greatest place to start a political career from.”
2023-07-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 25: Michael Ignatieff: Fighting Orban's Global Conservative Cabal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source