YouSaid · the spoken record

Rafael Behr

lines on the record: 31
first: 2023-09-20
most recent: 2023-09-20
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

“I don't know, but I do know that if we just assume it's the latter, then we are going to substantially limit our ability to avert the worst case scenario. If every bad political movement that you come across, you presume is fascist jack boots on cobblestones coming around the corner, then you've already accelerated towards that outcome by saying, well, democracy's failed, it can't work. It can. It does work. In this country, we are almost certainly going to have a peaceful regime change next year. And I don't think Rishis Sunak, however unpleasant he might be or have many unpleasant conservatives who might be around him, will do what Donald Trump did or will say, you know, actually I'm refusing to give up power. I'm staying forever. That's not going to happen. So again, that won't sound naive, but nor do I think necessarily we should despair.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Through every stage of setting modern history, modern British history, when there has been a time of turbulence and uncertainty, you will find commentary and people saying we are absolutely doomed. This is a disaster. I looked at lots of things that were written in the 1970s. People, commentators saying there probably won't even be a Briton in 20 years time. You might actually think of the early 1960s, the Cuban missile crisis, how close we came to total nuclear annihilation. And it is very hard to know when you sort of zoom the lens out from a time of frility and anxiety, whether it's sort of 1977 and the issue is people aren't collecting the bins but will pull through or it's summer 1914 and something absolutely apocalyptic is about to go off and i”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When he took Crimea, when he invaded Georgia, and it didn't happen, and Putin is losing, or certainly, or at least he's doing badly enough that the idea that somehow anything other than liberal democracy has been advertised as a successful alternative model. And all that is, and you can hold up Putinism as anything other than an angry, embittered moral and intellectual cul-de-sac in flight from democracy is absurd. That's clearly not happening. And finally, on this point,”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just younger voters, yes, it is true that the Conservatives are going weak at the knee about net zero, but they're also losing. Even in, you mentioned Uxbridge and West Riselip, there were more that more people voted for the Green Party, twice as many people voted for the Green Party as there was, as is the size of what's left of the Tory majority there. So if half the people who'd voted Green had voted Labour, it wouldn't be a Tory seat. Now, I'm not saying that might be Keir Stalman's fault for not giving those people enough reason to vote for him, but ultimately it's not that the people of West Rise Lip don't care about the environment. Something else was going on there. Lots of things were going on there. Russia, I mean, the reality is it seems almost inevitable that, you know, this totalitarian, brutal, monstrous machine would steam through Ukraine and it would all be over. And Putin gambled on that and he thought the West would register as they had done.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, this was clearly the hardest thing in the book for me was getting that balance between essentially a realistic appraisal of how bad things are and not sort of falling into a state of panic and abject despair and not alternatively also not trying to cultivate kind of Polyana-ish optimism as a sort of saccharin antidote to the sadness of what's really going on. And just on that last point, there are ways you can configure these things differently. And so I say I'm not trying to be kind of naive about this. But actually, the consensus on climate change that is actually happening in certainly in the UK is way stronger. And you look at opinion polls, people care about it a lot more across demographic groups, certainly younger voters. It's really animating with all.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Track before you derail it by zoom scrolling through something else. It was incredibly revealing to me that I was using my phone as a device to interrupt my own cognition and as if almost like a fear of where imagination and natural thought process might go to. And again, those society did we're going off on different track here, but this is why I think it's incredibly important to limit children's use of these devices because I just think they are the enemy of the sort of interior world of imagination that you need to get a bit bored to experience.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty much, yeah. I'm a bit better at policing it myself now because actually what you realize with a little bit of remove from it is that just as with giving up any other addiction, there comes a moment where you start to feel better for not having this thing going on. And certainly the two things I really identified with in terms of prolonged abstinence from social media. One, the anger definitely goes away. And not entirely, obviously. But as I say, the wrong kind of anger goes away. So I can still get frustrated by what's going on in British politics, but I'm not actively, I'm not seeing petty, stupid, small things niggling, raged that just gets under your skin that also makes you feel kind of helpless, not being exposed to that. And the other thing is allowing a train of thought or an idea to just roll through a few more stations on the”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To something incomprehensible and unmemorable. Writing on a piece of paper, essentially giving it to my wife and said, don't let me look at this until I next have to write a column and then I'll be allowed some time on social media, which is sort of pathetic, but ultimately it does work.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, I remember when I first tried to give up using social media, I remember actually once being on holiday and thinking, well, I'm not going to look at my phone for a few days. And this was long after I'd given up smoking. But I do remember getting this kind of twitchiness and this strange feeling of absence in my hands and a restlessness, like just a sort of fizzing itchiness all over your body that you couldn't quite pin down. And if something arises, it felt exactly like giving up smoking. And I mean, in terms of what you're describing in social media, it's very difficult when you're a political journalist. You'll know as well as I do, Johnny, that a lot of modern politics is conducted through that media too much, but it does mean that if you're never looking at it, you don't know what's going on. You are missing at least a portion of the stage on which politics is being played out. So you have to be aware of it. And so you have to get the balance right. And so for that, I took to sort of changing my password.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quit a very addictive substance. But actually, anger also stimulates a lot of the hormonal and chemical and neurological reactions that become compulsive and habit forming. And it is a kind of addiction and one that the technology, the infrastructure of social media is very well designed to sustain because constantly engaged or constantly sort of locked in adrenaline-fueled users are the best customers because they're not exercising rational judgment. They're doing things on impulse, which means they're buying on impulse. And that's good for business.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, I remember having a very clear memory of a moment when I was late one night. This was again pre-2019 and engage just sort of probably arguing with someone or something that might well have been a robot as far as I know looking back on it, but certainly sort of just getting really stuck in. And I got a text message on my phone from a very good friend of mine just saying, Raf, step away from the keyboard. If someone had seen me, the way I was operating on Twitter thinking this is not good for you. And I now see it, I've seen it in lots of other people as well. And, you know, as you say, this is very seductive, very deceptive. People don't think of anger as an addictive substance because you think of addiction as something that you sort of take up when it's at least initially pleasurable. So I've never been addicted to heroin, but I bet the first few times it's great. Then he goes very badly wrong. I've been a nicotine addict. I know how hard it is to.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That makes people, it's great if people want to go out and demonstrate and protest most of the time. But I think actually for a lot of people what rage does is it stimulates actually the fight or flight response that means they're better off withdrawing altogether. There's a great line I quote Philip Roth from one of his novels where he says where actually a character in the book says you know anger is to make you effective. That's why it's given to you. Basically it's the evolutionary function that will mobilize you to do something. But as soon as it stops doing that you have to drop it. And this is why again in the middle section of the book I sort of go into particularly the sort of the technology and the digital sphere and social media and some of the artificial rage inducing machines that mean there is a particular kind of synthetic anger, synthetic fury that is a very powerful political fuel for a certain type of political movement but not”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I dismiss the subtle as beta blockers will solve all of your political problems. No, no, it's a really important distinction because, and again, it's what I'm at pains to make in the book. I hope I make it clearly enough that I'm not against anger as a political response because precisely all the reason you say anger is not only a legitimate response to terrible politics, but the necessary impulse to action against terrible politics. And what I'm talking about is something I think important and different, which is sort of an incapacitating sort of red mist that clouds your ability to judge. First of all, judge what's important, what matters. It clouds your ability to judge what are the origins of your anger? What is it? Where should you be focusing this anger? And also it cultivates actually a kind of cynicism and it's a bigger driver of apathy, I think, than just the sort of anger.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sense of automatic belonging was changing, it was moving the goalposts. And I, again, I felt that that made me, that animated that sense of contingency, of vulnerability, that even if it wasn't entirely rational was irrefutable.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My taste for marmite would be different under those circumstances. But certainly it meant that when, for example, as part of the Brexit process, there was this business of the EU nationals who had moved to the UK exercising their freedom of movement, essentially taking advantage of a contract that meant that the political space they were in was the European one, and they didn't have to be British citizens, but they could set up home here, have jobs, marry, have children, fall in love, make friends, all these things. And then for Brexit to retrospectively sort of reach back in time and say, actually, the thing that qualified you to be here, to call this place your home, is now annulled and it's not your home. That was a different type of immigration intervention than anything, even the most draconian thing that had gone before, because it was pulling out a rug from underneath people.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think, I mean, this is why one of the things I hadn't pondered before I looked at this and started researching it, although when I, I mean, I've been in the lobby in Parliament, so I've been sort of security vetted. And as part of that, I had to go through this whole process of digging out my parents' naturalization certificates, the point at which they had to sort of swear loyalty to Her Majesty the Queen because they were so African. And then I realized, well, actually, my qualification, automatic qualification to be British by virtue of being born in Britain, really was a product of a very small window in UK immigration policy that closed in 1983 with the Nationality Act. And had I been born 10 years later, I would have had a South African passport and had to go through a very different process of naturalization to qualify as British. And I don't know whether my sense of loyalty or belonging or even”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't have to, as it were, align everything I care about with regard to British identity with a group of other people who have take from the same drop-down menu and that can be represented as a political project. And that's a very important distinction. And Brexit crucially made that arrogation. It said there is now a sort of a mandatory set of things that you have to believe politically to qualify for true pride in the national project. And 48% of you have just disqualified yourselves. Sorry, bye.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's right. And crucially also that nationalism is a political project that wants to claim exclusive ownership of what it means to be proud of your country and to enforce that essentially at the level of the state. And the thing, well, I think the point I make is that with, you know, I can feel I'm capable of feeling very patriotic about all sorts of things. I'm a liberal-minded person, but that doesn't mean I'm not patriotic. I'm patriotic about the fact that Britain produced the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I'm patriotic about a certain type of British sense of humour. I'm patriotic about Marmite. It's one of the greatest culinary inventions of modern civilization. But you can allow all that for those things and also think Britain is historically responsible for terrible crimes or that there are certain things that British government does that I would repudiate and be appalled by.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A great moment of liberation and go back to simultaneously go back to our golden age where we were once a great trading nation. somehow the glory of the past is also a prescription for the future. That is archetypal nationalism. And yet, Nigel Farage would never call him, they never dare to say he runs something called an English Nationalist Party. That would be considered sort of icky and taboo. And so somehow these things, as I say, that were really very paradigmatic tropes of a nationalist project just sort of flowed into the political mainstream. And then going back to then your question about the distinction between nationalism and just as a more general idea of patriotism, which I think is incredibly important because the two things just get sort of swilled around interchangeably. And crucially, the main way to, I mean, I hope you're right that I describe it well in the book. I can't remember exactly what I said. So I won't be able to.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's certainly, I think it was to go back to what you said at the beginning. It's absolutely right that there is a curious denial in British and English politics about nationalism on the understanding and I think some of this goes back to 1945 or even 1941 standing alone against the Luftwaffe and winning the war and this sense that nationalism is a sort of a continental fever and Britain having it hundreds of years of democracy of established democracy is somehow immune. And so to the extent that something like Nigel Farage, who if you just look at the arguments that are being made, we want our country back, there is a sort of a nostalgic idea of what Britain represents in the past that has been corrupted by outside influence. We've been sort of colonized by an alien power, in this case Brussels bureaucrats. And we will achieve...”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Labour Party and being Jewish and finding what I felt to be the permission that Jeremy Corbyn gave to anti-Semitism to run riot within the Labour Party withdrew that as well. So there was a kind of a double pronged attack on my sense of how I could participate in British democracy and how I could belong in it. And it drove me into a feeling of exile.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was an element of contingency in my feeling of belonging, not just to Britain as a society, but British politics and having the investment in British democracy and to suddenly being in an environment where the fundamental idea of what it meant to me to be British and therefore my stake in democracy was made sort of vulnerable, was questioned in the more fundamental way. That was very different to just my side lost in election or my preferred party was out of power. It was more profound than that. And then just to finish its point, something was happening in parallel, which we haven't yet mentioned, which was that Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party at that time. And ordinarily in a situation of feeling anxious and unhappy about the state of British democracy or in an oppositional stance rather than my side being in power, I would gravitate towards that part of my identity that felt it belongs with the opposition.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A wholly owned property of the leave arguments and that people who were insisting that there might be a better way of managing the European Union or even perhaps we should consider whether it was a good idea to do it at all, perhaps have a second referendum. That was never was always felt ambivalent about that. But certainly I thought it was a legitimate argument to have. We were cast as traitors, saboteurs, parliamentarians were described as the same traitors, quizlings, judges were called enemies of the people. And that sort of provokes sort of deeper, as I think I described it in the book as sort of someone running a sort of fingernail under the seam that joins you to the country that you live in. And I'm first generation British or second generation generation immigrant. And I had never fully examined the extent to which”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the thing I really came to understand when I examined it afterwards, I mean, it was, well, let's start with Brexit, because that was such a seismic event for all sorts of people and in all sorts of ways. And, you know, we should remember also that, you know, I felt very passionately as a remainer about I wanted Britain to stay in the European Union. I was also mindful of the fact that we'd had this huge democratic event and that, you know, more people had voted leave than voted Remain. And they also felt very strongly about that. What I came to understand was that there was something different about politics after 2016 in the way it was animating something more visceral about my sense of belonging in British politics and belonging to British democracy. And there are a couple of things going on there. One was that sense that as a remainer, once sort of the political narrative was established, that sort of patriotism and national identity was”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stress that I was unmistakably under can be a trigger. So I don't doubt that this was a factor in it, but mostly, and this is why in the book, I think I'm careful not to try and make it a huge over-elaborate extended metaphor where somehow my ill health becomes a vast simile for the body politic. That would be silly. It's more the As I say, the enforced reconsideration of my own unhealthy relationship with politics enabled me to then actually get the distance that I think made for an analytical view of some of the more complicated forces reaching back much further than 2016 to how we'd ended up in the state we were in.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good question. When I was discharged from the hospital, one of the things a nurse said to me was, you know, what do you do for a living? And I said, well, I'm a journalist. Oh, how interesting would you write about? I said, well, politics. And he said, oh, is that stressful? And I thought, I come to think of it, actually. Yes, it is quite. And look, crucially, I mean, I didn't know obviously I don't think politics gave me cardiovascular disease. You know, there is a genetic predisposition and I had spent most of my 20s with a cigarette in my mouth. That's definitely a big factor. Strongly would counsel against that. Younger listeners. And eating too many pastries. So all these things, and I didn't have any, so I don't know what my kind of blood lipid count was or crucially what my blood pressure was before. But it's definitely the case that if you are sort of, if you're on a hair trigger for something like that, a period of very intense.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to cut a long story short, you know, spoiler alert, it wasn't a fatal heart attack because here I am. But in the process of recovering from that and understanding some of the stresses and the pressures that had certainly contributed, I don't think they caused the heart attack, but contributed to the general state of my unhealth and unhappiness leading up to that. I was forced to really reappraise my relationship with politics, political journalism, and writing. And that gave me the sort of the palette from which I was able to start drawing various things together, drawing various pictures of what I felt had gone wrong with British democracy. And more or less out of that sort of self-therapeutic, self-diagnostic exercise, that's where the book came from. No, 44. I think”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I felt well, essentially I took me a moment to realize that this was probably exactly what one might be expecting to feel if one was suffering from an enormous heart attack. I then ruled that out as an option because it was New Year's Eve. I had guests coming for dinner. You know, the salmon was already ready to go in the oven. It would have been a preposterous thing to do to have a heart attack at that moment. And then I very quickly decided that actually I should get myself to a hospital.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty terrible, but I was working very hard and we all were, and also during that period, I would sometimes exercise to try and stay fit, not very successfully, and I'd go out running. And during those excursions for ATINS exercise, I would often feel a sort of tight burning pain across my chest, which being an intelligent and well-informed erudite person, I brilliantly diagnosed as being a bit middle-aged and unfit and old and entirely failed to diagnose as a very severe angina. Until New Year's Eve 2019, when I went out for one of my runs and felt the severe chest pain as I usually did and thought nothing of it, apart from being a bit frustrated that I'd only managed to get about half a kilometre away from my front door. And then suddenly I had this sort of volcanic eruption, sort of like the alien in the film alien felt as if it was sort of ripping out of my rib cage, except nothing appeared.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yes, I mean, as you mentioned a moment ago, you know, a conversation about how to deal with a general state of politics and what ails democracy had been sort of floating around in conversations with colleagues in my own head, in my writing for a long time. And we're talking about a period sort of between the Brexit referendum in particular 2016, running up to the moment where Boris Johnson wins the big general election majority landslide December 2019 where, which I think everyone who lived through it will recall as an incredibly febrile, intense, stressful time in British politics. And I will certainly no exception. I wasn't really aware of how heavily, I think that was weighing down on me, but then I certainly looked terrible and felt.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, Johnny, thank you for that wonderful introduction and for agreeing to do this, have this conversation, which we'd probably have had anyway, but we just wouldn't have done it with an audience present.”
2023-09-20 · Intelligence Squared · Politics in the Age of Chaos with Rafael Behr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT