Chris Bickerton: Welcome to the Technopopulist future

Freddie Sayers meets Chris Bickerton.

Listen to the podcast version: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/chris-bickerton-welcome-to-the-technopopulist-future

Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/chris-bickerton-welcome-to-the-technopopulist-future/

The pandemic has thrown traditional ideas about politics upside down. In a sense, it has been the ultimate triumph of the technocrats, with phrases like “following the science” and “trusting the experts” becoming commonplace; but notions like shutting national borders and moving governments onto a 'war footing' are more typically associated with the populist Right — it was Donald Trump who first shut the US borders, Modi in India implemented a swingeing lockdown early, and Boris Johnson's government is, at least in theory, a populist one. 

Chris Bickerton, reader in Modern European Politics at Queen's College Cambridge and sometime star of the Talking Politics podcast, has a book out which sees a pattern in this fusion of technocracy and populism: it's called technopopulism. In this fascinating discussion tells Freddie Sayers all about it.

// Timecodes //
01:13 What is technopopulism?
04:16 How Boris Johnson went from populist to technocrat
07:32 Dominic Cummings
10:56 How technocrats and populists see each other
13:07 Pluralism
15:07 Covid-19 pandemic
19:00 Politics in exceptional times
22:53 Are we becoming more like China?
25:55: Politics of numbers
28:03 The underlying question
29:14 The role of state power
30:41 Libertarianism
33:21 Revolution
37:05 Competence
39:16 Defending democracy

#technopopulism #dominiccummings #borisjohnson

Видео Chris Bickerton: Welcome to the Technopopulist future канала UnHerd