Prof John Keane delivered the opening keynote at ADI’s 2019 International Conference on 20 November 2019. The theme of the conference was ‘After Liberalism: Populism and the Future of Democracy’ and brought together academics from around Australia and the world.
“Reports of the coming death of power-sharing democracy may be greatly exaggerated, but there’s mounting evidence in many different global settings that two different but entangled forms of populism are among the prime forces pushing for its weakening, or outright destruction. In recent years, argues John Keane, governments from Russia and China through Central Asia to the Middle East and Europe have mastered a formidable combination of political tools, including a new form of managed populism, that threaten or outright destroy the established ideals and practices of power-sharing, monitory democracy. Elsewhere, in so-named liberal or constitutional democracies, populism functions as an auto-immune disease of electoral democracy. In the name of ‘the people’, electoral populism unleashes yearnings for demagogues who favour unrestricted corporate and state power and delight in the confusion and suffering of their victims, who are said to be ‘not even people’ (Eric Trump).
In both cases, despite all the differences, the managed and electoral forms of populism show that abuse of power is a populist thing, which in these troubling times raises the political question of how most effectively people and power-sharing institutions can be defended against the corrupting effects of populism. John Keane probes the developing fight backs against populism in places otherwise as different as Hong Kong, Hungary and the United States. He notes the spirited public defences of good laws, independent journalism and local governments committed to social inclusion. He looks as well at the campaigns for civility against racial and sexual violence; efforts to protect mosques, synagogues and other places of worship; the street mutinies of green networks such as Extinction Rebellion; and citizens’ initiatives to build sanctuary cities, independent trade unions, police monitoring groups, queer initiatives and crowd-funded media platforms. His suggestion is that one thing these different refusals of populism have in common is their practical commitment to a new version of an old ideal: the defence of civil society against all forms of predatory power.”
