Dr. Dennis Tourish is Professor of Leadership and Organisation Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the former editor of the journal Leadership, and the author of several books including The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership, published and Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. He is a proponent of the Responsible Research of Business and Management Network an organization that envisions a world where business and management research is used in practice to improve the lives of people.
Quote From This Episode
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
About The Boler College of Business at John Carroll University
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
Dr. Dennis Tourish is Professor of Leadership and Organisation Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the former editor of the journal Leadership, and the author of several books including The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership, published and Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. He is a proponent of the Responsible Research of Business and Management Network an organization that envisions a world where business and management research is used in practice to improve the lives of people.
Quote From This Episode
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
About The Boler College of Business at John Carroll University
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you so much for checking in, wherever you are in the world. We have a really, really, really interesting conversation today with Dr Dennis Tourish. He is a professor of leadership and organization studies at the University of Sussex. He is the former editor of the Journal of Leadership and the author of several books, including the Dark Side of Transformational Leadership, management Studies and Crisis, fraud, deception and Meaningless Research. He is a proponent of the responsible research and business and management network, an organization that envisions a world where business and management research is used in practice to improve the lives of people, and I think we're going there a little bit today, dennis, with an article that you have written, and I'm going to share a couple of things with you before to kind of maybe set the stage, and then we'll see where the conversation takes us. Thank you for being here again, sarah. Very, very much appreciate it. It's always a pleasure, scott.
Scott Allen:We were together in Copenhagen a few weeks back and at the International Studying Leadership Conference just a wonderful few days. We were talking about that a little bit before we got on today. Just an incredible conference organized by Eric Guthey and Nicole Ferry and their colleagues at CBS and I brought my wife and we had this wonderful, wonderful time ahead of the conference. We snuck out a little bit at the very, very end, but we had this time to go to these museums, and we went to the Louisiana Museum and we went to the National Museum, we went to the Museum of the Resistance and we went to the Workers' Museum, and it was this wonderful, wonderful experience. And I was kind of amazed at the Museum of the Resistance For listeners, anyone who's ever in Copenhagen A) go eat incredible food, B) be careful of bikers and C) go to the Museum of the Resistance, because it was a fascinating story of Denmark's experience during World War II.
Scott Allen:And of course, as you walk through the Danish Museum and as you experience that, you learn the history of Denmark. And of course it's just war time, peace, war time, peace. A little bit more war, a little more peace. And that to say, last summer we were in Greece and again the scale, as an American at least, is just fascinating to me. Our tour guide in Meteora said well, the Turks were here for about 400 years, and then there was the Romans and then there was the Nazis. And there's this memory and there's this history in Europe that I don't think exists in the United States, and there's a wisdom in Europe that I don't think exists in the United States.
Scott Allen:And that's not to beg on the United States, but I just think, given our age and given our history, I think there's some important conversations that we need to have about who we are and who we want to be and, at least in recent times, we have some fairly significant indicators that we are not healthy in some ways. So for listeners today, I don't want you to take this conversation as a Republican versus Democrat conversation. I want you to take this and try and stay at the level of health of our country, in this case the United States, and of course, similar things are happening in other countries around the world. But we have some indicators. As soon as a large faction of people decides that their next best move is to invade the capital of your country with violence, killing individuals in the process, that's a marker of a lack of health in the system. Or as soon as a faction of people their next best move is to burn down a police precinct in Minneapolis, that's an indicator of unhealth. Or if you're going to lot to hit nap the governor of Michigan, or if you're bringing a gun into the Supreme Court's facilities in Colorado.
Scott Allen:These are indicators of a lack of health. These are indicators that things are not necessarily where we want to be. The system is not producing the results that we would hope it would and, as we know, at least in our country and all over the world, the systems oftentimes are not producing results for many, for large factions of people, traditionally, or maybe currently. Maybe there are factions of people who have kind of lost of grip on what they had and see themselves slipping from where they used to be, so to speak.
Scott Allen:But your article really caught my attention because, at least in my circles in the United States, we don't talk about things like populism or fascism. They're foreign concepts that we learned in history class, but they aren't necessarily things that we talk about. So your article it is time to use the F word about Trump, fascism, populism and the rebirth of history it caught my attention. It really caught my attention. So maybe react to what I just said good, bad or ugly, disagree, agree and then maybe we start going into some definitions of how you think about populism, how you think about fascism and then what you're seeing as indicators from your lens as a leadership scholar. Yeah, the same, the same.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:I remember maybe it was 20 years ago now that Francis Fugiazma made the famous assertion that we had reached the end of history, and what he meant by that. It's been often caricatured, but what he meant was that not that events would stop, but that the norms of liberal democracy would become an uncontested good around the world, that the bones of the Soviet Union represented the decline of authoritarianism in general. And I think, as you were in faring, we're witnessed a reversal of that process over the last number of years in places like Poland, hungary, to some extent in Britain and most definitely in the United States as well, where there's obviously huge alienation on the part of the citizenry from the institutions that we have thought defined what the United States is, and that alienation exists for a number of reasons. It's obvious that Trump didn't start anything, as I argue in my paper. People are alienated and angry for a reason, and part of that that we can get a grip on is the erosion of the American dream, as it was called, over the last decades, the widespread recognition that for white working class people, their standard of living has been slipping. It is no longer improving. How precarity has grown enormously over the recent decades, and in my reading of it. Much of that is due to the ascendancy of neoliberal ideology, which has prioritized, above everything else, the idea that the core purpose of businesses is promoting shareholder value.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:And I came across an astonishing quotation recently, which I think explains a lot of this, from Jeff Immelt, who was the CEO of General Electric from, I think, 2001 to 2017.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:And his recent autobiography. He was reflecting on the offshoring practices that led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the US, where he said if we could move jobs more cheaply offshore, we thought that this was our right as capitalists. And he added this we didn't think too much about the consequences. Well, you know, laid off workers certainly thought about the consequences. All these shuttered factories leads to devastation for many, many people, and that despair is, to some extent, part of the explanation for the rise of extremism and Trumpism. It's not the only thing, because in my paper, I also acknowledge racism and the impact of having the first black man ever enter the white house and so on, but these were factors that created social stress and instability, which made people feel that the system wasn't working very well for them. And then, of course, as we know, trump has come along and capitalized to a very huge extent on those moods.
Scott Allen:As you were speaking in some ways, I had an episode with Henry Menzberg and he talks about balance and he talks about the concept of rebalancing society and he thinks in some ways that the US in particular has gotten out of balance.
Scott Allen:So to your point, I think that that connects really really nicely and yes, I mean, I see it. I see it in the state that I'm in. I'm in Ohio and you have communities like Lordstown, ohio, where 15,000 jobs are eliminated, and you have all communities that once had this identity, that once had a purpose, there was stability, and all of a sudden that's taken out of that community and in many places now the largest employer is the hospital, the prison, the Walmart or you know. It's in some ways that digitization and that globalization has left many places. That shift has left them not in a good place, because also then other things begin to enter those communities, like substance abuse and other challenges that occur. So, yes, you have these shifts in the context globalization, digitization and for a faction of people where there was purpose and where there was access, it's sliding, it's slipping right.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:Well, I mean the challenge for the opponents of Trump was to try to offer an alternative and come up with solutions to those particular problems. The thing about Trump and this is, I think, a characteristic of populism and fascism together is that the people who promote these. They always promise simple solutions to complex problems, and they also identify scapegoats immigrants of one kind or another, people of color, minorities of some kind or, in the case of the Trump movement, also the soup called liberal elite, which is said to be behind things. So you can identify these scapegoats and then turn the anger of the community, which has some justification onto these scapegoats and pretend that by doing things like building a wall between America and Mexico which is a lunatic idea but by doing things like that, you'll be able to solve the problems. Now, of course, all that you do is make their problems worse.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:That's the catch. But then what that does is it leads the populist or, as I now think we should talk about Trump, a fascist leader at least to increase their rhetoric, to look for even more scapegoats, to demand even more extreme measures and lead the country into an even deeper crisis. And it's quite obvious that if Trump is re-elected, we will be in an even deeper crisis, because I think what we would regard as democratic safeguards will be systematically dismantled and you will certainly have an attempt to create a permanent Republican presidency. Whether it works or not as a deframatical, you'll certainly have an attempt to do that, and it will become increasingly difficult for the majority of people who do not support this type of regime to make their voices heard.
Scott Allen:Well, talk a little bit about populism versus fascism. I'd love to get into some of those and I know that there isn't a clear cut definition and there's overlap, but help us and help listeners understand kind of the difference between those two. And is there something before populism that would be on our radar?
Dr. Dennis Tourish:Yeah, Well, I mean, elements of it have always been there. We've always had nationalistic politicians, we've always had demagoguery and so on. Well, populism really came into its own in my reading of the literature after the Second World War, when the revelation of the Holocaust and the defeats of fascism made some kind of a rebrand necessary. But to start with what populism is and what it actually shares with fascism, and then look at what is the difference, I think populism, like fascism, at first of all creates an in-group and an out-group. Okay, it says we, this persecuted minority or majority or whatever, we have something that we're losing and we're losing it because of the actions of this out-group, whom we therefore must take action against, and therefore whips up very powerful emotions on the part of people, of xenophobia, of hatred of minorities, of anger, of rage, of frustration. It says that the group is in decline, that if we don't act now, then everything that we will dare will be lost and we will be replaced by another group who will be taking over all the privileges that we have had, and also tends to be associated with the promotion of an individual leader who is said to intuitively understand the needs of the people and who needs a minimum, if any, legal restraints on their behavior. So far, that sounds pretty much like fascism in a way, and it is Insofar as there is a difference.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:Populist leaders after the Second World War at the very least made at least some show of respecting democratic norms and tried to achieve power through winning elections rather than through military adventures or pushes. Fascist leaders are much more overtly concerned with mobilizing an angry mob and turning loose on the traditional institutions of the state or the opposition, for example trade unions, and also with dismantling any democratic safeguards on their power. In the past, in the 20s and 30s, this involved things like overtly banning elections and banning opposition parties and so on, and that's not what Trump, for example, is currently advocating, but it's a direction of travel that he is on very, very clearly. When you begin to call your political opponents vermin, that's a very dangerous sign, because you don't negotiate or discuss with vermin. You extinguish them, you root them, you exterminate them.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:The ideas that are being put forward for a second Trump term, like, for example, getting rid of career civil servants and the like, further dismantles power, and I argue in my paper that you can see signs of increased efforts at gerrymandering electoral boundaries in the US, more efforts at voter suppression and so on. All of which is ironic because one of the founding myths of the Trump movement is the great replacement theory, this idea that the traditional white electorate is being replaced by a more pliable electorate brought in from Africa, mexico and elsewhere. But in reality, the proposals that are being considered are being enacted by some Republicans now throughout America. That's a replacement theory actually in action, because in essence, they're threatening to sack the existing electorate and replace it with one that is a little bit more conducive to their liking.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:So you find, with fascist type movements and greatly increased emphasis on conspiracy theories as the motor force of history and there are many within the MAGA movement, if we can call it that the most obvious one being this ridiculous idea that the last election was stolen and rigged, which, let's note now, the Trump or any of his supporters have ever produced any evidence for. It's quite incredible. It's just a bald assertion. The election was rigged but no evidence would ever be supported, and that kind of degradation of political discourse is prominent in both populism and fascism, I think.
Scott Allen:Not participating in the norms of how things currently exist. I mean, we have another debate here in the United States coming up on the Republican side and he's not even going to participate. There's just a complete abandonment of norms of decorum, norms of participation norms, norms of calling. There's that famous letter that George Bush Sr left for Bill Clinton in that transition and there were norms or norms of how Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan at least work to communicate and collaborate and compromise, or Gingrich and Clinton in some instances, but it's very dangerous because of the absence of those norms, actually depends on people accepting peaceful transitions of power.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:If one party to the debate refuses to do that and can mobilize many millions of people behind its banner, then you're in a very, very dangerous situation. One scholar that I quote in my paper has said that the Republican party is now becoming a truly revolutionary party. That's most dangerous. That's most dangerous. This development didn't start with Trump. He has taken advantage of it and intensified it, but it's an extraordinary situation when you think about it. The transformation of what used to be a recognizably democratic party and to one that more and more people is regarding as revolutionary in its essence, not committed any more to any of the normal constraints on executive decision making the idea that a president should be free of any threat of prosecution, for example, even if they break the law all that type of thing is pretty much unprecedented in modern American history. That's, in my opinion and I'm wary of saying too much about this because I'm not American, I don't live there, I watch it from far away but it seems to me the most dangerous period in American history within living memory.
Scott Allen:Well, ray Dalio has an incredible book called Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. Yes, I mean, there's these shifts that are occurring. That are occurring. I struggle sometimes to be to sound alarmist. It seems that every generation says, oh, this is the worst ever. Kids these days, they don't want to work. And you go back and you see headlines from the 20s about employers complaining about kids those days. But there are a great number of shifts, whether it's geopolitical shifts, whether it's shifts in again, digitization, climate change, there's just a number of shifts that are happening throughout the world, seismic shifts in many, many ways. And Dalio talks about kind of. He was very, very interested in that book. Have you read it, dennis? No, no, I haven't. Oh, it's very much worth. Please, please, please, take a look. How long to hold again.
Scott Allen:Scott Principles for dealing with the changing world order and Dalio as he founded the world's largest or at least the United States largest hedge fund. It's called Bridgewater, and so he's very, very interested in economics. But he's also a student of history and he's very interested in kind of what he calls the big cycle. And how is it that dynasties, countries, empires rise and fall and he has 18, I believe it is indicators of health in these different. Again, it could be a country, it could be a dynasty, it could be an empire. And what are the indicators? The Dutch Gilder is the backup currency, the British Pound is the backup currency. The US Dollar is the backup currency. Well, what led to the Gilder no longer becoming the backup currency? What led to the British Pound? What led to? And where's the US Dollar right now? And how are we doing?
Scott Allen:And so he talks about values gaps. As soon as there is a huge gap in values in the system, that that's an indicator that we're not moving. And then, of course, economic gaps. And I've said it before in the podcast, I don't know if the United States works well if we don't have a strong middle class, if we don't have that access for large factions of people to live. Quote, unquote what you mentioned the American dream. And so, yes, you have these shifts and you have these indicators. And his assertion is six stages in this cycle of kind of a country's emergence, its domination and then it's fall. And I think he said that we were probably at like a late stage. Five of these six stages, based on the indicators, the data that he's looking at. And so it's definitely worth a read. And again, I don't want to be alarmist, but I think it's alarming some of the red flags that we're seeing pop up.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:Well, again, that sounds very scary and we also need to, in this discussion, talk about how it can be avoided.
Scott Allen:Please, yes, it's not inevitable.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:It's not inevitable. It's not inevitable.
Scott Allen:Thank you.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:But I also, in my favorite, quote Barbara Walter, who's an expert on civil wars, who explores the conditions that create civil wars but also how they can be avoided, and one of the things that creates civil wars is she talks about countries that become what experts call anocracies. That is somewhere between being an autocracy and being a democracy, and it's in that kind of middle and a huge space that things like civil wars begin to happen and extreme regimes, fascist regimes, for example, can take control. And it seems to me that America under a second Trump regime would definitely become an anocracy at the very least and could conceivably become an overtly fascist regime. And if that sounds a bit scary. Let's remember things that, for example, when Mussolini took over as the first fascist leader in Italy, that was about two years before he fully consolidated this fold as an openly fascist leader At the beginning there were a number of other parties represented, other people involved in his government, took a couple of years before he openly proclaimed himself the leader of the country. So these things are a process, but we have to learn the warning signs in advance.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:And of course, one of the things that I argue in my paper is that the victories of fascism and Nazism.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:They were not inevitable in the 1920s and 1930s and they're certainly not inevitable now, but one of the things that did lead to their rise in that period was that people didn't soon enough recognize the dangers. There was a lot of complacency, so there was a limited amount of joint action between the opponents of fascism and Nazism to stop them seizing power. We need to learn from that and the present and there's no point hiding the facts and the facts are that we're in a very dangerous position. The other thing, of course, that helped Nazism and fascism come to power is that the established parties field to offer a really compelling alternative. They weren't able to articulate a program that would ease the enormous pressures that people were under in terms of, for example, the 1929 style of depression and economic calamities before that. So that also needs to be addressed. But the first stage is to recognize the nature of the threat and then begin to think about what should be done about it, and I try to outline some things that can be done in the paper that you referred to.
Scott Allen:Yeah, I love the phrasing there. These things are a process. It's a slow erosion of some of the current norms and again we've seen some of that. The fact that what happened on January 6th can even be explained away to large factions of people those are warning signs. That's not healthy, no Right.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:It's very difficult to overstate the significance of that day, really, when you think about it, I mean, we'll never forget the stag to go. The human carnage was immense, but then you had the denial afterwards, including this ridiculous idea, that it was actually a false flag event. But it was members of Antifa whatever that is supposed to be there were masquerading as Trump supporters, who went into the capital. You don't have to imagine if it was the other way around. By the way, with this, the Republican representatives, who have always prided themselves as the party of law and order, what they would have to say about it. But everything has become inverted. Everything has become the opposite of what it used to be and what it should be.
Scott Allen:Yeah, and it seems to me that one antidote could be and, dennis, push back if you disagree but again, how do you retool the system so that you're providing as much access as possible to large factions of people? To quote unquote, live that middle-class life? Again, I was fascinated in Copenhagen because men have three months of paternity leave, women have nine months of maternity leave. There's colleges paid for, health care is paid for and at times some of those basics are taken care of.
Scott Allen:And of course you look at some of the studies in the Scandinavian countries are oftentimes the most educated, the happiest, et cetera, et cetera. But we have large factions of people who I think don't have those basic needs. From a Maslow's hierarchy standpoint, even kind of met historically factions of people where they've not had access, and then more contemporary examples where that access is slipping. And so would one antidote be and I also loved what you said about do we have someone who's communicating clearly what's being done? Because I think that's a potential miss from Biden and that administration to very clearly communicate what we've accomplished in the last two or three years in simplistic, easy and repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated ways. Right, because providing and ensuring that large factions of people have access to that middle-class life, it seems to me, is one other antidote. Would you agree?
Dr. Dennis Tourish:I would very much agree. I think it's absolutely essential that an art of hope is created. But there's a particular problem trying to do this in the United States, which is that Europe let it go. Culture there is much, much more skeptical about the role of the state than we have in Western Europe. You mentioned what we see in Scandinavia, for example, in terms of the role of the state. That's all been very much resisted. And America.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:Look at the position with healthcare, for example, where the idea of involving the state in a way that we take for granted here is regarded as a complete infringement of normal liberties of the system. But I do think that one of the debates that needs to be held and where the Democrats need to come out strongly is to be openly advocating a more activist state. Not, let me stress, that the state takes over everything, because we also have plentiful historical examples where it oversteps the mark. But we do need to have state intervention to do things like address the crumbling infrastructure to provide decent healthcare for people. Barbara Walter in her book about civil wars argues something similar that it needs to actually be overly concerned with addressing the problems that people face, and without that it's very difficult to see there needs to be more of an emphasis on things like high quality education, higher minimum wage and things of that kind. And I think at an ideological level as well, that means an explicit repudiation of the philosophy of neoliberalism that has brought us to this position, where a few over mighty corporations and the people at the top, who have benefited enormously from this idea of shareholder value, can take decisions in a very casual way that devastates many people's lives. Now I would imagine having that debate in America would be difficult because it would be the inevitable pushback that this is communism, this is socialism, which it doesn't. But that would be the pushback that can be anticipated.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:But unless there is a counterpoint to the unlimited power of corporations, then it's difficult to see the secure middle class future that you rightly are flagging as necessary beginning to develop. It's been taken away in the last decades. I recall people visiting America back in the late 70s our deities and coming back and saying to me the standard of living of the American working class is incredible. But people I very much doubt would come back and say that now and when I have visited America I've been struck by the grotesque disparities and wealth that are evident, the obvious, horrible poverty of so many of its people and so many parts. All that needs to be addressed, and without addressing it and campaigning on it, we will be in trouble.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:It is ironic, well, of course, that Trump himself, proclaimed billionaire, says that he's going to address it, and the reality, of course, is that he's not and didn't when he was president in the first place. He would only make it far worse, but it's incumbent on the opposition to actually put forward an alternative, and that and I think beyond that also and I have a little subsection in my paper headed fixing democracy before it goes bust the deficits in the American democratic system need to be addressed as well. You're the only country that has this electoral college system, for example, which is preposterous. It's either heaven knows what they were thinking when they came up with it, and they might have had some good reasons at the time, but this was a very long time ago, and when you have it now in a position where you can win the popular vote by millions, by millions, but still lose the presidential election, something is very wrong there and that seriously needs to be addressed.
Scott Allen:Yeah, I had, and I just had a recent conversation with Barbara Kellerman and she was saying one time in a course that I was teaching, she was speaking and she said you know, in some ways we're running old software and of course some of what the founders put into motion was wonderful and appropriate software for the time, but now it's like we're running DOS or Windows 95. And it's 2024. And some of those approaches, for instance the justice, is a justice for life. At the time that was written, you know, the man died at 64. And now they're 94.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:There's so much that needs to be fixed. When you look at it like that, you know it's the justice system, it's the electoral college, it's the way in which a small number of states have an outsized influence with the people that they elect, and all the rest. But underlying it all, I think, is this idea about really confronting the economic calamity that so many people are experiencing and finding a way to address that. It's going to be a long road back, because none of this will be easy or is easy, and we've gone very far in the direction of disaster, but I still believe that it can be averted. Overseeing all of this, of course, is, at the single most important priorities, to stop Trump from getting reelected next year and Alu Joe Biden as his weaknesses, obviously including his age. The alternative is far, far worse. So that's the number one priority that people need to rally around. We can't have the perfect ideal being the enemy of what is possible. Yeah.
Scott Allen:Well, it seems to me that in some ways, as we started off, there's some indicators that we lack health and there's some very, very public indicators that there's longstanding indicators that we are not healthy in some ways, and there's some more recent developments over the last few decades that have emerged and I do enjoy the fact that you at least talk about, okay, here's how we can move out of it and here's how we can avoid some of that. And my head's just in a thousand places. I mean, I'm thinking about Minsberg and how we're out of balance. I'm thinking about Kellerman and how we maybe are running some old software. I'm thinking about Dalio and his commentary on civil wars and how empires decline. It's that economic gap and that values gap. And it's just an interesting space, because another one of those shifts is the media, where you have outlets that are overtly repeating narratives over and over and over, all day long, that create different worlds, different existence for neighbors. People living next door to each other have very different worlds, and this is another just interesting thought that I have. And then I'm going to turn it over to you to see if there's anything else you want to talk about before we wind down.
Scott Allen:But there's a gentleman named Peter Diamandis and he's not necessarily a technologist himself, but he is an individual who, in my mind, provides a lot of access to people about technology. He's kind of like a translator and he has a saying and I'm not going to get it perfectly correct, but he says our minds, our neural nets, be careful what you use to train it. What are we training our neural nets on? And is that 24 hour media or is that our echo chamber? On social media? We're training our neural net and the world becomes that, because then that becomes all we can see. And so I think that's another nook and cranny of the conversation. How are we, as individuals, consuming information and being critical thinkers when it comes to? Because it's hard. It's hard to find even a media source in the United States that anyone says they trust, which is another part of this challenge.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:This is an appalling difficulty, actually, and trying to analyze why Trump who's a very mediocre man with a very limited intellect, to put it as mildest and trying to analyze how an individual like that could have achieved such dominance. There are a number of factors, but one of them is clearly the media echo chambers that people have found themselves within the tendency for so many Republican voters, for example, to rely completely on Fox News and various other outlets like that for as their sole source of information. When I've been in America and watched Fox News, I've just been shocked and appalled at how blatantly right-wing and neo-fascist it actually is. There isn't any piece of nonsense that is too outrageous for them to repeat, and this is a difficulty that we have to find a way of overcoming. Friend of mine in America, steve Hasson, has written a book called the Cult of Trump I think it's called the Cult of Trump, pointing out the similarities between this MAGA movement and organizations that we describe as cults, because when you see interviews with a lot of Trump supporters, what comes across is that there's nothing, no piece of evidence that could possibly be presented that will cause them to change their minds. That's a fanatical, mono-mediacle conviction that everything to hear from Trump is the truth and everything against him is lies.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:I recall seeing an interview with a Trump supporting woman on American television where the interviewer pointed out that Trump once said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any votes. And she said no, he didn't. He didn't say that, but of course the fact is that he did. And when people get to this point, governed by conspiracy theories and a fanatical devotion to the figure of an individual leader, then they're not really thinking anymore, they're just resorting to pure emotion. And I argue in the paper that, from that perspective, fascist movements are really a form of organized despair. That is a really dangerous place to be. And if you can't rethink your ideas, if you feel that by giving up your faith and a leader, you're losing something existential about your life, that should be a warning sign as well that causes us to take a deep breath and try and reimagine a different future.
Scott Allen:Yeah, Well and ultimately a challenge in every country, and we've spent a little bit of time talking about the US today and I appreciate your perspective as someone who's looking from the outside in, so thank you for that.
Scott Allen:I think for me, how do we create the most access for the most number of individuals so that their livelihood is secure? And again, my mind just goes to a number of different scholars that I previously mentioned and if we can provide that security for individuals and that access, it's not going to happen for everybody, as it wouldn't in any society, but it's just. It's a United States problem. It's not a blue problem or a red problem. It's us also being able to come together as a country to collaborate and chart a path forward. And I think that's the missed opportunity in all of this conversation is we're so consumed with discussing all of this stuff. We are in some ways. If you again go back to Dalio, look at what's happening on the larger stage, we have our eye off that ball as well, and you know it's. We're navel gazing and the world's moving forward and some missed opportunities there as well.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:But I suppose if there's one thing I want to emphasize and I think this is a core argument in the paper that I've written, the victories of fascism in the 1930s were not inevitable and we have to recognize that mistakes were made and we have to avoid those mistakes.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:So we have to avoid a sense of fatalism when thinking about the possible reelection of Trump and what he could do if he's elected, If he is re-elected, particularly if he's re-elected while using the popular vote. There will be mass movements of opposition Hard to imagine how they couldn't be. It would be better if we didn't get there, because then we would have even more ground to recover. But recognizing the nature of the threat and doing what we can to stop it is very, very difficult. It's very, very important and I hope that many Americans don't adopt the view that because the alternative to Trump isn't really that brilliant, then they can simply election out and wait for a better alternative in the future. The thing is, there might not be a better alternative because the electoral process will become even more mismanaged by Trump in order to prevent the possibility of him losing power. So the time to act is now. Dennis sees the urgency of the moment.
Scott Allen:Well, Dennis, I really, really appreciate your time. I'm going to provide a link to the article in the show notes so people can check it out and do some of your own explorations. Yes, I mean by no means do we want to come off in this episode as there's nothing we can do and it's just all negativity. I think it's an exploration of, okay, what's happening in the context, what are some things we're seeing, what are some red flags, and how do we move beyond that and get somewhere better. And so I very, very much appreciate that, Dennis, because, as we started off the episode, we're seeing some indicators as soon as my next move is to walk into the Supreme Court in Colorado and have a gun.
Scott Allen:That's not a healthy place for us to be at all in any way, shape or form. Regardless of your politics, as an American, that's not a healthy place to be, and we can all be a part of trying to create a healthier place. So last question what have you been reading, streaming or consuming? What's caught your attention in recent times that you think listeners might be interested in? There was a gear shift.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:That was very much a gear shift and, as usual, there's a lot. Obviously, I've been reading a lot about fascism and about populism because of writing the article that I have which, by the way, is open access, so if you post a link to it, anybody can download that. But I've also been reading more about possible alternative futures that we could have, and I've been very struck by the work of an individual called Jeffrey Hodgson, who's written a book called Liberal Solidarity, which I think is very important and deserves a wide audience, sketching out how a slightly more active estate can do things like address the problems that we have been discussing. And Barbara Walters' book on civil wars is also, I think, very, very important Because there are a lot of people on the Republican side and I openly advocate them, which is incredible when you think about it.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:Steve Bannon, for example, trump's former advisor, is notorious for whipping up crowds and arguing we're at war, we're at war, we must become more in a war, like footing and so on. So reading material like that tells us well, this is how it has happened and this is how they can be prevented. I think it's very eye-opening for me and I look forward to looking up one or two of the books that you've mentioned during this lovely conversation that we've had?
Scott Allen:Yes, Well, dennis, as always thought-provoking, thought-provoking and listeners. I know that you have some reflections to ponder as well. Can't thank you enough, sir, for being with me today. Be well, take care and keep helping us think through and make sense of what's swirling on around us. We appreciate your work. Thank you very much, scott.
Dr. Dennis Tourish:It's always a pleasure Be well.
Scott Allen:I am thankful for the opportunity to speak with Dennis Tourish again. He's been a wonderful, wonderful scholar and just a brilliant thinker. You know, it's because of him that I've gone down a little bit of a rabbit hole and I have since listened to how Civil Wars Start and another book recommended how Democracies Die, and right now I am in the middle of the fourth. Turning is here. I have all very interesting and important perspectives to consider. I will put links to those in the show notes so that you can access them and explore for yourself the practical wisdom for me always keep learning Eyes wide open. It's a pretty fascinating world and leadership is an important piece of that conversation. As always, everyone take care, be well and if you like what we're doing, share it with others. Bye-bye.