Michael Ignatieff interview

Torrin Wilkins: Hello, and welcome to the Centre Think Tank interview series in conversation. My name is Torrin Wilkins, the Director of Centre Think Tank.

Today, we will be discussing the future of centrist and moderate politics. This includes the 2011 Canadian federal election, the future of centrism in Canada today, and in the wider global context. With me today to explore these issues further, I am delighted to be joined by Michael Ignatieff.

Michael has a wide range of experience, including as the former Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. He is also a professor of history at Central European University, having also held senior positions at Harvard, Toronto, Cambridge and Oxford universities. He also holds numerous honorary doctorates and has authored books on human rights, some of which I read during my own time at university on the same subject.

With his time in academia, political life, and his openness to discussing the challenges for modern liberalism, there are few better people to discuss the future of centrism and liberalism with. So, thank you so much for being with me today, Michael.

Michael Ignatieff: Nice to be here, Torrin.

Torrin Wilkins: So, for my first question, I want to cast your mind all the way back to 2009 when you were first elected as Liberal Party leader. And in 2009, Inside Story described your views as “squarely in the middle of the Liberal Party spectrum, a leader who can balance the social justice preferences of progressive liberals and the more conservative business liberals.” So do you think that was a fair description of your politics at the time? And is that description still true of you today?

Michael Ignatieff: I think that is a fair description, and it is a good description of my politics. I am what would be called in Canada and in North America, a big-tent liberal. I sense that all politics is coalition politics, especially liberal politics, especially if you are in the centre. So that would be a fair description.

I would go on to make a little distinction, however, between a liberal and a progressive. I am a liberal, I am not a progressive. That is to say, if I have to choose between equality and liberty, and sometimes you do have to choose, I choose liberty. And one of the criticisms I might make of the liberalism that I have lived with most of my life is that we have not been as quick to acknowledge the difference between a progressive tradition and a liberal tradition. We are very close. We work together all the time.

In Canadian politics, there is the New Democratic Party, who are progressives, social democratic, and we are liberals. But we blur the distinction at our peril because politics is all about choice, and the choices are often about how much liberty and how much equality. The liberal is always on the side of liberty.

Torrin Wilkins: You were very open after 2009 and going into 2011 and that election campaign about the successes but also the challenges, and you ran as a self-described centrist and moderate candidate. It was an election dominated by strong figures on the left with Jack Layton and the New Democratic Party and on the right with Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. So, do you have any lessons from that campaign about the difficulties of running from the centre ground? And would you position yourself slightly differently in retrospect, or do you still think that that was the way to go, and it just may not have been the election?

Michael Ignatieff: I think that is a good description of 2011. Let us remind our viewers and listeners that it ended in a pretty comprehensive defeat for me. The party lost, and I lost my seat. We were reduced to a rump. Remember, this had been a governing party for most of Canada’s 20th century. And it is a governing party now with Mark Carney and Mr Trudeau. So it was a real shock for a governing party to be clobbered the way we were. And we were between two millstones, a polarising right-wing figure, Mr Harper, and a polarising left-wing figure, Mr Layton. They both did a much better job than I did in defining themselves. So I own that. I mean, I take responsibility for that. I do not think it means that there is no place in the centre. There is a lot of talk to the effect that there is, but I think most voters are actually in the centre to the degree that they think about politics. They are cautious, pragmatic, small-C conservative in their aversion to risk. Most voters do not give politics a lot of attention. I do not want to disparage voters. They are pretty smart, I learned. But you have to go to where they are, and where they are is cautious.

But I think the problem I had was that I did not define the centre clearly enough. By that, I mean, I did not define it against a right-wing conservatism that, in my view, had not met the challenge of the 2008, 2009 financial crisis at all well. In fact, the conservative government only survived because we insisted that they inject $60 billion into the Canadian economy. That was a condition of my support for their budget. But they got the credit for that, not me. I think I behaved responsibly in that regard, but they took the credit. So instead of attacking them in 2011 for what they had failed to do, I had boxed myself in because I had told them what to do, and they had done it. Jack Layton, a very effective politician, scooped up our seats in Quebec by making a more effective appeal to Quebec, which always votes more to the left than the rest of Canada, for excellent social justice reasons. So I got squeezed in the middle, but it led me to think that my story is not the story about the death knell of centrism. It is the story about the fact that I was not able to define myself against two alternatives, both of which I reject. So you live and learn.

I noticed recently that Rob Jetten in the Netherlands, from Democrats 66 (D66), a party I know well, and I know him very well. A 38-year-old guy has shown again that that type of centrism is very attractive when you have had a flirtation with Geert Wilders and the far right, and the social democratic left seems exhausted. Suddenly, up the middle comes liberal centrism that can be very attractive to voters. They are tired of provocative politics. That is, politics is basically sustained by attacking and mischaracterising the other side. Most people, I think, do not like that type of politics instinctively. So if you can grab hold of their attention and say, I am not going to play that politics, I think you can get a hearing.

Torrin Wilkins: Something that is interesting about D66 is that they made very bold promises in the election. For instance, the “Tien Nieuwe Steden” or “Ten New Cities” pledge, which I think was a really good way of capturing people’s imagination. Is that part of the challenge centrism faces? The lack of saying, “Here is the vision that we have for the future and what it can look like”, which I think can often be easier for those on the left and right to say, as they can offer a very clear direction.

Michael Ignatieff: Yes. You do not want to have a centrism that becomes a synonym for cautious moderation. You want to have a centrism that thinks big, and above all refuses to categorise people as being left or right. I am very left-wing on moral issues, and on immigration, I am pretty left on social justice issues. I just do not think you can have freedom in a society if you do not have a basic foundation under everybody’s feet. So nobody goes hungry, everybody gets an education. All those kinds of basic commitments. I am fiscally conservative. You have got to pay for it. And you cannot transfer debt to the next generation. We have been doing it shamelessly for a long time. My party, however, managed in the 90s to cut the deficit essentially in half, showing the whole world that you can take an out-of-control deficit and get it under control by very, very tough fiscal compression. It was brutal. But here is the payoff. We then won the next three or four elections because Canadians understood that if they were going to pay taxes, they wanted the taxes to fund hospitals and schools, not debt service. That is the key. There is a centrism here that is socially progressive, but fiscally conservative, that I think people will be very attracted to.

But to get back to your original point, it has got to be ambitious. Mark Carney, right at the moment, is an absolute centrist politician of the kind I am describing. And he is just about to announce a whole new series of nation-building projects that are huge in their impact. 10 to 15-year projects to get our productivity problem solved, and get some crucial national infrastructure built. This is thinking big. But it comes from a centrist. I think that is the right model.

Torrin Wilkins: I think that is a very good explanation for centrism of socially liberal, but also fiscally conservative, balancing the books, but also some big ideas in there. So on that side of things, I can say at least from our position as a centrist think tank in the UK, I think we share that model of what centrism looks like.

One issue that has been debated for a long time in the UK, and you yourself have voiced support for, is electoral reform. And one of the reasons that I think it has grown in support in the UK is the idea that it can help to moderate the political system by encouraging more cooperation between different parties. Yet that is also a reform that Justin Trudeau did not deliver after promising it. And of course, Mark Carney has not actually promised it at all. So why do you think that electoral reform has proven so difficult for people in the political centre who might naturally support the basic principles behind electoral reform?

Michael Ignatieff: I think the problem reveals itself in places like Belgium and the Netherlands. There are certain kinds of packages of electoral reform that result in the proliferation of parties. I cannot remember how many parties there are in the Netherlands, but it is more than a dozen, right? That makes coalition formation intensely difficult. It improves representation in the sense that it means that every tendency gets potentially an electoral team that can carry that tendency forward. But it makes coalition formation and government formation after the election much more difficult. I think in Belgium, recently, it took them a year and a half to get a government. Whereas the electoral system that I ran under in Canada used First Past The Post, rather like the system used for British elections. The one thing to be said for it is that it forces the two big parties or the three big parties to form their coalitions before the election, as it were, and to get everybody in the big tent and assume that there are all kinds of liberals in Canada, but we all run under the same red banner, and then we fight in caucus about what we want to do, but we are held together.

The problem with electoral reform in Canada, but also in Spain and Belgium and probably even in the Netherlands, and maybe in Britain, is the risk that it increases polarisation rather than reducing it. It increases regional polarisation. In our country, the risk that you have if you move away from these big national parties is that you will start to get regional parties. We already have them in Quebec. We have a party that basically only represents Quebec. And that makes running our country fairly difficult. But imagine what it would be like if you changed the electoral system and had a British Columbia party, a Saskatchewan party, a Manitoba party, and an Alberta party, then the trouble of keeping a federation together, which is always a problem, becomes possibly unsolvable. That is why everybody is cautious about electoral reform, apart from the usual banal reason, which everybody, every political leader has, which is: Is it good for me or not? That is one set of calculations, which obviously plays very strongly in, for instance, Justin Trudeau’s decision not to go for the electoral reform he promised.

I simply do not know, looking at you honestly, what system of electoral reform I propose in my country. I am in favour of it because I would like a system in which my party, the Liberal Party of Canada, racks up some seats in Alberta. And I am willing to go for a reform that makes that easier on the understanding that the consequence is that it makes it easier for the conservatives to win seats in my heartland, downtown Toronto, right? The reason I think that is good is that it is good for the national unity of the country that a national party gets representation in Alberta.

We have been shut out as a party from the Canadian West, which is the future of the country. Because of population distribution, we have huge chunks of seats delivered to us in Ontario and Quebec. This leaves the rest of the country feeling excluded and left out of liberal governments. I am not saying that first past the post solves the problem. I am admitting that, in fact, the electoral system exacerbates our national unity problem. But I have yet to hear of a political solution to the problem that I can support. Because the objective is the national unity of the country. And it should be the objective in Britain that you do not want the country to end up more divided than it is. It is a little bit of cling to the nurse for fear of something worse.

Torrin Wilkins: It is a very good description of it, and it goes back to our conversation before the interview, where I was saying, “It is a good idea if you get it right” at the end of the day.

Michael Ignatieff: It is exactly that. That is the lingo of the think tank. It all depends on implementation and the consequences of implementation. No question.

Torrin Wilkins: So, another subject, which links back to my last question, is about the political extremes. And at the moment, we have a resurgence of people on the extremes, populists and authoritarians as well. And you have seen this, of course, up close at Central European University, where you confronted Viktor Orbán’s assault on academic freedom. But we have also seen Donald Trump’s success in the United States and the rise of far-right movements in Europe and beyond. So what can centrists and moderates do to counter these movements that often offer very simple answers to what are very complex questions?

Michael Ignatieff: I think everybody is asking this question, and nobody has terrific answers, and I certainly do not. What centrists are doing, which is the right thing to do, is say, Populists have no solutions. Mr Farage, I understand you are hostile to immigration. Fine, many people are hostile to immigration. But have you got any solution for the boats? If you want to be the prime minister, you cannot just blow smoke here. You will need to have something better than what Sir Keir Starmer has on offer. Do what any good political party does, which is bang away at their inadequacies until people start to listen.

So that is one thing. I think another thing is to do some honest reflection on some of our failings. I lived in Britain for 20 years, so I do not know whether that gives me the right to talk about Britain or not, but I am pretty fond of the place, and Canada is a British parliamentary democracy, so we are collegial. I think liberals, centrists like me, both in Canada, Britain and the United States, need to look much more critically at the liberal state. I am of an age that we are the heirs of the Roosevelt revolution and the creation of the post-war liberal state, the Beveridge state, the Attlee state. These were enormous achievements, but they are big machines that took a huge percentage of the national income and then tried to create social justice, empowerment and opportunity for people who had gone through the Depression and felt all the bitterness of exclusion.

The liberal state accomplished a tremendous amount. And then it got very big, very unresponsive, very bureaucratic and very centralised with losses to democratic accountability, with losses to popular control, and with losses above all in simply efficiency and effectiveness. And I think centrists have to own that. We are believers in the use of state power and not nearly critical enough of the enormous failures that ordinary people encounter in hospitals.

A couple of years ago, my brother died in a Canadian hospital. If you are a liberal centrist like me, one of your articles of faith is that the health service is going to look after you and is the incarnation of our interpersonal concern that liberals and centrists believe in. You see your brother lying on a gurney in a hospital corridor for hours, and you see him then get care that is just not well organised. It is not well-channelled, and it is very inefficient. You think to yourself, How did we get here? We are pouring huge amounts of money into a system that just does not seem to be delivering the care that either patients or nurses or doctors seem to want.

I think everybody’s experience of the NHS is an uneasy combination of worship for the ideal, with deep discomfort of what it is like actually to be there. That is part of the larger pathology of the liberal state. I mean, one of the things that strikes me in England is the incredible centralisation of authority in Whitehall. Is this wise? Why can big metropolitan areas like Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Cardiff not have much more taxation authority, much more responsibility? Why can London not be much more self-governing?

I understand some of the problems. You want to have fiscal discipline for the whole United Kingdom. You do not want to lose that. But the centralisation of authority into 10 Downing Street puts impossible pressure on the prime minister, impossible pressure on the parliamentary system. And I mean, that is the beginning of the problem.

The other problem. Speaking very candidly, as somebody who was in the House of Commons for five years in Canada, the total marginalisation of the legislative chamber in most of our democracies is a concern.

It is a little better in Britain. Parliament does hold the government to account, and the question period is a serious moment of democratic accountability. But it sure is not in Canada. And so we have real problems about democratic accountability in our institutions and real problems with the excessive power, excessive concentration of power in the liberal state.

We have to do a lot of work on that, favouring decentralisation that gives more power to citizens’ assemblies, that deliberately pushes problems out to the public and says, What do you think? Let us get together and hear the facts. We need you to help us shape a solution that is democratic and has accountability.

We are not doing that. And we are instead loading the burden of decision on overworked, over-tried, over-pressured politicians at the top of an over-centralised system. And I think we are heading for a breakdown, really. I just do not see how this is sustainable, especially against the background of the social media age and the incredible pressure on decision makers literally every moment that turns every political decision into basically a question of how you address the issue in front of the public to survive literally another day.

There is something very seriously wrong with our democracy as a result. It is consuming the legitimacy of liberal freedom in ways that I think every centrist should be concerned about. Somehow, we have to stand up and say, This is a problem and here is the solution that we would propose. Number one, a lot of it means giving power away. Number two, pulling the state back. Trimming the state down, saying there are things that the state should not be doing. We should get out of certain businesses and focus on where the state really needs to be present, which is in unlocking productivity and building infrastructure that sustains economic growth.

The other thing that the state needs to be doing and is not doing is controlling economic power. I do not know what problem there is in Britain, but in the States, you just think it is completely out of control. Democracy is being destroyed by the inability of the liberal state to use the power it has to break up monopolies, to force competition into the system. The great wisdom of centrist liberalism was that markets are pretty good things if there is real competition. It is good for customers. It is good for freedom. It is good for innovation.

We have an oligopoly piled on top of a monopoly that I think is throttling innovation, is throttling competition, and is throttling the very price system. And all of this, it seems to me, is a huge agenda that centrists need to take over because conservatives want to enrich the rich, the left and the far left are concerned absolutely appropriately with their constituency. But a centrism that says some issues concern all citizens, rich, poor, entitled, disinherited, all of us are suffering from these pathologies of the liberal state and the failure of the liberal state to get itself under control and the failure of the liberal state to control the market. I think there is an agenda there.

Torrin Wilkins: On devolution, I wrote a paper called Devolution Revolution. So definitely that aligns with my views on politics. I am always happy to hear another enthusiast for UK devolution.

I know you have spoken a little bit about it there; you have been very open about where centrism and liberalism have gone wrong in the past. And you have described parts of modern liberalism as condescending, know-it-all, dismissive and intolerant. So how did liberalism end up like this? And how can we fix modern liberal centrism?

Michael Ignatieff: Well, I think it has become a politics of virtue. It became that for excellent reasons. I mean, I am of a generation that lived through the proudest achievement of liberal centrism, which was the diversity revolution. It began in the late 50s early 60s, with immigration. The transformation of the ethnic composition of all our societies. Around the same time, in the mid-60s, the United States, Britain, and Canada began to admit large numbers of immigrants from Africa, from the Caribbean, and from Asia.

My view of this is that it powered economic growth, and it created a new society, which we call the multicultural society. It was terrifically good and politically problematic because beginning in the late 60s, early 70s, a lot of white Britons, white Americans and white Canadians woke up and said, “Hey, what has happened to my neighbourhood? Who asked me whether these people should be here?” There has been a democratic deficit in the multicultural revolution, which we did not see.

I am 100% in favour of it. I was born in a town where most people in the 1950s looked like me. And now in 2034, I will be a minority in my own city. That seems to me a good thing. Toronto is a much stronger, more interesting, dynamic, and effective place than it was in my childhood. However, there was a democratic deficit connected with the establishment of that. That is one issue.

The other part of the liberal achievement was the reforms that emancipated women, the reforms that slowly, painfully gave gay citizens equal rights. I have officiated some gay marriages, and it is pretty moving. These people, my friends, my buddies, suddenly feel, “I am an equal.” These are huge achievements, and liberals and centrists are rightly proud of them.

The immigration revolution, the feminist revolution, and the gay revolution are all good, but they have produced a backlash from people who feel threatened by them. So there is a democratic legitimacy problem that they have.

Because they aroused resistance, I think a lot of liberals, and you see this particularly in the academy, began to enforce almost a politics of virtue. Everybody should believe that diversity is a very good thing. Everybody should believe that feminism is a very good thing. Everybody should think that gay rights are a very good thing. And anybody who says that questions any of that, and then the trans revolution is another place where this suddenly went and blew up into flames in Britain.

Anybody who is against transgender people is somehow illiberal and reactionary. We enforce the politics of virtue for all. All reasonable people should think the same on these issues, which I think began to feel like tyranny for a lot of people. I do not think the right wing is entirely wrong to say that in the universities that I have taught in, say Harvard in 2000 and 2015, it looked like political correctness. There were things you did not say, there were things you did say and here is the cost to centrist liberalism.

We forgot about freedom. Freedom is not a nice warm bath. Freedom is listening to stuff you do not wanna hear. Freedom is allowing people to say things you think are absolutely crazy, wrong, and morally repugnant. But that is freedom. We impose a culture of virtue here, for which I think there has been a huge price.

Needless to say, Trump and these people have now clobbered the universities in the United States because of it. I am totally opposed to what Trump has done. But I understand that we gave him a certain pretext. So we are now in a battle for the future of these institutions that seem to me to be crucial to the future of liberalism. If you do not have free universities, you do not have a free society. We have got to do some things on the liberal centrist side to restore that freedom. So these are some of the things we need to think about.

I have been in too many rooms in my own university, Central European University, watching students shout down things that they did not want to listen to. Disrupt meetings because they disapprove of a speaker. I have confronted them directly as rector. I fought back right there at the scene, but had a queasy sense that nobody understands what is at stake. We must have a society where people can speak, listen to what makes them uncomfortable, angry, and morally dismayed, and not stop the other person from speaking.

There has been simply too much speech suppression by people who think that their own opinions are self-validating and cannot be argued with. And this is Gaza, this is Israel, and this is a whole gamut of issues.

So a centrist liberal has to cling to freedom and defend it against the right, against the left, and uphold it passionately because nobody else will.

Torrin Wilkins: So, for my final question, we have touched on it a few times, but the world now is more than ever dominated by quick fixes and perhaps “sound good, simple answers”, as I would call them. Showing that solving deep-rooted problems right now is hard, but unfortunately, I think we are in a position where it seems almost impossible, especially when people make it sound like they can be fixed easily, and then they are not. What advice would you give to organisations like our own working to create those solutions, and do you see that evidence-based problem-solving work as important for renewing the political centre ground?

Michael Ignatieff: I think there is no question that strong politics has to free itself from this performative news cycle in which you are playing rhetorical games on an incredibly tight circuit. This is destroying politics. What you have to have in a centrist politics is a politics of reality, a politics that starts from “Here is what the problem is and here is our best guess on how to fix it based on evidence.” That is the only way you can persuade people to lend their support to solutions which are of necessity long-term.

Countries have done great things, but all of them have taken a long time. The problem with politics is getting the time to get the solution done. Britain has very substantial productivity problems. Some of them can be solved, actually, with quick fixes, with regulatory change, a bonfire of the regulations, freeing up innovators to bring solutions to the market. But some of it is much longer-term. Skill training of adolescents, reform of education.

Infrastructure investment that actually adds to the productivity of the country, support for science and innovation at universities and in the private sector. A long-term, joined-up productivity strategy is a 10 to 15-year project for a whole society. It has to be sustained by joined-up research that studies what other countries are doing on the productivity challenge and tries to use the best ideas. What I have learned from looking at that is that there are solutions, but they are all reality-based.

Think tanks are essential to sustaining reality-based politics in a media environment where politics is all performative and empty of substance. You have your hands full, big time.

Torrin Wilkins: I think that is a very good way to end the interview, as we certainly have our hands full with convincing people. Thank you so much for joining me today and for discussing all of these issues with me.

Michael Ignatieff: Pleasure.

Note: This interview has been edited for grammar, clarity, and flow. The original recording is the final and definitive version.