On Tuesday the 8th May 2018, the Time to Talk Association and Vienna’s IWM talked to the former Prospect editor, David Goodhart, about the state of liberal democracy and why we change our minds.
About the debate:
Why do we change our minds about things? In his Financial Times article Why I left my liberal London tribe, the British public intellectual, David Goodhart, reflects upon the trajectory of his own ideological shift.
As a student, he once rebelled against his background, which included having a father in Thatcher’s government and attending Eton. Later, he became the founding editor of the centre-left magazine, Prospect, known for its readiness to challenge existing wisdoms and to display a wide variety of views from across the political spectrum. In 2004, this readiness to challenge established thinking led him into his first real conflict with the British left and liberal centre, both of which strongly criticised his essay, Too diverse?, in which he analysed the tensions between the UK’s solidarity-based welfare state and its society’s ever-growing diversity.
Meanwhile, Goodhart’s most recent book, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, has helped to shape the English-language debate on the nature of the current crisis of liberalism. In it, Goodhart asks who is to blame for the state of liberal democracy and whether liberals and people he calls Anywheres – individuals who are cosmopolitan, University-educated, mobile and less grounded in any one specific location – should took a good look at themselves when lamenting the current state of affairs.
This political salon, therefore, sought to create a non-partisan conversation which enquired into the defining changes defining our times, their underlying causes and the state of public discourse in Europe.
To find out more, either watch the debate highlights at the top of this page, listen to our full-length podcast just below or watch the full-length video on the IWM’s YouTube Channel. For information on other TTT media, visit our media section, where we link to our media platforms and explain how to keep up-to-date on upcoming media releases.
Participants:
Speaker:
David Goodhart is a British journalist, founder and former editor in chief of Prospect and a political analyst and author. Previously, he worked as a correspondent for the Financial Times and he has written for The Guardian, The Independent and The Times. Formerly, the director of Demos, as of 2017, Goodhart has been the head of the Demography, Immigration and Integration Unit at Policy Exchange. His books The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration (2013), and The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (2017) have fuelled the UK’s already heated and divisive debates on immigration, the social impact of globalisation and populism.
Chairs:
Christian Ultsch
Head of the Foreign Politics Department, Die Presse
Ivan Krastev – Bulgarian Political Scientist and Commentator, currently Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Debate media:
English-language video highlights of the discussion can be found at the top of this page and a full-length podcast is embedded just above our speaker descriptions. You can also access a full-length video of this debate on the IWM's YouTube channel.
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Organisers and supporters:
This debate was organised by Time to Talk and the IWM in cooperation with Die Presse and with the kind support of the Open Society Initiative for Europe and Energieversorgung Niederösterreich.
