May 4, 2018

Donald Trump is in power in America. Doug Ford is headed that way in Ontario. The alt-right seems ascendant everywhere, while liberal democracy is in crisis. Journalists are being demonized as "fake news" at best and "enemies of the people" at worst. Pax Americana faces an assault from within as its leaders openly question and threaten to dismantle the rules-based order that has undergirded global democracy, stability and prosperity since the Second World War. And it looks like a lot of people want it this way. What on earth is going on?

Joining Ben on the program is Professor Keith Banting of Queen's University. Dr. Banting is a renowned scholar of political science and policy studies, with a focus on diversity, immigration and multiculturalism. The author or editor of over 20 books, including
Inequality and the Fading of Redistributive Politics, Dr. Banting has recently worked to explain the not-wholly-unprecedented rise of populism in today's political discourse.

Read the blog post about this episode.

About the Guest

Dr. Keith Banting is a professor in two different departments at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario: Policy Studies and Political Studies. He has had a long-standing interest in the politics of social policy, and has recently extended this research to include ethnic diversity, immigration and multiculturalism. He is the author or editor of twenty books, as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Dr. Banting is a Member of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. You can find quite a number of his incisive and insightful speeches on YouTube, and I’d encourage you to take the time.

Learn more about Keith.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, books by Yuval Noah Harari
• Interview with President Barack Obama, July 2016, in which he discusses the collapse of consensus
• The End of History, a 1989 article by Francis Fukuyama
• Occupy Wall Street, a grassroots protest movement started in 2011
• The Tea Party, a conservative protest movement founded in 2009

The Quote of the Week

People do not have idea. Ideas have people.
- Carl Jung (1875-1961)