David Moscrop is a politics columnist, commentator and author of On Nationalism and Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions And How We Can Make Better Ones. His work has appeared in outlets including Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, Walrus, Time Magazine and The Guardian. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of British Columbia. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.
We spoke to David while he was in Canada before he headed down under, not only for Sydney Writers Festival, but as he says in the interview for Auckland and Melbourne too.
David has been writing for years about our political systems and whether or not a kind of unravelling is happening. We explored whether we are actually living through particularly volatile times, or if we’re just on edge anyway, all of the time.
We managed to persuade David to give us a whole Irresistible playlist as well, which you’ll find at the end of our chat, and we were pleased to discover had a bit of Top Gun and Rick Astley in it, so if all else fails, we’ll just keep playing that until democracy is saved!
Have you been to Australia before?
Not to a writers festival, but 20 years ago Australia was the 3rd country I’d ever been to outside of Canada. It was a high school trip and I haven’t been back since!
And you came to Sydney?Yes Sydney and Cairns. I loved Sydney and I remember Cairns as a kind of paradise, which is funny because I’m not really a beach lover. I just liked being there and walking around, because it was so beautiful and chill and coming from near Toronto in the winter it was very special.
As well as being an author you’re managing to squeeze in some other work as well.
I’m a full-time editor at Penguin Random House, and I’m also a freelance journalist. I teach a course in a journalism school here in Ottawa, and I’m writing a new book, so it makes for very busy days! And now I’m keeping all that up on the road- but I love it – it’s very exciting.
You’re doing some other festivals while you’re on this side of the world as well
I met Lyndsey Fineran from Auckland Writers Festival in Vancouver, when I was on the road in Canada for this book, and she invited me to New Zealand. We actually met in a car! Once that happened Sydney and Melbourne just fell into place. My best friend from school back in British Columbia lives in Melbourne as well so I’m really looking forward to hanging out with him too.
The power of relationships and networks is something you explore in your book. A lot of things happen simply because someone likes someone.
Yes who likes who and who comes to mind first. I can trace you a line between lots of the things I have done. I got a podcast because I was on a podcast that liked me as a guest. When we’re touring for that book, the publisher ask me to write a whole book, and then to come and work for them as an editor. Later, and back to Lyndsey, I’m in Vancouver at a festival, and then I’m off to Australian and New Zealand. Just being nice to people does a lot of work.
And then the other side of that is the negative dimensions of networks and how people make decisions. If someone doesn’t like someone the ramifications can be massive and even tip over into voting patterns.
I think that’s the core problem. You could be a perfectly lovely person who has a bad day, and it’s hard to sometimes recover from that. But also the structural disadvantages are when people make immediate judgements that can be racist, or sexist, or lots of things. That ends up shaping rooms, and it ends up shaping the world.
When we ask why does everyone look the same or it’s the same kind of people in certain rooms, it’s because that’s how it operates, and it becomes really quite prejudiced.
In your book you talk about agenda setting. Which is really about the boardroom in some way. It can all come down to the decision- making before the decision- making. As in which options are on the table and what kind of gatekeeping has taken place. We’re in a bit of a Wild West era when anything goes, even at the very top of power and media structures. What do you think about the changed or absent role of the gatekeeper?
I remember sitting down in 2015 across from a very senior Republican, in a small group setting. He said, ‘Trump can’t win. He’s got no machine. He’s got no ground game. The party will never accept him.’ He believed in the gatekeepers. And then that didn’t work.
Then it became, ‘Trump won’t do X, Y, or Z, because he’ll be managed by the institutions, the courts, by the bureaucracy, by other Republicans, by Congress. And then he just went on and did whatever he pleased, and no one did the gatekeeping.
Then we realised that the role of gatekeepers is collapsing in real time, and in some senses, it’s really encouraging, because it’s democratising. All of a sudden all kinds of people can get into public spaces: people can do writing, make videos, be big on the internet, get a message across. All these subcultures can have space to flourish.
But then, again, there’s the other side
Yes. You get AI slop, misinformation, disinformation, and radicalisation through communities that now can network. Communities can distribute, and connect, but then they also happen to be horrid white nationalists or extremists of one variety or another. So the disappearance of those gatekeepers has enabled a lot of things, but it’s also meant that anything can get through, and we’re pretty bad at sorting it, because now it’s up to us to sort. We’re bad at sorting, because it’s hard. It takes a lot of work. It’s exhausting. Just think about scrolling through a feed – even smart people fall for slop.
There’s so much, it moves so quickly, and everyone’s kind of tired.
It’s a huge problem because it then feeds into broader public discourses, and we just can’t tell the truth from the lie, and sometimes, we don’t even care to. And then we’re in big, big trouble.
Now, populist parties can mobilise people at scale. We don’t know what to do with that. Populism is very old, but the scale, the speed, and the ease of mass communication – that is new.
So what do you think the future of the gatekeeper looks like? Do you think it will come back? In a parallel to AI, do you think that element of human discernment and intelligence will be valued again, or do you think that it’s going to have to take a completely different form? Paradoxically, maybe a next- gen AI form?
That’s such a good question because I think that human beings need guardrails and need limits to function. Freedom requires constraints and order, and the absence of all that is chaos. If you’ve ever had a day off, and you can do literally anything, often you sit there paralysed, and then guilty. We do need some sort of order to give sense to our world. We need that in our individual lives, and we need that in our political and social lives, too, or else we get into trouble really fast.
So I do think we have two choices. Either we reestablish some reasonable constraining factors that are productive and not prejudicial. Standards and some rules, so we can have a society.
Or this all falls apart. If it all falls apart, then we still come back to point A, which is, okay, now we need to reestablish some standards and rules to rebuild all of this. So, I think there’s a good probability that we trend back towards some sort of order, but I don’t necessarily think that it’s going to be easy, or that it’s going to happen anytime soon.
And that’s what frightens me.
As humans, we don’t seem to able to avoid the suffering before the progress.
It makes me think of what Mao said about the French Revolution, about it being too early to tell what it all meant. I think we’re in one of those moments. If it does become a free- for- all, if everything is permissible, people will be taken advantage of. People unfortunately do cheat in life, and we could lose human capacities and the socialisation that makes our collective lives possible. If nobody trusts anyone, we will be in big trouble.
There has been such a structural shift in how we live together, and it’s happening so much faster than we can process. AI is a good example of that. The model from Silicon Valley AI companies is to move fast and break things. By the time we realise there might be a problem, new systems will be entrenched, and we won’t know what to do about it.
This is the Uber model. We never had a discussion about whether we really wanted Uber or Lyft. They just went and did it, in defiance of the law. By the time anyone caught up with the companies at the regulatory level, it was done. The taxi industry was dying off. People were using it- it was just decided. AI is sort of like that, with the important caveat, that it’s a multi trillion dollar investment bubble. If it does pop, it could collapse large parts of the global economy, at probably the worst time we can imagine.
We at Irresistible worry about that too. How do you see all this playing out on the building blocks of democracy itself?
I often say that democracy is very, very hard to establish and very, very easy to lose. And to try to rebuild is tremendously difficult. We’re on the democratic back- foot right now. There’s no guarantee that it survives. I reference a poll from a few years ago in the book, which asked people how they feel about autocracy and military rule and technocracy. A significant number of people, 20% ish were fine with replacing democracy with either military rule or autocracy. But technocracy, or rule by experts, was something like 50%. For a lot of people, the thing they valued most is the capacity to have their problems solved.
As soon as outside shocks happen, like climate issues or the war with Iran, and peoples pocketbooks are affected, people get real mad and real frustrated, and they’re willing to listen to whoever offers the most compelling vision, even if it’s not the most sound plan.
Do you think democracy needs a better marketing push?
I always talk about democracy holistically, and I see it both from the perspective of political participation, that is the right to vote, to protest, to speak your mind, to stand for office, and all those core political rights, but also from the perspective of economic rights. Often in a liberal democratic society, economic and material needs may not be met, and if that happens, people start to check out of the system. The response can be to want to elect a strongman or woman, a toxic kind of popular figure who’s promising to fix all their problems. They will tell them exactly who the enemy is, and who’s to blame, and that they’re gonna lock these enemies up. And then people say- ok sure, let’s do it.
I do think people need to have a realistic conception of what the alternative to democracy is, and that they are not good options.
I think a robust welfare state, protections in the workplace, well paying jobs, workers having more control in the workplace- these are the things that democracy should be selling.
Do you feel that we’re heading towards a tipping point?
I think there’s just so much pent up anger, resentment and aggression. It makes me think it must be how some people felt in France in the 1780s before the revolution. We need to find a way to respond to the feelings proactively which is hard, but it’s very hard to do it later. In the case of France, they waited to do it the very, very hard way, and the streets ran knee deep with blood.
Not that I think that’s going to happen in an advanced democracy. But the contemporary corollary is a bunch of people occupying the capital of Canada, Ottawa, as they did with the trucker convoy in February. They tried to do it in Washington, D.C. shortly afterwards. I think we should take these eruptions very seriously. Populist parties anywhere I the world should sound an alarm bell.
There have been a series of referenda in the world that have produced outcomes that can slow progress, and with how they are counted, may not even be democratic. How do referenda fit into a model of democracy- are they too simplistic with their yes/no options, and is society too fragile at the moment to embark on them?
I find this a very complex question, so I’ll start at the end and work backwards. I think if you’re going to have a referendum, it should be only under the most extraordinary circumstances, and then it should be very carefully prepared and executed. One way to do that, for instance, is to have a citizens’ assembly, and a deliberate democratic exercise ahead of it, that informs the process, and gives people a sense of what the question is, and how they might want to proceed. It effectively makes a recommendation. In Ireland, the referendum was fairly productive around reproductive rights, abortion and same sex marriage. But that was again also bound up very carefully with deliberative democratic exercises ahead of time. If you’re going to do it, you need to be very careful and do it right.
The thing about referenda is that they are a snapshot in time and a yes or no question. It’s very simple. And yet, they chart a path that’s very hard to undo. And so, if you ask a question in the midst of a heated moment, then you’re going to get a very particular answer, but it might not be the answer people want a week later, a month later, or certainly a couple of years later, but then you’re locked in, and it’s very hard to undo.
If we assume we’re going to be constantly living in a heated moment for the next few years, do you think we’ll get more of these kind of dramatic referenda?
Not only are referenda blunt instruments, but they’re heavily emotional, often in a counterproductive way, because people get riled up by leaders who want to use them. I prefer deliberative democracy, where you bring groups in, and really talk about these things over time. Representative democracy and a robust civil society are much more meaningful.
They turn into a popularity contest, and that’s what’s so scary. People become susceptible to emotional connections, and populist leaders are very good at manipulating people, at least in the short term. Eventually, people sometimes figure it out, but the damage is done. Brexit is such a great example of that. People were told all that money was going back to the NHS. Whatever happened to that?
There’s no accountability beyond the election, and everyone’s stuck with the map. The great irony of the effects of intense populist democratisations is that when people are ultimately let down, they get more angry and distrustful, and then they get more let down, and they get more angry and distrustful, and the cycle eventually leads to extraordinary circumstances, to rise of authoritarians and even fascists, who step in and say – we’ll clean up and make sure the trains run on time- of course, they never do.
The world has always had a lot going on, but it can feel like we’re living through a particularly historical time. Do you feel still feel shocked that something you once thought might happen actually does happen, or do you think we’re just victims of information overload and society is just moving forward as it always has?
Around 2015 I was in the middle of doing my PhD in political science and I was writing for Macleans magazine here in Canada. I was a political theorist, and I saw Trump arriving and said, very early on – this guy is an authoritarian. I wrote a series on Trump and covered him for years. Lots of people who were dialled into these concerns saw the arc, but it was really hard to accept.
I didn’t want to be right, but I also didn’t want to be delusional. It’s more important to be honest.
I think we’re regressing to the mean of historical extraordinariness. If anything, the strange time was the ’90s into the early 2000s. It seems like history has returned, and things are intense, and wild, and unpredictable, and then crushingly difficult, and it’s not because history hasn’t always been all those things. It’s because in the 1990s there was a period of wealth and optimism that was historically anomalous.
The difference is that we’re regressing at a time when technological advancement and capacity is exponentially greater than it’s ever been, and more dangerous. That is qualitatively different. There’s a confluence, not just the historical tendency towards extraordinary events. But the scale of risk and the consequences of failure are much higher. Weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence are all playing into that, and so in some senses, we’re living through a truly horrific period.
What kind of changes do you think will happen in Canada?
The great irony is that climate change is going to open up shipping routes in the north that we’re going to then use and contribute more to climate change, but people see it as an opportunity. A problem is that we also live next door to the United States, so we worry about that. I’m writing my next book now, and in it I talk about how I was in an urban used bookstore, thats used by the hip kids in town, and they were talking about whether or not they’d sign up in a war. One kid said that he yearned to spill yankee blood. Those are conversations that are casually happening now. We walk around saying – we don’t think the United States would invade, that’s crazy, right? But there is worry. I always compare it to seatbelts. You don’t think there’s going to be an accident, but the consequences of the accident are so significant that you might as well put your seatbelt on.
It’s hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Exactly.
In that spirit, you’re doing a playlist for your book for Irresistible Magazine- David Moscrop’s Irresistible Songs to Save Democracy!
I love it – what a blast and I hope you like it. I’m off to pub trivia now with my friends and we’ll be having lot of discussions about which tracks are making the cut!
Sydney Writers’ Festival
17- 24th May 2026
