transcript starts at minute 49 of the interview
Hallvard Berge: So you had some remarks, saying that the only distinction between the Syndicalists of Prydania and the Santonian syndicalists is that the Santonian syndicalists have yet to have the opportunity to enact a dictatorship.
Dr. Tryggvi Eskildsen: Specifically I said they hadn’t yet had the opportunity to consider tyranny.
HB: But the Santonian National Party, who syndicalists of that country call home, has the nickname “natural governing party.” They’ve had plenty of opportunities to be in power.
TE: I think we need to make some distinctions. The National Party being in power does not mean their syndicalists are in power, even if the party leader and Prime Minister come from the labour wing, which hasn’t happened since the 1970s.
HB: I’m not sure I follow.
TE:
chuckles Every nation has its own internal sets of values and historical contexts that inform the political compass of the present. For most this is simply a shifting of the political centre left or right a few degrees, but Saintonge is different. What qualifies as left or right wing in Santonian politics doesn’t translate neatly to a lot of other countries, our own included. To be clear, this is not a new phenomenon. It was commented on through the early and mid 20th century in Prydania, but the aftermath of the Civil War has sort of brought it into clearer focus here, as many of our friends and family now call Saintonge home. We’ve taken a keen interest in their politics, and the idiosyncrasies have stood out. Our government is led by a right of centre party, Peace not Blood, that is partially spurred on by events surrounding a Santonian National Party National Assembly member of Prydanian birth, and the National Party isn’t right wing, at least not in the Santonian context.
HB: And this context informs this distinction between the National Party gaining electoral power but the labour wing not? They’ve had PMs from the labour wing of that party.
TE: Saintonge’s unique political compass is a result of the Santonian Revolution. While the National Party isn’t an immediate outgrowth of the Revolution, its unique circumstances shaped the political paradigm in Saintonge to this day, and the National Party is reflective of that. It’s made up of five wings, four of which represent a branch of the revolutionary forces- you have labour, agrarians, moderates, the religious who are tied to the national church, and the green faction. The latter is the newest branch and the branch with the weakest ties to the traditional National Party identity as a party of the revolution, which explains why they broke off to form the Santonian Green Party. The remaining green faction in the National Party is probably the weakest of the five factions.
HB: That’s another distinction. Here agrarians have always been a conservative force.
TE: We need to be careful due to how distinct our political contexts are. Yes, in Prydania agrarianism was a conservative force broadly, and still is as a driving force behind Peace not Blood. Yet the Prydanian Agrarian Party, at its height, championed economic interventionism for the agrarian sector, pulled the Conservatives to the centre on economic matters, and this is one of the many legacies informing Peace not Blood's social market policies. Which is a similarity with the wider National Party, by the way. But when you factor in the fact that Prydanian agrarians also had strong ties to the church…well… you can find a lot of connective tissue with Santonian agrarians. Context places one of the left and one on the right in different national circumstances, not that they are radically different. But back to Santonian syndicalists.
HB: The labour wing…
TE: Each of the five branches of the Santonian national party… well to be fair more like four and a half… all support each other like sheaths of wheat. Já, you’re correct, Saintonge has had National Party PMs that belong to that party’s labour wing, but no matter what wing the National Party’s leader comes from, they need to garner support from the other branches. No single branch can take over the party on its own, so whoever gets to the top of that mountain has to compromise. Centrists need to make promises to labour, agrarians have to make concessions to the urbanites, and labour has to moderate. This arrangement has made the National Party as electorally successful as it has been. You don’t become a nation’s “natural governing party” without widespread success. Every leader of the National Party, by virtue of having to build an electoral coalition in their own party, emerges as very electable to the wider voting base. So any and all labour PMs Saintonge has had have been tempered by the National Party’s own internal structures. Not to mention that the National Party’s labour wing isn’t entirely uniform in their syndicalist leanings.
HB: This could change, though, right? Say the labour branch of the party grows larger than the others, enough that they don’t have to compromise as much.
TE: If that happens it will be a reflection of wider Santonian social shifts. We make the mistake of assuming that parties shape society via policy and governance, and they don’t. Society shapes parties. That this four and a half way situation is still valid means that it’s still reflective of the Santonian National Party voting base.
HB: So it’s just internal party structures that you believe has held Santonian syndicalists in check.
TE: Já, I do.
HB: It seems like an unprovable thesis though. Maybe you’re right, but how can you prove it?
TE: Well I did temper it by saying it was my opinion
chuckles Still, let’s look at it. We need to understand the eroding of democracy from a partisan political standpoint. Let’s use our own Syndicalists as an example.
HB: Ok.
TE: The Prydanian Syndicalist Party didn’t emerge in the late nineteenth century as a party of tyrants and murderers. Rune Læt was elected to two terms in government, and when he lost the 1931 election he stepped aside peacefully. This was a party that, at the time, was fully committed to the principles of parliamentary democracy. A series of events happened between 1931 and 2002 to turn them into a party that would rather trade one dictatorship for another rather than fight to restore democracy. And even then, these changes were fluid and late-coming. After all, Thomas Nielsen’s five questions…
HB: The speech that won him the Syndicalist Party leadership.
TE: Já. He was elected party leader in 1983, after he gave a speech in the Alþingi where he asked his ‘five questions to the powerful.’ Those being ‘what power have you got?’, ‘where did you get it from?’, ‘in whose interests do you use it?’, ‘to whom are you accountable?’, and ‘how do we get rid of you?’ These are fundamentally egalitarian and democratic in nature. That the man who asked these questions in the national legislature went on to establish a dictatorship is interesting, but it goes to show you that the transition from a party playing by the rules of parliamentary democracy to a dictatorship in waiting was still happening late in the process. So when people say that the Santonian syndicalists in the labour wing of the National Party are good democrats that doesn’t mean much. Good democrats can become tyrants in short order.
HB: It’s kind of wild though, to say that the same events that shaped the Prydanian Syndicalists into dictators can be applied to the Santonian National Party’s labour wing.
TE: Well I don't apply it to the entire labour wing, just the syndicalists. To them though, who said anything about the same events? Nations are shockingly insular when it comes to their political contexts. I wouldn’t expect the processes to be the same. So I don’t focus on events. I focus on end results. And I didn’t say what I said about the Santonian National Party’s syndicalists out of the blue.
HB:
chuckles that’s what I’ve been trying to get from you.
TE:
laughs We need to keep context in mind! But já. During our Civil War, there were some voices in Saintonge, the loudest of which came from the Santoian syndicalists, who called reports of Syndicalist brutality in Prydania FRE propaganda. Perhaps a reserved and prudent position from their perspective at first, but following the liberation of Austurland and the access the free press of the world had, both to people who had lived under Syndicalist rule and to mass graves and labour camps and prison camps, that position became less and less tenable. The final planks of real support for the Syndicalist Republic in Saintonge, already weakened by this point, fell when the Harrying of Hadden and the Advent Executions happened in quick succession. Even then there were members of the labour wing of the National Party who refused to back down and had to be cowed into silence by the rest of the party, who didn’t want to be associated with ideologues who were championing an abusive regime. Fast forward to the New Aleman invasion of Predice. Santonian neutrality was in play, but the leading figures of the National Party’s labour wing syndicalists were very vocal in decrying anything from the government that even hinted at sympathy for the Predicians. They used the idea of Santonian neutrality- incorrectly mind you- to try and argue a both sides paradigm for a situation where a communist power was invading a democratic power, unprovoked. In both of these cases I think it’s safe to say there’s a degree of moral decay. The willingness to champion abusive regimes and invaders because of ideology overall is a warning sign of democratic decay. If the Santonian National Party's syndicalists were to gain control of the levers of government unencumbered by the opposition or even the rest of the National Party… well… I do think it would be a crisis in Santonian democracy, já.
HB: Recent polling shifts in Saintonge show that the Prydanian community there has shifted to the National Party. How does this work into things?
TE: I’ll be frank here, I’m not Santonian, I do not live in Saintonge. My niece and nephew do, true, but I don’t pretend like I have any authority to tell citizens of another country how they should vote in their own affairs. That’s not my place. Still, I would imagine that if a large contingent of Prydanian-born citizens of Saintonge who fled the Syndicalist regime are comfortable supporting the National Party then that tells me that they perceive the syndicalists of that party as not being an overt threat. That just makes sense, I think.
HB: But you mentioned moral and democratic decay.
TE: Just because I notice these trends doesn’t mean I think they’re in danger of seizing power.
HB: A few months ago
you wrote an op-ed that painted the Radical Party of Saintonge as a danger to Santonian democracy.
TE: Já, I did. I stand by that.
HB: So you see threats to Saintonge’s democratic traditions on the left and right, however you want to define those. Isn’t that a crisis?
TE: I think that depends on the political establishment in Saintonge. In that article I wrote about the legacy of the Santonian Revolution. Defining events that set the political status quo hold firm as long as people who were alive for them are around to keep those memories and lessons alive. The lessons of the Prydanian Civil War won’t be lost as long as people are alive to remember it. But in a hundred years when we’re all dead? That will depend on how good a job we do at passing those lessons onto our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. In Saintonge, the Santonian Revolution was hundreds of years ago. Anyone with a memory of it died a long time ago. For a while the Santonian establishment did an excellent job of passing the lessons of that conflict down the generations, but here we have syndicalists in the National Party putting ideology above basic democratic norms and we have the Radical Party openly embracing bigotry. I want to be clear, I don’t think all is lost. Far from it, I think the Santonian democratic traditions are strong enough to weather this, but whether or not they do depends on how the political establishment responds to them
HB: You did get some criticism for that Radical article, that Saintonge is a country that has freedom of speech and association.
TE: Já, and I think a few of the Santonians who expressed that view took the opinion that as a Prydanian the concepts were foreign to me
chuckles
HB: Well regardless, it’s true. Is your solution just to lock up the nuts?
TE: No, and I think it’s a lazy attack to go to. ‘You don’t like their politics, you must want to lock them up.’ No, no. I don’t like their politics, and I’d like to see the political establishment take them seriously as a threat and work to minimize the risk they represent. Jailing political opponents never works, even with the best of intentions. I’m sure the SocComs and the Syndicalists here told themselves everything was for the greater good.
HB: So when you say you want the political establishment to take them seriously…
TE: There’s a belief in what I call privileged countries, such as Saintonge, that if you engage the nuts you validate them and help them grow by giving them a spotlight. I think Prydania, our own history, is a testament to what happens when you let this stuff fester. Because when you ignore them, you let them grow under your nose. It’s a bad situation. Privileged countries…
HB: Could you define that?
TE: Countries that haven’t had to consider political upheaval in at least three generations. It can, in my opinion, lead to complacency in the face of threats to democratic norms. Anyway, in these privileged countries inertia is a powerful force and there is an unwillingness to confront threats to the democratic order. Arrogance, laziness, and complacency all come together. So my warning, from a country that let these forces fester and paid a great price, is for the Santonian political establishment to challenge these anti-democratic factions openly, and push them. Push them until they crack under the pressure. The Liberal Party needs to hold the Radicals to account. The agrarians, centrists, faithful, and greens in the National Party need to discourage the orthodox ideologues among the syndicalists they share a party with. As I said, if Prydanian Santonians who fled the Syndicalists are joining the party, that’s a sign to me they’re doing a decent job of this already. Keep it up. Smack it down.
HB: Is there a reason you see these elements popping up now, over the past twenty years or so?
TE: I think it’s just time. Any political status quo will leave unclaimed space on either the right or left. Often both. And after a certain point there begins to be a feeling that some sort of re-energized electoral success can be found by venturing into these spaces that have long been considered off limits. This is fundamentally the start of democratic decay, and it falls on the establishment to recognize it and push back, to not be complacent. Hell, you don’t even need to be a democracy. Look at Waltalriche.
HB: You’re referring to the Party of the Holy Mother, aren’t you?
TE: I am. I am not going to lie and say that the Waltalriche regime is democratic, because it very clearly isn’t, but it is ruthlessly pragmatic. The political arm, the interestingly named Liberal Democratic Party, has built a status quo based on the accumulation of power, both domestic and internationally. While many of us might recognize it as an extremist regime, it has its practical elements. They refuse to push Waltal nationalism, emphasizing the multi-ethnic nature of the state and affording ethnic minorities some autonomy. They also tolerate the Friedensstadt. This is both an economic arrangement and a social one. The Friedensstadt, while not a fully fledged democracy either, has far more relaxed laws regarding religion, morality, and one’s private life. So Friedensstadt serves as a safety valve. Rather than make martyrs, the regime sends people who refuse to conform to Friedensstadt. So let me ask you this. How do you think the Party of the Holy Mother, a party that believes Andrenne needs to be annihilated in nuclear hellfire, views Friedensstadt?
HB: I don’t…um,, I don’t think they’re fans.
TE: No they aren’t. The Liberal Democratic Party and the regime they serve sees it as a pragmatic partnership. The Party of the Holy Mother views it as an unacceptable heretical compromise. And sending their version of the Pius Militant into Friedensstadt to subdue it and purge it in the name of “purifying the motherland” will be far easier to do than picking a fight with Andrenne. So Friedensstadt has to be our canary in the coal mine on Gothis. If the Party of the Holy Mother gains any influence in the Waltalriche government then we, and by that I mean the PGU, need to guarantee Friedensstadt’s sovereignty, even if it’s not a member nation. If we allow PHM-controlled Waltalriche to move on Friedensstadt than a broader, more destructive war is over the horizon. That would be integral to any wider plans they would have.
HB: And all of this is because of dissatisfaction with the status quo.
TE: It falls on every political establishment, be it a democracy like Saintonge or a dictatorship like Waltalriche, to continue justifying itself to the populace. If they fail to do this then the radical fringes gain traction.
HB: Dr. Eskildsen, I’d like to thank you for joining us. I’d also like to suggest that our listeners and viewers check out your new book
Problematic Populism.
TE: Thank you for having me. And thank you for the plug!
