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The Current Transcript for September 19, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: Judge Thomas began to use work situations to discuss sex. He talked about pornographic materials. On several occasions Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The year was 1991 and the testimony of Anita Hill over allegations of sexual harassment, involving the then nominee for the U.S. Supreme court Clarence Thomas, began to change the conversation, not only in Washington, but in workplaces across North America. But it was accompanied by a smear campaign against Ms. Hill and it did not stop the appointment of Justice Thomas. Now well into hearings for another Supreme Court nominee, a California professor is alleging Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers more than three decades ago. In a moment, we're asking about the parallels. Also today, talk about downsizing.

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VOICE: I'm about to sell everything that I own. My five bedroom, two bath house. Every stitch of content inside and my two cars. All in one shot.

AMT: Michael Bowden in tiny Lennox Passage, Cape Breton as part of a big movement that embraces living with less. Proponents of a minimalist living talk of finding purpose and shedding their guilt, but others decry it as elitist and just another form of consumerism. We're unpacking that in half an hour. And speaking of elite, let's talk about the elite. After all, every populist politician does.

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VOICE: I meet these people. They call them the elite. We got more money. We got more brains. We got better houses, apartments. We got nicer boats. We're smarter than they are. And they say the elite. We're the elite. You're the elite.

AMT: From Donald Trump to Doug Ford, from Maxime Bernier to the rising parties of Europe, populist politicians are tapping into grievances that turn into votes. What are they seeing that mainstream politics is ignoring. We're asking in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Kavanaugh case brings Anita Hill's historic testimony to the fore: journalist

Guests: Jill Abramson, David French

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VOICE: He's an incredible individual, great intellect, great judge, impeccable history in every way. I feel so badly for him that he's going through this to be honest with you. I feel so badly for him. This is not a man that deserves this. It should have been brought up long ago and that's what you have hearings for.

AMT: Well of course that's US President Donald Trump, defending his pick for the US Supreme Court. Conservatives hope Brett Kavanaugh will shift the court to the right for a generation, but since last week his nomination has been in jeopardy. That's when a woman came forward accusing him of sexual assault. She said it happened at a house party when they were both teenagers 36 years ago. At first, the woman was anonymous. On Sunday she went public. Her name is Christine Blasey Ford. She is a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University. Judge Kavanaugh has denied the allegations. Negotiations are underway to have both testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but lawyers for Ms. Ford say she wants the FBI to investigate her allegations before she testifies. And as this unfolds, many are drawing parallels to another Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Clarence Thomas and another accuser Anita Hill.

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VOICE 1: Are you a scorned woman?

VOICE 2: No.

VOICE 1: Do you have a militant attitude relative to the area of civil rights?

VOICE 2: No, I don't have a militant attitude.

VOICE 1: Do you have a martyr complex?

VOICE 2: No I don't.

VOICE 3: Can you tell the committee what was the most embarrassing of all the incidences that you have alleged.

VOICE 2: I think the one that was the most embarrassing was his discussion of pornography, involving these women with large breasts and engaged in variety of sex with different people or animals.

VOICE 4: If what you say this man said to you occurred, why in God's name, when he left his position of power or status or authority over you and you left it in 1983. Why in God's name would you ever speak to a man like that the rest of your life?

VOICE 2: That's a very good question and I'm sure that I can't not answer that to your satisfaction. That is one of the things that I have tried to do today. I have suggested that I was afraid of retaliation, I was afraid of damage to my professional life and I believe you do understand that this response and that's one of the things that I have come to understand about harassment, that this response, this kind of response is not atypical.

AMT: Well some of Anita Hill's testimony in 1991. You heard her being questioned by Howell Heflin and Alan Simpson, senators. Jill Abramson covered Anita Hill's testimony for the Wall Street Journal. She is now a Guardian columnist and the former executive editor of The New York Times. She's also the co-author of the 1994 book, "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas." Jill Abramson is in Boston. Hello.

JILL ABRAMSON: Hi. Good morning.

AMT: What was your first reaction when you heard about Christine Blasey Ford's allegations against Brett Kavanaugh?

JA: Well on Sunday when I read her interview in The Washington Post, I said to myself, oh no, here we go again. And it wasn't because I was powerfully affected reading the terrible details, which you said happened to her so long ago, but I was thinking, now that she has been identified, she probably will be asked to come to Washington to testify at a public hearing. And I immediately remembered all of what your listeners just heard. That these powerful US senators just were arrayed the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee to really try to destroy Anita Hill, before the American public. It was a horrifying thing to sit through that then in 91. I was in the hearing room and I thought, oh you know Dr. Ford, you have no idea what's in store for you.

AMT: So you see similarities right away. You see the parallels.

JA: Well there are so many parallels. First and foremost, the timing of this. Anita Hill she became known to staffers on the Judiciary Committee who contacted her. She filed what she thought was a completely confidential affidavit. She too feared initially having her identity know, but the contents of her affidavit leaked to the press. And you know the story snowballed from there just as Dr. Ford's letter to Senator Feinstein and her house representative in California. She had contacted and told them about the long ago incident. I thought that then and there is a parallel, the fact that the first set of confirmation hearings for Judge Kavanaugh had already happened and were done. That was true in the Thomas case too. So that Anita Hill surfaced after that process was complete and a new set of hearings was scheduled after really there was a public uproar about the fact that the judiciary committee was speeding to confirm Clarence Thomas without considering these allegations. And you had this exact same thing happening with Kavanaugh that his confirmation hearing was over and Republicans decrying that this is an 11th hour attempt to sabotage his nomination. So, neither of those are good environments in which to try to get at the truth.

AMT: And of course there is a clock ticking on this because they want him confirmed before the midterms, am I right?

JA: Absolutely. I mean this whole process has felt quite rushed to me because you know usually judicial confirmation still gets started so quickly after the nominee is named. So that's a thorough investigation of their background can take place. And you know the Democrats complained once hearings began that they weren't given access to all kinds of documents they wanted to see. And then when they got the documents, they were given no time to review them. So it sounds a little bit that the White House is trying to muscle that through. And if Dr. Ford decides she doesn't want to go ahead with a hearing on Monday, which seems passable the Republicans are now saying they're just going to go ahead.

AMT: I spoke with Anita Hill.

JA: And it is because of your point that they desperately want to get this done before the midterm elections because I think they fear losing control of the Congress, including the Senate and then it's unlikely that any of President Trump's nominees would be confirmed.

AMT: I spoke with Anita Hill in 2013. I want to play you part of what she said.

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VOICE: Yes, there are problems now, but that was a moment which the secrets that so many women kept. Even when their closest friends and intimate associates, family members. Those secrets were opened and we were allowed to talk about them for the first time without feeling that we had done something wrong. And so we that I think is was has the power to monumentally change the public conversation, when we can abandon the guilt of shame that we've felt through experiences.

AMT: Jill Abramson, to what extent do you think Anita Hill's testimony changed how we talk about sexual harassment and misconduct?

JA: I think it profoundly changed how we talk about it. First of all, it was the first exposure you could see that in the then all male, all white Senate Judiciary Committee. It was their first exposure to the issue of sexual harassment, which is part of why they mishandled the hearing so much. But when the hearings were over, after Thomas was confirmed, there was you know rising anger, especially among women voters about how this problem, this pervasive societal problem, sexual harassment had been kind of dismissed by by the US Senate. And you had a tidal wave of women voters turning out that next November and the election of six new women senators, there were only two women senators before the Hill-Thomas hearings and now there are 23. The new women senators who were elected back in 92 actually called themselves the "Anita Hill Class." So it had a profound effect on politics. The number of sexual harassment complaints that were filed with the ESC after the hearings quintupled. People were just more aware of it and then you have to roll the clock forward. I'm not saying you know that society, every aspect of the way people behave in the workplace was changed. It certainly wasn't. We found that out, of course in the past two years with the growing accounts of women speaking to various reporters investigating the pervasive nature of those sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual assault still in the workplace with the MeToo movement.

AMT: So right. I was just going to say, we're almost out of time here. Before I let you go, you've tweeted call the Anita Hill moment meets the MeToo movement, will it end any differently? Will it? What do you think?

JA: I think it is. And I'm loathed to predict like how this is going to come out, but that is what it is. It's having almost an identical case unfold after the MeToo movment has been such a big event and has supposedly changed many attitudes again about the horrible mistreatment and power imbalances that women still confirm in their professional and personal lives.

AMT: Well, I'll pick that up with my next guest. Jill Abramson, thank you.

JA: Thank you.

AMT: Jill Abramson, former executive editor for The New York Times and now a columnist at The Guardian. She joined us from Boston. We wanted another perspective on this story and we've gone to David French, who's a senior writer for The National Review. We've reached him in Franklin, Tennessee. Well Jill Abramson is talking about the parallels the Kavanaugh case has with the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings from 1991. What do you think of those comparisons?

DAVID FRENCH: Well there is some surface parallels in the circumstance, obviously a confirmation of Supreme Court justice. Late notice of the allegations, that there are some really, really important differences. One is quite obviously these are much more serious allegations. What Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of doing, she was accusing him of workplace sexual harassment. Here Justice Kavanaugh is being accused of an outright sexual assault. The other thing that is different and this is really important is he's being accused of misconduct that occurred more than allegedly occurred more than three decades ago. And one of the problems you have, when you're seeking to establish the truth, a very old claim is that it becomes the older the claim is the more vital it is that there be some form of corroborating evidence. And one of the reasons is quite obvious and this is something that people who practice law and trial lawyers have understood for a very very long time and that is memory is a tricky, tricky thing, even memory of traumatic events. And the older, the more time that passes from event to allegation, often the more fraught memory is and so it's becomes very important to find corroborating evidence to prove a claim and that's I think one of the things that you're going to see take centre stage over the next few days as Ms. Ford determines whether or not she's going to testify.

AMT: Do you think it's important that she be publicly questioned about these allegations?

DF: Oh absolutely. Absolutely. If you're going to make a claim of misconduct, particularly misconduct this egregious, it's very important that your claim be able to be tested. For your claim to be testable. I mean under our system in the United States, you can't even make a claim that someone owes you $10. Force them to pay $10 without making a claim that is testable. You'd have to put your hand up in the air and swear under oath and subject yourself to cross-examination. Here you're making a history altering claim potentially, certainly a reputation altering claim and that has to be able to be tested. You have to be able to put your hand in the air, swear under oath and state your case and subject yourself to cross-examination. Now it's incumbent on senators to behave with more dignity than which you heard in the Anita Hill hearing and there has been some talk of some of the senators delegating their time to competent attorneys to do the questioning, but still you have to be able to, you have to subject your claim to questioning.

AMT: And can I, I just want to understand this, as you point out, is an allegation of sexual assault and there's talk the FBI I don't think is investigating, but is anyone looking for charges or are they looking solely at whether this serious allegation should determine whether Mr. Kavanaugh becomes a Supreme Court justice?

DF: Well charges aren't possible here because of the age of the allegation and the FBI doesn't investigate typically state criminal law claims, but you know the only possible charges that could occur is if someone is caught lying under oath. So this is and the FBI wouldn't, not in the course of business investigate the truth or falsity of claims that aren't in its jurisdiction. So the single best fact-finding mechanism we have available right now is this Senate committee and that's another side effect sort of the age of the claims. So that makes it very important. This is the opportunity right now to know if this happened or if it didn't happen and so that's why testimony is so critical.

AMT: Based on what we know right now to what extent do you think the allegation made against Judge Kavanaugh should cost him the Supreme Court confirmation.

DF: I think under the current right facts, unless there is additional substantiation that we learn about in the next few days or additional important evidence we learn about in the next few days, I don't think it will because what you have is an accusation that it's very different from the other MeToo accusations that have either destroyed careers or destroyed the reputations of very powerful men. I'll tell you a couple of the differences. One is some of the key MeToo allegations in the recent past, such as against Roy Moore, Senate candidate in Alabama, even though those allegations were very old, there was evidence that the person who had been subjected to the abuse had told other people at the time. And The Washington Post and others were able to go back to those people and they said yes, she told us about this and here is what she told us. And that substantially corroborated their story. The other thing that's really important there's no corroboration, contemporing is corroboration and the first word that we know of this is more than around 30 years later, when she told a therapist. And the therapist notes conflict in important ways with the story that she is telling now. So you have an accusation that has no contemporing these corroboration. The therapist notes conflict with the current story and then also another thing that's important is time and again, when you have allegations of serious misconduct and this is an allegation of very, very serious misconduct, you don't have just one allegation. You have multiple allegations. So here you have one corroborated allegation and I say without more information, he's likely confirmed. And certainly if she doesn't testify, he's likely confirmed.

AMT: OK. Well I guess we'll have to wait and see how this is handled, but thank you for your perspective on all of this.

DF: Thanks for having me. Much appreciated.

AMT: David French, senior writer for The National Review. He joined us from Franklin, Tennessee. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the Contact link. People arguing the parallels and others saying there isn't enough there to continue forward. We'll see what they decide. Stay with us, the news is next and then got stuff piled up in a closet, packed away in the basement, things you haven't used for years? Doesn't have to be that way. You could join the Living With Less movement who's disciples say they're doing just fine with the bare minimum. But is that another form of consumerism? We're asking. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Minimalism: Upper-class luxury or liberating lifestyle?

Guests: Cait Flanders, Colin Wright, Kyle Chayka

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come, it's the heartbeat of Donald Trump's presidency and the lifeblood of an increasing number of political leaders around the world. We're exploring the allure and the dangers of populism in 30 minutes. But first, living with less.

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VOICE: I spent two years volunteering. During that time, I learned a slogan that has always resonated and meant a lot. Live simply, so others can simply live. I've gotten to the point in my life, where I just have way too much stuff that has become way too material and at this point I'm about to sell everything that I own.

AMT: That's Michael Bowden from Lenox Passage in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia launching an online project that takes de-cluttering about as far as it can go. He says he's selling everything he owns, the house, two cars, everything else, family photo albums, childhood memorabilia. The only things he's going to keep are the cat and a few sets of clothing. Michael Bowden says he's selling it all in an online auction to spread a message.

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VOICE: If I can make one person see that stuff is just that stuff and it's not going to make them happy and maybe it will bring about a change in their life, where they will look to seek their happy. Where they will look to help others, then this whole thing would have been worth it.

AMT: That is Michael Bowden talking to CBC's Maritime Noon. Although he's taking it a bit further than most, Michael Bowden is part of a larger trend of minimalist living, a reaction to conspicuous consumption. There is of course the Japanese de-cluttering guru, Marie Kondo, who preaches that you should only keep what sparks joy in you or Instagram feeds filled with white walled sparsely decorated homes or people who list every object they own, always aiming to go lower with the number of things they own. Living with less, maybe having a moment, it also has its critics who say it's become its own form of consumerism, available only to those who can afford it. Joining me to talk about all of this are Colin Wright, who's an author and a podcast host, who's been traveling the world and living out of a suitcase since giving away most of his things almost a decade ago. Colin Wright is currently visiting his hometown of Columbia, Missouri and that's where we've reached him. Cait Flanders is the author of "The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in A Store." And that title pretty well tells you what her recent project is. Cait Flanders joins us from Vancouver. And Kyle Chayka is a freelance journalist and author of the forthcoming book about minimalism called "The Longing for Less." Kyle Chayka is in Boston. Hello to you all. Hello.

CAIT FLANDERS: Hello. Thank you.

KYLE CHAYKA: Hey.

COLIN WRIGHT: Hey. Thanks For having us.

AMT: Colin Wright, let's start with you. What do you think of Michael Bowden's project of selling his house and almost everything in it?

CW: I think it sounds very interesting. I think it's wonderful that he's seeing it as a step towards something else, as opposed to an end unto itself. I think optimally that's what you have, is you're moving towards something you're not just running away from something.

AMT: Why did you give up all your stuff, Colin?

CW: In my case, I found that I was setting aside all of my supposed priorities. I was not prioritizing my actual priorities and I was living a life out in Los Angeles where I was trying to buy my way to happiness. I was trying to spend a bunch of money in order to fill certain voids that I felt when really what I was doing I was setting aside the change in lifestyle that probably could have gotten me there a whole lot faster. I'd always wanted to see the world and I was making way more money than I'd ever made in my entire life and yet I still had a blank passport. So getting rid of that stuff allowed me to just on a very practical level, free myself up so that I didn't have a bunch of stuff in storage, I didn't have a bunch of bills to pay, but it was also kind of a psychological milestone that allowed me to move on to that more mobile lifestyle and recalibrate toward trying to live for experiences more than for possessions.

AMT: What were you doing at the time?

CW: I was running a branding studio.

AMT: OK. Cait Flanders you began your project with a vow not to buy anything new for a year. Why did you also end up giving away a lot of the stuff you already owned?

CF: Throughout the year I think what I just really realized was that I had spent a lot of money on this person that I wanted to become. So I was always buying things for you know like kind of the smarter version of myself or the more interesting version of myself or just the more grown up or professional version of myself that I thought I should be or thought I wanted to be, but I never ended up using or reading or doing any of those things. And so throughout the year really just realized I had to let go of who I thought that person was supposed to be and just accept myself who I was.

AMT: So what do you have and what don't you have anymore, Cait?

CF: I mean like if you walked into my home it would still look probably like most people's homes in some sense, like I obviously have basic living room furniture and I have a desk that I work at. I guess I just don't really have anything extra, like actually a weird thing that someone came to my house and commented on is I don't have a toaster. I mean that's simply just because I don't eat bread really so I don't need a toaster.

AMT: Are there other things though that you said I'm just not going to have this anymore, like what's your shoe closet look like?

CF: I mean I have the probably four pairs of shoes that I wear all the time. So I have a pair of boots for kind of the winter, I have a pair of boots for hiking, sandals for the summer, one pair of heels that I wear to all weddings, so that's about it.

AMT: OK. Colin, has living with us made you happy.

CW: Absolutely. It's been parts of becoming happier, I would say. I don't think the process itself is inherently negative or positive, it's what you do with it and it's how you do it that's important. I absolutely think that it's totally possible to chuck all of your stuff and be totally unhappy. If you're getting rid of the wrong things, if you're not filling your life with the right things and those things don't necessarily have to be possessions.

AMT: Do you know how many objects you own?

CW: I actually stopped counting several years ago. I was trying to present it as kind of inspiration like hey you don't need so much stuff, you could probably do something similar. Some people took it as a challenge that you are more morally correct and more of a minimalist if you own fewer things and that's absolutely not the case. Everybody has different needs, different priorities, different stuff that will contribute to their happiness and amplify whatever they've got.

AMT: How low did you go though?

CW: Way back in the day I was down into the 50s, but I was also traveling full time. So everything that I own fit into my carry on bag.

AMT: So what do you have and not have now?

CW: I live a very varied lifestyle these days. So sometimes I'll have an apartment. At the moment I am on the verge of going on tour around North America in a 1985 Holiday Rambler Imperial RV. I own a few more things than typically I own because I'm able to flesh out the kitchen in the RV. I've got a mattress that goes in the RV, things like that.

AMT: Are you, did you play the guitar?

CW: I do. Yeah.

AMT: Do you lug your guitar around, what do you do?

CW: At the moment I do and it has been really wonderful for the past year or so having a consistent guitar, but in the past when I've been traveling, I've just bought a cheap guitar and then resold it or given it away.

AMT: So Cait, beyond having more space in your apartment, how has living with fewer things changed your life on a philosophical level?

CF: I think the most core level, what it really has taught me over the past four and a half years now, is just that wanting like wanting more, usually means that there's a lack or like a feeling of lack. Something I've learned personally is how to deal with those feelings as they come up. So if I feel like some part of myself or my life is lacking, then it's about looking at that, rather than just binge consuming on something that I think will make me feel better, but which has only ever provided a very temporary fix. So I found out my parents were getting divorced, my two dogs passed away nine days apart. I went through a pretty, just a sad breakup and in moments like that I always found that I was reaching towards something like it started with drinking when I was quite young. And so I quit drinking when I was 27. And so when I didn't have that to reach to anymore, I think spending sort of just became the next thing that I was doing. So when I couldn't do any of those things, I just had to start feeling the feelings.

AMT: That's interesting because we do have that phrase "retail therapy."

CF: It definitely exists. I also sometimes wonder like who came up with that, like I don't have the answer to that question yet.

AMT: Someone making an excuse, maybe. Kyle Chayka, I know you're there. I've been waiting, I want to bring you in as you listen to our other two guests. You have talked about the "arrogance" of the minimalist movement. Why do you use that word?

KC: I certainly think the philosophy of minimalism has a lot to recommend it, but I do think there's been this kind of lifestyle trend of minimalism, where people compete with the fewest objects or make these lifestyle blogs and kind of identities around being minimalist in a way that like projects it as a solution to everyone's problems. I think choosing what you want in your life and choosing what you want out of it is certainly a good thing, but especially in the kind of broader design trends of minimalism with furniture or the blank white walls that you see in every house lately, it's a way of almost purifying your surroundings and not letting anything else. You feel like you have this blank empty space where the only thing that exists is yourself and that to me, maybe that seems a little arrogant to me.

AMT: Well I want you to hear a clip. We asked one of our producers in Vancouver, Anne Penman, to visit a thrift store where she talked to a shopper about the trend of people choosing to live with less.

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VOICE: So I'm actually looking for a winter coat. Yeah, something like this. This one's $12.99, which is actually really cheap for Value Village. $39.99, I mean you know, I don't know how someone on social assistance would be able to afford that so, you know. I think there's a bit of a class element implied there, so people that often are decluttering I think are people that have an abundance. And so I think that really appeals to someone who is maybe middle class, upper middle class. I think a lot of people have found that more does not necessarily equal better or happier. I grew up very working class. So I'm used to shopping at thrift stores. I've shopped at stores pretty much my whole life. I am part of the generation that has a lot of student debt and is trying to survive in a city that is becoming increasingly unaffordable. So it is out of necessity still, but just in a little bit different way.

AMT: Kyle Chayka what class elements do you see in the trend of minimalism?

KC: I do see it as a middle and upper class thing and I think the design aesthetic is now connected with an idea of luxury, like the most luxurious products are the ones you only ever need to buy one of. And I think I've also found that it does take a certain amount of stability and money to be minimalist. Like Colin was talking about traveling, but even you know buying a new mattress requires an amount of money that not everyone has.

AMT: Colin is living with less something you can only afford to do because you used to have a very well paying job?

KC: Well, I don't have a very well paying job anymore. That said, I mean it's an excellent point and it is something that's a real issue. The preponderance of this Instagramlable minimalism, which in my mind is something very different from minimalism as a philosophy, instead of heuristics. That is something ideally that could apply to anybody because it's really just about reallocating resources, however many you happen to have toward things that serve you better and help you get to where you'd like to be. And so I've seen bloggers and spoken to people directly like Phnom Penh, Cambodia who have far less on average than the average middle class or upper economic class American, but the philosophy as a core, not the Instagramable version where it's all about buying the most expensive Scandinavian designed whatever, but the idea of spending your time and resources and energy on the appropriate things, rather than just spending them. That is something that I think translates really well. That said, I do think that still in this space, a whole lot of the most visible people talking about it in particular, are people of that class.

AMT: Cait Flanders do you see an elitist attitude in minimalism?

CF: Oh my gosh. I mean I've just been nodding along. I think it's really important that we're acknowledging it. That's something that I don't think everyone in this space is willing to do. The problem with things like Instagram are that the way it's being sold is truly just another form of consumerism. That's something I've been really conscious of this whole time to like not share pictures of my home because I don't want anyone to think that they need to aspire to what I have. Like that just doesn't feel good in any way whatsoever to me. Another problem in this space is sort of when there is advice kind of thrown around like oh if you can repurchase something for less than $20 or $30 then go ahead and declutter it. And I'm like well that's not an option for everybody.

AMT: And I'm really struck by you know if you look at, if you look at pictures of anyone fleeing a desperate situation or conflict zone, they're carrying whatever they can. And I remember Joe Schlesinger actually, CBC's legendary foreign correspondent, once saying he used to look at these people and think you know they got stuff, like why. And then he realized it's all they have. And if they don't take it, they have nothing. That's where some of the class differences come into it.

CF: It is, one of the things I want to add to it though is that in anything we're doing in life, we can't speak to everybody. You know I think the reason we're seeing this as a trend is because it has been a problem for a lot of people, at least like in western society that for years that you know it started in the 80s when really like things like credit cards and consumerism became so popular that now you know decades later we're realizing oh it's actually caused a lot of problems to live this way.

AMT: And then the mass production of goods, right?

CF: Yes.

AMT: I mean there's just more stuff available to us at prices that many people can afford.

CF: Absolutely.

AMT: I have another perspective I want you all to hear. Jennifer McCartney is the author of "The Joy of Leaving Your Stuff All Over The Place: The Art of Being Messy. Although I'm saying stuff, she uses another S word, instead of stuff. We got her to take us on a tour of her 700 square foot Brooklyn apartment and as you might guess, it is not pristine. She says it helps make her more creative though.

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VOICE: So when you walk in, the first thing you'll notice is our bookshelves. My husband and I are both readers and writers. So as you can imagine, between the two of us, we've got a lifetime of books on display here. If you've read Marie Kondo and her book, "The Life Changing Magic Of Tidying Up," you'll know that books are clutter and you should get rid of them. Obviously, I don't subscribe to that theory. I don't think most sane people would and so next we'll go into the kitchen. We've got loads of fridge magnets obviously. Here's one from the Calgary Stampede. That's just a picture of some donuts. And there's one from the Cheers bar in Boston. Down the hall you'll find our knickknack cabinet, which I think is essential for any cluttered apartment. So here's a tongue in cheek crossed stitch my mom did that says, plan ahead and the letter D is all squished. Here's an old tiny candleholder we got in Iceland and a kind of a beat up plastic radio that used to be in the bathroom at my parents place. Now into the bedroom, you'll find an unmade bed, which I think is the reality for most people. Does anyone actually make their beds in the morning? Clothing on the floor of course. My bedside table stacked with books, hand cream and empty water glass. Some dust bunnies I'm noticing, probably cat hair actually. So I mean one of the fun things about visiting someone's home is looking at their stuff and figuring out what kind of person they are. I mean I get anxious when I visit someone's place and it's just completely devoid of things right. Like where do they put all their stuff, what are they hiding? Like I guess if your home is minimalist, people really have to look into your medicine cabinet for more info.

AMT: So there you go. Okay full disclosure, I'm one of those people who makes the bed in the morning. But Colin, would you judge Jennifer McCartney for her messy apartment and for having so much stuff?

CW: No. I mean if anything, positively. I would argue from the way that she talks about it that is something that makes her very happy and minimalism to me is not about owning as few things as possible, it's owning exactly the right things and no more than that. So what I usually tell people, if you are more passionate about unicorns statuettes than anything else on the planet, then you should absolutely have a really killer collection of unicorn statuettes. Like the idea here is not to completely rid your life of stuff, it's to make sure that the stuff that you bring into your life is amplifying the good things in your life.

AMT: She talks about some of the stuff from her childhood that she keeps around. Have you given away all those things?

CW: I've not given away all of them. When I was going through and getting rid of some of those things, some things that I had just been holding onto forever that were essentially just dead weight for me. They were not things that I revisited. They were things I felt compelled to keep because I felt like society was telling me I was supposed to keep these things. Some of them I photographed and then got rid of. Some I gave away to my parents and then a few things I gave away to other people who don't know me.

AMT: So, no teddy bears?

CW: No teddy bears. No. And in some cases too, the physical objects that we hold onto that do connect us to some type of meaning, we can extract that meaning in some way. Recognize that it's in our brains, it's not in the object. And then hand that object off to someone else who might actually get use out of it and maybe build their own memories around it. So you can increase the amount of value that's in the world by being more intentional with this stuff.

AMT: Kyle what would you say to someone who feels guilty about having too much clutter in their lives? What would you say to make them feel better?

KC: I'd probably say there are things they could feel guilty about. I was just thinking about you know the idea that by getting rid of your photographs or teddy bear or something, you're getting rid of material things. Like if you digitize all your photos, you're actually taking up space on a server farm that's like spreading over miles of desert and polluting the environment. There are consequences to throwing out things, just as there are consequences to keeping them. So I think like the idea of clutter to me is not really the issue. It is more of this like wider awareness of how we live now and the desire as the society inculcates in us that you should have the house, you should have the car, you should have more stuff and like interrogating those a little more.

AMT: And you should document your life.

KC: Without giving you anxiety over having less stuff.

AMT: Yeah I know it's interesting because you're pointing out that we're all sort of documenting our lives in a new way too. We think we have to hang on to things in some way or another.

KC: Yeah the internet has created a whole new class of objects, which is just like an excess of digital material. Like I've been on Twitter for eight years or whatever and I have thousands of tweets that represents a lot of like wasted time and energy, probably. I think I feel worse about digital clutter than I feel about the stuff in my house.

AMT: I think a couple of hundred years from now someone's going to have a heyday with all the stuff that they're going to find encrypted that we have all left behind.

KC: If it survives that long.

AMT: Colin what, what one thing did you have the hardest time giving away?

CF: Oh gosh. Honestly I don't think it was even a physical thing. It took me a while. Probably the most difficult thing to get rid of though was the perception that I had of myself as weird as that sounds. This idea that I was represented accurately by the stuff that I had in my life and that I was defined in part by the role that I played in kind of that value creation cycle. The idea that by generating revenue and buying specific things I was defining my life and showing the world who I was. So that's something that I think for a lot of us is a little bit difficult to change over, even if you might have all the reasons in the world to do so, not necessarily just you know to define yourself as a minimalist. I think a lot of the people who are in my mind living as minimalists, do not go around and tell everyone all the time, hey I'm a minimalist. Look here's the minimalist things that I do. But being able to redefine yourself in terms of the stuff that you're actually freeing up all of that time and energy and resources in order to do.

AMT: Well that raises another question Colin. As you did this, did you have, maybe not friends in the sense that your friends might understand what you're up to, but acquaintances who would judge you for what you had or did not have as you started to cull.

CW: Yeah. And actually it wasn't an overt, hey you don't own the right things anymore, but there was a great deal of judgment and even a kind of soft cutting of ties with certain people with whom my relationship with them was predicated entirely on like a business relationship. And so the fact that I was no longer aspiring to the same goals that they were and no longer orienting my life around earning money as the only metric of success, that was something that led to some difficulties initially. It was not something that a lot of people who were in my life up to that point could understand.

AMT: Interesting. Cait, what about you? Did you have one thing that you had the hardest time giving away and how did people react to you?

CF: I had to let go of the value I had placed on the object when I had first purchased it. I think that that's something we do when we're buying for the wrong reason. And those were the toughest things to get rid of because I didn't see it at first.

AMT: Kyle, despite your concerns about minimalism, how do you live?

KC: I live pretty simply, I would say. I live in Brooklyn and I don't have a big apartment because I'm not wealthy. So I don't actually own that much stuff. I do collect art, which definitely brings me a lot of joy and means my walls aren't quite so blank. But I guess I've just been thinking about what social pressures exist that are making us think and live in this different way. And you know gentrification and expensive cities means we live in smaller spaces. More precarious careers and jobs means we can't identify with what we do for work as much anymore. You know minimalism is maybe one solution of a different way to think about yourself, but maybe instead, we should have more sustainable social structures.

AMT: Well that's another whole conversation. So I'll leave it there and maybe we'll pick up on that later. Thank you for making us think, all of you.

CF: Thank you so much for having us.

KC: Thanks for having us.

CW: Yeah thanks for having us.

AMT: Colin Wright, author and podcast host, who gave away most of his things in 2009. He's in Columbia, Missouri. Kate Flanders is the author of "The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping Gave Away My Belongings and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in A Store." She's in Vancouver. Kyle Chayka is a freelance journalist. His forthcoming book is called, "The Longing For Less. He joined us from Boston. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and stay with us. In our next half hour, the perils of populism, that's what we're talking about. Donald Trump has mastered the art of appealing to the every man, even though he is far from being an every man himself. He's drawing from a populism playbook that's being used more and more around the world. We're looking at that and we're asking what some politicians are missing when it comes to that. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Politicians need to listen to their voters' fears, says expert

Guests: Mike Medeiros, Sophia Gaston, Yascha Mounk

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: They talk about, they talk about the elite. The elite. You ever see the elite? They're not elite. You're the elite.

VOICE 2: It's official, The People's Party of Canada is the name of the country's newest federal political party.

VOICE 3: Because it is time that the government put Canadian people first.

VOICE 4: The people are behind us and I can tell you my friends, we will never, ever back down.

VOICE 5: This is about politics. We are voted to run our own country for better or worse, richer or poorer till death do us part.

VOICE 6: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has attacked the European Union, claiming the Western political elite had failed to protect the block from Muslim immigration.

VOICE 7: As expected, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats made big gains and could now hold the balance of power.

AMT: Well from a surge in support for a far right party in Sweden to the newly formed People's Party of Canada to the populist in chief Donald Trump, all over the West, politicians rail against so-called elites. They say the institutions of liberal democracies are failing the people and their popularity is growing. Their message resonates. Europe has seen a surge in nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment and racist attacks alongside with this so-called populist wave. In Canada, Ontario Premier Doug Ford rails against unelected judges to cheers from his base. It's left mainstream politicians struggling to find ways to counteract populist rhetoric. For their thoughts on the rise of populism and where it might lead, I'm joined by three people who have been tracking all of these changes. Sophia Gaston is the director of the Centre for Social and Political Risk at the Henry Jackson Society. She's been conducting focus groups across Europe to try to better understand public support for populist and far right politics. She joins us from London, England. Yascha Mounk is a writer and academic who has spent years studying the rise of populism. His latest book is called, "The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It. He joins us from Strasbourg, France. And Mike Medeiros is a Canadian political scientist who's now based at the University of Amsterdam, but he's in Toronto today and he's with me in our studio. Hello everyone and welcome.

MIKE MEDEIROS: Hello.

SOPHIA GASTON: Hello.

AMT: Sophia Gaston, I want to start with you. Let's get a definition here. What do we mean when we talk about the rise of populism?

SG: Populism is a term that has been bandied around quite a lot and it doesn't necessarily always apply in the instances where it has been used, but there is a very clear academic definition and it's generally coming to this point around kind of strategic campaigning or communications exercised, where you are positioning the pure people and this party or candidates representing them alongside up against a corrupt elite. So it's inherently about a kind of anti-establishment dichotomy there and it is about a division that is very clear and those divisions are seized upon and capitalized to try and wedge them further to distinguish oneself as either deserving or undeserving.

AMT: Mike Medeiros, how do you define populism?

MM: Well I think that Sophia is right that it is a communication style that tries to be folksy and pits the good people versus the corrupt elite. It's also an ideology where it tries to go against this elite. It proposes to have more power to the people through mechanisms, such as referendums.

AMT: And how do you define elite? Or how does, look at Donald Trump's definition of elite. What is the elite?

MM: Well it's an abstract term that's why somebody like Donald Trump or even Viktor Orban, who's been in Hungarian politics for 30 years, could still be the outsider. Is you try and focus on a group of individuals who become the bogeyman, who are defined as not representing the people and you attack them for that.

AMT: Yascha Mounk, last week we saw an election in Sweden. What were the populist themes that the Sweden Democrats were campaigning on?

YASCHA MOUNK: Well I think the populist themes are always relatively similar and that comes out well in the two definitions that we've heard so far, which is that they claim that they alone stand for real people. That's why I love this name. I hadn't heard about this until today of this new political parties you seem to have in your country, the People's Party of Canada because that assumes that this particular political party stands for the whole people and everybody else doesn't stand for anybody. So the nature of populism is this claim to exclusive representation of a people. I alone stand for people and everybody else doesn't. Everybody else is illegitimate. That's a key part of what the Sweden Democrats ran on. They're also a right-wing populist party, which means that they particularly attacked Sweden's relatively open door immigration policy, that they'd had for the last three years, which has now been somewhat changed. They talked a lot about problems of supposedly rising crime within Sweden. The failure of the institutions to punish refugees who commit crime robustly. So those were the main themes.

AMT: And Yascha, why has the migrant issue become such a lightning rod for populists across Europe?

YM: Well I think there's sort of a specific reason for the last few years and then an underlying reason. So the specific reason is simply the big wave of migrants and refugees you saw over the last two and three years. The fear that this would continue indefinitely, that if you have about a million refugees arriving in Germany over the course of a year, if you have an even higher percentage measured by the smaller population of Sweden arriving in that country within a year, and you keep going like that then the country will change radically within 10 or 20 years. And that fear really motivated people. Then there are some concerns about how the refugee crisis is actually being handled. It is true that in many European countries like Germany and Sweden now, you have large populations that have essentially been told that they cannot stay in the country in the long run. That they're not allowed to work and yet they're not being deported either. So you have a relatively large population of people who are quite hopeless. And that is both a social and a political problem, but I think it's a mistake just to focus on the refugees because we've seen the rise of these far right populist parties before the refugee crisis and that was responding often to a more longstanding transformation of what used to be mono ethnic, monocultural countries, which forged themselves as quite homogeneous into more multi-ethnic countries. And Sweden, Germany, Italy have gone a long way in expanding the definition of citizenship and understanding that you can have fellow citizens that come from different parts of the world. That transformation is not completed and there's a lot of people who are rebelling against it.

AMT: Sophia, the focus groups you've been conducting across Europe, do they speak to this? What have you been hearing about why people tend to support populist politicians?

SG: I mean the most amazing thing is that it doesn't really matter where I am in Europe, the conversations are almost verbatim, the same. And they really come back to these principal concerns around immigration that really straddle the numbers different dimensions. So they're economic, they're social and cultural in nature. I think you know the primary means by which anti-immigration sentiment feeds into an economic story is around the level of resource scarcity that's come to dominate national psychologies around the financial crisis. So in a time where funding seemed to be pressured, jobs are scarce. Citizens minds became quite focused on this idea of legitimacy of access. So who's receiving benefits, who's getting the best jobs and so on. There's also more political dimensions to this as well. So this also coincides as Yascha ludes to a time of social liberalism and trying to right the wrongs of the past, in terms of empowering different groups and raising awareness to different social inequalities. So this scarcity around the government becomes the scarcity of representation as well. There are quite significant concerns on the social level as well, around integration and I think we need to accept that there's been significant policy and political failures here. And then of course we get to the trickiest dimension, which is this cultural aspect. And there's two strengths really here. One is about this idea of different cultures being fundamentally incompatible with Western Christian values and traditions and we certainly see someone like Orbán promoting this idea. And linked to this, but also separate is this feeling that governments have somehow neutralized what we mean by liberalism to the point where it's become an entirely accommodating force. So it's seem to be sort of bending to the force of other cultures, not asserting or affirming the values and traditions of the nation state. So these concerns about immigration and the rise of populism have necessarily come hand in hand because immigration has become really an issue of democracy. People feel that governments have not been listening to them, not being true to their promises. So citizens who are highly concerned about immigration, much more likely to be susceptible to anti-establishment messages and feel supportive of change.

AMT: Mike Medeiros at the same time there is the argument that economic marginalisation leads to populist sentiments. Where does that fit in?

MM: Well economic marginalisation is very important. I think we should focus on that a bit more, if we're talking about populism. By concentrating on immigration, it kind of confuses the message that or finds that populism also has a left wing aspect to it that is getting stronger and stronger in European countries. What's come out of the Swedish election is this so-called rise of the far right, where in actuality they really haven't grown that much. Missing is the more of an increase of the far left, which was the same case also in Germany and these far left parties don't tend to be anti-immigrant they tend to be a lot more focused on the anti-establishment, if you will, they're pure forms of populism. And it really is the aspect of the economic situation and the economic left behind, rather than the cultural fears that immigration brings.

AMT: And do the two meet, if you think of it as a circle, do the two meet at some point?

MM: They do in some parties. I mean if you're looking at far right parties, they meet in these parties or you have parties that are fueling on economic fears and on cultural fears that are created by immigration or rapid social changes, however economic fears are just fear, discontent with the elite don't necessarily have to be in line with immigrants or the issue of immigration or the fears that are caused by immigration.

AMT: We're talking about fears. I want you guys to hear a clip. This is from Elif Shafak, who's a Turkish novelist and political commentator, who spoke at a forum on the rise of populism. She talks about living in an age of emotions.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: And I think it's OK to have fears. But my point is it is OK when countries are guided by fear because when we are guided by fear, we have made the worst mistakes and human history is full of these mistakes. But it has been also a big mistake on the part of the liberal intelligency, intellectuals to look down upon many people's emotions. If I belittle other people's emotions, including their fear, what I will be doing is to push them towards the lap of the far right because that is one public space in which their emotions are not belittled.

AMT: Yascha Mounk, what do you think of that point that mainstream politicians haven't been very good at recognizing and acknowledging people's visceral fears and their emotions?

YM: I think unfortunately that's absolutely right. You know I was on a panel a couple of days ago, where one of my fellow speakers was essentially saying that there's no difference at all between the supporters of populists and fascists. And the answer is that they have to read more Thomas Mann and learn to be more cultured and have more empathy. That's meant very nicely, but I don't think it's going to be the solution to the political problems we face. So we have to take seriously what people are telling us. I think often, you know if a broken clock is right twice a day, populists are right three or four times a day, more with the diagnosis they offer than with the solutions they would want us to follow, which often are not factual at all. But that starts by taking seriously what they're telling us. And I have to say I'm a little surprised when you know the previous speaker was saying that actually this has nothing to do with immigration when first of all, we see immigration and security coming top of opinion polls as political problems in Europe time after time after time. And when we see you know right wing populists absolutely dominating across central Europe, when we see the Sweden Democrats having by far and away their strongest performance ever in the elections a month or so ago, when we see the most popular politician in Italy being an incredibly xenophobic interior minister and the leader of the deep xenophobic elite. You know it's very nice that if you have you know left wing economic provinces, you would wish that it's about the economy and all we have to do is to provide a nice welfare state and suddenly everybody is going to be calm. But Sweden has a relatively generous welfare state, a very functioning society and yet far right populists are doing better there now than they ever half. So I think taking seriously the fears, starts by not engaging in political fantasy and seeing whether it's that and then we have to find a way of responding to that in a principled way. That doesn't pander to them. That doesn't start to emulate xenophobes because they are being successful, but it is to see where popular fears are and think about how we can respond to those in a principled manner.

AMT: Sophia, do you see this in your focus groups. Do you see, are people saying they feel ignored? That they feel that their fears are being belittled or their legitimate fears, what they see as legitimate fears, have them labelled like as outcasts?

SG: Absolutely. I mean I think we need to recognize that we're coming off the back of really 20, even perhaps 30 years of what I would describe as a kind of doctrine of progress. And I think in many ways we can look around and see huge achievements during that time, particularly on the social level. But I think at the same time to many people, this has been a period of immense change and you know one man's progress is another man's decline. And I think there are so many different aspects to this change and some of them really are just about these kind of quite amorphous feelings of being on the wrong side of history. And certainly I mean when I do focus groups in Saxony and around Dresden and so on, where Pegida and AFDI have the little hot spots around there. You know people talk about immigration absolutely, but they talk about suppression of freedom of speech even more. And they say well you know everybody's just trying to silence us by calling us Nazis. So I think that traditional politicians really need to find new language to start talking about values and traditions and culture and what we even mean about the nation state. You know what is it that we're protecting and defending? What is contained within these walls? What is that concept of citizenship. In the 21st century, recognizing that our society's are no longer ethnically homogenous. I think people just want to know what is immovable in the face of change.

AMT: You're also talking about people who want to disrupt the status quo, but want to keep the status quo. That they're afraid of the change and at the same time they want to disrupt what they see as the people controlling things.

SG: They want to, well I think there's two dimensions. So much of this populist force that we've been seeing over the past particularly few years across Europe, it reflects a kind of accelerated risk taking appetite. So people who feel they have nothing to lose or people who feel that they have something to gain by disrupting a system that they feel no longer works for them. So really in a way they're trying to reinstate a system that feels more comfortable to them, but one of the huge paradoxes of populism at the moment is trying to reinstate something from the past, has now become a kind of change movement because the orthodoxy from the traditional parties on the centre left and the centre right became so all encompassing and so indistinguishable that that became the mainstream. That became the elite. So there are all sorts of ironies in here and I think you referred earlier to this point around to all the elites. And of course many of these populist actors are actually you know incredibly wealthy people, look at Donald Trump for example. But the elitism and this perceived sneer is around a cultural elitism. These are people who don't feel they have acceptance on the level of the cultural elite, so the liberal cosmopolitan.

AMT: Right intellectual elite, cultural elite. Yeah OK.

SG: Yeah exactly.

AMT: So Mike, last week in Canada, former Conservative MP Maxime Bernier launched a new federal political party, the People's Party of Canada. Interesting choice of words. Over the summer, he criticized extreme multiculturalism. He's gone out of his way to say we've got to stop being politically correct. What do you make of his version of self described intelligent populism?

MM: Well it's very interesting because right off the bat he's defending himself against the attacks people throw at him as populism and he's saying that he's not a bad populist. That he's a smart populist. That he's in there for the people and as a way of promoting his ideas in terms of economic liberalism and also the more nativist vision of social diversity in Canada. But he's focusing on this aspect of the people that the people of Canada are not properly represented by the current political offer and when he broke away from the Conservative Party, he took it a step further and called the party morally corrupt. Too morally corrupt to be reformed and that aspect of elite corruption is very important when you're trying to be the representative of the people because once again Maxime Bernier has been around politics for a while and you can easily point him as a political elite. However he's defining himself as an outsider who is able to represent the people.

AMT: It's interesting because we've just seen Doug Ford at a ploughing match yesterday, talking to farmers, people in agriculture and making the point that these are the people. These are the regular people that he represents. Maxime Bernier is the politician who says I don't want to protect agriculture any more with marketing systems I want to get rid of it, but I am protecting the people. So whose people are we talking about?

MM: Well it depends who you're talking to and believe it or not, both people might actually be the same if they see a benefit in it. Farmers, just agricultural policy is complicated so we won't get too much into it. It's not necessarily, Doug Ford concentrates the downtown Torontonians as the bogeymen, Maxime Bernier talks about lobbies as being the bogeymen and both are against farmers. And both will have possibly a interest in that community or that group of electors.

AMT: So Yascha Mounk, are populist politicians just better at getting their message out?

YM: Well yes and no. I mean part it, right. If you want to you know I talked to a very right wing, but not populist Republicans state legislator a couple of years ago. And he told me, look you know I'm a politician. I've been a politician for a long time. I know when I have to speak in simple sentences, but I have to explain ideas in straightforward ways. But right now when I offer a three sentence answer to a question and somebody to my right answers a one sentence answer to a question, people think it's me who's lying. And that to me was a very striking way of looking at it because of course when you're trying to tell people, hey the world is complicated. I can do something for you, but there's limits to what I can do, there's no easy solutions to all of your problems. That's an inherently a less sweeping message than the thing that every populist, whether left or right, whether in Canada or the United States or Europe says, which is leave it to me. I'm going to fix everything. All of your current problems cause of the elite that exist, once I'm in power, it's all going to be gone. So I do think the populace having an inherent advantage in that way. But I also think that established politicians have not been good enough at having a clear message. And that's partially because they haven't been good enough at having imaginative policies. When you look at the 2016 presidential election the United States, it wound up being a choice between an extremist part of change and a modern politics of the status quo. What established modern politicians have to do to win over voters is to develop a radical set of policies that's based in the actual values and that allows voters to see that the life can get better without having to embrace the ideological extremes.

AMT: And let's just I want to ask a little bit more about political correctness, Sophia, and how much that plays into things. Again, we've heard Maxime Bernier tweeting "I hereby officially declare the death of political correctness in Canada." Donald Trump talked about political correctness. Yet, when Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a basket of deplorable, which is pretty politically incorrect, everybody jumped on her. Why couldn't she be politically incorrect?

SG: Because I think she's not seen as the messenger and she's not trusted. I mean in so many other ways she's seen as a messenger of the kind of identity politics, so-called identity politics, that so many on the kind of anti-political correctness bandwagon few find particularly offensive. I think the challenge that mainstream politicians have got to is that these really these issues that have turned out to be very important to people, values, tradition, culture, citizenship, community, have all become tied up in political correctness. And politicians have become so afraid of wading into these issues, but they are really the fundamental fabric of our nations and our societies. I think something that comes out really clearly in the focus groups, is it's also just around this broader sense of precariousness and uncertainty that a lot of people feel with modern life and modern change because they say to me, I just don't know what the right language is I'm meant to be using. Every day there's a different you know new word that I'm not meant to use. LGBT is now LGBT, I, Q, Plus and so on. And I never know the right terminology and it's all gone too far. So they say to me I feel like I'm walking on eggshells and I think that's a really important point here because it's people saying I just feel this landscape is very uncertain for me. I'm not sure how to wade into that and that's feels stressful for them. So I think we have to be careful that political correctness isn't stopping us you know isn't stopping people feeling they can engage in public debate and isn't actually stopping politicians from really speaking openly about challenges and issues and interrogating these topics that are very important for people around culture.

AMT: We're going to have to leave it there, we're out of time, but we'll end on that thought. Thank you all of you.

YM: Thank you.

SG: Thank you.

AMT: I've been speaking with Yascha Mounk, a lecturer on government at Harvard University. Sophia Gaston, Director of the Center for Social and Political Risk at the Henry Jackson Society. And Mike Medeiros, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Dan Fogelman, the man behind the hit TV family drama, "This Is Us," has a new film out called, "Life Itself" and he's joining Tom Power. Today, we began looking at similarities and differences between the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh this week and Clarence Thomas back in 1991. The grilling Anita Hill was forced to endure 27 years ago was a galvanizing event for many women. You heard that in the piece that the highest number of female candidates entered the race in 1992 in the U.S. federal elections. Dianne Feinstein won her first election in 92. She's a Democratic senator and she spoke on the New York Times podcast, The Daily, about the impact of those Clarence Thomas hearings on her own political aspirations. We'll leave you with a bit of that. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I believe the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearing was a big turning point. Every woman that watched that changed. I think change happened at that moment. What I am thinking to myself is, can I change this? And what happened then was kind of a groundswell.

[Sounds from rally]

VOICE 2: You know the saying goes the rooster crows, but the hands deliver.

[Cheering]

VOICE 1: Did it move me to action? Yes. And the action was to run.

VOICE 2: Dianne Feinstein.

[Cheering]

VOICE 1: That was a very big deal. It had never ever happened before.

VOICE 2: I feel like I've just given multiple births and how wonderful it is to see this stage filled with these outstanding women.

VOICE 1: And I was one of them.

[Music: Theme]

Sept. 19, 2018 episode transcript

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