Freddie Sayers meets Chris Bickerton. Listen to the podcast version: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/chris-bickerton-welcome-to-the-technopopulist-future Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/chris-bickerton-welcome-to-the-technopopulist-future/ The pandemic has thrown traditional ideas about politics upside down. In a sense, it has been the ultimate triumph of the technocrats, with phrases like “following the science” and “trusting the experts” becoming commonplace; but notions like shutting national borders and moving governments onto a 'war footing' are more typically associated with the populist Right — it was Donald Trump who first shut the US borders, Modi in India implemented a swingeing lockdown early, and Boris Johnson's government is, at least in theory, a populist one.  Chris Bickerton, reader in Modern European Politics at Queen's College Cambridge and sometime star of the Talking Politics podcast, has a book out which sees a pattern in this fusion of technocracy and populism: it's called technopopulism. In this fascinating discussion tells Freddie Sayers all about it. // Timecodes // 01:13 What is technopopulism? 04:16 How Boris Johnson went from populist to technocrat 07:32 Dominic Cummings 10:56 How technocrats and populists see each other 13:07 Pluralism 15:07 Covid-19 pandemic 19:00 Politics in exceptional times 22:53 Are we becoming more like China? 25:55: Politics of numbers 28:03 The underlying question 29:14 The role of state power 30:41 Libertarianism 33:21 Revolution 37:05 Competence 39:16 Defending democracy #technopopulism #dominiccummings #borisjohnson