Daniel Ziblatt: Is Democracy in Danger?

you well welcome it's unusual for us to do our program at noon but our real reason or secret reason is that we're going to be as you know talking about democracy and talking about democracy in this country and we want to get it on KQED tonight before the elections so that when we're not reflecting the results of the elections that will be understood anyway welcome thank you so much your book is a wonderful read it's and couldn't be more timely I wanted to sort of step back and and look at the global context you know we've been told by my Stanford professor Larry diamond that you know democracy is retreating around the world at setting in the wrong direction by Frank Fukuyama who has said that gee between the early 1970s in the beginning of this century there's extraordinary growth so there's some like 35 210 democracies and and at the same time we've looked at some broad trends and I want to know how those trends may have affected the politics in various democracies there's the information revolution decentralization of authority there's economic globalization and that's sort of the creation and concentration of wealth along educational lines and finally demographic trends I wanted to get a sense from you as to how those factors as as well as domestic political realities may have affected things in in European countries like Poland like Hungary like on the edge turkey another NATO member yeah well first thanks for having me here it's really great to be here coming from Boston where it's getting wintry it's nice to be in a sunny location so yeah yeah a very good question I mean in many ways we think about the United States is because citizens of the United States we focus on American politics very single-mindedly but of course everything that's happening the United States is happening within a global context and there's this view that after the collapse of communism the number of democracies in the world expanded and then in the mid 2000s we can experience a kind of period of democratic recession if you turn it turns out if you look at the numbers it's it's a little bit more complicated than that I mean there what certainly an explosion the number of new democracies around the world after the collapse of economies in Africa in Central Europe the former Soviet world but really beginning the mid-2000s you had a kind of flatlining of the number of new democracies so there wasn't really isn't it so there were some new democracies that were breaking down and some new democracies that continued to come into existence but the growth of this kind of explosive growth in the number of new democracies after the collapse of communism has definitely slowed down in the last two years there's actually been increased for the first time really 2016 2015 2016 I mean that for the people who study this and there all of you know people who kind of code the countries as democracies not there's big there's beginning to be a recession and the number of democracies and so the question is why is this happening and you know and on the one hand I think part of this is driven by the natural sequence of things I meani time if you look back there's been these moments of democratic expansion after 1918 at the end of one moreone after 1945 there's it tends to be these periods of democratic growth and then democratic recession and often there's a kind of real exuberance for democracy and global pressures for democracy but it turns out that kind of preconditions for democracy in a lot of countries aren't fully there so if you're a rich country you tend to be more democratic so high GDP per capita and if you've had a lot of democratic experience as a country the older our democracy is the more likely democracy is to survive and so a lot of new democracies and a lot of poor democracies where things look very promising at one point they are beginning to look less promising so that that's kind of the moment that we're living in and a lot of these big trend that you're talking about are certainly exacerbating that so what about the role of having a robust middle class an educated middle class I'm to give of Germany because of course it had experience with both democracy and autocracy so what fascism what is the role of having a kind of an educated broad-based middle class yeah so this goes along with with in general wealthier countries have bigger middle classes more educated populations all of these things are correlated with with the robustness of democracy and in historically these were the the collective groups that pushed for political rights the expansion of political rights and so that's that's really a crucial precondition but again you know what's happy palazzos the probability of dying at a certain point begins to increase democracies by contrast as they get older the probability of dying decreases I mean as democracy all democracies basically don't die and so how these countries become old democracies partly because of wealth and growth you know robust civil society robust middle class and all of these things are certainly preconditions but it's they don't guarantees Democratic survival we wait you know Brazil today that recently just had the presidential elections had a vibrant growing economy a growing middle class and yet a lot of people voted for essentially an autocrat mm-hmm Mexico yeah well I think Mexico is less it less of there's certainly been increased polarization and Mexican society had the breakdown of the parties of the established political parties and so you've had kind of new populist parties but it's that the in our book we propose what we call a litmus test authoritarian litmus test where we try to identify characteristics of political leaders that once they're and before they come into office once they're that once they're in power they may act as authoritarians and so the authoritarian litmus test includes things you know does the politician attack the media does the politician reject the legitimacy of their political rivals does the politician reject the basic Constitution these are the kind of key elements of a litmus test we developed this actually drawing on a great Spanish political scientist writing in the 1970s juan linz who proposed this as a way drawing on his studies of interwar europe latin america in the 60s and 70s and so what's the benefit of this litmus test is that it allows us to identify potential authoritarian so there you might not like somebody's policy somebody may be a populist on economic policy or right-wing on economic policy but they're committed to the basic rules of the game and I think in the case of Mexico that this is there's we don't have an authoritarian whereas in the case of Brazil this is somebody who's clearly violated this authoritarian litmus test before we move on to others I wanted to ask you to differentiate between liberal democracy and electoral democracy yeah well I mean historically elections are certainly a necessary condition and today or like necessary precondition a precondition of democracy but elections aren't enough we need to have I mean when I think about democracy I think about democracies you have elections for elect for most important offices in the country but you also have civil liberties and civil rights and that's what I think is the heart of liberal democracies combining both elections as well as protections for minorities ideological minorities ethnic minorities political minorities through civil rights and civil liberties and so that's a kind of a hard combination we tend to think these things go together but around the world we increasingly see countries in which there are elections but the second part of the kind of a package of democracy is not there in that category yeah I would say Russia is not even a liberal democracy is an outright authoritarian system a bit but I think some examples of countries that are a liberal democracies hungry today where you have elections there's not much election fraud actually turns out but there's ink decreasing that you have a kind of tilting of the playing field so it makes it harder and harder for minorities to win elections Turkey is another country that's and I would argue a little bulldog so we continue to have elections elections are the only game in town basically every country has elections but are these other elements of what counts as democracy there and many of these countries they're not I talk a little bit about the role of identity and culture in this a couple things one is that we're finding in our own country that people increasingly define themselves by their political affiliation and I'm a Democrat or a Republican first I'm a woman second I'm an American third of the initiative is of an unusual prioritization which makes it pretty hard to talk to one another and listen to one another and view one another as as legitimate or at least one of us are you seeing that elsewhere is that particularly pronounced here today yeah so one of the key points in our book and I think this is this applies around the world is that one of the preconditions of democratic breakdowns or one of the things you see before democracies break down is extreme polarization extreme party polarization so whether one's talking about the 1920s and 30s in Italy in Germany the 1960s and 70s in Latin America and Chile in 1973 you have extreme polarization and some polarization disagreement on parties is absolutely a precondition for democracy you need to have people disagree with each other what extreme polarization this different kind of polarization one begins to view one's rivals not simply as rivals but as enemies as existential threats and you become so fearful of one's rivals that you'll do anything to keep them out of power to get them out of power you know whether that's a military coup election fraud cheating but you know if you think your rival is really an enemy it kind of makes sense to use those sorts of measures so you know that when politics reaches that level it's really hard to get out of this and this this is what I think of as extreme polarization and certainly a very dangerous phenomena where you know and so there's actually a recent study by political scientist Yale where he does the surveys of first did this study in Venezuela but now has done this in the United States where if you essentially ask in a highly polarized setting if you showed us respondents survey respondents that the person on their side is violating democratic rules well they still vote for their person over the person of the other political party and people are increasingly willing on both sides of the aisle in the United States to look over violations on their own side because they identify with the party another kind of incredible statistic so there was a survey done in the early sixties asking Americans how would you you know would you be upset if your child married somebody of the other political party and five percent of Americans roughly five percent on both sides said that they would be upset about this today that numbers fifteen percent so you know this is a kind of deep level of animosity and it's and when one doesn't regard one's rivals as just rivals that you maybe dislike and disagree with but think I have a fundamental right to exist and compete then it's hard to sustain a democracy you even feel that in Washington DC where wherever you live your next-door neighbor works for the guy or the woman who beat your guy you know your boss and you know that you share a value you share a commitment the country you share a commitment to public service and the rest is about tactics and the other side's tactics are legitimate they're wrong but they're legitimate even in a town like that where where one is forced to bump up against folks of the other party who are in fact rivals even there you're seeing folks not talk to each other and not going to cocktail parties together I keep thinking that part of what makes us robust as a civil society as a civil society is that we do interact right we do solve problems together whether it be in your city blocker or your writer like neighborhood or city are you seeing as part of the solution to this problem here the kind of new localism we're hearing about in which individuals are running for local office but they're also forming groups that take on local problems yeah well I think there is some hope in that I mean in general we're extremely polarized I don't think we've become any less polarized over the last several years so it's it's nice to try to find some silver linings and things but it is true that there are lots of groups developing now where people are it's very self-consciously trying to reach out to people across the aisle and form different kinds of civic organizations both at the local level as well as the national level but what's striking about a lot of these organizations that I'm often invited they're very these kinds of meetings is that the membership is often secretive I mean because people are afraid if you're an elected official and you're willing to show that you're you're able to interact with other people from the other side you might actually get punished electoral II for this so this this is a vice not a virtue you know everyday citizens certainly I think focusing on problems in one of the actually the great lessons of the integration of the European Christian of the European Union was you know youth if you think about it there's a few more polarized settings than Germany and France after World War two and the way that the European Union was founded was you know through a very mundane activity which is governing stew coal and steel and so the idea was German and French bureaucrats can get together and negotiate try to solve very small problems and by doing that they developed trust and you kind of create a feedback loop where there needs to be further required the further cooperation to solve additional problems you get expanding zones of trust and that's that's how the European Union was created that's how peace was restored and I think that actually can happen in our politics as well but we see in our political what we see in our polling the vast reduction in trust not only trust in in institutions of governance but trust in one another in the u.s. do you see seem to be saying you see some hopeful signs there but the polls are not are not encouraging yeah I think you know we do we do have low levels of trust in our political system but I think that's less concerning to me that then the attitudes of political rivals towards each other and in many ways actually it's it's partly a problem of normal citizens interacting with each other but it's also about our political class you know so you mentioned DC I mean I was recently in DC and talking to some Senate staffers and that the thing that I hear over and over is people saying you know we're just we just have different temperaments Democrats and Republicans have different temperaments we're from different planets which I find frightening that people are saying this because then you know that's a precursor to kind of I mean it sounds as if you know we're different ethnicity different nationalities or something and so I think you know that there's more that's more worrying to me actually then distrust in the places they are the other right um norms you talk about you write about in your book with your co-author the breakdown of norms these are stated and unstated rules by which we govern ourselves most politically but our interactions with one another what are the early signs of a breakdown of norms political norms in particular here in the US well so norms are unwritten rules so they're hard to see you don't really see them until they're being violated and one of the points of our book is that the Constitution of the United States is not enough we have a very short Constitution and according to the Constitution the president could pardon whoever he or she likes at any point for any reason the Congress can block any presidents nomination for the Supreme Court for any reason the House of Representatives could impeach the president for any reason up until the night until the 1950s or after Roosevelt presidents could run be President for life they could run for president II know there was no limits on presidential reelection the fact that none of this stuff has happened is because of a set of unwritten rules a set of behaviors that if one violated the behaviors you get you're kind of a finger shaking at you and people kind of shared these norms and the two norms that we talked about that are particularly important in our democracy are one this norm of mutual toleration where you treat your rival again no matter how much you despise them or dislike them or disagree with them as legitimate and then the second norm which is which is a little bit harder to kind of see yours a little more unfamiliar in the norm we call forbearance and the norm of forbearance is essentially self-restraint they even though you have may have be very powerful and have a constitutional right to do things you step back from the brink it's a kind of cell self-conscious under utilization of power politician in our system of our presidential system where you might have divided the government these two norms are critical without them the system turns into a system of dysfunction and deadlock and so what we began to see in the United States beginning the 1990s were politicians attacking these basic norms and accusing the rivals of being treasonous or not being loyal to the country or not loving their country and politicians pushing to the max and you know government shutdowns partisan impeachments and this really ad they increased use of the filibuster I mean there was there was more use of the filibuster in the second term of Obama's presidency than for large portion of the entire 20th century combined and so this kind of hardball politics is in many ways a kind of key sign I think of the violation of these norms I think now about at the end of Obama's term are not quite in fact a year a year from his the end of his term the refusal of senators to even meet with let alone grant a hearing for Merrick garland that was yeah the worst violate the most egregious violation I think there was something that hadn't happened since the 1860s I mean they have the constitutional right to do this again but it's it's a kind of hardball tactics and so that one of the interesting things is why you know why is this happening I think and I think we argue in our book this being driven by polarization again if you regard your rival as an enemy then you're going to use any means necessary to stop your rival and then they changed the rules in order to confirm corsage right wasn't a two-thirds vote filibuster for the first people court at that point yes we said many people think of of Gingrich as Newt Gingrich as being kind of the beginning of this break out of norms but you could also argue that changes in the media added to that he took advantage of c-span he really understood that he could stand all alone on the on the House floor at 3:00 a.m. giving a long speech and knew that there was an audience out there for it but you also had the rise of talk radio which didn't seem very grounded in facts I mean it was screaming and demonising and now we've got cable TV and we don't have a Fairness Doctrine anymore so there's a legal change a change in policy but there's also technology change so talk about the role of the media and what the information revolution has done to the media because it's not just sort of purposefully trying to discredit the media there's also a business model that is in flux yes so we argue that Newt Gingrich was the original kind of hardball politician in our in our era I mean he didn't but you know he was taking advantage of an opportunity that I saw and you know people get on different sides of the political I didn't actually disagree with this I mean this is something for historians to debate where this began at some level you could sort of say it doesn't really matter where it began because we're in the situation we're in now and we have to figure out how to get out of it but it but it's important it is important to try to understand where it came from and I think you're right that the Gingrich began this but he saw these opportunities in c-span taking advantage of c-span but he also saw an increasingly polarized political environment that was driven in part by media but also driven by other demographic changes that I could talk about but an economic changes but but certainly the media environment has exacerbated this and this is all before the rise of social media and you know I think what's really become clear social media you know we're all equipped to cope with this new environment and the rise of social media and the kind of fake fake groups Facebook groups and the spreading of misinformation exacerbates and social scientists have only recently begun to study this in very careful ways and begun to see for instance there's this kind of echo chamber effect where if you expose people to only media they agree with over an extended period of time they shift further to the right what's interesting is the findings don't find huge shifts to the right people are often already you know pretty far to the right or to the left it but it but it exacerbates the problem certainly so this contributes to the polarization but at the end of the day I you know I make the case in our book that driving this is that important as media is and and I certainly think Fox News and the elimination that Fairness Doctrine has exacerbated this that there are deeper sociological divisions within our society that this is that the media this kind of media environment is allowing to even get worse I mean so these deeper sociological trends and economic trends I think are even more fundamental than media I would argue anyway but you do have a purposeful effort to discredit traditional sources of information I always think of those sources of information as you know there was there was real authority to what the New York Times wrote you know or what the three networks put forth there was this sense that okay these are the facts and on which we can build a consensus but if you have disputed facts I don't I don't know how how you avoid seeing compromises capitulation which is seems to be the current the current mood that's right and I think it's what what's fad you know so I'm teaching a course at Harvard this semester with a group of freshmen and this is one of the topics we're spending a lot of time exploring and you know I hadn't occurred to me that you know I grew up in an age when there was three television stations you want and the day you know this is something very unfamiliar these are students who were born in 2000 so this is something totally unfamiliar to them and so they don't really understand you know that this this transformation that has taken place or you know they're beginning to see it I think the question though is what do we do about this because you can't put the genie back in the bottle I mean I think we're in a situation where there's market competition and so the the best I can think of is that we need to arm our citizens with the better capacities to deal with the onslaught of false information and you know I think there's a kind of renewed interest in the role of civics education for instance you know so during the the 1930s in fact there was this incredible initiative undertaken by this organization called the Institute for propaganda analysis which was sort of organized by some sociologists and psychologists to train schoolchildren to inoculate them from the appeals of totalitarianism was the phrase then so fascism and communism and so in lots of elementary school curriculum around the country there was kind of curriculum which emphasized encouraging children to identify the hallmarks of fact of propaganda you know stacking the deck and sort of techniques of propaganda this is something that has kind of gone to the side and I think there's an increasing attention and realization that in this new social media environment and unless you know there's going to be the nationalization of media which I wouldn't argue for I think that the best solution is to train our citizens especially our young citizens and schools to be able to cope with these environments and develop the core critical thinking skills that are absolutely critical for democracy you know we've had this sort of long view I think for a long time at least the period that I've been growing up in which we think you know democracy take care of takes care of itself but I think this the last several years in the United States and around the world has made us made it clear that we need to defend democracy democracies are very fragile species and so part of that is training citizens to be robust them interact of democratic citizens yeah I don't know I was raised to believe I'm thinking about the First Amendment that more information drives out bad information you know just put it put out more good information and it will work out so so that's the media is one institution it's a essential civil society actor when when it comes to self-governance what about other institutions that we saw have seen as independent and as essential to a functioning democracy for example the judiciary there the court system yeah I think you know so when we think about our very systems of checks and balances that are supposed to help maintain our democracy media is certainly one that's a social institution the judiciary is another and I think by and large lawyers have done a very good job I mean the profession of lawyer you know that have been a very good job in that there's a kind of denseness to our to our legal institutions and the kind of decentralization of our judicial institutions with circuit courts and state courts and that State Attorney General's helping protect our democracy and I think these in many ways the one of the most significant differences between the United States and other countries that have experienced democratic backslidings such as Hungary such as Turkey is the robustness of our judicial institutions and the independence of our judicial but seen as increasingly politicized is that a fair observation yeah I think that's right I mean that the recent Supreme Court hearings were you know a case in point and this you know people are increasing in questioning the legitimacy of the Supreme Court it means this is just simply a political body or dismiss that it's above politics you know given that it's not really about politics why do we have any deference to it and there are people on the Left arguing is you know that maybe we should instead of trying to pursue social change through our judicial institutions we should do it through legislative institutions I mean I think that's unrealistic I mean we need there's an important role for judicial review and in the United States and so you know we need to continue to fight over these institutions but I think by and large you know the fact that we have this highly decentralized set of judicial institutions you know what so one of the things that happened in Hungary very early on under Viktor orbán's rule was he changed the retirement age of judges in this highly centralized political system so all these judges were forced out so then he was in this position to appoint a bunch of new judges it was a kind of stacking of the court you know in the United States that's there's we have you know some people argue that they're stacking up the court going on but it's much more constrained than it has been in other countries and so that's there's a I think there's this is one of the strengths of our political system that just a third kind of it check our legislative institutions have not done such a great job I would say I would say the Republic of the Trump administration the Congress which is really supposed to be a watchdog of democracy has really been much more of a lap dog and it's part of this kind of level of partisan polarization has turned this these institutions or the legislative institutions into kind of really weak institutions there have been sort of some some seemingly cynical moves that would reduce public faith even in our elections and efforts to depress voter turnout in some situations moving the polling polling booth to you know a mile out of town with no public transportation how and and and accusations by President Trump have claims that there's widespread voter fraud and and vice president Pence as well how serious is this are people do you see this as a successfully depressing the vote but be raising real concerns about the legitimacy of the outcome yeah this is one of the most worrying sign things I think that have been going on over the past two years and in our book we there was this week talked about the Kobach Commission which was sent up right after Trump took office to kind of examine election fraud ended up being disbanded which was a good thing I think that it was disbanded this was to investigate the rant that what they argued was a rampant election fraud although there's all social scientists made clear that this is completely exaggerated I think it is very worrying because really you know one of a couple of things that elected autocrats do you know the way the democracy die today is at the ballot box so people come to office through elections and then once in office attack democratic institutions and the way this usually happens is by first capturing the referees of the state so that means the judicial institutions second going after the opposition and opposition media and training the media impartial media as opposition media but the third big thing and I think this is really important is the tilting of the playing field this is dirt this is turning our institutions over the long run making entrenching the incumbent making it harder and harder to dislodge the incumbent so one of the things that Victor or bonded and hungry was changed the electoral system so that it was much easier for him to win reelection even without gaining up he got a supermajority of the seats in the parliament without getting a majority supermajority of votes in the electorate similar things have taken place in other countries so when you see efforts to kind of monkey around with our electoral institutions in effect what you're seeing is an effort to protect a minority in office and so and once these are altered it's we've lost the kind of key instrument of leverage I mean the most powerful point of leverage our vote our votes and our electoral institutions and so that's why this is really a key thing and I you know and I think that it's you know there's lots of attention to this is taking place at the state level but you know it's it's certainly a ulnar ability of our political system at the same time there seems to be a lack of real interest in ferreting out the degree degree of Russian meddling using social media primarily both in 2016 but also continuing into 2018 yeah you know though it's a lot of people debated how decisive was this I mean it certainly signs of Russian meddling in the election and lots of evidence of this but the question of whether you know the election was so close that there's like 25 different causes that all were decisive and I think it's possible the Russian election was but you know there's the Russian intervention was you know and Russian intervention meaning the kind of manipulation of social media but you're sowing a division yeah and the sowing of divisions have to be decisive to matter it's unacceptable and under any circumstances you know whether it was you know made the key difference or not that sort of a matter of dispute at this point yeah gerrymandering yeah gerrymandering has always happened throughout history you know it's named after an old as you know congressman from from Massachusetts so this has happened throughout history so in some sense I think gerrymandering is less of a concern I mean it's one that a lot of people are you gerrymandering is a driver of polarization that you create the politicians create these homogeneous districts that that plays some role but it turns out the political scientists actually if there's not as much that has a one that's one driving force of the polarization but there's another driving force which is a kind of natural demographic shift which is that Democrats tend to cluster together in urban areas and Republicans tend to cluster on average and less urban areas and so because you have this kind of concentration and it's a have to do with the structure of our economy we have these kind of parts of the US economy and regions where there's these booming economies where there's low unemployment lots of migration you know whether San Francisco or Boston where I live I mean you see these are areas where where there's lots of Democratic voters where there's no competitive districts and then you have large parts of the country where there's where there's not many Democrats living and I think a lot of this is driven by the structure of our economy and so this is a kind of natural gerrymandering in effect that takes place that I think is partly Drive that may even be more important than the partisan gerrymander many of us feel that that a commitment to pluralism is the center quinone of our democracy that is the notion that multiple cultures can live side by side with in a larger shared society and that once we lose that commitment to pluralism our democracy becomes in day injured to what extent has Democratic demographic change affected the way we think about who we are as a nation and led to some of this polarization well you know if you look back to the 1960s or you know early 60s late 1950s the two major although America was a diverse society the two major parties basically culturally looked very similar I mean the political parties were essentially mostly white Christian and politicians were male I mean if you looked at Republican Democratic candidates for office they look pretty similar you know this past across all levels of office governor's mansions as well as presidents u.s. senators members of Congress beginning in the 1960s Syria three big changes took place that speak exactly to this one you had the full democratization of the mayor of the United States through the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the mass migration of Southern Democrats previously Southern Democrats to the Republican Party and African Americans primarily ending up in the Democratic Party you had it that was the first big thing that happened the second big thing that happened right around simultaneously with this was a massive wave of migration that began as a result of reforms in mid-1960s and many of these immigrants and their children ended up in the Democratic Party and then the third big change was the shift of Evangelic or Christians who had previously been evenly divided roughly between Democrats and Republicans to the Republican Party so by the time you get to the 1980s we had this transformed environment in which rather than to kind of very similar-looking parties you have one political party the Democratic Party which is a kind of rainbow coalition of urban educated whites and collection of ethnic minorities and the Republican Party which is still primarily a party of white Christians and so having these two demographically very different parties I think has contributed to the level polarization because you know white Christians aren't just any group I mean they were once the dominant group in American society the majority and in terms of status the highest status group I mean governor's mansions college professors sports stars news anchors were all white male Christians that those days are long gone and so losing its status and losing ones majority status is deeply threatening and so I think a lot of the polarization that we're witnessing today is a function of this now you know personally I think demographic changes are all to be applauded and they've enriched American society but it certainly hasn't contributed to polarization and so the question of how you combine a multi-ethnic society and overcome these kind of dynamics of polarization is the chief challenge I think that American society faces today there is a there's a writer who is based in a conservative think tank in Washington and his name is Pete Waner I don't know if you know him but he is he's conservative he was served in in okay I think the second Bush administration and he's written a lot on the the fact that the most aggrieved population is the one that's most politically powerful right now and that's white male Christians and trying to figure out how how could they feel aggrieved and he is one of those how can they feel aggrieved when they are in fact the most powerful one of the audience members asked whether the decline the disgust back to the trust issue but the decline and faith in religious institutions organized religion whether it's been a major factor in weakening our our democracy in part because it's just it's it's part of social capital yeah I you know I haven't thought much about the decline of religious institutions and what effect that has had on American society may I think in general the decline of institutions whether labor unions or religious institutions where people have the opportunity to interact with people unlike themselves I mean having kind of great social mixers I think of these kinds of institutions is opportunities to talk to people that are different come from a different background may have different ideologies as this is this is really critical for for democracy and this helps at the kind of very everyday level of citizens to create trust and so in that sense I think it plays a role um you know there I think there's other ways this can also happen though you know as I say through labor unions through religious institutions through public institutions you know public libraries other by public you know public basic though you know architecture of our sister of our cities and our daily lives you know do people have the opportunity interact with people they don't know and I got a Steinway and this is this is something that we don't really know in this kind of infrastructure of public life is really critical for democracy and and and whether public libraries have given away to people sitting alone at home looking at their googling wonderful book by Eric Klinenberg called palaces for the people which he makes the case that these kinds of public institutions are really a key to reducing the polarization so other questioners asked and the relationship between the concentration of wealth on the one hand and the health of our democracy and I'm gonna let you answer that yes yeah well this is certainly one of the most striking figures I've seen in the last six months I would say is that I saw this in the Economist magazine if you look at productivity rates in the United States from 1945 of the US economy from 1945 to 2016 you see a kind of straight diagonal line up I mean the economy's gotten more and more productive if you look at the average or median wage growth in that same period you see a perfectly parallel line to that line as productivity increases wherever median wages go up as they should because people are being more efficient in their labor but suddenly in 1981 you get a flat line and so that dis juncture between the the kind of general state of the economy in the experience of people's lives you know where people's wages are not increasing has contributed to to inequality and in conditions of high economic inequality combined with a lot of these demographic changes that were been talking about create people it results in a situation we have people who are feeling vulnerable and looking for somebody to blame and so the combination of these things has been a real problem for our democracy and so I sometimes imagine that kind of counterfactual world had the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and what the way big wave of migration began the nineteen sixties all have passed let's say in 1948 and you then had 30 years of uninterrupted economic growth you know that we would be in a very different world because what really happened was these reforms passed in the 1960s and for reasons totally unrelated to that beginning in the 1970s the oil crisis you got a basic slowdown in the economy global economy and so as the combination of these things in an environment where P both salaries are no longer increasing at the rates they once were we're much more vulnerable to populist politics so and part of that story is the 2008 financial crisis that spread right through the world and the 2009 crisis of the Euro and I think of that because those all took place are started in the most robust democracies in the world right so what did it what did it do to the reputation of liberal democracies as the source of stability and and future prosperity yeah well it certainly created crises within our within these countries I mean so I mean if you want to understand why there's you know such appeal to the right-wing populist parties in Western Europe today part of it's driven by immigration but a lot of it's driven by economic justice disaffection and and dislocation and so a lot of this comes out of the 2008-2009 financial crisis and I think similarly in the United States you see similar things what the reputation more broadly on the on on liberal democracy it's an interesting question I hadn't thought of that you know what is what you know what is clear is that I think the US has actually recovered pretty well and respond I mean it you know we avoided full-blown economic catastrophe and so I think in a way that's it look compared to previous examples of economic crisis the Great Depression for instance we avoided that Faden so I think there has been incredible learning in terms of economic policy and Federal Reserve policy since the 1930s and the need for expansionary spending I mean I personally don't think there was enough you know under the in the early days of the financial crisis but nonetheless we learned we've learned a great deal so the the I think liberal democracies are better off than they once were but certainly the the existence of the financial crisis and the the fact that it even happened has made people look to other models I mean China for example is a model that other people around the world look at is a successful economy and what about practice on Wall Street are we doing some of the same things that got us into trouble to begin with yeah you know it's worrying I mean there's a lot of the regulations that were reintroduced after the financial crisis I'm now being undone and so it's not clear that everybody has learned their lessons and so you know I think we are probably vulnerable a little bit about the relationship between markets on the one hand and government policy on the other because I recently read Atlas I can't think of his first name Richard Ellis maybe has done a book that that does a little bit what you do and that is to go back historically to see what did our founding fathers have in mind and is is it exactly what we're claiming now they didn't and points out that John Adams argued that democracy and unfettered capitalism couldn't coexist that in order to preserve democracy you had to have the government play a role in regulating markets and we've kind of gone back and forth of this in our lifetime I mean it was Keynesian economics but the dominant then Milton Friedman I don't quite know what now but it seems to be heavily focused on deregulation and sort of a hands off a small government when it comes to tamarcus yeah so the degree to which inequality is a threat to democracy for the reasons that I just laid out before I mean tells you something about the relationship of capitalism and democracy because in cat under capitalism of course there's winners and losers there's competitions you have winners and losers and so what's what's striking is that you have varying levels of economic inequality around the world I mean there's nothing I would say that there may be some tensions and sort of in a general principled level between capitalism and democracy but our political systems have developed techniques of taking the rough edges off capitalism and if you look historically you know there was higher levels of inequality in the past the United States there was a period after World War Two were in equality the United States declined and there's increasing inequality today that happens to parallel the kind of general sense that our democracy you know there was a period of where things were working well and that's not working so well today also looking cross nationally in countries where inequality is lower there's a sense in which maybe democracy is more secure and so in putting under conditions of unfettered capitalism you're more likely to have high levels of inequality in this pose certainly poses a greater threat to the stability certainly in the case of both Brazil and Mexico one of the set of conditions was extraordinary inequality that's right and that you know and it's connected to court there was a corruption scandal and so on but this but this is what's right yeah that's right is there did as you as you look at the trends in American society do Americans trust that their government can now actually solve hard problems or as they look at problems like they'll take a dramatic example its climate change an inability to take the steps that certainly would appear to be necessary my inability to do anything that has the requires sacrificed today for benefit tomorrow in general democracies have a challenge with this because politicians think short term they have short term dimerizes they're you know in the case of members of the House of resident representatives they're interested in being reelected in two years so to make their constituents suffer today for some benefit down the road is always going to be difficult under a democracy you know but there's there's ways in which these these trade-offs can be managed and I think you know part of it has to do with political courage certainly of political leaders but part of it has to do with a consensus about what the problems are and so this gets back to I think the point you made about the kind of fragmentation of the media environment and you know if people can't even agree that global climate change for instance is a problem then it's harder to impose costs on on electorates but I think a third big point is you know the the Republican Party in the United States this is pretty striking is the only center-right party in any advanced democracy that the highest level of the party denies climate change I mean and every other center-right party around the world accepts climate change and it's trying to take measures to adopt it so some sense part of this part of the problem is disaffection or distrust of our institutions but part of it is that one of them two major actors in the political game don't think or don't aren't isn't willing to admit publicly that it's a problem and so given this at some level it doesn't really matter what citizens think I mean this is this is a major this is a major problem so the short-termism and the inability to solve hard problems kind of come together in that if you disagree about the solutions to environmental degradation or climate change the easiest way to deal with that is to say the problem doesn't exist or in the case of you know if your of the cost to you of the solutions is is so unappealing or in the case of a president Trump is said of course the climate will change but it'll change back which is a very hopeful look good look at look at the problem um three of the questions go to the heart of white nationalism and I wondered the degree to which white nationalism has is on the rise or the degree to which it's suddenly visible speaking of norms they you know they if you're a white nationalist this was not something you were very public about in the United States you know right yeah well I mean one thing I would say I mean there there is a sense that it's become more visible and people are more open about it but I think it's important to recognize that you know there was no Golden Age of American history where racism and white nationalism didn't exist you know one of the things one of the points we make in our book is that there's a long tradition in American life I mean if there's a long side of a very robust liberal democratic tradition in the United States there's also a long tradition and authoritarian tradition just in the twentieth century alone Henry Ford ran was considering running for president founder of Ford Motor Company was a famous anti-semite and was actually quoted in the first edition of mine Kampf and Hitler's Mein Kampf Charles Coughlin father Coughlin that the catholic radio personality i mean you were talking earlier about the kind of proliferation of you know right-wing and fragmentation the media landscape father Coughlin at tens of millions of listeners on his radio stations in the 1930s Joe McCarthy George Wallace in the 1960s I mean if you look at a lot of his rhetoric it mirrors a lot of the rhetoric we see today so so I think there is in fact a long sub current in American political life of politicians and voters who like those politicians embracing this sort of thing and in fact there's you know each of these figures I just mentioned according to Gallup poll data we looked back and writing this book at Gallup poll data going back to the 1930s in there's there's always been this question do you have a favorable and unfavorable opinion of various politicians in each of these figures at around 35 40 percent favorability ratings in the United States Charles Lindbergh is another that the famous pilot so in the 1930s and 40s so the point is that this has always existed I think what's transformed to two big things one that these sorts of figures are no longer fringe characters that we increasingly have people in the mainstream of our political life who speak in these ways this is something really unprecedented and second of all by do by having this this the fact that this has become mainstream has made it more publicly acceptable and so I think part of trying to understand what's been happening just in the last several weeks you know is that people there's crazy people out there they hear this message and and they embrace it and so I think it's it's it's very certainly very dangerous you know and there's this you know a lot of people talking about do words matter I mean with two two ways in which words matter I mean this is not exactly on your question but the attacking of the legitimacy of elections if you look at surveys you know as politicians I'm more and more said that elections are fraudulent more and more Americans think elections approach as apologists is that more and more said that the press is the enemy of the people if you look at surveys more and more people think that there's a conspiracy in the media and it's all very corrupt and so I think similarly when it comes to white nationalism if you have leading political figures speaking in these ways it creates there's a kind of echo effect where people begin to mimic that the rhetoric that they hear their leaders you mentioned if George Wallace takes me back to an experience I have when I was in my 20s where I was in a conversation with the head of the Democratic National Committee Robert Strauss of Texas so exactly what you picture as the head of the Democratic National Committee a a large charismatic Texan and I help me understand how this works your head of the Democratic National Committee what happens if George Wallace wins the nomination what is your job then and he said honey you go into the voting booth you close your eyes and you pull the lever for the Republican in your book you suggest that that the political parties should do more to restrain the you know the George Wallace's of the world but now is the time of institutions that are weakened political parties are dramatically weakened in part because there are packs the parties no longer control where the money goes for campaigns and their power is gone so what is your how do you if you would kind of lay out the steps for Democrats or Republicans and and the institutions that serve them if you lay out the steps for them to you know offer some guard where rails what would it look like is it possible now well for the first three quarters of the 20th century you had the way that our Kennedy selected through the smoke-filled back room which you know had a lot to criticize about it wasn't democratic it was an inclusive wasn't transparent you know the people got together a convention time and decided who the candidate would be political leaders get together and they would decide they had seen me it was a kind of political scientists at the time called it a system a peer review where they wouldn't they hadn't seen these other politicians up close they'd see my moments of triumph and moments of crisis and they knew who would be a potential demagogue and so they would select and there was that for all one can criticize about the system it actually worked quite well in keeping these sorts of figures like George Wallace out after 1972 the system was opened up and in some sense made more democratic I mean in the waiting that now we have primaries and voters in the long primary season choose the candidates for their parties and so this is more inclusive it's more democratic it's more transparent but it also means that the road is much clearer for a potential demagogue and so Democrat the Democratic Party coped with this dilemma by introducing in the early 1980s a system of super-delegates where party what's so-called super-delegates they didn't call themselves this what the press calls the super-delegates where party leaders had some votes to help select the candidate and kind of an extra guardrail in a sense that the Republican Party never had introduced this and so I mean you know in many ways I think you know had the Republican Party had a super system of super-delegates in 2000 sixteen you might have had a very different outcome where party leaders might have picked a different candidate or the party you know the party leaders would have had more of an influence this might have served as a deterrent for in for Donald Trump to even get in the race in the first place what's amazing is that the Democratic Party has trance as rough now in the last several months reformed its system of candidate selection and gotten rid of essentially gotten rid of super-delegates now there continue to be the super deal its elected officials local elected officials but they don't they're not allowed to vote on the first ballot of the candidates election so essentially the Democratic Party has introduced us so although the Republican Party really had a crisis I would say of its candidate selection system it's the Democratic Party that's reformed its system made it more like the Republicans now there's probably people sitting here listeners or audience members who are thinking well this is a good thing the smoke-filled back room wasn't so great it wasn't democratic you know and if we had a more inclusive system things would be better and I you know and there's a lot to be said for that but on the other hand it is also true that this system is a double-edged sword the system is more vulnerable what can be done about it you know I think that there is an important role for elected leaders and helping select the candidates for the party for the parties in it you know I think in 2020 were likely to see as a proliferation of celebrity candidates who have no political experience running a similar kind of campaign that Donald ran ran in 2015/16 you know and it's I guess we can decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing I tend to think it's actually this probably won't make me popular but I tend to think it's a bad thing so it's Oprah V Trump right I go have a nod here you know yeah weird Schulz I mean there's a lot of people who have no political experience who are considering or so said to be considering running for office so um former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wrote a book called fascism in which she quoted Mussolini is saying if you pluck the chicken one feather at a time the chicken won't notice it do you feel like that's what's happening to democracy here well you know democracy does die differently at one point in the past I mean during the Cold War three-quarters of democratic breakdowns happen in the form of military queues since the collapse economy is the majority of democratic breakdowns now happens at the ballot box through elections as I said somebody comes to office and the elections and so has democratic legitimacy you can't question the democratic legitimacy at some level of Donald Trump he was elected or of you go Chavez or Victor Orbin or air21 these guys are elected by a majority of the voters but then the question is what happens once they're in office and if they attack institutions in a subtle way it's hard for voters to notice it in Venezuela in 2011 so 12 years ago Hugo Chavez's leadership a majority of Venezuelans still thought they lived in a democracy so voters often don't even notice it's happening and so you know in until it's too late and so I think that's that's one of the reasons we wrote this book was to kind of try to alert fellow citizens of the natures the nature of the threats to democracy in the world today not in the United States but everywhere I think your phrase in the book that the Constitution is not enough is probably the most striking because they do think that we view our democracy as enormous ly resilient because of that Constitution how have very similar constitutions fared in Latin America notes where yes so the Argent in our book we make the point out that and the Argentinian Constitution in the 19th century was essentially plagiarized from the American Constitution two-thirds of the text was taken from the US Constitution and so if it was the canta words on the page that mattered you know exclusively Argentina wouldn't have had a 20th century history of military coups you know so it's not the words on the page only that matter I mean really are at the set of unwritten the words on the page matter not to say they don't matter they certainly matter but what's also critical it's not enough I mean that we have to these unwritten rules help make the system function and especially a presidential system I would argue where you have the potential where you have different parties and control of different branches of government and you'll have institutional welfare and warfare unless elected leaders behave responsibly because you are a professor as well when you interact with the next generation I wanted to make a point of of using this question card that asked what you most fear for our country and what gives you the best hope and as you look forward to the next generation do you think they'll manage this better or worse yeah I think what gives me fear is that when I look for instances around the world where country where countries enter into the spiral of polarization where each side increasingly views extreme measures as necessary to prevent the other side from getting into power I mean this kind of death spiral it's really hard to find examples of countries breaking out of this you know and so that's that's frightening where each side says you know if you're going to pack that if you're going to steal a Supreme Court seat we're gonna practice Supreme Court and then the next guys come and say okay we'll pack the Supreme Court this spiral it's it's really hard to think of examples of where this spiral ends well so that's that's frightening what gives me hope is that the US is an old democracy and as I've said before all democracies tend to survive longer and also what gives me hope is actually doing lots of public events where he's you know over the last year we see the kind of level of engagement of American citizens and at some level the robustness of American civil society you know people are worried people are increased don't decreasing Li take American democracy for granted and I think that's really critical and so you know I think you know our our electoral institutions still work and so as long as they continue to be channels for democratic mobilization you know at some level we have these instruments in our hands and we need to use them so you're seeing an increasing number of books out there like folks like like James and and and Deborah fallows and other serious thing well gee there's also bad there about in Washington but they're not bad throughout the country this questioner asks what you've learned in your own book tour from from audiences from the nature of their questions from the moderator thank you for that but have you learned things in this process of interaction around the country I guess a couple of things one the level as I said the level of engagement but to the degree to which actually it turns out people I mean it sounds kind of mundane but I think it's really critical that people just doing their who doing their jobs on a daily basis or actually a source of democratic strength so the professions people's professional ethical codes in some ways are a kind of system of inoculating ourselves so whether it's lawyers whether it's military officers whether it's civil servants people not being willing to be bullied and people standing up for what is the right thing to do on a daily basis just in their jobs are actually you know a kind of key bulwark of democracy I mean we think of institutions as some distant thing but it turns out institutions are filled with people and if people are willing to kind of bow under pressure that's a bad sign but I've found that lots of people come up to me and talk to me about the kind of you know their own work and their own daily lives and I think you know people again doing their own going about the business of their daily life in ethical ways or actually an important source of strength in American society there were two institutions we didn't talk about and once the military and the other is a law enforcement agencies Department of Justice FBI even CIA as an intelligence gatherer President Trump has has ordered the military to go to the border to stop migrants from from Guatemala El Salvador Honduras from coming into our country I have and and and I think at some point said they would have orders to shoot if if somebody threw rocks at them I have a very hard time picturing general secretary mattis from doing that in part because you think it's not the role of the military but also because of what it would do to attitudes toward the military in our society so I kind of picturing him wanting them to be there giving out water bottles and tents or you know doing something very different what do you imagine I mean military is the commander in chief is the president how how do you picture kind of squaring the circle being respectful of the institution yet following orders yeah no it's a really at putting that this kind of situation puts the military in very difficult situation and this you know we probably often think of like military coos is something happening elsewhere but you begin to understand the dynamics that can lead to tensions between civil and military government when when military officers think that the civil civilian government is is behaving in reckless ways you know clearly we don't want to end up in that situation and so it's it's really critical that's what you know that's that's why elections are so important I mean we're gonna have civilian control of the military we don't want to leave it up to military officers to be making the calls on these things at some level that's a failure of our own democratic institutions to lay the burden on unelected officials whether the intelligence agencies or or the military so you know when this anonymous letter was published in the New York Times you know saying that you know there's resistance within within the within the federal government to the President and some people were happy about this I thought this was terrible I mean it's the fact that this first of all the fact that this had to happen is a symptom of deep underlying problems and second of all it generates the suspicion that there's a conspiracy and the kind of secret plot underway which I don't think there is but this creates the perception of that and so if you have you know the military not following commands this is certainly obviously would be a major problem for our democracy and so it's really critical that we avoid this from happening through our electoral institutions because again one of the things looking around the world that that that one of the first things that elected autocrats do is try to capture these powerful course of institutions of the state either through you know in other countries the way this happens is through intimidation through threats through bribery and often it's very invisible happens in the dead of night you have intelligence agents resigning and so on and you have a kind of quiet process through which the political apparatus takes control of course of institutions and so you know I think American civil military institutions and the relations are quite strong and robust and so you know I'm hopeful but it's certainly these things are unprecedented and worrying I mean the solution of the problem of a undisciplined or undemocratic president the solution is as bad as the problem right that's right yeah please join me in thanking Daniels iFly and for his remarks today for joining us today but also for a book that is a really terrific book so I really recommend it to you thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: World Affairs

Views: 2,486

Rating: 4.1351352 out of 5

Keywords: World, Affairs, democracy, election, authoritarian, politics, political, government, democrats, republicans, polarization

Id: aIQNPy6_s8M

Length: 62min 51sec (3771 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 06 2018