"How Democracies Die" with Daniel Ziblatt

I want to propose an alternative analogy the crisis of democracy may be must less like global warming and more like an earthquake like with an earthquake there may be deep in real fault lines they erupt from time to time but Democratic crises perhaps like earthquakes tend to come and go and the biggest challenge is to get through the earthquake with our institutions intact we have to make sure our institutions are built strong enough both to get through the earthquake and to have around after the earthquake to do this we cannot take our institutions for granted we cannot attack our institutions by playing constitutional hardball there's simply too much at stake [Music] I'm excited to hear from doctors it Blatt and from all of our panelists I'm looking forward to this conversation so please join me in welcoming doctors of lit to the podium thank you very much president Kelley for the very kind introduction also for the invitation to be here at this forum I'm really you know that your words about inclusion and the role of universities in that is so I take this very seriously and I think it's great to have open discussions like this I mean one of the most exciting things about having written this book usually you as a political scientist you write a book you know and a couple of people read it but being able to come out to public forums like this and talk to people about issues that a lot of people are thinking about and feel strongly about has just been really important has restored some of my faith and democracy I have to say so with that very positive entry I need to begin with some positive news because a lot of the talk is negative so it's it's really wonderful to be here to have a chance to talk about a question that I'll have to be honest with you I didn't ever think and my co-author as well Steve Levitsky neither of us ever thought we would be asking and that is the question could American democracy genuinely be in danger no like most Americans I think my co-author and I both really took the stability of American democracy for granted and there was actually really quite good reason for that no democracy remotely as old as the United States's or as rich as the United States has ever broken down I mean that's just a kind of simple fact and yet president Trump's election in the past one and a half years of his presidency have seemed a place that's really an unchartered territory I think a lot of people have that feeling now in his classic 1978 book the breakdown of democratic regimes Spanish political scientist juan linz who was a political scientist for many years at Yale he divides what he called a litmus test to identify authoritarian political leaders before they get into office and we actually present a slightly revised version of that in our book this litmus test to identify authoritarians before they get into office seems like a good idea to do that and it turns out before assuming the presidency candidate trumped tested and in Vegas positive on that litmus test he suggested he would not abide by the results of elections he threatened legal action against critics and the media he threatened to lock up his opponent and he can known and even encourage violence now so whatever one thinks offend man there's a lot of debate you know maybe he's just a traditional Republican who says outrageous things what's clear in any case is that no major Party presidential candidate in modern American history had behaved this way but Steve and I in looking around the world and other parts of the world and other times had seen political leaders behave this way so me and my work in Europe in the 1920s and 30s in Europe and Steve who specializes in the study of Latin America in Latin America in the 1960s and 70s so watching the campaign unfold over the course of 2015-2016 we felt we had this real feeling that we had seen this movie before and we knew and felt that it usually didn't end well so we decided we really needed to want write write a book on this and to draw to study other democracies in crisis at other points in time in other regions of the world to study how some democracies having faced those crises overcame those crises and how democracies in other countries having faced those crises sub-cut succumb to those crises and what what lessons we could draw from all of that for the United States so that's what we decided we wanted to do ok so let's start at the beginning you know with the title of the book is how democracies die so how do democracies die well the first point I guess is that democracies don't die like they used to you know democracies during the Cold War three-quarters of democracies democratic breakdowns during the Cold War came in the form of military Q's at the hands of men with guns generals tanks airplanes flying overhead contemporary democracies die in much more subtle ways they die not at the hands of generals but instead of elected presidents and prime ministers leaders who use the very institutions of democracy to subvert democracy democracies die constitutionally through elections referenda parliamentary rulings judicial rulings as a result many citizens often aren't fully aware what is happening until it's too late so in 2011 just to give you one example you go shot and there's 2011 twelve years after Hugo Shah became president in Venezuela a majority of Venezuelans according to surveys still believe they were living in a democracy similar dynamics are unfolding today in Turkey a decade after the AKP s rise to power and in Hungary in Poland as well so if Democratic breakdown now begins at the ballot box one of the keys to protecting democracy today is keeping extremists and demagogues potential authoritarians from getting elected in the first place we have to be they have to be blocked from getting elected in the first place and it's here actually where political parties play an absolutely critical role we often don't think about political parties serving this function but political parties are democracy's gatekeepers because they select candidates in an often very invisible part of the democratic process they have the power political parties have the power to keep extremists and demagogues out of office it's when parties fail to play this gatekeeping role that democracy gets into trouble so elected authoritarians it turns out rarely come into office on their own they almost always get an assist or some help from mainstream political parties or politicians so around the world elected authoritarians often begin their careers as outsiders business leaders generals sort of general rabble rousers not part of the political establishment but seeing these sorts of figures on the horizon mainstream politicians and parties often attempted to strike a kind of Faustian bargain with the outside or not of miscalculation or opportunism they align themselves with the outsider hoping to tap into some of the energy of the outsider and also in the belief that they can control the outsider they have more experience after all but a key lesson of history is that this bargain often backfires so to give you one example in Italy in the 1920s Mussolini was really an outsider of the political system was you know on the edges fringes of the political system liberal but there was yet lots of enthusiastic support liberal Italian statesman Giovanni Gillette II saw this energy on the far right and decided to include you Mussolini's party on his party list at the parliamentary election time this legitimated Mussolini within two years Mussolini was in power and Gillett he was long gone in 1930s Germany the leader of Germany's Conservative Party saw Hitler on the horizon and this is the mainstream conservative party and trying to attract some of the grassroots appeal of Hitler issued joint proclamations with Hitler's party held joint rallies but the strategy helped to legitimate Hitler and Hitler rose and this party the Conservative Party fell apart in early 1933 you in conservative statesman front's von Papen was trying to swage the fears of his Conservative Party allies after they had appointed Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933 he told them to said don't worry this is a quote from from poppin don't worry within two months well have pushed Hitler so far into a corner he'll squeal a bigger miscalculation is harder to imagine in both Italy and Germany mainstream politicians driven by short-term ambitions abandoned their gatekeeping role and let extremists in the in the door so this is a key way in which democracy has died historically now by contrast to all of that in the United States political parties have done that actually a pretty good job of gatekeeping this is important because the United States has not has had no shortage of extremists and and voters who would support extremists we tend to kind of whitewash our own history and forget that there's a whole cast of characters out there who were really quite popular we think of in the 1930s a Catholic priest a father Coughlin right-wing radio personality who had tens of millions of listeners or 1920s Henry Ford the founder of Ford Motor Company was a famous anti-semite and was actually quoted positively by Hitler and the first edition of mine Kampf and considered running for president in the 1920s Huey Long in the 1930s that autocratic governor and senator from Louisiana in the 1950s Joe McCarthy had big political ambitions in the nineteen sixties George Wallace the segregationist governor from Alabama decided to run for president tried to run for president and remarkably there's actually a Gallup poll data going back to the 1930s asking favorability opinions of various politicians in favor these each of these figures garnered around thirty thirty five percent approval ratings and surveys but a number that's not so dissimilar incidentally from the support base of President Trump today so here's the point none of these figures despite being very popular made it close to the White House why not and what has changed how are they kept out well we argue in our book that the way they were kept out was mostly through the presidential candidate selection process so prior to 1972 American presidential candidates were selected in a system so the first three quarters of the 20th century were selected in a system that's often called a system of smoke-filled back rooms it conventions what would happen is party leaders would get together in hotels surrounding the convention hall in hotel rooms with lots of whiskey and lots of cigars they would decide on the candidate now the system certainly was not transparent it was not inclusive it was not democratic but it was an effective filtration system party leaders served as gatekeepers they engaged in what political scientists at the time described as a system of peer review and by that what what political scientist meant was that the party leaders who had worked up close with potential candidates had seen them in moments of crisis had seen them on moments of triumph they knew which of them also were debt potential demagogues and so for all of its shortcomings I would not argue to go back to the age of smoke-filled back rooms the old convention system actually had a pretty good record basically a perfect record in keeping demagogues off the top of party lists under the old convention system it was actually impossible for an outsider like Henry Ford or a demagogue like Huey long to be nominated by a major party so most of them didn't even try curious how many of you have read Philip Roth's novel the plot against America the 2004 novel if you know record highly recommend it it's a work of fiction came out in 2004 kind of counterfactual history inspired by real events in which the celebrity airplane pilot Charles Lindbergh who in fact was something of a Nazi sympathizer capture and the fictional part of the stories he captures the 1940 Republican nomination and goes on to be FDR and everything goes downhill from there this story seems all too imaginable today I mean in fact that's partly what the sales boosted after 2016 but back into 1940 actually unthinkable Lindbergh's candidacy would have never made it out of the smoke-filled back rooms it would have been never pay it made it past the party gatekeepers so what happened in 2016 well not booked we argue two big things happen first American political parties adopted a system of binding primaries starting in 1972 they adopted a system of binding primaries so the binding primaries is the system we're all familiar with today it's far more open than the old convention system but it also weakened party leaders role as gatekeepers so now if a demagogue like Huey Long or Charles Lindbergh were to run for office would be much harder to keep him out and that's what we saw in 2016 I mean one way to think about this is that Donald Trump was the kind of Henry Ford of his day for his party gatekeepers he kept far Ford far from the presidency Trump found the gates wide open the Democrats experienced something of course slightly different they also open the door but they'll introduced a system of super-delegates which served as a kind of check in some ways on the open system but the Republicans of course never adopted a system of super-delegates okay so that's one part of the story that's not the end of this story the second part of this story is Republican gatekeepers I would argue failed a second time one of the key lessons that juan linz and other political scientists who study this make is that looking at interwar Europe is when when somebody emerges on the scene who you think might be potentially a threat to democracy mainstream parties must do everything possible while still abiding by the rules of democracy to keep them far from power of course resisting a demagogue on one's own side is difficult it risks angering the base it often means short term political defeat and politicians often tell themselves and rationalize it well maybe the person won't be so bad you know maybe we can get our agenda through and so you don't want to hand power over to your ideological rivals actually in Brazil today we're seeing after the first round of the presidential elections is very similar dynamic and full were elected leaders have to decide are they going to support false NRO a right-wing former general who's running for president or a left-wing party that's reputations been ruined through corruption which says it not it not a great choice but Lynn's made this point forcefully and so I want to quote him what Lynn's wrote one Linds wrote writing in 1970 said when faced with would-be authoritarians he wrote politicians must join with opponents ideologically distant but committed to the survival of the Democratic order so Republican leaders didn't like Donald Trump very much during the election they thought he was a demagogue I mean a lot of them said said as much they thought he might be unfit for office yet they did not do what linz would have recommended which is to join forces with with the other side now one might think that was unrealistic to expect but it's clear lots of leading politicians on the Republican party for Paul Ryan Mitch McConnell Marco Rubio Ted Cruz didn't particularly like Trump but they all endorsed him Bush remained silent to send a crucial signal to Republican voters it told the Republicans that this was essentially a normal election and a normal election between two parties can go either way in the context of an uneven economy Stan or two parties can go each other either way and that's what happened it happened to go the way of Trump now just in case you think it's not realistic to have expected this to happen this kind of act is kind of crossing party lines I mean if something similar to happen in France in the 2017 presidential actually we also have a two-round presidential election where francois peron who is france's Republican party candidate didn't make it to the second round in the second round and was McCrone a former minister and a socialist government and marine lepen theone could have remained silent he could have endorsed slapping but instead he endorsed McCrone in this there's some evidence to suggest this made quite a bit of difference in the United States this did not happen and again I would argue and we can debate this that art somebody with authoritarian tendencies or at least a weak demonstrable commitment to democratic norms is in a powerful office once they're in the door it's a changed game so now for the first time arguably you know in modern American history there is a president in the office beginning in 2017 who unleashed this kind of firestorm because of a perception that he was not committed to democratic norms and we've seen the results in tumult over the last year and a half now this is where actually political institutions really come in to play a major role because Americans tend to place a lot of faith in our Constitution we have the oldest and most successful written constitution in the world and system of checks and balances has in fact contained many powerful and ambitious presidents and you can think of Andrew Jackson you can think of FDR and his effort at core packing you can think of Richard Nixon so if it contain these guys why shouldn't it contain President Trump it might and perhaps it in fact it has but one of the core messages of our book is that the Constitution by itself is not enough to save democracy constitutions aren't self enacting they don't just work automatically if they did a country like argentina that a country that my co-author knows quite a bit about and spent a lot of time studying argentina adopted essentially identical constitution to our own two-thirds of its text in the 19th century was taken from the american constitution and yet argentina suffered six military coos over the course of the 20th century so the point is the words on the page are not the only thing that matters they matter but that's not the only thing that matters constitutions work best when they are written reinforced by unwritten rules or norms and our book focuses on two norms in particular they think are really critical for the survival of democracies the first we call mutual toleration or accepting the legitimacy of your partisan opponents this means no matter how much you disagree with or even dislike viscerally your opponent you treat them with respect and they have they have the legitimacy to least compete for office and to govern in other words we do not treat our rivals as enemy the second norm is what we call institutional forbearance now forbearance means refraining from exercising one's legal rate it's an act of self-restraint and off self-conscious under utilization of one's power so why is this this manner so much well think about what the president can constitutionally do under the law in the United States the president president under the Constitution can pardon whoever he or she wants whenever he or she wants any president with a congressional majority can pact the Supreme Court if you don't like how the Supreme Court is ruling expanded to 11 expand it to 13 it's perfectly legal or for president's agenda is stalled in Congress you can circumvent this through executive order and we've seen lots of this reason the president the Constitution doesn't prohibit such action I think about what Congress can do the Senate can use its right of advise and consent to block any cabin an appointment of a president or any court appointment of a president of a Supreme Court vacancy and of course the Congress can impeach the president on any grounds it thinks count as high crimes and misdemeanors the House of Representatives Allah needs to pass an indictment is 50% it's pretty easy to get that so the point here is that politicians can exploit the letter of Allah all of these things are legal in ways that eviscerate the spirit of the law legal scholar at Harvard mark Tisch that calls this form a behavior a constitutional hardball if you look at any failing or failed democracy around the world at any point in time you'll see an abundance of constitutional hardball Argentina under Peron Spain in Germany in the 1930s Venezuela under Savas contemporary Hungary Poland and Turkey constitutional hardball is how even brilliantly designed constitutions systems of checks and balances get subverted it's how legislative and judicial watchdog institutions turn into lap dog institutions it's what so it's critical then is what prevents constitutional a system of checks and balances from descending into constitutional hardball that can wreck a democracy is forbearance it's the unwritten but shared commitment of exercising restraint and deploying one's prerogatives rooted in a commitment to the spirit of the law just to give you another example if you think about presidential term limits historically in the United States prior to 1950 one of course the US Constitution pasted place no limits legal limits written legal limits on running for reelection so US presidents could be President for life yet George Washington of course famously stepped down after two terms and for nearly 150 years no president even ever sought a third term mean lyses s grant Jefferson Andrew Jackson very ambitious politicians could have done this but it was an unwritten rule of self-restraint that they did not do this or take the filibuster technically that filibuster a Senate minority can use the filibuster to block every single piece of legislation but historically the filibuster was rarely used in the United Sates it was used as an instrument of last resort so between 1917 and 19 sixty they're only 30 filibusters fewer than one a year today that number of course has exploded so the point here is that norms of mutual toleration and forbearance serve as the soft guardrails of democracy they help they prevent healthy political competition from degenerating into political deadlock and partisan fights to the death that have wrecked democracies and other parts of the world in other points in time now American democracy hasn't always had these soft guardrails it didn't have them in the early years of the Republic I certainly didn't have them during the civil war and in the aftermath of the civil war constitutional hardball was abundant in the 1960s in the 1970s both sides viewed each other as existential enemies and impeachment of the president was launched Supreme Court nominees were blocked supreme court size was expanded and but for very tragic reasons that we discuss in our book beginning in the late 19th century Democrats and Republicans began to accept one another as basically legitimate and avoided then as a result of this D stable except constitutional hardball in particular what prompted this was that the Republican Party gave up on the reconstruction of the u.s. south in effect giving up on the cause of racial equality Southern Democrats no longer viewed northern Republicans as an existential threat so kind of tragic truce was achieved mutual toleration was restored forbearance re-emerged but a great tragic irony that we continue to live with today is that our norms of mutual toleration and forbearance that are preconditions for democracy ironically were achieved at the price of racial exclusion so in this sense our democracy was fundamentally incomplete but constitutional hardball was now diminished there were no during the course of the 20th century there were no impeachments or successful court packings senators were judicious and sparing in their use of the filibuster and outside of wartime presidents refrained from for the first part of the 20th century from acting unilaterally to circumvent courts and Congress for more than a century in short our checks and balances worked but they worked not just because of the words on the page but because they were reinforced by these two norms of mutual toleration and forbearance now as we show in our book these norms have been unraveling over the course of the last 25 years we've seen this accelerate in the past two years arguably I think on both sides but it's important to recognize the decline of mutual toleration and forbearance though we witnessed today proceeded long before Donald Trump preceded Donald Trump it began really we make the case in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich who became Republican House Speaker in 1995 beginning when he ran for speaker became Speaker he instructed his Republican Party allies to use terms like betray an anti flag anti family trader to describe Democrats Gingrich was a master also of constitutional hardball he was engineered the first government shutdown in 1995 three years later the Republican House carried out a mostly partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton it was the first presidential impeachment 130 years so this process of normalization though really took off in the 2000s during the Republican during the Obama era the Tea Party movement radicalized the Republican Party encouraging them to abandon mutual toleration Republican leaders began to say that President Obama did not love America that Obama and Democrats weren't real Americans the birther movement when a step further questioning whether President Obama even had a right to be President if it's if he was not born in the United States let me just give you one example Colorado Congressman Mike Coffman declared for example the mid-2000s I don't know if President Barack Obama was born in the United States of America but I do know this in his heart he's not an American he's just not an American Hillary Clinton received similar treatment so as I've noted America has always had a kind of extremist fringe but this was definitely not French politics these were all now increasingly national political leaders leading Republicans were increasingly denying the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals this was particularly worrying because in the absence of mutual toleration politicians if you in effect if you regard your rivals as existential threats as enemies politicians are tempted to abandon forbearance their attempted to engage in an escalating spiral of constitutional hardball when we view our partisan rivals as enemies when we view them as an existential threat we grow tempted to use any means necessary to stop them and this is what was beginning to happen in the 2000 politicians increasingly to do forbearance to the wind so when Republicans won control of Congress in 2010 they decided to block anything that uh President Obama was proposing filibuster use which had already been rising for decades at the hands of both Democrats and Republicans reached an all-time high there was actually more filibusters during President Obama's second term than in all of the years between World War one and the end of the Reagan presidency combined I mean it's a striking figure President Obama responded with constitutional hardball of his own when Congress refused to pass immigration reform or climate change legislation he simply circumvented Congress and rule made policy by executive order that action was technically legal but again it clearly violated the spirit of the Constitution by the end of the Obama presidency Republicans increasingly at the state level as well began to use more extreme measures 15 states all republican-led adopted strict voter ID laws in North Carolina in 2016 after the Democrats won the governorship in 2000 the Republican legislature held a surprise special session in which they passed laws at weakening the new Democratic governor they packed local election boards to Griffith nearly a thousand Republican appointed officials tenure in the state government and they reduced the size of the court most any of although in my mind and this has come up in the last several weeks was the US Senate's 2016 decisions and a lot to not allow President Obama to fill the vacancy prompted by judge Scalia's Justice Scalia's death this move was unprecedented tonight to not even hold hearings since 1866 now all of this though I want to make the point was before Donald Trump was elected president so the problem is not just that Americans have elected somebody with at best a week commitment to democratic norms it's that we've elected a demagogue when the soft guardrails protecting our democracy have begun to erode okay so the question you might be asking now is why in the hell is this all happening why is this happening sorry I tried to check myself that was inappropriate well we are you in our book that what's driving all of this pradhan lots of things are driving this but what's that the kind of major factor driving this No Oshin is polarization Republicans and Democrats have come to fear and loathing in nineteen sixty-five percent of Republicans said they would be displeased if their child married a Democrat today that number is 50% we have similar numbers on the other side as well according to a recent Pew survey 45 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats say the other policies other party's policies threaten the nation's well-being 49 percent of Democrats 55 percent of demo 49 percent of Republicans 55 percent of Democrats say that the other party makes them afraid we've not seen this kind of partisan hatred since the late 19th century and this isn't just traditional liberal conservative polarization people don't fear and loli Cho over taxes in health care today's partisan differences run much deeper they're about race religion and way of life our parties have changed dramatically in many ways over the last 50 years in the 1960s and 1970s Republicans and Democratic the party leadership were culturally actually quite similar there was huge policy differences of course but demographically the party's leadership were overwhelmingly white and Christian three major changes have taken place over the last half-century first the civil rights movement and the achievement of full civil rights and voting rights for all Americans in the 1960 led to a massive and gradual migration of southern whites from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and leading many Democratic Party second the u.s. experienced after major policy changes massive wave of migration beginning in the 1960s and most of these immigrants ended up in the Democratic Party and third by the time of the Reagan era Christian evangelicals who had previously been split remarkably evenly between the Republican and Democratic Party were predominantly in the Republican Party so today Democrats and Christians are Democrats and Republicans are racially and culturally distinct the Democrats are mostly a kind of rainbow coalition of urban and educated whites in the Republican Party by contrast remains overwhelmingly white and Christian now this is important because white Christians aren't just any group they were once the majority and the used to sit unchallenged atop this country's social economic cultural and political hierarchies they filled the presidency the Congress the governor's mansions they were the pillars of local communities there were the CEOs the newscasters the movie stars the college professors they were the faces crucially both of the Republican and the Democratic Party those days are long gone but losing a majority and losing one social status can be deeply threatening many Republicans feel like the country that they grew up in is being taken away and this we think is ultimately what's driving polarization the problem is that extreme polarization can kill democracies this is a major lesson from 1960 70s Latin America a 1930s Europe when politics is so deeply polarized that each side views a victory by the other side is intolerable as beyond the pale democracy is in trouble when an opposition victory becomes intaglio of course start to rely on desperate measures justify using extraordinary means in other places this has meant cooze violence election fraud of course this this is not the this hasn't happened in the United States but we have reached a point in the United States well according to 2016 presidential exit polls one in four Trump voters one of four Trump voters believed he was unfit for office one of four Trump voters believed he was unfit for office yet they still preferred him to the Democratic candidate we've reached a point where according to Gallup Republicans have a more favorable view of Vladimir Putin than they do of Hillary Clinton these are dangerous levels of polarization Donald Trump is a symptom of this polarization he's not just a cause of it and his departure won't put an end to it okay so what can be done no idea but in the spirit of the four hall forum and looking forward I'm gonna propose a couple of ideas and I hope to discuss this you know we can have a nice discussion so I'll be ending with a couple of points here first it's clear the Republican Party itself needs to transform itself it has to become a more diverse party as long as it remains national at the national level an overwhelmingly white Christian party in a country as diverse as the United States it's always going to be tempted it's often going to be tempted to use polarizing white national kind of extremism okay so that's one thing what can Democrats do now there's been a lot of talk really especially in the last several weeks but even preceding that and progressive circles of the idea that Democrats need to learn to fight like Republicans if Republicans are going to play constitutional hardball the argument runs then Democrats need to play tit for tat if they don't there'll be this victim of an endless series of sucker punches dough stolen Supreme Court seats and the like the recent book has come out by a political scientist title it's time to fight dirty and the formula goes something like this impeachment should be pursued no matter what there has been grown there's there's you know if the Democrats we take the Senate there should be pushed and actually I just saw a recent column by EJ Dionne making this case as well that there needs to be a push to stack increase the size of the Supreme Court as Franklin Roosevelt did if a Democrats we take the Senate in the presidency if if Democrats retake the house in the Senate begin impeachment hearings on Republican judges now the appeal of these sorts of constitutional hardball strategies is really understandable and in many ways they are becoming increasingly dominant perspective among elements of the Democratic Party and it's also a response that I can frankly understand but it also worries me and my co-author it's really a turn another turn in the spiral if Democrats respond with constitutional hardball it will most certainly reinforce and even accelerate the process of normalization in other words will further corrode our democratic guardrails and our experience having looked at other countries around the world and looking to other democrasy is in crisis around the world this sort of escalation rarely ends well now I understand elected leaders elected Democrats in particular under enormous pressure to fight hard and many ask why shouldn't Democrats why should Democrats engage in kind of unilateral disarmament the other side's breaking the rules you know why shouldn't we again I understand the pressure that elected officials feel but I think there's actually two two points so these will be my last two points first we believe that Democrats actually face an incentive to preserve democratic norms even if it means playing a sucker in the short run so in his book a trump Achra C by Republican speech writer and analyst David Frum he argues that the Republican Party today is operating with incredibly short time horizons as it's currently constituted from our use it with long run demographic shifts on the horizon it's going to the Republican Party is gonna have a hard time winning in the medium term and the long term and so in fact according to from the heart these kind of hardball tactics that I've talked about vote-rigging locking advantages in the court norm breaking these are kind of a desperate effort according to from to preserve as much power as possible given this medium run and long run up with these poor prospects of the medium run in the long run Democrats by contrast have much better medium-term prospects so the greatest threat to Democrats prospects is escalating this conflict that puts these very institutions at risk so for Democrats to preserve the Democratic game is in the democrats enlightened self-interest fighting dirty might play better with the base but it's a strategy but it's a strategy that i think ultimately is is more dangerous so you know the broader point i guess i'd like to suggest and I'll end with this is when we talk about the crisis of democracy how endangered are our democracies there's often a sense that the crisis of democracy is something like global warming I used to say that you know that it's a crisis that's off in the future but you know as we've seen in recent reports 10 20 30 years but that similarity is the crisis of democracy is something in which things are only getting worse that there's rising tides of disaffection dissatisfaction dysfunction and unless we take desperate new measures we're now a brave new world where the old rules don't apply unless we take dramatic measures to halt this rising tide of democratic crisis then we're doomed so that that's one analogy global warming I want to propose an alternative analogy the crisis of democracy maybe must less like global warming and more like an earthquake like with an earthquake there may be deep and real fault lines they erupt from time to time but Democratic crises perhaps like earthquakes tend to come and go and the biggest challenge is to get through the earthquake with our institutions intact we have to make sure our institutions are built strong enough both to get through the earthquake and have around after the earthquake to do this we cannot take our institutions for granted we cannot attack our institutions by playing constitutional hardball there's simply too much at stake thank you the forum is about discussions and as you have heard I mean I think this is an important book for very serious times as you can tell also I'm from a different country I'm from Spain and I had I guess the misfortune to grow up in a country in which we had an authoritarian regime so I know firsthand what living and the dictatorship means I don't need to read about it in the books or to discuss it in hypothetical terms and it is profoundly this coin to see what is happening in so many countries all over the world a lot of the focus was our but when you think about what is happening in Europe with Latin America and many Asian countries I think that this question has become a global question and to discuss it we have a great panel president Kelley introduced them before I'm not going to introduce them again I want to start very quickly the discussion the format is going to be the following I'm going to ask them for questions to start the discussion then dr. Zubrod will join the panel and we will open up to the audience we are about going to be passing now small cars to all of you with pencils you will be asked to write your questions we will collect those questions and then I will select those questions and post them for the panel so I encourage please those of you who are interested in asking questions please write them down in the cars in a way in which hopefully I can read them please so I want to start just quickly with a general question for the four panelists about the book and I would like to ask them if they can comment and react to the books and to the the the comments from dr. Zia black you wanna start with her sure thank you thank you very much wonderful presentation just a wonderful presentation and a great summary of the book and then some go forward so if you like the presentation you love the book I did so congratulations bro want to add a couple of things though which i think is worth thinking about as we look at democracy particularly United States we are now beginning to have a situation where candidates become president who do not have the largest popular vote they win the electoral college but do not have the largest popular vote and I think there's a strong case for erosion in public confidence in our presidential election I think that's one point that I think needs to be further discussed secondly I also believe the role of the press is very important to consider on the one hand it is a distinguishing factor between our country and many of the other countries that you a reference in your book and how their countries respond democracy but on the other hand I think in a couple cases I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with this notion that major networks are left or right so you're watching CNN or MSNBC or Fox and you walk into a room a bar or restaurant or a public place and as soon as you see one on the dial you say well I don't belong here or I do belong here seems to me they need to be balanced secondarily with respect to the press I think they were duped by candidate Trump I can recall when Donald Trump called in to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski every day because it was entertaining it was fun they had no idea that they were giving credibility institutional credibility to his candidacy I also think the notion of change elections need to be discussed there were there are times in our history when America wants a change I think President Obama can Obama tapped into it and Canada Trump definitely tapped into it and then I'll just make one other point acquired your reference to prior years when backroom dealings made the candidate the cannulate I would suggest that the Democratic Party tried that this time Donna Brazil's book subsequent information from former DNC chair congresswoman debbie Wasserman Schultz suggested that they were going to inaugurate candidate Clinton regardless and it became public and backfired she resigned more importantly though Bernie Sanders now believes it's his turn because he was blocked out last time so great book these are some things I think would be part of the conversation going forward thank you later yes well yes again thank you for inviting me to this panel yeah I think actually I was fascinated by the book I think one of the things the professors about talked about was that you know you write a book as a political scientist and only two or three people outside your family read it but this is a book that but this is an example of a book that actually as I was reading through it I was recommending to people all the time if this is a great political science book this is an example of good political science it's accessible it talks about an issue that's contemporary that's relevant to depressing you know and I think that's the thing about it I would describe the book is useful because what it does is provides an analytical framework in this idea of the litmus test that you describe from from lenses work and others of what is the nature of an authoritarian or an elected authoritarian or a demagogue so it's so what you do is you're treating is treating they're they're treating Trump as a case and I think that's quite important so it's not just if they're treating a comparative analysis and they're looking at Trump as a case that you can then apply this framework to and then and why I think this is quite useful is it because let's all admit it you know ever since Trump descended the escalator into 2016 you know he's defied comprehension in a way I mean it's like you in the book that talked about the invisible primary he you know he didn't get any endorsements then he just wins in the primaries and point talking to students talking to other people observers they just thought at what point will this guy just implode or like like a number of other marginal candidates have done on this on both sides so that that's the thing but he didn't write any gets through each the invisible eye gets to the primary gets to the general election actually gets elected and so I think that's the thing is fascinating about this book and recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it yet that it provides a framework for understanding not Trump specifically in in addition to that all these these broader trends like polarization and as they describe it the great unraveling that's happened in contemporary u.s. politics thank you so I think I also join the other panelists in thanking you for the opportunity to comment on this book and I agree with the comments that have been made so far I think that Richards point about how there are some structural changes that are not addressed in the book about our democracy that are perhaps worthy of consideration and I'll allude to one of them in a few thoughts that I wrote down beforehand I also agree that with Brian that this book really does a very fine job of documenting the historical record of how attic rats came to power and the kinds of events that the public should be aware of and be watchful for in the democracy so that we are not surprised by the what happens when we elect people who reflect these characteristics so I think that that is a very very useful service of the book and I agree with all the comments about how its readability and accessibility and I congratulate him on having all these people read the book it's a it's wonderful in that regard one of the sentences in the book that I found that I think reflects really how we should be thinking about this problem in our democracy right now is that professors ablack quotes a North Carolina congressman David Price who's a Democrat from Chapel Hill and price says American democracy may be more fragile than we realized and I always think about this that if you think about the events in the world what's happened in some of the other countries that professors have professors at blat and Levinsky talk about in the book countries like turkey you know more recently hungry Poland that everything seems to be going along just fine and then one day you wake up and things are not fine anymore and and so it's it's one of those things that we we must you know constantly be vigilant about what's happening in the political culture and what's happening in the society I think that you know because the you know that the book is written by two political sciences there's less emphasis in some ways on the role of the courts in helping to construct this problem although they do refer to it I'm not saying they ignore this issue completely but if you think about the role that they discuss in the book of external groups having a very big impact on you know the political process you know external unelected groups that you know have their own agendas and I think about the role of the courts I think about how in the last twenty years or so the Federalist Society has really taken over the process of putting forward nominees acceptable for judicial appointments by Republican presidents Trump an open president Trump openly acknowledges that he is operating from the Federalist Society list every time he makes an appointment especially at the court of appeals or in certainly at the Supreme Court level there are most our newest justice just as Cavanaugh refused to admit that he was a product of this system even though the president has bragged about it and indeed the Washington Post today reports that the leading candidate to replace justice Cavanaugh on the DC Circuit is Naomi Rao who's the head of the Office of Information and regulatory affairs the Office of Management and Budget she was instrumental in getting George Mason law school named after Justice Scalia after his death so she's long been operating in this orbit so it's going to continue on the decision by the Supreme Court to take and decide the Bush v Gore place essentially putting it someone the scale in a presidential election when there is a constitutional mechanism for resolving these disputed elections was was very in you know significant in sort of contributing to the problem that's been analyzed the Citizens United case which overturned limits on money and politics and there been other cases that have done so there are a series of decisions undermining consumer protections and employment rights by upholding required arbitration policies and employment agreements in in companies and then last term's decision undermining public sector unions is another weakening of the ability of kind of ordinary people to to function and to assert their rights in a whole variety of contexts so I think that and so and then I could go on at length and I won't take too much more time with this but the some of the decisions of the Supreme Court have taken a page from the late 19th century and early 20th century courts of undermining voting and other kinds of rights by pretending not to understand the implications of gerrymandering decisions our voter regulations that really have an effect on the ability of people to exercise their right to vote there are some counter examples to those so in a way I'll end up on this optimistic note as well that I think that Chief Justice Roberts even though I disagree with him about a lot of things I think he does really do care about the institutional legitimacy of the Supreme Court I think that his votes that were essential and upholding the Affordable Care Act and two decisions that the court made the the first one the National Federation of Independent businesses and then the challenge to the tax subsidies for purchases on the exchanges those two votes really were a signal that that you know the Congress passed a law and let's let the executive and the Congress work with the law and the public benefit from it and so I think that you know that to the extent that Chief Justice Roberts has he I on that long ball that there might be some hope that there is that there will be a concern for the institutional legitimacy of our government institutions I'll say two other points that are just about me and my connection to some of these issues so I was working in the Clinton administration during the two government shutdowns in the 1990s and during the second one which was longer somehow they the head of my unit in the Department of Justice got us all declared to be essential employees so we came back well what was our essential work we were working on vetting and screening judges right for judicial federal judicial appointments and you know that's also that's when some of the problems began to really become significant in terms of Republicans and the Congress not being willing to approve judicial appointments by Democratic presidents and I'm not saying that the the reverse hasn't all also been true at times and then one final thing going back to Richard's point about structural considerations one of the things to think about is how to depoliticize at least the appointments process for the Supreme Court which seems to be the one that you know causes the most consternation in the system and there's a lot of discussion about perhaps having a wrote you know very long terms but term limits 18 years so that there isn't this game played of you know what's the youngest person that you could possibly get through the Senate to be on the court to have your legacy cemented forever and to also give every president the opportunity to appoint justices to the courts so that it's not you know some rant or you know sort of random event in the in the biosphere that you know Justice Scalia's death someone resigning unexpectedly that gives the opportunity for a presidential a president to appoint a Supreme Court justice spends good on it Thank You Sebastian and thank you Dan for this book it is it is an encouragement to know that it is a New York Times bestseller I think that shows something about the hunger in the country to understand what's going on there's so much I could talk about and would like to talk about in this book and if you haven't read it I I really encourage you to read it I'm a political philosopher so let me let me begin with that and a quote towards the end of the book from your colleague Danielle Allen who wrote that the simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multi-ethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality social equality and economies that empower all have been achieved so one thing I think we need to remember about the American Republic is that it not sure it's unique in this way but it is highly unusual in being founded in philosophical ideas and those ideas are represented in our Declaration of Independence in the formation of the Constitution and other documents that are part of I think what you are calling the unwritten Constitution that set norms for what the expectation broadly speaking is of our republic but something else that your book brings out you also talked about it today is what can only be described as the original sin of that Republic our Constitution begins we the people but who is that people who is that we and we know that racism and slavery were ground into the bones of the Republic in the larger sense than just its constitution from the beginning and as your book shows that has been part of the dynamic of this country's politics ever since even when it was functioning well it functioned well because it's set to decide the question of who that we included so in the period between the end of Reconstruction until the Civil Rights Movement Democrats and Republicans had a kind of truce on this issue but that was at the price of excluding people of color from the full promise of all men are created equal all persons are created equal really right so on John Locke who was one of the most influential thinkers in the period before the founding on the founding generation his view was that you can't really have a political community that isn't a single body politic that the body politic that the we precedes the constitutional form that though we then gives itself so that is our problem as a nation is that we have not yet come to grips with the fractured we that we are and really try to solve that problem and it's because that problem lies underneath the surface the different political movements can lay hold of it and manipulate it and in this case I fear that it's part of the unraveling of our democratic polity at this time when the previous white Christian America which had been used to being on the top of the pile and unquestioned in that role now feels that this is the last chance and Trump is their avatar so that's what really frightens me now and so the question of a solution has to be a solution that also addresses the fractured we in a way that you know we had the revolution we could have done it then we had the civil war we didn't do it then we had the civil rights movement that didn't lock it in because now we have the Southern Strategy that brought us Donald Trump so something has got to be done about that I'm not sure what it is it might be some of these suggestions you have about electoral policies that would appeal across the divides but it's been going for 230 years I don't know what I'll break it this pathology we have thank you Greg I want to build on that comment about solutions I mean we've heard a lot of the problems and the sources of the situation that we find ourselves today in and dr. shifflette made the comment about the situation that we live almost in in which Democrats and Republicans feel that this is a crisis almost an existential threat every time that the Republicans lose they feel that the Democrats are gonna finish with everything that they consider sacred and the other way around it's also people feeling in the words of sociology that was here at far at support a field which a few months ago dr. Roger that mentioned did refer to these people as strangers in their own land how they don't find himself in a situation that they recognize that this is the country they love and the country that they love in so I'm interesting in some ways in hearing your perspective about how do we get away from this situation we see growing polarization we see as more and more ansari we see a situation in which many of the communities that existed in the past have broken down for the reasons that are discussed in the books so i want to ask the panelist if they can't comment on wasting what you think that we can address this polarization and this insanity well I really strongly believe that the underpinning of our democracy is a strong two-party system and we don't have that now you really defined the makeup of each party and I am trouble particularly with a system where the majority of one ethnic group belongs to the Democratic Party and is not balanced so where I come out on that I think the Republican Party has to lose big big not maybe for the reason you think but the reason has to be that there has to be a conclusion to leadership topped at the Trump model does not work and it only will happen if there's a real change wave then the party has to step back and say what do we do now to regain the confidence and get back into power so so having said that you got a vote as we used to say in South Boston vote early and vote often vote as much as you can and resist every opportunity to restrict voting and empower everyplace to vote early registration that we have early registration of Massachusetts get people register get young people everybody in this room particularly college students register and vote so that's number one number two I honestly believe that the Republican Party will never regain the confidence of the traditional african-american that ship I think is gone but there is a Caribbean community that the Latino community the African community and other immigrant communities who I do believe can believe that that the real Republican Party the old Republican Party offers an opportunity whether you're talking about small business entrepreneurship family focus church focus those are some things that are attractive so I know it sounds scary to have a two-party system but we got to have one we really got to have one number one and then number two as I mentioned voting I'll raise one other issue though which I neglected to mention in my first response which i think is important you talked about the internal threats to democracy the grave external threat of course is social media and the intervention of Russia and others in our election so I am I am most concerned our institutions will come and go in your book did a brilliant job of giving evidence where we've had trouble before Dred Scott decision reconstruction civil war we've had problems and we've come out of them but if we don't fix the external threat of a social media and and disruption in change in public opinion I might think we'll be in trouble so those are my comments okay the thing is polarization polarization is around to the extent to which it is because it works polarization works what do I mean by that you guys we have a participation and enthusiasm crisis in the United States people don't participate in politics the best description I heard of politics and by the way I was like people who hate politics even I study politics I think they're the most fascinating they told me that your politics is background noise politics is background noise and it's so the thing is this Republican Party it's done this better than the Democratic Party but but I can tell you the Democratic Party would use the exact same strategy if you could figure out how is that used is that polarization works for Republican Party because it mobilizes people that's why they that's you know so so this is I agree actually with Richard that the solution and also with press is Sublette about parties I must a researcher of political parties I think they're important and they're vital in fact because they are really the mechanisms because for example you can say registration the registration yeah we've seen this before motor voter Bill and Brett registration means nothing you know what a political party is or used to be is something that comes and grabs you by the collar and actually Yanks you out to vote and the thing about saying vote off when you say when you say vote early when you vote often what that means is it's not just you mean obviously it's illegal for you to vote more than once right but what but what it means what it means is this is that you get 50 people that you know are going to vote the same way as you to vote and you don't mobilize 50 people who you don't know who you're gonna who are gonna vote against you you me not you know so political parties that's what they do you know parties don't care about democracy they care about winning and so you know I know I know people who do this for a living and they tell me that you know that is they organize political campaigns for a living they get people elected if somebody walks up to them on Election Day and ask them if there's an election that day they'll say I don't know why is that because I don't know how to is gonna vote now so this is the thing so like so political parties are an infrastructure they're an organization and I think that that's the thing is that what you're seeing is you've seen one that simply done a much better job in part because it was captured by a social movement in the 1960s and 70s called conservatism so the Republican Party in the 1970s or beginning in the in the late 60s and 70s became a much more ideologically homogeneous party because otherwise what parties have been in the United States has there been they're there they're groups of factions parties are factions think a bag of cats that's what political parties are in the United States prior to the 19th 1965 actually after Goldwater lost the Republican Party became a party that had one huge cat and one very small cat called like a liberal or they just called Rockefeller republicanism and that huge cat just slowly just killed off the smaller one so and by 1980 by 1978 1980 you just had a 1:1 cat and on the others yeah and on the other side so it became much more ideologically cohesive and much more organizationally cohesive alternatively the other side the Democratic Party remains the quote/unquote federated type of weak parties that most other countries in the world would look at and say is not a political party is it barely has any structure we all know the famous quote you know I'm a Democrat you know I'm not I'm not part of any organized group but I think that's the thing is it's so it's so in some respects polarization is problematic but it's it's also it's an infrastructure it reflects institutional practices that are used to mobilize people in a political system where it very few people vote very few people thank you so I this is gonna sound kind of funny because it ends in a way it's the problem but I do think that we have to stop demonizing government that's one of the other things that's been demonized in our culture and I you know I sort of lay a lot of it at the feet of Ronald Reagan because he sort of developed it to a high art before even before he was president but I you know people like other institutions in the society you know large companies arts organizations you know the media we've been talking about some of these organizations throughout this evening you know government has a and I think one of the issues that we see in the polarization is that one of the political parties believes that government can be a force and a useful tool for helping solve some of the human problems and the economic problems we encounter and another party thinks the government perhaps has very limited if any role in that regard and so when the parties try to get together to do something in the government and the Congress this these very differing visions of what should happen really impede you know any possibility of moving forward so you know my favorite example the current example of course is what's happened on the Affordable Care Act right they you know the the Democrats thought that they had made the big compromise because they the the structure of the statute is built on a Republican idea which the Republicans have now backed away from so and the Republicans refuse to respect to negotiate about how it might actually be implemented at the time of its passage then there were the refusals of some states to adopt the Medicaid expansion leaving millions without health care coverage I'm never quite sure how that has worked as a political strategy but nevertheless it seems not to have cost us to date although that seems to be changing the Republican Party too much then there were the refusals to correct some of the flaws in the Affordable Care Act in the old days that would have been a technical Corrections bill that would have obviated the need for at least one of the cases that went to the Supreme Court and you know there are some it's not a perfect statute no statute like that ever is and but with some fine-tuning it could work better and be more effective and actually helping people get health insurance no collaboration on doing anything about that and then Trump is elected and he begins undermining the implementation and so I see just this whole series of efforts to really undermine the notion that government can have a positive role in solving any of these prob and that we need to actually get beyond that if we are going to make any progress in eliminating the polarization bless you so in your book you make a number of suggestions for how the Democrats could mobilize politically to cut across the divide and for the benefit of the members of the audience I'll just member who haven't read the book I'll mention some of them but your main point is to look for more universalistic policies that could apply to all Americans not just segments that can then be identified as part of identity politics right so you mentioned things things like comprehensive health insurance a basic income family leave policies subsidized daycare pre-kindergarten you also mention labor market policies such as more extensive job training wage subsidies to train workers work-study programs for high school and college students mobility allowances for displaced workers the thing that concerns me though is the success of the hyper divisive nasarah I mean we did have our li hawk shield here and it strikes me that many Americans who are currently voting for Trump are voting for identity reasons and they will let that trump literally anything else and therefore I'm not sure how that's going to be a successful strategy and secondly I just have a question for you which is given that one party is by far and away the the aggressor in destroying the soft guardrails the political norms and by doing so ensuring a lock on power through gerrymandering voter suppression which has been turned into a real art to lock in majorities how can an opposition respond to that without further exacerbating the divisiveness because what you're accusing them of is undermining a Republican form of government in not in the larger the smaller sense so it is a betrayal of what this country is meant to be how can one say that without being divisive so for the sake of time I want to now open the discussion to the audience and I would like to invite Daniel to join the panelists I have received thousands of questions trying to go quickly through them and they keep on coming unfortunately there's no way that we're gonna be able this is the stuff that I have that we're going to go through them so I'm going to ask the question the first question is maybe just one or two of you hopefully we have more of an opportunity to cover more questions so the great question here they say is the United States decline in democracy not the result more of in a need in an all are always all these are key among the wealthiest rather than an autocratic regime so why why is it that the u.s. is not more of an all exactly rather than an autocratic regime and what role if any has the United States military foreign policy played on the decline of democracy one of the underpinnings of the book is that was the answer that the ballot box is the precursor to new leadership I think it's before the ballot box and so I believe that the failure of business and government to respond to for example the 2008 financial collapse the extraordinary cost of health care the impact of technology on jobs those are the socio-economic conditions that give rise to these authoritarian leaders because they see this fracture in the promise of America and the reality of how we live and so when and so I strongly believe that if you look at Hitler you look at all Trump - they pee Polly I give you an example colleague of mine is an attorney in Detroit and he's 70 he said Richard my classmates who finished high school with me went to work in the automotive companies they had great jobs they have great pensions they retired they send their kids to school when they have pensions and I'm still working that reality doesn't exist anymore those people cannot finish high school and have a job for life so I believe this this this gap between the wealth of our society and the average person and the distance between it is a fundamental threat to democracy and I believe the the business community as well as the political community for the understanding its impact just echoes something about that one of the most striking figures if I had PowerPoint I'll just draw it for you in the air you can imagine this which is imagine a figure which you look at productivity gains every year from 1945 to 2016 in the United States you see this line kind of going up like this like the economy is getting more productive at all times you look then they're on the same figure there's a line for average wage gifts for the average worker perfectly parallel to that line going up suddenly in 1981-82 the line begins to flatten and basically it's been a flat line since 1981 82 average wage gains for the average worker and so the point is it's it's hard to imagine a fact indicates is people aren't necessarily sure that their children are going to have a better life than themselves and so as cut as we tended to think that rich countries don't have democratic experience democratic breakdown again as I said at the beginning I mean that that's something that that's a there's a lot of evidence of that but one of the reasons may be that wealthy countries don't have democratic breakdowns is that things are getting better for most people but if that's no longer the case then the question is you know for the first time in a hundred years this is no longer the case can we rely on that correlation between national wealth buying US Democratic stability I mean I don't question that you can ask a question so your comparative political scientists those same trends in the development of productivity compared to wages that's not just an American thing right but it is an American thing that in the age of Reagan it flatlines for working Americans I don't know the answer to this but I suspect that in places like Sweden and Germany and others those lines are much closer so what happened why why were they able to maintain that when we were not and I just put it to you that it's still the devil's bargain of the fractured American we which is that in America racial status Trump's economic well-being because white Americans cannot imagine other people who are in their position suffering as they are as part of the same body politic and therefore they cannot unite to come up with Solutions and that leaves them vulnerable to being captured by an autocrat like Trump and something like the Southern Strategy which speaks either directly or indirectly to racial anxiety yes oh so just answer the question I mean that it is true that that you have similar patterns in West European countries but they came later they came really beginning the 99s the u.s. was a kind of canary in the coal mine for this trend and you know why so in some of you see similar figures I've seen in Germany beginning in the late 1990s you know all of this is rooted in a certain global economic reality which is that wage that economies stop growing so fast after the early 1970s and so we're kind of coping with how to deal with that basic reality you know I sometimes am and I think it's that combined with an increasingly diverse population that makes such a potentially potent mix because it's easy to play demagogue populist politics when you have both a slowing economy and an increasingly diverse population and so I sometimes imagine you know imagine to yourself what you know so between 1945 and 1973 you had basically a period of uninterrupted economic growth in the United States imagine if the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act had passed in 1948 instead of 1965 you would have had 40 years of an institutionalization of American democracy in a period of high economic growth instead we had a kind of experience and act an unfortunate accident of history that these these reforms didn't happen until the 1960s and totally unrelated to this the global economic oil shocks and so on the economy began to slow and so it's this combination of these two big macro trends that made this made the u.s. vulnerable but I think you know this it makes it sound very kind of deterministic I think there are policies to kind of take the rough edges off these things policies I just add something to that that these policies that Greg was alluding to before so I'm actually on sabbatical this semester and one of my projects for the sabbatical is working in Washington several days a week for an organization called the National Academy of Social Insurance so I'm not going to make this a commercial about that but but it's you know it's basically a think-tank on Social Security Medicare Medicaid health insurance unemployment insurance workers comp and we actually have a paper that we hope to finish before I have to come back to in January on universal basic income or assured income and we don't make proposals and recommendations we just analyze different options that are out in the world that that one might think about how to structure these programs so the infrastructure exists in the United States on everything except for assured basic income infrastructures starting to be developed on family leave policies care you know support for caregivers and the families who have to use caregiver paid caregivers states are doing is starting to do a lot of interesting experimentation and all of this and so these the ideas are there but it's really a question of will to commit to them so that we can that people have this level of Economic Security so that they feel like they can participate in the political process so that they have confidence that the you know the bottom isn't going to fall out from under them in the world because of you know declines in productivity or the oil crisis or you know some climate change disaster so it's there but we really have to commit to making them work more effectively for people in this country I think have a question from the audience um do you see any one Republican or Democrat who is working to preserve norms hey he was invincible questioning I mean I think I I think that the Democratic Party leadership congressional leadership has been remarkably restrained you know so Nancy Pelosi has been very clear that she you know she's under I think the Democratic Party leadership is under enormous pressure by from angry voters probably lots of people in this room is sort of sake take you know take a stand like go after this guy but you know I think they actually I think wisely showing forbearance of saying we're not going to pursue impeachment unless the malting wait till the Moller report comes you know we're gonna wait tell them all the report and look at the molar report and we would be very tempting to not do this and you know there's guys like Michael avenatti who are out there you know saying we need to fight hard and act like tough guys and you know that's that's appeal and again that I can you know I can understand the visceral appeal of that but I think the Democratic Party leadership and you know I think that Judicial Committee if you look at a Judiciary Committee over the over the you know the Cavanaugh hearings I think the Judiciary Committee was it I mean they didn't have many options I mean you could ask them like what constitutional hardball options could have they used they could have not showed up to the hearings perhaps but they didn't they sat there and participated in the hearings they asked rough questions you know but that's the process they voted no that's part of the process so I think in a way I think the democratic party leadership has showed remarkable self-restraint and in that sense is trying to its best to reinforce norms I think that you know I I think President Bush actually during the Bush years I mean it was I didn't vote for President Bush I was not a fan of President Bush during the Bush years but I think during the Bush years President Bush and retrospective he had ninety percent approval ratings I mean he could have done anything he wanted with ninety percent approval ratings after September 11th and you know he did do lots of bad things but he did not he treated his political rivals with some degree of respect and you know he didn't he'd you know if you asked yourself with if president Trump had 90 percent approval ratings what would the world look like so I think in fact I think I think that you know we have to give recognition that there are there are political actors on both sides I think the current on in the current context the Republican Congress has performed abysmally though I just maybe a sports analogy is helpful here because you know I too am tempted to you know retaliate and kind you know for all of the insults but if you think about you know watching the Sunday you know football games in Saturday college games right the player who draws the penalty is the one who retaliates the ref never sees the original infraction but the ref always manages to see the retaliation and I think that that's the the risk that Democrats run into here because people have actually the public has forgotten about Merrick garland and how norm breaking that whole situation was so - you know do things that were more extraordinary than what they did during these the Cavanagh proceedings I think would have been very problematic because the public would not have felt that it was justified another question the focus of the book is on a little behavior leading to Democratic backsliding via normal ocean the focus of solution is also on elites what is the role for mass publics in both the decline and the potential fix I can respond to that so I think that that's actually fundamentally one of the challenges that the author's recognized in the book go right back to the founding fathers right to talk about that you need these gatekeepers who firstly was an electoral college and that was the parties then we even they talk about painting of the famous rooms in the back cigar filled rooms in Chicago where all these people were being elect being you know essentially selected and I somebody raises the the populist kind of dilemma well firstly you know think about populism number one what does it mean how was it defined now it's like no one really knows and and it's also the question of like is it what are the pros and cons of it because the sense is yeah that if you there is this there's just too the space between something that's quote-unquote populist that you think is favorable and positive and something that is essentially mob rule or or a majoritarian will that systematically kind of represses any kind of minority opinion is quite it's quite narrow you know so even though like ideologically we often say and I think this is one of the things that they point out in the book right that both on the left and the right political traditions in there and in the world have I'll invoke the idea of the masses but that can become kind of like a mob relatively quickly excited about this year has been the number of new people standing for election particularly women and I think that the best way to express your discontent the best way to get involved in addition to voting is standing for public office I mean that's what this country is all about I was very very involved with recent campaign City Council Jana Presley ran against a 20-year incumbent on a congressional side and when she spoke to me very early on about thinking about running I said well tell me why you want to run one of the data points that she pointed out to me was that one in every four voters blanked this incumbent meaning they went to the polls but because he was disengaged they didn't vote for him so that suggested that even someone sitting in office was disengaged and she beat him by 18 points so stand for office start young run for something at Suffolk lead your club we have campaign school who's one of whose uh professor runs campaign school yes I do [Laughter] mr. Codd myself and professor caucus Rachel Carr they run campaign school run for public office so there's one other group that is commonly not recognized that is actually trying to enforce norms and those are the career employees of the government they now you know there is the whole deep state criticism and I'm not quite sure and this was written by a political employee about that New York time's up dad you know about you know controlling things and slowing down the president but the political employees I mean the career employees really do try to keep things running as they always have been running obey the law enforce the law implement the laws that Congress have passed and that we actually as a country should respect them for that because I think that that is really a crucial aspect of our system which is why if the Republicans win in November I think we can expect large purges of civil service after November I don't know what purges there will be some voluntary departures that's for sure the civil service rules do actually make it quite a little bit difficult to accomplish the purchase but after you can make life miserable you you can and after Bush was elected the second time in 2004 a lot of the career people that I worked with left the government at that point because they just couldn't do another four years of it so that does happen yeah one I mean one you know we talking about turnout and what people can do I mean one thing that you know other countries have Australia other countries is mandatory voting you know and I'm not that's sort of to think about like how one implements that and so on is it's hard to imagine in the US but that's something worth thinking about because it requires people to vote and you then get people to vote who normally aren't voting and you can imagine that the whole politics then can be arranged as a result of that but I really like this point about Korea career civil servants but I would even broaden it to say I think that what something people can do in their daily lives without even realizing is I think the professions more generally people have operated in their daily lives if you work by a professional code whether you're you know a member of the Bar Association or any profession that you're part of there's a set there's an ethical guide set of ethical guidelines that guide your behavior and going to work every day and doing your job and and not you know giving in to pressure of corruption journalists I think civil servants military officials lawyers abide by a kind of professional code that is these are that I think helps protect our democracy and if people don't give in to the kind of pressure and it can latch on they're kind of professional ethical codes this can actually bolster our democracy and I think you seen this with journalists and across all walks of life well if I may add one one comment to that I think something important that is mentioned in the book but that we see it all the time is we need to engage from people that think differently than us I mean one of the major problem that we see today is that we reinforce our own views our ideas our own politics because all we do is read watch TV follow social media from people that think like us I think if we want to build bridges if we want to build consensus importance that will reach across DL there's another questions here to watch then the threat to democracy lies in its failure to enact the policies reflective of population aspirations rather than those of competing factions of economic elites exercising the influence on other political elites you know one of things I want to mention was Nate Cohen who works for the New York Times upshot you know he made an argument that a significant number if you look for example in Michigan 4.6 million people roughly voted in Michigan 2016 Trump won by about 12,000 you know so if you look at across the quarter court brexit states as people refer to them right than Midwest the about 1870 what 50 to 80 thousand roughly where it's decisive and I think what color makes your argument is that what Trump did to Clinton in 2016 was what Obama did to Romney in 2012 he made her appear as the elite Wall Street outsourcer who was not responding to their economic reality but what Cohen argues is that a is that Obama did that in 2012 to Romney and got a lot of these people to vote for him in 2012 so that is it goes back to idea that if the Democratic Party I think one of the fundamental mistakes and failures of Democratic Party in 2016 was like what was its economic message and if you look at you look at you know read the Trump speeches or listen to them you know he does--he appropriate a lot of rhetoric from the Occupy movement and saying that this was a global elite and obviously it kind of got into some some some inflammatory stuff that the Occupy didn't but that but it was this transnational corporate elite that the Clintons are part of and that were captured by Wall Street and that they represent what that that's what that's what they represent and so I think that that was you know for a number of people they were like well I don't know maybe maybe they're right until your same point though we're faith gonna face that same issue now you you you can't we learned that you can't run against Trump you can't say I'm not Trump so let me that's essentially what Hillary did you gotta have a plan and a program and so the party's got to find leadership with a plan and a program that resonates to the public you just can't say hasn't this been awful haven't you had enough no that's not gonna do it well one of the problems we haven't really talked about is the the fake news and disinformation problem I mean it's discussed in the book the the misrepresentations and lying that go on now you know there's always with swords spin in politics it tries to make you know that so purse out of a sow's ear and all of that all of those old expressions but you know you know when I apologize for all the health care things but this is you know this is what I do so that's what I follow but you know yesterday president Trump published an op-ed in the in USA Today you know basically it was a scare up ed about how the Democrats are going to ruin Medicare for you by you know these proposals for Medicare for all and you know you can read that and then you can read the Washington Post fact check on it today but the you know he's basically making all these promises about you know protecting people with pre-existing conditions protecting choice and health care providers which no one has now anyway all of this stuff that is a scare tactic but has no basis and actually the delivery of actual health care and it's not representative of what the Republicans have wanted to do which is to replace Medicare with vouchers he makes it sound like the Republicans are in favor of continuing Medicare and making it better it's not clear that that's the case and you know he's proposed and in supported legislation to eliminate the protections for people in the insurance markets with pre-existing conditions and things like this so um there needs to be some ability to communicate to the public about what's accurate and what's not in the political discourse I think can I follow up on that point one of the things that I've discovered and this is not in our book but the word that in the 19th is a kind of interesting little story in the 1930s there was these psychologists and sociologists who are worried about propaganda and funded by filings of the filings store that's no longer here they they set up an Institute of the Institute for propaganda analysis in which they developed its elementary school curriculum to train children to immunize them from the appeals of fascist and communist propaganda and this was implemented by different states across different and sewed actually the thing that brought my attention to this my father who grew up in Maine I could still recite you know 60 70 80 years later you know the five hallmarks of propaganda I mean so these guys developed a very effective method educating but then it was pretty smart stuff you know and so but this kind of interesting sad twist to the story is that once they were successful at this then they decided they needed to train school children to humanize them against the appeals of Madison Avenue and marketing and it turned out some of these guys were socialists and so or were key and so during the 1950's this kind of came under critical for our purposes that I think is interesting is the idea of civics education and you know on that sort of like civics education doesn't sound exciting but in fact I think it's potentially very promising kind of way of training children in particular and citizens to deal with the media environment in sophisticated ways and I think you know we're only in the beginning stages of this you know this is work that both sociologists psychologists are increasingly interested in and there's lots of kind of initiatives underway to try to figure out what what are things that we can do to train citizens and to not just assume that you know in a way it's taking our democracy for granted to just assume you can have the free flow of information and don't have to sort of prepare ourselves to deal with this environment I'm all in favor of the free flow of information but that this doesn't mean that we don't need to prepare ourselves for and so I think training citizens and schoolchildren to deal with this is really critical the book is a comparative books and they're examples of many other countries this wasn't one question specifically focus on that say other than Venezuela I think all of the examples that you gave of authoritarian regimes are right-wing regimes is there a reason that authoritarian methods are used more by right wing's yes that's a question for me well I don't know if if air21 in Turkey counts as a right wing you know that I mean he's he's a he's ambiguous I mean I I think the thing that they have in common is that they are outsiders and these guys often have little political experience and come into office and are quickly overwhelmed and you know so this is not just Donald Trump I mean I think in Peru there was a similar we tell the story the peruvian president who wanted to start wanted to get nominated for the senate but nobody would nominate him so he'd to say he'd start his own party and in order to get attention would run for president and then became president and so these are outsiders then once in office don't know how to deal with don't know how to deal with the onslaught and use out inflammatory rhetoric then are perceived by the establishment as being threats which they probably are and then that kind of spiral begins so you know I think that that's that's the big part of it yeah I don't know I mean you're right though I guess it is tends to be on the right I mean I think you know that the ideology of people matters I mean do you have a commitment to liberal democracy and I guess and historically in the 19th century we have written a book on conservative parties and democracy in which I make the case that conservative parties actually made an incredible contribution to democracy but the push for democracy came from the left historically it was workers parties demanding the right to vote and demanding expansion of the suffrage but I but I have a book on conservative parties and the point of the conservative the conservative poll you have to mean cancer you can't wish away conservatives but the question is what kind of conservatives do you have do conservatives in southern countries in Europe that race democracy or do you have conservatives who turn against democracy and I think that's so conservatives play an important role as well there is at least there is a distinctive kind of Marxian tradition where people have interpreted how Marx responded and analyzed the Paris Commune in the 1870s which basically when the French they captured everyone they just executed people they didn't take any prisoners at all and and there was a distinct mark same tradition that basically said that that shows you what will happen if you get captured by the bourgeoisie so you have to eliminate the Bush huazi I mean that's basically the terms of the deal so you could see this in a lot of the you know the Russian Revolution the Chinese Revolution there was this definitely the sense that you have to capture the state and then you have to use it as a vehicle for for over political violence and I think that was one of things that led to the tradition of like Stalinism and things like that so unfortunately on that side there was that quote/unquote rich history their exceptional questions and I'm so sorry that we don't have time to go through them have the final one a lot of the questions have to do with every piece in and institutions and the role of civil society this question is says American democracy has historically excluded specific communities from the political system so why should we as engaged citizens care about preserving these institutions why not develop new systems that truly are inclusive of our communities well you know that you know there's there's an argument out there which is that you know norms of hierarchy are worth eliminating and I agree with that i think you know nor not all norms are good just because we've had norms in the past doesn't mean they're good but I but I do so norms of hierarchy norms of repression norms that justify hierarchy and repression of racial hierarchy these obviously need to be eliminated and these obviously are account counter to democracy but I think if we look at the content of the norms the norm of mutual toleration which is the norm that you essentially accept your rival you can't have a democracy without it and so you know I think it's worth preserving these norms and you know me preserving the institutions I mean I'm not sure when somebody says eliminate the institution's I'm not sure you know like the institution of institution of hot the House of Representatives I mean I you know I think there's certain institutions one could somebody brought up the electoral college that one could kind of revisit I mean there's lots of things that but I think we have to have a basic guy you know sort of baseline against which we measure our institutions which is a kind of commitment to the basic values of democracy and so you know you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater I guess that's my short answer I would just add that one of the things for example that a young oppressor did is she hired a multicultural media team and took ads out and Portuguese down in Chinatown Latino community and pushed those voters to the polls and so it's just basic politics you've got to look at the demographics of the electorate today it's changing and if you are an incumbent and you don't make a transition you got a problem but it represents a great opportunity for new elected officials so but that all that example also raises another interesting point it's unlikely and I think she agreed with this that she would vote differently in the Congress I'm not saying she doesn't represent a lot of valuable valuable and important principles but she's that her vote in the Congress is probably not gonna be a lot different than her predecessors was so so we can discuss that but go ahead yeah well anyway because I have a story to tell about that too so but the hours late but right I do but but the example is that you know the book talks a lot about race and that's you know the the exclusionary practices and how a lot of the political accommodation was built on excluding people of different races who were not white but it was also built on excluding women which I think was also a factor and you know I agree with the comments about the nature of the Democrats campaign in 2016 but I said we have not we have not dealt adequately with the full incorporation of women in our political culture either thank you so with this I mean I remember what I was reading the book and reading so much how about what is happening today it reminds me to a famous quote from William Faulkner and he said the past is not dead it's not even past so I think that you reflect at what it was seeing through the wall and the historical context in which the book frame it I think that quote is more relevant today than ever but I want to end on a positive note and a quote from mentioning President Abraham Lincoln and making the reference that we hope that our countries will rediscover their better angels but also let's remember all of us the collective responsibility that we all have to make sure not only there are democracies don't die power democracies will flourish thank you so much all of you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: GBH Forum Network

Views: 6,515

Rating: 4.826087 out of 5

Keywords: Boston, WGBH, democracy, politics, political science, fordham forum, suffolk university, daniel ziblatt, Trump, elections, polarization, republicans, democrats

Id: LY0GFSLmyjg

Length: 102min 20sec (6140 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 06 2018