"How Do Democracies Fall Apart (And Could it Happen Here)?" Session 2

I am absolutely delighted to to be the moderator on this panel our second sort of substantive panel where we are looking at signs and instances of democratic erosion our first speaker is Nancy Bermejo from na field College Oxford and Princeton University and we will pretty much have the same set up so if you can speak for you know 10 12 minutes each and then we will go to some questions at the end Thanks and I'm pleased to have studied without stepping so i endorse what our students at earlier today and I'm very very glad to be here and very glad to see y'all doing what it should do and reach out to the real real politics around us anyway I've been in England for a long time and my British colleagues often read papers and it's an efficient way to get a lot said in a short amount of time so that's what I'm going to do how did democracies fall apart the truth is that they never do falling apart implies the process devoid of will driven by gravitational forces but regime change is always the result of deliberate action democracies don't fall apart they're taken apart by counter elites so will it happen here do the ominous parallels between the rise of interwar fascism for child tragedy as people sometimes discussing here since we can learn from success as well as failure I'm going to trace the trajectory of failed democracy and into worried Italy an enduring democracy and interwar Finland putting our current democracy and comparative perspective reveal some troubling similarities and some consoling contrast Italy story is one of capitalist fascist alliance ill-conceived invitations and a weak defense the hopes and fears inspired by the Bolsheviks revolution and its success in Russia played a pivotal role in the breakdown of the Italian democracy in 1922 Mussolini was spectacularly successful in using the seizure of factors and farms and the threat of revolution as a means of mobilizing support landowners and industrial elites joined Mussolini in common cause and his fascist squads man by veterans provided the property protections and the coercion that the new democratic order failed to provide together a fascist capitalist alliance helped undermine the liberal state fearing the left himself Italy's liberal Prime Minister Joly T invited the fascist party to join the electoral list of the national block a coalition of parties united in opposition to socialism the invitation gave the fascists an air of legitimacy and 6% of the seats in the legislature it was followed by an even more consequential invitation when King Victor Emmanuel asked for Cellini to form government the elected elite who should have defended italy's democratic institutions failed miserably their rampant corruption boosted disaffection and provided mussolini with a ready audience key leaders simply beat a retreat as the fascists grew stronger do you lead to himself resigned and stayed out of Rome during the entire crisis and parliamentarians simply avoided key votes and debates finally Italy's chief military commander refused to commit his forces to resistance when the King asked if he could repeal Mussolini's advance Italian democracy was left defenseless Finland's success was based on a dearth of fascist dollars successful exclusion and a broad defensive Finnish democracy endured the assault of a movement inspired by Italian fascism the extreme right lapa movement emerged when anti-communist farmers reeling from the depression rioted in 1929 and it swept the country so quickly that the breakdown of democracy seemed to certainty at first political elites made concessions to the movement passing anti-communist laws and overlooking extreme right lawlessness and violence but by the autumn of 1932 crackdown the courts meted out harsh punishments for movement violence and even convicted a leaders son of political murder the conservative agrarian union party turned decisively against the movement in 1930 unlike its counterparts in Italy it elide with the Social Democrats and two other moderate parties to exclude extremists and form a lawfulness front as its coalition malapa movement soon lost nearly all of support from economic elites when the movement organized a revolt in 1932 the conservative president PE FINA fund he is arrested its leaders and made a radio peal urging its members to go home as a well-known nationalist hero himself from the Civil War but once had support within the movement Savina who might well have behaved as Victor Emmanuel did in Italy but instead he outlawed the movement all together working together Finnish political military and economic elites kept Finnish democracy alive so what does this comparison which might seem curious here today what does this compare us and teach us finners democracy endured because it's political elites marshaled what I've called elsewhere something called distancing capacity distancing involves condemning and prosecuting all those who engage in violence Ollis nests or in our case violations of the Constitution even when they present themselves as allies in Finland political parties conservative political parties courts and capitalists and a conservative war hero succeeded in distancing the right from anti-democratic forces and thereby preserving the system now might we see a process approximating distancing here I'm not going to push a parallel between Spain of ruin and John McCain McCain wasn't wielding presidential power when his own process of distancing began and Trump has already been invited to rule without a king and we see the very opposite of distancing often in Congress this said there might be reasons to expect more successful distancing in the future I discussed several in the paper but here I have time for only two and the first involves the differing role of economic elites distancing was unlikely in Italy because a critical mass of fearless of fearful economic elites believed that democracy could not serve their interests but US Capitol has done spectacularly well under liberal democracy they don't need any thuggery or anti system action they're in control of the system we heard that this morning unions have been so weakened that they hardly pose a threat to profits much less prosperity anarchists a few a number and despite blatant deadly provocations mobilizations in defense of minority rights have involved only minimal violence and it's rarely property related this is astounding rather than colluding with trunk many of the most dynamic and powerful sectors of our capitalist elite have emerged to oppose his policies they don't fear a redistributive left instead they fear tariff walls that will raise their cost of production they fear losing valuable members of their workforce because of the xenophobic immigration laws they fear losing market share if their association with Trump's racism or anti-semitism leads to consumer boycotts and surely many fear violating their own democratic principles so we're not seeing a sweet capitalist alliance here we're seeing the seeds of distancing instead so if powerful economic elites or some powerful economic elites can distance themselves from trump in anti-democratic initiatives can political elites follow suit or should they like party elites in Italy assume that they need to support Trump and anti-democratic actions to win elections well maybe distancing is impossible here we read that moderate Republican elites are running scared and that Bannon and the Mercer's are waging successful war on the Republican establishment but a closer look at political behavior and opinion reveals that the incentives for some form of distancing might still exist for observations motivate my hope with this conclusion first Trump might bear some resemblance to Mussolini but I'm not sure Trump himself believes an actual movement he has only a base and that's different the dynamism that we saw in the interwar years even the dynamism we've seen more recently with leaders like Chavez or Korea simply it's simply not there the abysmal turnout for his inauguration provides evidence of my point this is a movement this is a movement this is probably not a and keep in mind that Trump's charisma is not transferable think about past affection the people and causes he backs often fail Trump supposed supporters and allies have often been fickle friends and this lowers the cost of imposing his anti-democratic initiative public opinion trends provide further incentives for distancing positive opinions of Trump as we heard earlier today have been declining since January 25th and a full 30 percent of Republicans not us in this room a thirty percent of Republicans saying that they agree with him on a few or no issues and only a third of Republicans say that they actually like the way that Donald Trump conducts himself as president is this because so many Republicans stand on trump's right must would be distance nurse here simply shut up and move right or lose office perhaps not despite polarization the proportion of Americans who deem themselves consistently conservative is still only 10% they simply seem more numerous because they're so visible in the media and so visible in primaries polarization has definitely taken place all of the literature shows us that especially the asite that Adam gave us earlier but there's still a center there's still a center there's still a lot of people who aren't on the very farm right the mention of primaries and elections brings me to a second set of data that might reveal incentives for distance inez a nes data suggests that the strongest predictor of Trump votes was right-wing ideology not a big surprise but if we look over time the trends in right-wing ideology are highly volatile and actually decreasing so there's a vulnerability there moreover anti-immigrant sentiment has declined steadily and decisively that's good news these trends might make distancing possible if politicians can succeed in exploiting the third incentive for distancing is the fact that support for basic democratic institutions remains very strong here and we heard that earlier today the vast majority of American 74 percent still believe that the rights of people with unpopular views should be protected seventy-nine percent still believe that people have the right to nonviolent protest and eighty-nine percent agree that strong democracy depends on national elections that are open and fair even though our troubled legislature might seem to parallel Italy under G Lethe 83 percent of Americans still believe that strong democracy requires a system of checks and balances 83 percent so these data make me think that at the national level at least elected elites can distance themselves from Trump and Marshall an effective defense of democratic institutions with public support and if I'm right in assuming the Trump's base is largely populist and not literally fascist the challenge of keeping mainstream parties a lot is diminished and there are all kinds of institutional reasons for that as well the key though is to get a broader sector of the electorate to vote in primaries and in elections so improving that miserable 55 percent turnout we had in the last election as a place to start so a quick return to interwar comparisons will highlight my very tentative conclusion here the actions of the most dynamic sectors of American Plus at least some core aspects of American public make me think that the parallels with Finland are much stronger than those with Italy Trump's support with key economic elites is precarious and it's possible that their mobilization and an alliance with democracy preserving political elites would prevent further backsliding Alando by noting that every unhappy democracy is unhappy in its own way and that the scripts for transitions for democracy are infinite it's possible that identity politics or some other factor that I've neglected entirely today will enable Trump to stave off distancing and take our democracy part but for now I think we should all be consoled by the contrast with interwar Italy thank you [Applause] Thank You Nancy our next speaker is an aggressive small abu say and i have for years been butchering her names so I am going to be both less optimistic and more parochial as I usually a.m. and I'll offer examples rather than the kind of sophisticated analogies that it doesn't talk really mostly about to Poland and Hungary and I'll try to make three points the one the first Western briefly described what the rise of authoritarian populism has been like in Hungary and Poland to show you some of the institutional damage and the rewriting of history that occurs and three and this is where I get really pessimistic sure that there's been very little in the way of constraint of this processes so first what are these populist look like well this is our friend Viktor Orban from the Hungarian Fidesz party known as the party of Young Democrats which picket and it basically is one of the sort of the stalwarts in the heroes of the communism of the collapse of communism 89 but becomes a conservative populist party in the 1990s it experiences City gains in the 2000s and as you can see this is a percentage of the seats that it holds in the Hungarian Parliament it basically holds over two-thirds of the seats starting in 2010 and that will turn out to be a very important number in Poland you have peace he represented by its leader Joseph Kosinski the placement of that crown is not incidental this is a party that is both conservative and populist from the start and two years ago and wins 38 percent of the vote which gives it more than half of the seats in parliament and the reason why these parties arise the reason why voters plug for this authoritarian populist is basically because of the weakness of mainstream parties the incumbents the Socialists in the and hungry basically admit to have lied about the state of the economy a secret tape comes to light and they basically have in that tape the Prime Minister minutes that we have and I quote live day and night about how bad the state of the economy is in Poland similarly you have the previous centrist party that governs Padma which basically umbrella starts to rely on what what is known as the politics of warm water we're basically on the taps run there's nothing really off on offer from the part of you whatsoever and so voters get both bored and somewhat disgusted with some taping scandals that occurred the problem is that there are no other real alternatives for the voters it's either these populist or it's the discredited mainstream parties so this I would argue is less a weakness of democracy in these countries then basically this party competition at this particular point in time which the populist both criticize and benefit from now the significance of the populist coming to power is that the numbers that they achieved that discussed with the mainstream parties was so big that feeis gains that 2/3 of the seats which gives it a constitutional supermajority it is now basically free to rewrite the Constitution as it sees fit in Poland for the first time the governing party can govern without cumbersome coalition partners and in Poland having coalition partner basically is no Doom's the government which gives both of these parties enormous discretion discretion that they immediately start to make use of and are basically follows is a set of templates there's almost an institutional template that both of these parties fought once in office there's no moderation through inclusion just because they start to govern they don't become responsible governments and they basically both start to implement this template for dismantling formal institution and of basically undermining the informal norms and values of democracy so when it comes to formal institutions the reason why I say there's a template is because both parties follow the exact same sequence and this exact same targets basically they should totally share the same pattern of both sequencing and targeting the first target are the courts in both cases that party seek to end judicial economy by packing the courts and restricting their domains over which they can act imposing term limits instead of basically lifetime terms and so on on both the supreme court and on the lower bodies in Hungary one official conveniently the wife of the number two party leader becomes the person in charge of all judicial appointments at all levels of government so it's an incredible politicization of the one main check on government power in a parliamentary system or we see next are attacks on the media as being unpatriotic being picked newsy and so on followed by formal constraints by basics of near limiting in some cases basically heavily taxing the media forcing it to register imposing regulations on what canon can't report the next target our civil society ranging from nongovernmental organizations to churches and universities which now again have to undergo onerous registration requirements are classified as foreign agents in the cases of NGOs and so on the whole sort of witch-hunt of George Soros has to be seen in this light right this is basically he becomes the one of the first targets of the Hungarian government and then the government's go after the legal framework and here the fact that foetus and hungry houses two-thirds supermajority allows it to rewrite the Constitution entirely and it relights the Constitution in a ways that not only favored in the short term but favor in the long term as well so for example the new constitution now includes supermajority requirements on even simple legislature such as budgets which means that even if fetus is ever in the opposition it can effectively act as a veto player and an eto point on all subsequent governments that exist in Hungary there's also of course gerrymandering with massive changes in the electoral laws to favor in the existing existing party and it shirts for the incumbency and finally in both countries we see attempts to rule by law so we see basically targeted and retroactive justice where analysis especially there are lost targeted at individuals and that are attractive in their administration but formal situations aren't the only thing that matter in democracies these parties also attack the informal institutions the first thing they do is to basically exclude the political opposition so in these parliamentary regimes the political opposition parties have traditionally been included in all kinds of oversight and ethics committees and it's seen serve as an informal norm that you do that to make those committees let it basically give the greater legitimacy this they are now excluded from the ethics and oversight committees the opposition basically is no longer allowed to participate in those when it comes to the media what now happens is basically the government will buy the large Swain's of ads and of CERCLA and channel a channel funding only to government is to me yet a basely favor the government and they basically in effect starve other newspapers and other media of of advertising new revenue there's also a total sub abnegation of informal accountability I'm Anna Pollan and Holly there's less worry about publishing the president's tax returns than there is about publishing the full lists of donors to the political parties a lot of those that have now become entirely opaque and we're no longer sure quite exactly who's funding these parties or how they're using more importantly state resources to fund themselves and finally what these gov governments have also done is to fund all kinds of friendlier organizations all kind of all kinds of astroturfing they have funded all kinds of funds to party allies directly from the state violating these informal norms of basically fiduciary duty to the state and what also happens in Poland Hungary is sort of a politics of memory and identity a rewriting of history to favor the current governments so there's a rejection of the communist past and the Communist Party successors and politicians as inevitably tainted right in Poland there's this whole story that aphromoo that not the entire democracy after 1989 has been tainted by the round table agreements between the Communist Party and the opposition back in 89 but the entire Democratic the system is tainted by these communist leftovers that have to be extirpated there's a division of society into good and bad the Polish the heiress of Kartini whom you saw earlier actually talked of a worst kind of polls referring to those who don't support the party and there's the institutionalization of these this is you know the this is the hungarian house of terror as it's known its amid giant museum that's erected on the site of the former Arrow Cross fascist movements headquarters where basically the argument is made that communism and fascism are one and the same thing and they are both based in these taints on Hungarian history the exhibit that you see there of course is cutting which is a reference to the murder by Soviet officers served by the Soviet army of Polish officers during World War two so there's also some yogurt evidence over sort of a sympathetic similar I want to Poland as well and as if all this weren't enough there's evidence that the two parties have coordinated their leaders have met at multiple meetings sort of multiples of note for our meetings help between the party leaders they follow the same template they support each other in the international arena and they continually refer as having a shared vision of what you're about to look like and what their countries have to look like and here this is exemplified by of course a Polish right-wing newspaper cover in basically on your orbit and Kochanski they are defending Europe against the madness of the left-wing politics and Islam business the terror is the equator so what are the constraints on all this well unfortunately they're proving to be pretty weak the EU the European Union which has somewhat castigated these parties has proved largely perilous and that's because fetus belongs to the European People's Party which also counts among its members the German Christian Democrats and several other prominent parties and that party is basically blocked sanctioning of Hungary and turn Hungary has blocked the sanctioning of Poland and as repeatedly said it will repeat Oh any moves to sanction Poland within that it countries themselves the opposition parties are highly fragmented they you know they to suffer from this inability to coordinate and to offer some kind of incredible alternative to the ruling parties and so they're really the only two things that constrain them are basically the the twofold the first of this is that wealthiest and peace while these two parties share the same commitments it can be safely said that the Polish party has half the competence of the Hungarian one so you know the Hungarian party's BC led by a bunch of lawyers and they have systematically done everything that a bunch of lawyers would do they pass enabling loss they came up they're carefully chained to check the legislation they cross every eye and they dot every T anyway this is my second language they're very very careful about the process by which they enact this erosion of democracy in Poland in contrast the governing party has now for example send conflicting the conflicting versions of the same law to the Senate and to the lower house of parliament it's unable to keep a straight story about what's going on it has consistently basically fallen all over itself in an attempt to around democracy in Poland so this is one place where you're the lack of competence at least in the Polish case may prove a constraint on their designs on democracy the second force that has intermittently been helpful is civil society and civil society has not been able to for example stop the erosion of judicial economy it has not been able to stop the rewriting of the constitutions or the electoral laws but it has on specific occasions been able to generate enough pressure for the government to basically hold back and that's the case for example of the ever-increasing structures on abortion laws in Poland where there was a massive black protests of women you know this is held in the rain last October that recently brought is saw hundreds of thousands of people coming out to the streets in defense of the status quo or in the Hungarian case the protest against for example the the shutting down of the Central European University the one sort of autonomous university left in Hungary so there is some grounds for hope here but unfortunately you know in contrast to to Nancy's eloquent you know somewhat shaded optimism the situation in Poland Hungary is basically not looking well at all thank you next up is Susan Hyde great good morning everyone or yes still morning got in very in the wee hours continued even it's a true honor to participate in this panel and to be back here at Yale I spent the first decade of my career here and I taught my very first lecture from this very spot when I was the 27 year old assistant professor so I'm especially pleased to be to be have the opportunity to be back here I mentioned that I'm now at UC Berkeley which is one of the campuses that has recently experienced pretty significant efforts to Bates I think the campus community into a reaction that will gain national and international attention we have had quite a bit of I guess we'll call it security concrete barriers on campus streets bomb squads on active duty on a regular basis dozens if not hundreds of police patrolling campus events and what appears to be lone controversial speakers in the central part of campus surrounded by throngs of what appeared to be amateur journalists armed with cell phone cameras on selfie sticks and they are are mobbing the speakers who again are I think trying to provoke a reaction and so I end that just in passing but more generally I want to say that I am on this panel and my expertise comes not from a deep knowledge of specific countries as a true comparative historico story enlike the the other individuals on this panel but primarily from a focus on international relations and on international efforts to promote democracy around the world as well as documentation of efforts by elites to resist pro-democracy pressures so the resistance to efforts to promote democracy is something I been interested in I'm going to remind folks of something that I think has been on the table in much of the conversation already today and in some of the many memos that were circulated in advance which is that democracy has dominated as a globally promoted and accepted form of governance not because it is perfect or because it without fail elects the best leaders or even very good leaders all of the time but because it is supposed to be self-correcting and potentially self-enforcing mistakes in one electoral cycle can be corrected in subsequent electoral cycles this is the self-correcting mechanism and there are commonly understood expectations already referenced several times today for regularized behavior like periodic elections that create the conditions for citizens to enforce democracy or for other political actors to enforce democracy the bright lines referenced by by the organization sponsoring this conference bright line watch I agree with the sentiment expressed in some of the memos most clearly by Adam cherski that history may not be a good guide to the present in the US case that it's I struggled when I was sitting down to write this I've been thinking about exactly which cases I should talk about in terms of specific instances of democratic erosion and we we just don't know I guess is my room or I don't know any other people on the panel probably no but I I don't know and I use this as partial justification for my slight deviation from our assigned questions for this panel just just slightly so it is nearly a point of faith or was a point of faith I guess when I was in coursework in graduate school that that developed democracies do not die yet here we are having this this exact conversation all of what follows this is basically speculation a number of reasons have already been proposed today and in the memos as to why democratic erosion might currently be at work in the US and I will underscore that populism a point already made has it many times in history been a very useful and powerful tool for autocrats to take power through democratic means I want to focus on and really underscore two other processes or mechanisms that I know a number of would-be autocrats have exercised in the past while seeking to make their regimes more autocratic in practice sometimes while preserving the veneer of of democracy at the same time both of these I can imagine quite being being quite consequential in the u.s. and in fact we're just mentioned by by vana and her remarks as well the first is the role that the media plays or more precisely that shared information or common knowledge plays in allowing democracy to have these two purported purported advantages that I mentioned at the beginning of being self correcting and self-enforcing democracies have and I'm not just talking about media freedom or media oppression right there's something else afoot right now in the way in which citizens are accessing information democracies as we all know have elected many many terrible leaders some of them were would-be authoritarians yet the general idea is that unlike in democracy when bad leaders can often only be ushered out via extra constitutional means and often through their own death or poor health and democracy bad leaders or bad parties can be ushered out within constitutional provisions they're elected all the time yet we think we can get rid of them there are also regularly expected elections and sometimes other events that provide routine focal points for collective action and defense of democracy by either civil society the judiciary or other actors who are able to take relevant actions to defend democracy although you know depending on the actor of the circumstances are slightly different I suspect we all already know this but I summarize this Locke logic in order to emphasize what I think most people who have written about democracy as potentially self-correcting and self-enforcing have assumed which is basically some level of information transmission amongst the general population or at least a sizable group of the general population that that may be lacking in the u.s. today or that may be eroding in the u.s. today there is some possibility there must be some possibility for a democracy to be self-correcting and democracy to be self enforcing for the the potential of the existence of a sufficient degree of common knowledge to allow citizens not only to agree that something is wrong but to also understand that other potentially diverse groups of citizens feel the same way and are likely to do something about it so here I am borrowing heavily from some of the luminaries in the room but I think it's worth worth emphasizing the state of media and information consumption among us among citizens in the u.s. today is potentially distinctive polarized and and doesn't require cracking down on the media for this mechanism to be less operationalized right that this mechanism that I'm talking about maybe is undermined by simply patterns in consumption of information and I'm this is this is speculation again but I think these current pattern patterns of information consumption have already undermined the ability of citizens to play their parts in democracy in in either voting bad leaders out of office or perhaps more crucially being able to play their role in self-enforcing democracy which requires both that they value democracy and are willing to defend it against potential seizures of power by authoritarian rulers so if the bright line were obviously crossed and there was a clear focal point there are a few things would also logically have to be true for self-enforcing democracy to operate and those are the things that I think I am most worried about today this is again repeating some of what and just underscoring what others have already said and what others are going to say the current informational environment might be a symptom rather than a cause but if it is sticky if it is path dependent my concern is that it will make it very difficult in the future for these mechanism to operate for democracy to be self-correcting and self-enforcing on a practical level you know specific examples have already been mentioned but we know that something like this was definitely afoot in Venezuela in the early 2000s the the polarization of information consumption by the citizenry there was extraordinarily polarized and there was an inability of citizens to to understand anything that seemed like they were experiencing the same reality the other mechanism that I'm going to just mention briefly that we have seen before and that may be a growing concern in the US but is also sometimes a potential source of hope is the independence of the judiciary long game autocrats ones who wish to come to power and erode democracy in their country we have seen individuals like Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua comes to mind I would call him a long game autocrat he understood that the judiciary under a constitutional democracy is a constant threat to their ability to do what they want he was elected president in 2006 I believe without much direct manipulation of the election itself in part because he had spent at least a decade working with his allies to ensure that the judiciary would be aligned with him in support or at least not oppose the reforms that were necessary to allow him to be elected president with a sort of small plurality of the vote and and to continue to rule indefinitely which I think that we're seeing here I'm not sure that we're on the cusp of that here but the behavior of the judiciary and other other actors within the giotto Sharri and their willingness to step in to defend democracy when bright lines are crossed is something to pay attention to and stacking the judiciary has certainly been a potential mechanism of slow and gradual Democratic erosion I'm going to that that's ten minutes I have lots of other things to say I want to just mention two things very quickly one is that one thing we have already seen is and this started under Obama I believe a dramatic decline and the USS commitment to being a democracy as an example and as a supporter of democracy in other countries around the world this is something that I have seen very acutely in my own work and I think that that can have reinforcing patterns over time that end up undermining the notion that citizens would come out to defend democracy if we are less if democ being a democracy is less part of the national identity that we all share then I think it is less likely that citizens will come out to defend it and that will have reinforcing implications for many other countries in the world so to conclude I'll just make one other point which is that I'm sort of returned to one of the big motivating questions for the conference that we were sent which was whether a powerful individual in one country can undermine can threaten democracy and so I I'm not I'm still not sure right it depends on how everyone it reacts to that individual so if at the very least is something that requires passivity on the part of the citizenry but one point of hope is is that within a democracy within a country that already has democratic institutions an individual or small group of individuals can also help activate the institutional constraints that are supposed to trigger self-enforcing democracy and so thinking about who those individuals are and what they might do and how they might speak to the broader population in a way that allows people to listen across a variety of currently siloed sources of information I think is something to devote some time and energy to going forward [Applause] yes we have Daniel's a blot next I realize I've been remiss I've but not been giving people's institutional affiliations Daniel is a professor of government at Harvard thank you it's wonderful to be here my comments are going to be drawing on a book that I've just completed it's coming out in January with a title that's very similar to one of the panels the last panel it's called how democracies die it's coming out in January with Steve Levitsky who wanted to be here but couldn't be here so I'm gonna draw on some of the ideas from that obviously not summarize all of the ideas but in that book we really draw on the lessons of nineteen thirty some of the cases that Nancy talks about in Europe Latin America the 1960s and 70s and contemporary cases as well this really feels almost like a summit of people I've been in communication with you know over the last year virtually and think you know and just and you know you know seeing people's tweets and Facebook posts and so it's really wonderful to be in the same room with everybody so again there's lots of things I could have talked about but what I wanted to do was to draw on really one theme from the book and that's a theme that John Kerry mentioned at the outset invited us to think about norm breaking and how to think about norm breaking and I wanted to kind of spend my time just give you some remarks and thoughts on Norma Rosen and norm breaking so a lot of us who look at the u.s. situation are fairly convinced I think that a serious threat as Donald Trump is the problem in American democracy runs much deeper Donald Trump is the outcome of a long process or symptom of a deeper problem the problems in American democracy long precede him will probably long outlast him so that in this intuition is kind of feeling that there's something deeper wrong really comes from I think partly the idea that one of the deeper sources of problems in American democracy and an indication of trouble in american democracies that is the growing intensity and frequency over the last 25 years of democratic norm breaking or normal erosion so what is worrying is less the outright violation of democratic norms and even in the first year the trump presidency i think and and what's more worrying is the breaking of democratic norms then breaking of unwritten rules and so we worry about this I think because when we look around the world and look at other countries we know that the death of democracy is often preceded by the breaking of in words and deeds of democratic norms so it's ominous of course when we know that political leaders and actors threatened to lock each other up attack the free media and other neutral institutions like courts and bureaucracies it's all deeds also are frightening when politicians use constitutional procedures to the hilt in a dangerous game of political escalation these two are worrying signs so in other countries court packing or the impeachment of as Beatrice mentioned the peach and Pietschmann of judges of presidents and so on that are often very legal these kind of violations of democratic norms are also worrying so I'll speak before both Steve Levitsky and I I think when I say that we are both convinced that was protected democracies historically in the US and elsewhere is less the formal system of checks and balances within political systems and more often than norms underpinning these political institutions so of course the US political system that checks and balances have been pretty effective over the last hundred years I would say not the last 200 years over the last hundred years but these checks and balances aren't self enacting they're only effective when reinforced and embedded in robust democratic norms so in our book we want to kind of dig into this idea of democratic norms and to think a bit harder about what precisely we're talking about when we talk about democratic norms why what what is it that's being undermined and why is this happening so we think there are really two master norms that are really worth thinking about and broad strokes I think these two norms encompass a lot of the smaller norms that we often focus on and that we often see decaying in democracies in crisis so one is what we can call it mutual toleration the norm of accepting the basic legitimacy of our partisan opponents not treating them as treasonous subversive otherwise beyond the pale so I'll come back to this in a moment so that's the first one the second norm is a less familiar one perhaps well one we call the norm of institutional forbearance or using one's institutional prerogatives with restraint not deploying the letter of the law and ways that undermine the spirit of the law so if you think about presidential impeachments Senate approval Supreme Court nominees the filibuster court packing presidential pardons if politicians use any of these prerogatives to the hilt exploiting the letter of the law to maximum partisan gain our system of checks and balances would quickly descend into dysfunction and chaos so Paraguay and style and Pietschmann Argentinian style court packing these are actually perfectly legal in the American context so it's not the Constitution that prevents them its underlying norms of mutual toleration and forbearance so institutional forbearance again the norm of not exercising a formal right of Praga tiff just because you can this these are this is crucial I believe that argue for democratic stability so the question then becomes are these norms weakening and if so why so I think they're in fact warring sides as probably everyone here would agree these norms have been quite viable in American history but they are now being undermined and we I think driving this is as we've heard in a lot of the presentations today is an erosion with emerges of a particular form of partisan polarization so Democrats and Republicans despise each other and we all are citing the same study that Adam mentioned where Republicans you know and Democrats say five percent say they would be displeased if they marry each other in 1960 today it's fifty percent you know this pew study again others have cited you know fifty percent of Republicans Democrats say they're afraid of each other so we have not really seen this kind of this level of partisan animosity since the end of Reconstruction in the United States I mean we have seen this before of course and this kind of partisan animosity is something that we it's familiar to all of us who study democracies in crisis in other parts of the world so this isn't really a traditional left-right polarization I'm gonna kind of give my own spin on this year it's often about race religion and culture it's about identity it's about way of life it's existential so this particular form of polarization that erodes democratic norms in the US and then it does so in the following way norms of mutual toleration and forbearance serve essentially as the soft guardrails of democracy they prevent normal and healthy political competition from spiraling into partisan fights to the death and so of course as I've said America hasn't always had these norms actually you know beginning in the early 18th century Democrats and Republican our federalist and Republicans viewed each others as treasonous enemies the u.s. didn't have these norms between the 1850s in the 1870s when the country descended into civil war but beginning in the 1880s in the late 19th century Democrats and Republicans pretty broadly accepted one another as legitimate rivals and refrain from destabilizing acts of constitutional hardball so there was no impeachments there was no successful court packing senators are judicious and largely refrain from acting unilaterally to circum to with presidential appointments presidents were acted with restraint outside of wartime so the checks and balances basically worked but things are changing a large faction of the Republican Party now questions the legitimacy of their partisan rivals they describe Democrats as traitors not real Americans many questioned whether Barack Obama was a legitimate president so this kind of again this kind of this kind of partisan animosity if view your enemy is an existential threat justifies violating norms of forbearance and if you think that your enemy is a partisan is an existential threat then you're willing to use any means necessary to remove your enemies from power if you view your energy your parties and rivals as a threat to your way of life then this again justifies abandoning forbearance so I think early signs of this or the Clinton impeachment in 1998 the Texas redistricting case in 2003 was a kind of an interesting example the deployment of the filibuster as an obstructionist tactic the use of government shutdowns and threat of defaults as a tool of partisan warfare and finally I think most egregiously the 2016 Senate's refusal to allow President Obama to fill a Supreme Court vacancy this was an act without precedent in the United States since 1866 so again our democratic norms have been roading for the last 25 years and our goal really is to introduce these terms these terms into our vocabulary to think about norm breaking mutual toleration and forbearance and their presence aids Democratic survival their absence their kind of them it gives rise to the mirror image their absence so that gives rights a different set of norms mutual intolerance and instead of forbearance constitutional hardball while you play to the limits so when these norms of mutual intolerance and constitutional hardball proliferate democratic politics become unhinged marked by no holds bar conflict deadlock and dysfunction so you know is America then on the verge of democratic alliance I'm not so pessimistic outright democratic breakdown is unlikely our institutions are certainly more robust than they are in Hungary or turkey there is really no comparison but neither on the other hand do we think that the checks and balances will save us and this kind of leads to a third perspective I think a third scenario given the diagnosis when you imagine a future for American politics we kind of think of other countries that operate with that kind of democracy as a low-grade fever where one that's marked by continued partisan animosity more departures from political conventions but most importantly increasingly institutional institutional warfare in other words politics without solid guardrails so even if President Trump fails to consolidate authoritarian rule of some kind I think you know if we think about what kind of politics this looks like and try to imagine this the United States and what to try to imagine what is politics without guardrails look like we can consider North Carolina today so North Carolina is a classic purple state with a diversified economy its wealthier more urban and more educated than most other southern states yet despite this or perhaps because of this over the last seven years North Carolina has become what Jedediah Purdy's is called a microcosm of our country's hyper partisan politics and growing distrust so partisan warfare is intense constitutional hardball is rampant he's racially gerrymandered districts the 2013 voter law fights over stacking election boards and out an effort by outgoing governor in 2016 hamstrung his successor impact the state's executive branch this is a glimpse of what state-level politics looks like without power one could imagine this taking place at the national level so just I'll conclude then with this thought Louis Brandeis once called America's States the laboratories of democracy today they become a nemedians this is the laboratories of authoritarianism and it's here we can see America's future possibly thank you our final panelist is Tim Snyder who is a professor of history at Yale okay thank you very much Susan thank you all for including me in this community as as you'll know from the the brief but entirely sufficient introduction I'm not a political scientist I political science and you can test me if you want but I'm not a political scientist and this is going to this is going to be I think essential for the argument that I'm gonna try to make about about democracy and how we might think of what's going wrong with this thing that we're calling American democracy so because I am a historian I think a lot about time and the way that I would define the value of a democracy is as a producer of time what democracy does is that converts almost magically are unstoppable capacity to make mistakes into a sense of continuity about a political regime right that's what democracy does it produces a certain amount of time and that's it's a virtue but it's also democracy's vulnerability because if you can get to a situation and I'm going to argue that we're getting towards one where people start to think about time in a different way time not as something which goes forward predictably but time is something that loops around and makes cycles if you get to that tipping point that can then double down and hurt democracy so in other words if the thing you're calling democracy is flawed for whatever reason in such a way that it produces a sense of Doom rather than a sense of progress at a certain point that could be the thing which brings democracy down now the only way to make this argument is to introduce time as a variable if you insist a time is something which can change in people's minds in most social scientific analyses time is in the background we take for granted that it moves forward that it's measurable and so on that is itself a historical artifact of the of the moment that we are in if the question is whether we're entering other moments or not we have to open up how we think about time and consider that that might be changing okay so to make this case I'm going to start with two methodological points about this thing we call American democracy and then I will move to the organ without time and then I will draw a conclusion about what this means for comparisons with the past so methodological point number one is we should be very careful about defining the system that we have now as a democracy when you look at it from any kind of external point of view the fact you know you ask if it's representative most people in this country don't vote in most elections and those that do consistently don't have their policy preferences translated into policy in another country we would see both of those things as as major warning signs if what we're meant to have is a representative democracy it's it's it's you know they think we take these things for granted but it's very weird that we have registration that we have Tuesday voting that we have an electoral college that the Senate is lined up the way that it does that we have the gerrymandering that there are ten million American citizens who are legally disenfranchised from the system again all of those things if you looked at it from if you looked at another case a historical case in 1928 or a foreign country in Asia those things would spring out at you as reasons while you're not looking at a fully democratic system and that's not to mention the limitless money in politics which I think an objective observer would usually mark as a sign of oligarchy so I would characterize our system as a mixed oligarchic Republican system in which we use democracy in some parts of government as a succession principle something something like that now the second method Lodge up why is that important it's important because it helps to focus what we're thinking about because we could be asking the question is democracy failing alright another way to ask that would be is the non-democratic part of our system succeeding to which the answer I think is fairly clearly yes if our focus is on the head of state or on the on States and I completely agree with this emphasis on the states then what we can see is that the non democratic parts of the system are doing quite well it's the non democratic parts of the system which permit the election of mr. Trump it's also the non democratic parts of the system which create the de facto one-party rule that we have in places like like North Carolina okay second methodological observation has to do with the unit level on America this thing this thing called America when we consider democratization as a good thing we have no trouble imagining that democratization is an international phenomenon where we're actions taken in the US would then have positive knock-on effects otherwise we have to do the same thing when we consider D democratization we have to consider the possibility that there is a but there is a brown globalization or there is a reverse globalization however you like that events beyond the United States can have a material effect on the United States itself whether we like it or not and most of us don't like it prefer not to face it we are almost certainly in a situation where the actions of a foreign government determined to our head of state is if we were looking at another country again we would have no trouble saying ah that means that country is not completely sovereign we don't like to say that about ourselves right because we're inside the system but given that the man I mean I won't go into all of the ways that Russia affected the outcome of the election we're learning more about them all the time but been writing about it for two years but it but it given that the man won by 70 thousand votes scattered over three states if they had any influence at all they most likely tipped it in his favor we don't like that fought right because we're Americans but if we were looking at a different country we would say okay that's a country which is tipped into some kind of half sovereignty which i think is accurate for us whether or not you accept the half sovereignty terminal the methodological point I want to make is that we have to consider this not just as Americanists and as compared to this but as Susan Hyde was suggesting a different way as students of international relations what happens inside the United States it doesn't just have consequences for others it also works the other way around and this goes right down to the technical details for example in an ogee mabuse's paper about the tape scandal in Poland right the tape scandal in Poland took place at two restaurants owned by a consortium connected to a Russian mobster said Russian mobster is also the boss of felix tater who is the person who was in charge of bay rock who is the person who rescued donald trump and made him a public figure in united states which leads to the earlier point about criminal takeovers of democracy if you look abroad in beyond your own country you will often notice phenomenon like mafia democracy which you might not notice if you were only looking inside inside your own country okay so those are my methodological points I wanted I want to pick up on North Carolina because I think North Carolina suggests I agree with you completely suggests a way that things might be going I'm going to characterize it in a slightly different way and return to the idea of sub all turns the subalterns in the United States and the chief the chief the chief agents of identitarian politics in the United States are of course American whites and the big confusion among American whites is between citizenship itself and and being white and the reason why this confusion materially matters is that when your state becomes when your state or your country state in the sense of North Carolina or state in the sense of federal government becomes a one-party state you don't notice that anything has happened because you don't make the distinction between your race and the populace or the citizenry as a whole right so rare is the white North Carolinian right at least of one one of the two parties who will say well it's it's okay that my party's in power but it's wrong that we've transformed our system into a one-party state now if that can happen on the scale of a state it can probably happen on other scales as well and of course then I'm gonna know the first thing that you know one of the important things that in addition to the things that Daniel mentioned that the North Carolina State Legislature does is it it goes after its own state education system which was on world scale remarkable and now will not be again such for unfortunately for a very long time which leads me into my point about about time escapes so I want to now try to consider a number of the points that were made here and in earlier panels for example by Professor Sikorsky in a slightly different conceptual apparatus one which has to do with how we think about time let me start with factuality which Susan Hyde very helpfully introduced in order to think that you're moving through time in a forward direction you have to believe that there are facts that connect you to the world around you and to the people around you and that the apprehension and discussion of those facts can lead to meaningful action that is that is that that is an Enlightenment assumption that probably most of us here take for granted but which is by no means a feature of the world it's a feature of our experience in the world and it can be broken if you move into a world of epistemic pluralism where there's no longer a broad consensus not only on the facts but about whether in fact there are facts at all then the sense of moving forward in time becomes much more difficult discussion becomes very difficult as some of you might have noticed and in addition to that common action on the point about trust I think is extremely well taken without a sense of factuality it's very difficult for there to be tour there to be for there to be trust so that is one thing which breaks us away I think is breaking us away from a sense of time moving forwards another is a group of factors which were mentioned in in earlier panels which again I'm going to characterize in a slightly different way you all little literature better than me but it seems to me the one the one factor there one corrala which actually Trump's whiteness or or right-wing ideology when predicting a trump vote in a county where Trump voting increased over Romney voting from 12 to 16 is reduction in levels of health right not bad health but most precisely people whose health was getting worse at the county level tended to go significantly from Romney to Trump and this was most significant by the way in five states that switched and so it's a factor to which one might want to pay some attention the economist was quick off the mark with this and then there was a paper a week ago in public very of science some bye bye-bye waspey at all about this and what why am i mentioning this because it seems to me that this factor of people not a people's lifespan shortening but in voting Republican because of it or people's health getting worse and voting Republican because of it or at least along with it correlates with these other things that we've been discussing for example lack of mobility right radical income inequality means lack of means lack of mobility that's the thing which this with this Chetty study has established which I won't belabor likewise lack of mobility as such is strongly related to lack of social mobility if you're between 18 and 34 in the United States you are you are most likely living with your parents it's more likely than any other arrangement which means that literally you have not moved right lack of geographical mobility like worsening health like shortening lifespans like lack of social mobility works against a sense of time which allows you to think that time is moving forward right and so the time escapes start to change now how does this work in politics in politics it can be it can be you can be channeled moved incorporated exploited however you prefer by politicians who talk in terms of a different time scape so for example make America great again is a time scape which doesn't refer to a better future it's a time scape which loops back to an unnamed and mythical past right so now there are studies now about what make America great again means for Americans for example Taylor at all in the Journal of applied research and memory cognition finds not surprisingly that Americans define the moment when America was great in the past as the moment when they were young right which is funny but I think it's also politically very significant because it refers us to a certain political style which I'm going to call the politics of eternity or the government as being rather than than doing because one of the things about youth is that government can't give it back to you right I mean whether wherever we are on the span of like how much government should do not do can we will generally agree that government cannot in fact make you young again right so this is funny but it's also revealing because the pot what I'm gonna call the politics of eternity the politics of cycling back to the past rather than imagining of future is precisely about defining political problems in fictional terms and therefore in irresolvable terms so if what you want out of politics is to be young again you might keep voting for that promise but government is not going to give it for you and can't I will now give you a more serious example one of the things which distinguishes white trump voters from white Clinton voters is that a significant majority of white Trump voters in a very small minority of white Clinton voters it's an interesting difference a significant majority of white Trump voters believe that White's face greater racial discrimination in the United States than blacks do now that is interesting but it's also interesting politically because that's a fictional problem if you are white and you believe that your problem is that you face Greater racism then black people do again that is not a problem that government can solve right it's an in it's an because it's a fictional problem now I'm trying this is not meant to be funny it's meant to define a different political style a Timescape in which government doesn't promise you a better future but instead regularly in a cyclical way mentions the things which irritate you which are important to you which cannot be solved the politics of doing rather than being if that seems imaginary consider the first year of the Trump administration there is no legislation which is going to make any of these kinds of voters it's not going to speak to what we would regard as their interests or even to an ideology right um the two major initiatives are take health insurance away from people which is precisely interesting because it's people who needed the health insurance most who were the swing group which brought him into office right that's the first one and the second one is tax regression right the second major policy initiative his tax regression precisely taking income away from poor people and giving it to richer people that's it in the landscape of the first year those are the only two things neither of those things can be thought of as creating a future right those things if anything only makes only make matters only make matters as one might see it worse so where does this where does this lead us to the first thing is I'm gonna referring to to where reception Dvorsky ended up it may not be that the thing we have to worry about is whether mr. Trump will fail I mean I don't think he's actually after success in the normal liberal sense of the word I think he's after failure I don't think they intend to make policy which makes life better for their constituents I think they're moving very consciously towards a different kind of policy um I think it's a mistake therefore to refer to this as populism because in American tradition anyway populism means you're against the elites but you still imagine the government is going to do something for you I think we're in a different territory I think we're in something which is more accurately characterized as say to populism where you you are against the elites right but you don't expect government to do anything for you in fact you kind of want government not to do anything because that reinforces your beliefs about the way the world works so where does this lead us this is my final word where does this lead us on the question of of comparison right so what I worry with when when people say well it's it doesn't line up well to the interwar cases there are difference between US and Nazi Germany what I were with is about that is the implicit conclusion that therefore everything's a-okay right everything's not a okay just because it's not February 1933 and thoughts of Germany I think the way to understand the comparisons is more as a source of normative action right I'm not gonna make that case now because it's the case I made in the book on tyranny it's not that where we are now is going to inevitably lead to czechoslovakia 1948 or you know germany in 1933 it's that those regime changes or the witnesses to those regime changes give us useful and timely advice about how to head off regime changes in in rule of law states I think the comparisons are most useful in that way most useful is a general guideline that globalization's can crash most of our comparisons are about the first globalization crash we're now in the middle we're now in the middle of number two what I think is that we can move away from democracy we can learn away we can learn from other people while we're doing didn't try to resist it even though where we're going is going to be somewhat different I mean as for me where I think we're going or where we seem to be going is is something like you know oligarchy with just enough fascism to get by as a kind of lubricant and and the and the way this would look would be not so much the creation of something new but just the dissolution of what we have right and not I completely agree with the point not mobilization but demobilization are only very occasional mobilization like very occasional marches very occasional violence but mostly the mobilization at atomization and what's worrying about that is that then you know implicitly the people who in some of these presentations were counted on to come save us right the economic elites whoever they are that the economic elites can be on the same side that you you can be an economic elite and you can think in you know environment Germany you can be the economic or in Italy you can be the economic elites and you can think rightly or wrong you can think wrongly we can outwit these guys maybe in America you're the economic elites and you think correctly you can outwit these guys but the outcome still isn't democracy right if you continue to have the kinds of drift that we're having with the outcome still to democracy it might not be anything that has another dramatic name but it's not necessarily democracy so the the point that I'm trying to make is that we're at this historical moment in the sense that not just that great things are at stake and that in that in the actions and Institute that we take now make a lot of difference but also historical in the sunset the way people are thinking about time is changing I mean if that tips if that if we tip from one way of thinking about time to another if I'm right that there is such a tipping point then we're closer to dramatic change than other kinds of indicators might suggest okay thanks thank you for those amazing presentations I think that probably we could re title this whole conference how scared should we be and this panel in particular you know sort of how terrified should we be and I think the reason we're seeing a lot of answers to that question that kind of vary across the spectrum from you know completely terrified to only mildly concerned is that we really don't know I mean who knows you know that's sort of the point no one knows how history is going to unfold we've certainly been surprised by it in the last year and not just in the last year so the answer to the question is not is not no and I like to tell my students you know I asked them a question I say that's a real question not a professor question you know we we really don't know and so if you're like me at all you you go back and forth in your own mind over even over the course of the day I wake up in the morning and I think oh you know it's gonna be okay and then by you know 3:00 in the afternoon I want to crawl under a pillow and just you know be one of these actors who's stayed away from Rome for the whole whistling period so so we have we do have kind of a range of responses and one of the inspirations for bright-line watch is that you know you look for signs of what is going to happen and the last thing you want to do is see the sign in the rear view mirror we don't want to be treating in retrospect at the signs we don't want to say well it really was the moment when Judge Garland didn't get a chance to be confirmed or it was the moment when you know fill in the blank when things really became irreversible and and democracy died or became severely eroded in the United States in a way that would be very very difficult to recuperate over any meaningful time period so I have some some questions I remember that you folks are writing down questions and filtering them to headman who's standing over to the side we have a few questions I like a two-door I'm going to take some moderator prerogative enact ask a few questions but I'm mindful of not taking too much time because I know that there will be more questions from the audience and that these were highly provocative and interesting presentations so just just a few questions for Nancy you and there the concept of distancing which which I took to mean and I've taken from your early earlier work to mean that even if my ally even if the person who I'm a elite political actor and someone who I'm in alliance with violates a critical norm or constitutional feature I will join the effort to punish that actor but I'm thinking about another kind of not distancing but let's call it constitutional action and I've I'm thinking about this in part because seeing our tutor this morning thinking about his fascinating retrospective considerations of what happened in Chile there were moments in the sort of slow-moving debacle of Chilean politics where it went from being a long-standing democracy to being a coup and a military dictatorship that lasted for 17 years and was extremely repressive and harsh there there's the sense of you know moments when say the Christian Democrats might have said it's good for us if this happens but it's really it's a it's a danger for Chilean democracy so that's a slightly different concept I think that's putting the long-term health and viability of the constitutional order ahead of immediate partisan advantage and I wonder whether in the cases you examined and more to the point in American politics today you see room for those kinds of moments of constitutional action on it your presentation makes me think that Trump is Fidesz and piece right that we're sort of we you walk through the actions that those governments amazingly parallel kind of template's as you described them and it makes me think that we're sort of only halfway there so the courts are politicized well you know Melania is not making judicial appointments yes or I guess it the real equivalent would be mrs. pence so the media in the United States is harassed but there aren't really formal constraints that have been imposed for the most part yet and the question then is again this this issue of what are the signposts and when do you see them in in Hungary and Poland 2010-2015 was it predictable were there you know forward-looking intellectuals journalists concerned citizens who saw these things coming or or were they really surprises questions for sort of this is sort of Susan and Tim but well Susan mostly I it's it's you both raised in your presentations the very important point that what we are observing is taking is unfolding in an international context and what we do influence is what other democracies do and likewise what they do influence is what we do and I guess I'm looking for any hope in that so instances in which we might learn or be or be forewarned or take actions drawing on international contemporary international events that that might help with the situation here there were I recall with the French election there was some speculation that it didn't help lepen to have a Trump out there that perhaps that gave that gave some french voters pause Daniel you it was interested in the so the the sort of problems of lines being crossed of norms being violated and the examples you gave were pretty much on the Republican side and I so our colleague Jacob hacker has written a lot about asymmetric polarization I wonder if you think this is an asymmetric problem or if they're symmetric more along the lines of what team or Quran was talking about this morning if there's a kind of symmetrical equilibrium that we've that was sort of a bad equilibrium that we've entered into Tim I am it's mind-blowing to think about the you know the sort of social construction of our sense of time and and and how that influences politics on the other hand I'm very struck by you know the make America great again narrative so that means he you know the the the the slogan is collectively sort of doing what you say we do as individuals thinking that there's a you know there's an adolescence or a teenage period of early 20s sort of in in our in our national so I'm equivalent to that in our national history that is a moment we want to get back to and that strikes me as setting up setting the government up for the setting Trump up for you know greatly disappointing his constituents for some of the reasons act reasons you gave and although I take what you say that perhaps you know the the the goal is not success on the Ute and the usual metrics that politicians use such as high popularity when the next election comes around in re-election so those are some questions maybe we could just get to them while while people in the audience are filtering out any other written questions that you want to have a so yeah I I'm delighted that you asked this question about distancing in the US and whether there could possibly be a different kind of distancing here because I I was struggling with that way myself as I was writing this the kind of distancing that we saw in interwar Europe where political elites were facing fascist parties were engaging in violence gave them a less ambiguous signal than we're getting here you know if mobs are killing people you know that wrong has been done if you're talking about violations of constitutional principles or norms that fight is is much much more ambiguous and so distancing under those circumstances is much harder and so frankly I'm still grappling with the idea that how that concept can be transferred to this kind of system but there's no doubt that battles over the constitutional norms in the courts would be a place to start that would be an arena for distancing but it's going to be much harder here except that I am assuming that money still has a huge amount of importance universe politics and that if you if if the most dynamic sectors of our economy can get behind some sort of distancing and realize that they don't need the nationalism especially or the xenophobia that's embodied in the particular kind of challenge we have which doesn't involve actual killing yeah then I think that that it is still possible but that the battles may take place in the court and that's part of a historical continuity but not completely so it was was what happened in Poland and Hungary predictable um it was I mean this is you know - this is basically the death of a democratic there's a chronicle the Democratic Death Foretold um and it was predictable because you know the leaders were very clear on this right they wanted not just to remake policies but to remake the institutions of polish and Hungarian democracy to better serve national interests right this was very much you know making Poland and Hungary great again secondly there was precedent right the institution's had not been impervious to this before there's been put the polarization of the judiciary in the past there was a previous attacks on the media this was just a much more concerted effort um and third I think will response important was that these are parliamentary systems and in times past these fairly fragile governing coalition's I will kept these parties from fully exercising their Prague and now in the absence of either in opposition or coalition partners they were able to do exactly what he said they would so serious question for me was what basically what's the hope from thinking about this isn't international events both u.s. you deserve in other countries in that other countries are affecting the US and that was a very difficult question I have lots of things that I might say I mean one thing to just note is part something that I don't think isn't a viewpoint that's it's going to be presented much at the conference which is sort of Mia culpa from some of the IR scholars with who are really promoting open economy politics Pro globalization stuff which is just that you know the the embedded liberal liberal liberal compromise that we knew about and we have known about for a very long time was not successfully implemented in the US and that that both economically and culturally maybe maybe a fault and is maybe something that policies prescriptions could deal with right their policy that others have have potentially thought about I guess the other thing that is not really hopeful but I think something that I skipped over in my remarks because I was 10 which has just said when I very much interested in how countries react to international pressure to look and act a certain way right and so some autocratic posturing that I think we are seeing now might be for short term sort of applause and political gain rather than like it might some of it might sound worse than it actually is which is not really that hopeful but I do think that there are incentives that that some leaders that we see throughout the world to act you know more more totalitarian more fascist more you know they sort of take these these dances that are that are quite extreme because they know they will get attention for taking those those dance which is not entirely good news but I think can be interpreted as something that is maybe slightly less nefarious and the extremely clever long-term long game autocrats that it's referencing who are able to abide by the rules of the game up right up until the moment in which they they break with them right so I think that that is a long term in the long term I'm more worried about that sort of strategy rather than the sort of splashy head like grab bean you know attacks in the media and that's not sort of thing which are consequential but I think not quite as nefarious as some of the other strategies that one could imagine and that are harder to observe unhappy yeah so two thoughts one directly on your question on the asymmetric polarization no I I mean I think that the record shows that it began on the right you know and you know people often date this the Gingrich revolution and kind of change tactics in Congress and Orrin Mann and Ornstein and the work on the US Congress have kind of shown this but it you know it's not it's not only Republicans who are vulnerable to this I mean Harry Reid's use of the filibuster in the early 2000s against Bush I mean this is clearly another instance of this and that I guess that's what's dangerous is that is that it mate you know it doesn't at some level you know begins on one side but then when it escalates and it becomes a kind of spiral that's exactly exactly the dangerous scenario even the dilemma of course is you know we should stay high-minded and continue act with four born before Barents in the face of somebody who's not I mean it's like going into a box you mean with one one hand tied behind your back does that really make sense and I guess my thought on that is that as long as there are Democratic channels still available that's the way to go I mean you know this is the right answer but that's that's that's kind of how I think about it I just wanted to say something also on the distancing and learning because I think there is actually something that can be learned about other cases of dis distancing and just you know just recently in the last two years I mean what's striking about the Austrian elections last year of presidential elections and the French presidential elections in both cases in the Austrian case the Catholics didn't make it to the second round and they and a lot of Catholic politicians endorsed the Green Party candidate for president in France fiown and endorsed that you know the right - right candidate endorsed McCrone rather than lepen and so both cases there's instances of distancing kind of on the right - against the far right and so we can learn from that and I think one of the interesting things is why in these countries this has happened the waters in the US this hasn't happened and I think part of the reason is in a in a multi-party system in Austria and a two tiers you know with a runoff system and in France there's a history of this and in both instances people were in Austria they refer back to Kurt Waldheim and say well you know we have learned from this in France there's the experience of father lepen and dealing with father lepen and so I think you know if the idea is that you know the u.s. we just didn't have we haven't had experience with this and there's possibility for learning and this is kind of where you know human action actually can make a difference so people could learn from we can learn from our mistakes and my guess is next time around you know hopefully people learned something right so there's something I learned from other cases as well okay so there were the the question about any hopeful things internationally and then the idea of making America great again it cannot lead to disappointment so internationally I'm just gonna take a step back and make the point that I think the winning the Cold War both the idea and the fact has turned out to be very poison chalice for us so the idea that therefore there were no alternatives I think stultified our political debate precisely about alternatives and made inequality much worse in this country in the last quarter century and the reality of the end of the Cold War was also bad for us because one of the reasons we had civil rights in the welfare state was to compete with not so much with the Soviets but to respond to their propaganda and without that challenge we drifted in another direction so that's just I mean that's just by way of making oneself conscious so that one can learn things well could we have learned I mean the book that I'm that I'm finishing now is about this it's about the last five or six years not starting from us but starting from Russia with the idea that most of the things which happened here which seem surprising to us are just more sophisticated versions of things which happened in other countries which we didn't recognize at the time so I mean here I'm 5050 there are a lot of things we could have learned for Russia and Ukraine between 2011 and 2015 but we didn't learn any of them um and the consequence was that in 2016 in my world at least it was the Russians and Ukrainians who were jumping up and down saying you know Trump is possible this is how it works in other people's worlds it would be the African Americans but there are plenty of segments of the pocket or the renegade Midwesterners right there were various demographics who said Trump was gonna win but the Russians and Ukrainians said he was gonna win and they had a reason no um people there are people there are positive exceptions like Peter pomerantsev in his book nothing is true but everything is possible which is you know on its surface a book about the media in Russia ends that book which concludes in 2014 ends that book by forecasting that that combination of media unreality and political authoritarianism is going to come to the UK and to United States and then there's brexit and then there's and then there's Trump so and then there are people like pet rock Rocco in Hungary you know who runs political capital who does who do Studies on directed unreality right foreign projections of unreality in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and those things are useful for us to read because the things that were happening gotten further in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and Hungary then here nevertheless started to turn up here in 2050 so yeah I mean analytically we can definitely learn from others and of course civil resistance is something that we can learn from other people right we can swallow our pride and realize that there's been a lot of successful civil resistance movements in other countries and that the social science on civil resistance is actually very mature the second point on whether some of these some of these voters will be disappointed because they imagine a better world in the past and they're not going to get it I don't think so and I'll tell you why I think I mean there there will be Republican voters will be disappointed with Trump but that's a different set of Republican voters there are two sets of Republican voters there are the ones who own house doesn't have money in the stock market and are the ones who don't own houses that don't have money in the stock market the ones who own houses are gonna be disappointed when the stock market crashes and that's not gonna have anything to do with these narratives that I'm talking about and I don't treat them as the critical bloc of voters because they went for Romney - right they did they didn't change anything but these folks the nine million people who voted for Obama and then for Trump or the people whose health is getting worse but voted for Trump the people in Michigan Wisconsin West Virginia Ohio Pennsylvania who swung the election these folks I don't think can be disappointed in that way that that's my point you know it's you want to be young again but you know at some level you're not going to be young again you'd like the person who tells you look great but you know at some level it's not true right and that's how that no look for you it's true you're like 15 but but I mean the general right you know it's not true and that's how this kind of politics works it's not by the delivery of goods it's by the regular delivery of affirmation as against someone else we're where white Republicans become in political science terms the slope the identitarian subalterns who are expecting to own the state but what they only expect from the state is that they own it that's it they're not expecting that it's going to do anything for them the other thing I want to say about making America great again that links back to the other point is that the make America great again does have a specific historical referent not for us for us it's about being young again that for mr. Trump it's about the 1930s or the 1920s it is a it's a revision of the 1930s as being a time where we didn't have a welfare state and where we didn't go to war against Nazi Germany right that's what America first means America first is Deutschland uber alles in English America first means we have more in common with Nazis than divides us and there is you know the fact they did they commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day by saying other people suffer besides the Jews which is like commemorating the fourth of July by talking about French independence I mean it's true that there are like other possible references in history but like the holiday is for one of them and there are a number of other examples of this how they're trying to undo a certain American myth and what it comes down to is that we used to think the 1930s were a bad time to be learned from and now we're being instructed not just in America this is international in Russia Poland Hungary and also implicitly by the fullness and island France said by the brexit movement in Britain we are we were being instructed the 1930s were a good time to which to which we should loop back I have some questions so this is a question for Susan Hyde and Anna G B while the EU is powerless not able and willing to move effectively against democratic erosion how successful have other regional organizations around the world been to fight forms of democratic erosion eg Mercosur a you just one question at a time uh yeah I think so I think we will see how far behind we get on that yeah yeah I mean the so there there's some empirical work on this that other people have done and and you know it's very hard to separate from the international environment entirely right so I don't know who I should but basically I I think that the the European Union and other regional organizations most of which in the world have a stated preference to support democracy have some ability to do something right now right I mean there's no reason why the US needs to be the only country that is willing to stand in defense of democracy and and increasingly I think others are stepping into that role what can they do you know not much but a little they can they can sort of make clear that this is a value that the groups of countries definitely support I don't know that they can do anything for the u.s. specifically the case that were most concerned with today but in smaller countries they certainly have made it clear that Jews are unacceptable for example this is already one of the biggest moments we've seen in recent memory on this front is that most countries that have coos many of them have been pro-democracy coos right that they're not against democratically elected leaders they're against basically authoritarian leaders we've seen a few of these but even those have been on pretty strict timelines for democratic elections following those so you know we'll see I'm not super optimistic that they're the saviors of us democracies certainly and I would say that knew the EU shizuka-san was familiar with isn't captain some ways responsible for the rights of the populace right because and they run up to you accession in 2004 there's basically this elite consensus among all mainstream parties that the EU was this fantastic good that premarket was wonderful and free trade and everything else have went together as a wonderful package and the only parties that criticizes consensus or the populist who at the time we're getting you know five percent of the vote and it's after the accession when it becomes apparent that neo maybe this there was some room more for criticism it's the populace who make hay out of every single some deleterious effect of free trade of the EU and so on and they're the ones who then come to power on the basis of this elite consensus and now anytime that the EU speaks against these parties they point to it as this is further severe negation of our national self interests that the EU is prompting so we now have to you know go to our loins and defend against the EU okay this is a question for the panel in general and Nancy bur mayo in particular you say that the tendency what can you say about the tendency of citizens to vote along personal political issues ie those heavily influenced by cultural predilection predilections such as gun control or abortion rather than in the interest of democratic norms not much so what one thing I think that we don't fully appreciate that is that at least going back to the 1930s earliest opinion surveys thirty percent of Americans are authoritarian I mean I think you know if you look at who you know father Coughlin had thirty percent of the vote George Wallace had thirty percent of the vote you know support in opinion polls McCarthy had up to forty percent support you know this is there's a kind of strand in the electorate that I mean you know I this is a bit provocative I you know I don't have details you know add an attitude data but these they supported authoritarians and so the issue is not what you know is the American electorate becoming more authoritarian the issue is how do you prevent that portion of the electorate and those tendencies from putting somebody in leadership positions and so until 2016 we had a presidential selection system that kept that served as a gatekeeping system and kept these kinds of dynamics out of the top leadership positions in the u.s. say a few words about that but I think the question is actually really important whoever asked it all right because it's forcing us yeah I think you're asking us to to think about these small these issues that seemed small in our abstract discussion of democracy but actually loom very large in the minds of individual voters and gun control is a wonderful example of that so political elites to really have to do more research on what makes certain issues salient and what makes certain issues Trump all of the other much more important issues like health care at the polls and motivate you know a trump vote and but I just I think social science can be an answer to that first of all identifying those voters and then targeting those voters and in an alliance with moderate politicians changing their minds and changing the salience of issues in people's heads I think it can be done with the media if we're just not doing it so do you disagree because I think you know gun control or abortion our democratic values right these are things that political parties have traditionally espoused I mean the Republican Party has espoused it and there's nothing you know there's nothing inherently wrong with being pro-life or promotion or non democratic about those stances right I think you know what I'm more concerned with is the the statistic that the Daniell brought up which is that it's not just the United States if you look at you know Poland or hungry or France in the last elections there's a steady 35 to 40 percent of the electorate that is willing time and time again to plump for authoritarian populist right-wing nativist etc to parties and so the question is how do you contain that yeah I don't think it's I don't think it's a question of persuading I think it's a question of containing well I certainly don't want to say that all of those positions of the abortion position is anti-democratic I'm just thinking about the salience of issues as someone approaches the polls so they can say this candidate like Trump for instance this candidate is clearly anti-democratic and repulsive on many issues but I really give priority to anti-abortion and he appeals to be an anti-abortion candidate so I'm going to vote for him that's the that's the sort of calculation that I think demands more research and more thought on the part of politicians but there's certainly not especially an issue like abortion that's not an anti-democratic issue I think so this is a question for Daniel's if lat but Tim Snyder might also reflect on it how and why were those norms of mutual tolerance and forbearance built in the 1880s through the 1900s what lessons does that period have for for for us today ya know it's it's a it's a tragic story in fact and then and we dig into this in our book and this is kind of more a discovery after admit as somebody who didn't spend my life studying American politics I think the norms of mutual toleration and forbearance were built on racial exclusion you know it's the end of Reconstruction 1890 the failure of a voting rights bill the lodge act that allowed Southern Democrats and northern Republicans to get along so you know what do we do about that I mean at some level these so-mei I hesitate even to call these Democratic columns these are norms of stability forbearance a mutual toleration so the real dilemma I think we fit in at some level one can think that you know the post 1965 rule there's one in which racial inclusion of making our political system finally democratic really after only 1965 I would argue has generated a backlash which now threatens those norms and so the dilemma that Democrats face you know with it with a small D is how do you reconcile these things can't can a political system be built that is both democratic inclusive as well as one that sustains these norms because historically they have not there's a tension that there's really a tension there's a just following from Daniels point we did the United States undertook two experiments more or less simultaneously and they were I don't think there were two experiments that go well together the first was the experiment which I think probably none of us would call into question of actually trying to make the country democratic by allowing its citizens to vote right 1965 is clearly an important step towards American democracy which again I would emphasize American democracy is and remains an aspiration but 1965 is an important step towards it but not long after that about 15 years after that we began the experiment of inequality which we are still in the midst of professorship gorski's charge of the gap which is from the economic policy something it's a that this shows that the gap growing from 1980 between productivity and wages right and the experiment that we've conducted on ourselves since 1989 about what what it means when you say there are no alternatives those two experiments have been happening simultaneously and so on the American Left when I talk to people on the American Left which I do know all the time there's this constant disagreement about whether it's a race or whether it's inequality and I just I don't see why we have to choose between those two things it's both and the way they work together is that if white people feel privileged then they react to inequality laughs and in a way which is louder and which might be more disruptive of the system than others but the inequality to the way to which they react is nevertheless real right so that the racism may be harder to get a handle on and the inequality may be more tractable by policy instruments so we have lots of questions unfortunately thing we're gonna have to do it just a couple of more so this is a question for Susan Hyde you emphasized the demand side of the information problem but what about the supply side how worried should we be about state media like Tennant sorry I don't think I read that right media tendencies like Fox and how do you compare to other cases like Venezuela or Italy yes state media tendencies media like tendencies I guess yeah I mean there's there's an abundant you know there's an abundance of information right now right it's not that people can't access accurate information it's it their self-selecting into inaccurate information and I think one can talk about the supply side of this issue as as a contributor to how we got here but I'm not sure that it matters in terms of where we go from here if that makes sense so once you get into a space in which people are just unwilling to look at the same sources of information and many people may be unwilling to consider objective information or know how to judge whether any piece of information is objective I feel like the demand side is just something we understand a lot less well than then we understand the supply side so because of the individual access to to the Internet to lots of sources of information and because of the lack of trust in all institutions I think also expert institutions right those individuals that might be perceived as providing expertise on any given topic and I think that confidence in their their opinions has also been undermined already we don't trust expertise we don't trust objectivity we don't trust science we don't you know all of these things are undermined that to me I mean I feel like just the demand side is is broken enough that fixing the supply side at the moment is not going to change that problem so I'm sort of evading the question of it okay last question and this is directed to Nancy burr Mayo but others on the panel may want to address it as well focus is on importance of distancing by elites and optimism is based on the idea that US democracy does not present an immediate threat via redistribution to elite interests yet earlier presentations levy she wore ski suggests that the lack of progressive redistribution is undermining confidence and democratic institutions is there an irreconcilable difference here over weathered redistribution counts as a threat or an asset to American democracy I think there's an important distinction between redistribution and actual property seizure and revolution and we are clearly in remedying the inequality that we talked about in an earlier panel would not require revolution if which require redistribution of the old social democratic component and I think that folks in Silicon Valley are probably not even worried about that I think they could handle it and I think that I haven't seen survey research but maybe some of you have done it I'd like very much to look at the values of the young entrepreneurs in the tech industry and to see whether they would in fact halt much more redistribution than we have I'd love to see that data I sense that there's probably more room there than we might anticipate and certainly more room than there was in fascist Italy yeah comments on that last yes there you go no but it's it's just fall short of revolution and it falls short of backing anti-democratic action on the part of truck so but it's basically buying social goodness sure well I want to thank our panelists very much for a fascinating session [Applause] [Music]

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 27,409

Rating: 4.6373334 out of 5

Keywords: Yale Program on Democracy, Bright Line Watch, Democracy, United States, Julia Azari, Emily Bazelon, Nancy Bermeo, John Carey, David Frum, Tom Ginsburg, Joe Goldman, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Gretchen Helmke, Aziz Huq, Susan Hyde, Timur Kuran, Frances Lee, Margaret Levi, Steve Levitsky, Beatriz Magaloni, Yascha Mounk, Brendan Nyhan, Adam Przeworski, Ian Shapiro, Timothy Snyder, Susan Stokes, Arturo Valenzuela, Daniel Ziblatt

Id: mps4RM04J9U

Length: 107min 49sec (6469 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2017