Making Sense - Sam Harris - #274 — The Future of American Democracy

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris.

00:00:25.260 Okay, well in today's episode we are presenting audio from a live event we did on Zoom a couple

00:00:33.000 of weeks back, which was free for podcast subscribers, and over 9,000 of you joined

00:00:39.960 us live in the middle of the day, and most of you stayed for the full two hours, which

00:00:46.140 was really great.

00:00:48.200 Anyway, upon re-listening to this, the conversation was even better than I had realized, and I'm

00:00:55.000 very happy to get a chance to present it to a wider audience here.

00:00:59.860 The event was inspired by a recent issue of The Atlantic magazine, which had several articles

00:01:05.700 focusing on the ongoing threat to American democracy posed by the widely believed lie that

00:01:13.380 the 2020 election was stolen.

00:01:16.600 Something like 60% of Republicans believe this, and needless to say, that has consequences.

00:01:25.800 So to walk us through this grim situation, I enlisted the help of four Atlantic writers,

00:01:33.560 Anne Applebaum, David Frum, George Packer, and Barton Gelman.

00:01:38.700 Anne Applebaum has been on the podcast before.

00:01:42.880 She is a journalist and prize-winning historian, a staff writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow

00:01:49.600 at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, where she co-leads a project on 21st century

00:01:56.280 disinformation, and co-teaches a course on democracy.

00:01:59.720 Her books include Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine, Iron Curtain, The Crushing of Eastern

00:02:07.180 Europe, 1944-1956, and Gulag, A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.

00:02:17.440 Her most recent book is the New York Times bestseller, Twilight of Democracy, which is an essay

00:02:22.800 on democracy and authoritarianism.

00:02:24.780 She was a Washington Post columnist for 15 years, and a member of the editorial board.

00:02:31.580 She's also been the deputy editor of The Spectator, and a columnist for several British newspapers.

00:02:37.460 Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Wall Street

00:02:42.140 Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and many other publications.

00:02:48.360 David Frum has also been on the podcast several times before.

00:02:51.200 He is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and the author of Trumpocalypse, Restoring American

00:02:57.980 Democracy, which is his 10th book.

00:03:01.400 David spent most of his career in conservative media and research institutions, including the

00:03:06.620 Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

00:03:09.800 He is a past chairman of Policy Exchange, the leading center-right think tank in the UK,

00:03:15.140 and a former director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

00:03:19.680 He also famously served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush.

00:03:25.060 David holds a B.A. and M.A. in history from Yale, and a law degree from Harvard.

00:03:31.040 George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about American politics, culture,

00:03:36.360 and foreign affairs.

00:03:37.120 He is the author, most recently, of the book Last Best Hope, America in Crisis and Renewal,

00:03:44.820 which I'm reading now, and it's really a great book.

00:03:47.700 He's also the author of The Unwinding, An Inner History of New America, which won the National

00:03:53.100 Book Award, and he also wrote a biography of Richard Holbrook, which also won awards, and

00:03:59.260 he's written seven other books.

00:04:00.660 And finally, Barton Gelman.

00:04:04.400 Bart is also a staff writer at The Atlantic, and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation

00:04:09.320 in New York.

00:04:10.560 He's the author, most recently, of Dark Mirror, Edward Snowden, and the American Surveillance

00:04:16.320 State.

00:04:17.300 He also wrote a biography on Dick Cheney.

00:04:19.880 And he's won no fewer than three Pulitzer Prizes, as well as an Emmy for documentary filmmaking.

00:04:26.100 Anyway, as you'll hear, I really just had to get out of the way and let my guests talk.

00:04:33.640 Any imputation of partisanship on their part makes no sense when you consider their biographies.

00:04:40.840 I actually don't know the politics of Bart and George offhand.

00:04:46.380 Not that it would really matter, but Anne and David have been quite esteemed in center-right

00:04:54.600 circles, I think, for all of their political lives.

00:05:00.140 There are some disagreements between them, but generally they're on the same page with

00:05:05.560 respect to the sordid history of how we got here and the problems that really must be solved.

00:05:13.560 I guess the question could be asked why I didn't have someone on the panel who was a contrarian

00:05:17.900 on important points, and therefore someone who could help make it a proper debate.

00:05:22.920 However, the truth is, on this topic, I really would view that as a waste of precious time.

00:05:32.140 I have no interest in hearing from someone at this point who thinks that the 2020 election

00:05:37.280 was stolen, or thought that the attack on the Capitol on January 6th last year was a non-event.

00:05:45.220 I raise points of this sort so that my guests can try to perform an exorcism on all that is

00:05:52.440 happening in the Republican echo chamber.

00:05:55.320 But as to what happened here and the lies told about it, there's really not much of substance

00:06:03.660 that we can be in doubt about.

00:06:05.720 And any real skepticism about the general picture here is quite ludicrous at this point.

00:06:12.700 So, I view this conversation much more as a PSA about an ongoing emergency than as a proper

00:06:21.260 topic for debate.

00:06:23.160 I mean, to use an analogy that often occurs to me, imagine you're on an airplane that's

00:06:28.740 about to land, and there's a commotion in the cockpit, and the door swings open, and you

00:06:36.480 can plainly see that things are definitely not okay.

00:06:41.140 You catch a glimpse of someone lying on the floor, and someone who's not dressed like a

00:06:46.040 pilot appears to be randomly flipping switches.

00:06:49.740 And someone purporting to be the pilot just came over the PA system and told you to stay

00:06:54.540 in your seats because the Jews have removed the plane's landing gear.

00:06:58.380 At that point, I don't want to hear from someone who thinks that this behavior might yet prove

00:07:08.180 to be normal, or that perhaps some Jew somewhere may have sabotaged a plane, and we should talk

00:07:16.140 about that.

00:07:17.020 That seems worth looking into, doesn't it?

00:07:19.060 No, what is absolutely clear is that what is happening right before our eyes is not remotely

00:07:29.380 okay.

00:07:31.040 And that's the situation we have been in for several years now, with a Republican Party that

00:07:37.660 has morphed into a personality cult, enthralled to a conman and crackpot who just happened to

00:07:44.440 have been president, and the plane that we really must land is to have a peaceful, orderly, and

00:07:52.320 legitimate presidential election in 2024.

00:07:56.360 And there is no reason, currently, to think that that will be easy to do.

00:08:01.900 That cockpit door is wide open, and it's just chaos in there.

00:08:07.900 Now, as this is another PSA, this episode is not paywalled.

00:08:12.220 As always, if you want to support what I'm doing here, and generally listen to full-length

00:08:16.660 episodes of the podcast, you can subscribe at samharris.org.

00:08:21.040 Actually, the last episode on the Joe Rogan controversy was also a PSA.

00:08:25.940 Perhaps I should say a few words about that, because I heard from thousands of you, in fact.

00:08:32.320 And the most common response I got was really enormous gratitude for what I said there.

00:08:38.300 Some of you hated it, of course, but there was a tremendous amount of thanks expressed for

00:08:46.100 what I said about Rogan himself, but more importantly, for what I said about racism and the ethics of

00:08:52.980 apology.

00:08:55.060 And almost everyone who commented seemed to think that I had really stuck my neck out in a way

00:09:01.560 that's become all too rare among academics and journalists.

00:09:06.060 And many of you explicitly thanked me for my bravery.

00:09:10.140 Well, I'll let you in on a little secret.

00:09:13.420 There's not much bravery involved at this point.

00:09:17.360 Now, if I worked at a university, or at any institution where I could be fired,

00:09:21.920 yes, then that would have been a very brave and even reckless podcast to drop.

00:09:26.140 If I had to worry about whether I'd be able to pay my mortgage or afford college for my

00:09:31.420 daughters, because a Twitter mob might successfully get me fired, or dropped by my sponsors, or

00:09:38.180 demonetized on YouTube, well then yes, I would probably hesitate before telling you what I

00:09:43.440 honestly think on certain topics.

00:09:46.220 And that's why when many of you ask me about engaging culture war issues, I never offer blanket

00:09:52.020 recommendations.

00:09:52.760 And I certainly don't say that everyone should take the risks that I take.

00:09:57.320 Because the truth is, I'm not taking much of a risk now.

00:10:01.820 I have deliberately built my platform so that I don't have to worry about these things.

00:10:06.820 Or at least I have to worry less than almost anyone in media.

00:10:10.980 And that's why the Making Sense podcast is a subscription business.

00:10:14.540 And I don't rely on ads.

00:10:16.980 And that's why I don't depend in any important way on platforms like YouTube.

00:10:20.500 Because my goal for years now has been to remove any incentives that could keep me from being

00:10:27.680 able to tell you what I really think.

00:10:30.860 And the only thing that makes that possible is you.

00:10:34.900 The fact that a sufficient number of you not just listen to the podcast, but support it

00:10:40.920 directly by subscribing.

00:10:42.480 That is the secret to my apparent bravery.

00:10:47.000 Those of you who actually purchase monthly or annual subscriptions have given me greater

00:10:52.100 job security than almost anyone on earth.

00:10:56.320 Now, that may sound like an exaggeration, but it's not.

00:11:00.840 And it's not a question of wealth.

00:11:03.040 I mean, I know billionaires and movie stars who have to be way more concerned about cancellation

00:11:09.260 than I do.

00:11:10.980 And it's because they really are much more vulnerable than I am to having a comparatively

00:11:16.200 small number of people decide to pull the plug on their careers.

00:11:20.860 I mean, just think about it.

00:11:22.280 I have no sponsors and no boss.

00:11:25.960 There's no board of directors who can tell me that I can't do this podcast tomorrow.

00:11:31.360 Or that it might be better if I just avoided certain topics.

00:11:34.160 So, it really is not about my personal courage.

00:11:39.260 It's about our having built a platform together.

00:11:43.080 So, once again, I want to thank all of you who support the podcast.

00:11:47.400 When I say that I couldn't do this without you, I truly mean it.

00:11:53.080 Okay.

00:11:54.580 And now I bring you an all-too-timely conversation about the future of American democracy.

00:12:00.060 I hope you find it useful.

00:12:04.160 I guess I should say that if we wind up crashing Zoom for some reason, we will apologize to

00:12:14.300 the audience and then just re-sign in privately because I don't know what the bandwidth limits

00:12:21.360 are here.

00:12:22.440 I don't mean to disparage Zoom here, but anything's possible.

00:12:25.980 This is my normal book event, you know, six and a half, seven thousand.

00:12:30.340 So, I'm used to Zoom working here.

00:12:33.100 We're getting to Madison Square Garden, I think, here.

00:12:36.380 All right.

00:12:36.580 Well, I'm going to start because I value your time, the four of you.

00:12:43.640 And so, just to be clear to the audience, I mean, this is not primarily considered a video

00:12:49.440 event.

00:12:50.060 I love that you're all joining us to watch us record a podcast.

00:12:53.200 But the final product here will be a podcast.

00:12:55.300 So, there may be some moments where we retake things just to get clean audio if we're talking

00:13:00.220 over each other.

00:13:01.040 And I will also introduce the four of you more fully in my intro to the podcast.

00:13:06.700 But I think we should just go around briefly here.

00:13:09.120 As I was saying offline, this conversation is born of my having read two articles in the

00:13:17.080 most recent issue of The Atlantic, the January-February issue, which is focused on the fundamental

00:13:22.920 threat to American democracy that is posed by Trump and the Republican Party at this point.

00:13:28.480 And, you know, this will be a controversial claim that I want us to shore up any way we

00:13:33.740 can over the next couple of hours.

00:13:36.080 But the two articles were Barton Gelman's article, Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun, and George

00:13:43.980 Packer's article, Are We Doomed?

00:13:46.540 So, which I want to introduce, let's start with Bart.

00:13:48.900 Bart, thank you for joining us.

00:13:51.260 Barton is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

00:13:53.800 I will read your bona fides elsewhere.

00:13:58.820 Barton, thanks for being here.

00:14:00.520 Pleasure.

00:14:01.260 And George Packer, you have written several wonderful books.

00:14:05.460 As I was saying, I was reading your latest, The Last Best Hope.

00:14:10.200 You've won a National Book Award.

00:14:12.640 I also realize I studied with your mom in college.

00:14:17.460 I just discovered this in reading your bio.

00:14:19.160 So your mom, Nancy Packer, taught an amazing course on the short story.

00:14:23.920 Which I remember fondly.

00:14:25.520 So we have that connection.

00:14:27.840 That's great.

00:14:28.120 I'll tell her.

00:14:28.860 She's 96, but it'll still make her very happy.

00:14:31.580 Amazing.

00:14:32.620 Well, then tell her.

00:14:33.600 I can't imagine she would remember this even if she weren't 96.

00:14:37.520 But I remember going into her office, and I remember her consternation upon learning that

00:14:43.460 I was dropping out of school to go to India and recapitulate the 60s for myself.

00:14:48.340 And I had to tell her because I was resigning editing the literary magazine.

00:14:54.220 And it was on her to figure out who my replacement was going to be.

00:14:57.300 And I remember the look on her face where I was clearly making a wrong turn into the wilderness

00:15:01.240 of self-absorption.

00:15:03.140 And so just know that I'm a great disappointment to your mother.

00:15:06.420 I've seen that look every day of my life.

00:15:08.240 I don't know what it looks like.

00:15:11.340 So, yeah.

00:15:13.100 And we're also joined by Anne Applebaum, who's been on the podcast before.

00:15:17.520 And really, Anne, you're one of the highest signal and lowest noise people I've ever come

00:15:25.180 across, in particular on the topic of the threat of authoritarianism and the ubiquity

00:15:32.160 of propaganda.

00:15:33.700 So thank you for being here.

00:15:35.060 And it's great to talk to you again.

00:15:37.640 Thanks a lot.

00:15:38.020 Thanks for having me.

00:15:39.160 And last but not least, we have David Frum.

00:15:42.780 Also, I should have said Anne has also won a Pulitzer, at least.

00:15:47.520 I'm sure many other things.

00:15:49.060 She's a historian.

00:15:50.400 David, do you have a Pulitzer I need to worry about or a National Book Award?

00:15:53.360 No, this is getting a little awkward, actually.

00:15:55.160 All right, good.

00:15:55.600 Well, you're pristine.

00:15:57.100 You're like me.

00:15:57.640 You don't have either of those debauched awards.

00:16:00.520 So this is wonderful to be joining you here.

00:16:04.260 But thank you, David, for helping to organize this because you helped to quarterback this.

00:16:08.580 And you are a very frequent guest on the podcast.

00:16:11.360 So good to see you again.

00:16:13.000 Thank you.

00:16:13.260 As I said offline, I view David and Anne as helping me in extracting as much as I can

00:16:20.040 possibly get on this topic from Bart and George, in addition to contributing everything

00:16:26.600 they have to say on it.

00:16:27.760 I just I didn't want to drop the ball here.

00:16:30.420 And, you know, the two of them know as much as anyone about the topics we're going to discuss.

00:16:35.580 David is further distinguished in perhaps being the only person on Earth who has a greater

00:16:41.820 case of Trump derangement syndrome than I do, just by a touch.

00:16:46.220 We agree with, I think, on all points there.

00:16:49.440 So let's begin.

00:16:51.360 I want us to talk about the future, you know, that where this is headed, this conversation

00:16:58.120 is really summarized by a quotation that I have from Bart summarizing his article.

00:17:05.900 He wrote elsewhere.

00:17:07.180 He said, January 6th was the initial milestone, not the last, in the growth of the first violent

00:17:14.280 mass movement in American politics since the 1920s.

00:17:17.440 And the Republicans have made up their minds to steal the 2024 presidential election and are

00:17:22.600 well on their way to manufacturing the means.

00:17:24.500 There's a clear and present danger that the loser of the next election will be certified

00:17:30.120 president-elect with all the chaos and bloodshed that that portends.

00:17:34.180 So that's where we're headed.

00:17:35.740 I want us to see if we are still that concerned.

00:17:39.140 This has been at least a month or so since Bart wrote that.

00:17:43.200 But I want us to try to establish what has already happened.

00:17:46.760 Because my concern here is that, you know, out here in Podcastistan, there is quite a bit

00:17:53.920 of controversy over what has happened.

00:17:56.480 And the lies and misinformation about the past have taken hold to a degree that I find

00:18:03.520 a source of considerable concern and even despair at this point.

00:18:08.280 So here's just to give you the cartoon version, which is not too far from what is in fact believed.

00:18:14.060 I think many, many millions of people believe, and it's not just Republicans by any means,

00:18:19.740 that virtually everything that has been said about Trump by people like ourselves has proved

00:18:26.300 to be an exaggeration, right?

00:18:28.000 That there's, you know, he was really, he was a crass businessman who shook things up.

00:18:31.900 But all of the calumny about him, and certainly every claim that he was a fundamental threat

00:18:38.360 to democracy or to our institutions, amounted to just a blizzard of partisan lies.

00:18:45.160 And, you know, the Russiagate hoax was just all hoax.

00:18:48.280 The Steele dossier vitiates everything.

00:18:51.380 The Mueller report never found anything.

00:18:53.740 The election may, in fact, have been stolen, or at least there's reason to believe that there

00:18:57.600 were significant irregularities, and Trump was totally within his rights to challenge it.

00:19:02.060 The significance of January 6th has been totally exaggerated.

00:19:06.780 Those were just, you know, there's just hysterical libtards on CNN and the New York Times who've

00:19:13.240 been calling it an insurrection or an attempted coup.

00:19:17.380 But they were, in truth, it was just a bunch of goofballs taking selfies, and there was nothing

00:19:22.580 really fundamental was at stake.

00:19:24.720 And so what we are reacting to in this conversation, and any prognostications on that basis, is just

00:19:33.140 a kind of grotesque media confection that is being amplified based on just because it gets

00:19:41.020 clicks, essentially.

00:19:42.060 You know, this is what is good for, this is the lifeblood of CNN and the New York Times

00:19:45.340 at this point.

00:19:46.260 So I want us to try to perform an exorcism on that set of claims.

00:19:51.720 And perhaps we'll start with you, Bart.

00:19:54.760 Tell me where you think we are with respect to all of that, and then we'll kind of go

00:19:59.240 around and everyone can also, we can fill in the gaps here.

00:20:03.080 Well, yeah, I mean, all of that needs to be exercised because none of it is right.

00:20:10.260 The, I mean, Russiagate was not a hoax.

00:20:13.140 There were extensive efforts by the Russians to help Trump win the election.

00:20:20.660 Trump and his people solicited those and welcomed them.

00:20:25.340 And it did not rise to the level of conspiracy.

00:20:31.260 But the Mueller report showed very clearly a roadmap to a successful prosecution for obstruction

00:20:38.140 of justice.

00:20:39.360 It named multiple occasions on which Trump could be said to have obstructed justice.

00:20:45.860 And at least three of them met all the elements of the crime.

00:20:50.560 And you can go down the rest of the list.

00:20:53.600 January 6th was a, it was part of a broad and vigorously fought attempt to overthrow the election.

00:21:03.700 And we're learning more, even in recent days, since I wrote my piece about the extent to

00:21:09.560 which Trump was trying to get people who had theoretically the power to do things, to do

00:21:17.320 those things that would have overturned the election.

00:21:19.500 Most recently, we're learning more about proposals that were discussed with Trump and that he solicited

00:21:28.000 further information about that would have seized the voting machines.

00:21:31.960 I mean, an absolute sort of classic dictator move in which he was going to have, in various

00:21:39.040 iterations, either the Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security or the

00:21:44.100 National Guard, go around the country and seize voting machines in at least six states and

00:21:50.300 quote unquote rerun the election under sort of national security establishment procedures yet

00:21:59.240 to be named.

00:22:00.380 I mean, this is at the same time that he is trying to get Mike Pence to either simply declare

00:22:07.720 him the victor on January 6th or to throw away enough votes that the election would fail

00:22:17.680 and would go to the House of Representatives for resolution.

00:22:21.660 I mean, January 6th was an attempt by a violent mob to stop the congressional count of the electoral

00:22:30.700 vote, the final stage, the final sort of irrevocable moment in deciding the election.

00:22:36.720 And it was done at the beck and call and instigation of the president.

00:22:41.780 I mean, it couldn't be more serious.

00:22:44.620 Mm hmm.

00:22:45.620 George?

00:22:46.060 George, I completely agree with Bart, and I've learned a lot from Bart's reporting on

00:22:51.220 this, just how carefully Trump read the situation he found himself in after the election and proceeded

00:23:00.160 down the the one path that might have overthrown the results of the election, which is to say

00:23:06.560 to decertify the state results and the electors who were going to be sent to be counted in Congress.

00:23:14.700 Trump understood that he needed to delay the count on January 6th in order to find the

00:23:21.980 enough corrupt state officials, state legislatures, secretaries of state, county election board members

00:23:30.700 to to throw the election his way.

00:23:35.120 And that was the way that Bart outlined in an earlier piece that Trump could could throw it

00:23:42.140 all into confusion. And then the confusion itself would become the grounds for him and key allies

00:23:50.800 to declare that that he was the winner. And that's what he tried to do. He tried very hard.

00:23:57.300 He didn't succeed, partly because of the what you might call the civic virtue of some of those

00:24:04.600 state officials and secretaries of state and legislators and county officials. And now what

00:24:12.140 we see happening, Bart again, has written about this in his most recent piece is, again, a concerted

00:24:18.280 attempt by Trump and his allies to target those offices that most people have never even heard of

00:24:25.020 and fill them with loyalists who next time around can be counted on to to do the corrupt thing that

00:24:32.700 others were unwilling to do in Georgia and in Michigan and in Arizona and in Pennsylvania last time.

00:24:39.660 So I don't know what more evidence anyone needs. And the problem is this is the the exorcism doesn't

00:24:46.740 work if the degree of what you might call tribal irrationality is so great that it's simply not

00:24:54.660 subject to the kind of argument and evidence that that Bart brought in those pieces and that we're

00:25:00.520 bringing here today. And that's where we are. My piece was about the failure of imagination,

00:25:05.820 which has been Trump's great friend all along. Simply the inability of most Americans to imagine

00:25:11.820 that we could have a president as corrupt and indifferent to laws and norms and is prepared

00:25:17.520 to trash the Constitution and even the majority will as Trump. We couldn't imagine January 6th.

00:25:23.320 The intelligence agencies could not imagine January 6th. That's what General Mark Milley said afterward.

00:25:28.840 We have to imagine this because if we can't imagine it, we are a big step closer to it happening

00:25:35.120 in next time successfully. So what I tried to do in my piece was simply lay out, you know, not

00:25:41.960 convincingly to me, but just start out to think what might it look like? What could happen?

00:25:48.020 Is it going to be violent? What form will the violence take? How will the violence begin?

00:25:52.040 Or will we turn into a kind of sullen, cynical, formerly democratic populace rather like Russia

00:26:00.740 that doesn't believe anything, that doesn't believe anyone, that thinks the media lies,

00:26:05.220 the politicians lie, so the hell with it all, and we withdraw? And I think that is at least as likely

00:26:10.660 a scenario following the next presidential election as outright mass violence. But mass violence is

00:26:19.440 not only possible, it's—we saw a very vivid foreshadowing of it on January 6th.

00:26:27.280 Yeah, I mean, there's several things here that are especially troubling. One is the degree to which

00:26:33.400 our institutions still rely on the integrity of individuals, right? You can't take the monkey out

00:26:41.360 of the apparatus here. And if just a few people had decided they were Trumpists to the core,

00:26:48.600 things could have happened very differently. And as you say, that's being—the ground for that is

00:26:53.180 being prepared next time. So some of this sounds like a conspiracy theory, right? Some of it happens

00:27:00.140 behind closed doors. I mean, the evidence is there for those who want to see it at this point. But

00:27:05.400 I'm amazed by a phenomenon that, David, you've pointed out a lot, really every time you've spoken

00:27:12.600 about Trump, which is that some of the most egregious things he ever does, he does in plain

00:27:18.580 view. I mean, there is no debate about the fact, for instance, that he would not commit to a peaceful

00:27:24.460 transfer of power. I mean, that alone, that one detail, which is attested to by, you know, endless

00:27:30.720 evidence—I mean, he was given multiple chances to do this on television, and he declined—that alone

00:27:37.740 should have alerted us that we were in uncharted territory, and that this was an explicit threat

00:27:44.220 to our democracy. David, I just want to bring you in here to reflect on that.

00:27:48.120 Let me start by trying to answer the first question you posed in a way that I maybe will be—make it

00:27:53.620 more vivid what we're talking about. When my late father-in-law returned home from Korea, he'd had

00:27:58.000 some distinction there. He was invited to a party at the house of a general officer. He was young and

00:28:03.020 didn't drink in a party full of people who were older and did drink, and he got bored. So he

00:28:07.340 wandered away from the party and wandered into the general's private study. On his desk, the general

00:28:11.900 had a luger, which he had brought back from the European theater. Father-in-law was interested in

00:28:17.020 weapons, picked it up, and the gun discharged. It was loaded. The bullet went through the general's

00:28:23.620 study, went through the wall of the other room, and embedded itself in the dining room.

00:28:28.320 And my father-in-law, it was like the worst three seconds, but worse than anything he'd been in two

00:28:34.620 wars. This was the worst moment of anything. And he walked out, and everybody was laughing

00:28:40.020 hysterically because the bullet had missed. They were all drunk. They thought it was funny.

00:28:44.740 No big deal. He told that story for 50 or 60 years because it was a big deal. The fact that the

00:28:49.560 bullet doesn't hit anybody doesn't mean the gun wasn't loaded, the gun wasn't fired. We got real

00:28:57.100 lucky. We got real lucky. We got luckier than we deserved. But the fact is, the president of the

00:29:02.460 United States, having lost an election, tried through, as Barth describes, a complicated scheme,

00:29:08.040 and then by violence, and the two interlocked in a lot of ways we can talk about, to overturn the

00:29:12.300 election. That's incredible. That's just incredible. And we're now so used to it, as with so many things

00:29:18.780 with Trump. You know, as you say, it was public. There have been presidents, and there have been

00:29:23.980 certainly officials in the United States who have taken bribes. And when they have done so,

00:29:28.980 they've usually made some effort to conceal the bribe-taking, made some effort to cover it up.

00:29:34.740 The idea that you say, okay, my idea for taking bribes is I'm going to go to, I'm going to acquire

00:29:38.940 a building on Pennsylvania Avenue and put my name on it, and put a red carpet down to the street,

00:29:44.200 and cars will come up, and people will come out, and they will put money on the counter for me,

00:29:48.980 the president. And I will tell everybody, I will tell literally everybody, I will tell the New York

00:29:52.880 Times, I will tell National Review, I will tell everybody, that you don't get a meeting with me

00:29:56.880 unless you've given me the money first at my building on Pennsylvania Avenue, who will say,

00:30:01.260 well, I guess he seems to have a clear conscience. It can't be so bad.

00:30:04.880 Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. It's just this astonishing social phenomenon that if you have no shame,

00:30:11.260 and your indiscretions are big enough, a different physics takes over, and you are really kind of

00:30:19.260 beyond... One, people just can't keep track of how fully you're trespassing on various norms, but it's...

00:30:28.060 Let me add a PS. I find oftentimes the way you have to deal with this is through the building up of

00:30:32.560 minute details rather than the big theoretical statement. Here's one of these little stories.

00:30:36.720 So I'm now going to forget which year the Trump presidency this was, but Vice President Pence

00:30:41.900 made a visit to Ireland. He was stopping there on the course of another mission. And he had meetings

00:30:49.860 in Dublin with the Dublin government. He opted to stay at the Trump golf course on the other side

00:30:57.780 of the island. Dublin faces toward England. He stayed toward the Atlantic. And in order to go to his

00:31:03.320 meetings, he had to take military transportation from the Atlantic Ocean to the English side of

00:31:10.240 Ireland in order to have his meetings at a cost of the taxpayer of something like a million dollars.

00:31:14.760 All of this in order that the United States could put a few thousand dollars into Donald Trump's

00:31:19.980 personal pocket because there are hotels, believe it or not, in Dublin. And that was one day. That was

00:31:25.700 one day. And then there was the next day. And then there was the next. And so the accumulation of

00:31:29.460 corruption had the effect. Because these things are often technically illegal or certainly inappropriate

00:31:36.100 or certainly frowned upon, you have to, every day, the president had to tinker with the structure of

00:31:40.620 law in order to cope with the thing that he was fundamentally about, which was stealing from the

00:31:45.980 taxpayer.

00:31:47.180 Well, so Anne, you obviously have a very good view of all of this, but you have a perspective

00:31:54.060 internationally that might be interesting to bring in, if not here at some point, because

00:31:58.800 the unraveling of our democracy and our commitment to democracy is of a piece with what's happening

00:32:04.660 elsewhere. I want to bring you in here. How do you see the current state of the misinformation

00:32:10.300 in our society that is allowing fully half of Americans to not follow the plot here?

00:32:17.060 So, yes, I think the international perspective is important in one sense, because if you look around

00:32:24.520 the world, and you look at the way in which democracies fall in the modern era, you know, we all have this

00:32:31.100 idea that there are going to be tanks in the street, and there's a lieutenant colonel in the presidential

00:32:35.560 palace, and he shoots a gun in the air. And, you know, that's how the coup d'etat happens. When we think of

00:32:41.720 coup d'etat, we have this kind of 1960s, 1970s vision of it. In fact, most democracies fail, and I mean

00:32:49.020 Venezuela, I mean Russia, I mean Hungary, it's happening in other places now as well, because

00:32:55.600 elected officials who are unscrupulous take advantage of the current political system, they change the

00:33:03.240 constitution, they ignore the rule of law, they ignore the sense of the law, and they seek to remain

00:33:08.660 in power illegally or immorally, one way or the other. And that's the, it's very common, it happens

00:33:15.220 over and over, and much of what Trump did, and much of what he continues to do, is familiar from other

00:33:22.260 times and places. Let me just focus on one piece of it, and I think everybody has alluded to this one

00:33:28.020 way or another. This was the, you know, the method by which Trump, after the 2020 election, the method by

00:33:34.500 which he started to attack the validity of the vote. If you remember, it wasn't just one form of,

00:33:41.180 you know, the vote is rigged. It was voter machines not working in Arizona. It was people cheating in

00:33:47.300 Georgia. It was, you know, dead people voting somewhere else. There was a theory about the

00:33:53.340 Chinese having intervened in the machines. There was a theory about the Venezuelans having something to

00:33:59.380 do with the machines. The voting machine companies themselves were attacked. Some of them sued.

00:34:05.040 And the cumulative effect of all of these things, I mean, of course they were, as Bart said,

00:34:09.980 they were part of a tactic, you know, to try to get people to stop and consider whether the election

00:34:15.660 was legal and to try to get people in particular states to change the rules by which the votes were

00:34:21.420 counted. But it had another effect, which I believe was also deliberate, which was to do what Steve

00:34:28.100 Bannon once described as flooding the zone with shit. And this is something that authoritarians

00:34:33.800 and dictators in other places also know about. If you tell one lie once in a while, you know,

00:34:39.960 then people can argue about it. It can be proved or disproved. If you tell hundreds of lies, if you

00:34:46.300 tell them over and over again, different lies from different directions every day, what you create is

00:34:52.020 cynicism and nihilism and confusion and belief that no truth can ever be known. A great example

00:34:59.020 of how this was done was, if you remember the Malaysian plane that crashed in Eastern Ukraine

00:35:03.860 in 2014. If you remember that, it was actually shot down by Russians. We know exactly how it was done.

00:35:09.720 They thought it was Ukrainian plane and so on. What was the reaction of the Russian state after this

00:35:15.300 happened? The Russian state media put out literally dozens of explanations for why the plane was shut

00:35:21.220 down, ranging from the totally improbable. You know, there were dead people on the plane in

00:35:26.140 Amsterdam and they took it down on purpose to discredit, you know, or the plane had flown too

00:35:34.240 close to another plane. It was trying to shoot down Putin's plane, whatever. There were dozens and

00:35:38.580 dozens of explanations. And the point of that was to make sure that Russians had developed the attitude,

00:35:44.740 which I heard one of them say in an interview in Moscow a few days later, namely, we don't know

00:35:51.160 what happened and we will never know what happened because it's unknowable. And Trump uses this same

00:35:57.480 tactic. He repeatedly lies. He makes repeated different explanations for how and why the election

00:36:03.780 was rigged. And he creates a sense of falsehood and a sense of unknowability. And he does this,

00:36:10.500 of course, he's assisted in doing this by a huge range of right-wing propagandists,

00:36:16.080 from Steve Bannon to Tucker Carlson, you know, from the famous ones to the much less famous ones

00:36:21.400 on multiple channels. And the effect is to create the cynicism and nihilism that you started out

00:36:28.400 with. You know, we don't believe any of this. The mainstream media is lying. It's all exaggerated.

00:36:33.700 None of this can be proven. You know, whereas in fact, you know, all of it is provable. I mean,

00:36:38.820 there were no attempts to rig the election. There were no problems with the voting machines.

00:36:43.520 Most of the votes, you know, in Georgia, the votes were counted multiple times by hand,

00:36:48.080 by machine. There was no proof of any irregularity whatsoever. But by repeating the idea that there

00:36:54.660 was regularity, by coming up with different theories, Chinese, Venezuelan, Italian explanations

00:36:59.940 as to how it happened, they create the sense that something, you know, there can't be smoke without

00:37:04.440 fire. People wouldn't be talking about all this unless there was something to it. And that,

00:37:09.420 you know, that's a deliberate tactic, you know, and that is something that we can see being used

00:37:15.620 by other people. We can see Putin doing it. We can see Hugo Chavez used to do it in Venezuela.

00:37:21.560 The more noise you create and the more distraction you create, the harder it is for people to believe

00:37:27.120 anything. And then you create the cynicism that you began with.

00:37:30.620 Yeah, as you say, it's a deliberate tactic and it creates a powerful asymmetry because so what happens

00:37:38.880 in response to that blizzard of lies is an increasingly frantic attempt to contain the damage

00:37:46.240 and every single misstep there gets scored by a very different set of norms, right? So if the New York

00:37:54.620 Times gets a story wrong or the Atlantic gets a story wrong or we wind up relying on, you know,

00:38:02.220 the Steele dossier for anything to substantiate, you know, Russian influence here, it seems for the

00:38:09.420 people who care about just the integrity of facts and the coherence of an argument, the little missteps

00:38:17.860 seem to pollute the entire case against Trump in this case. Trump and his enablers and, you know,

00:38:24.720 the propagandists on that side, all they have to do is create a mess and in cleaning it up, people who

00:38:32.420 care about the integrity of journalism have to be held to norms of honesty and coherence that become

00:38:41.780 harder and harder to enforce when there are a thousand fires to put out rather than just one.

00:38:47.680 And so journalists and certainly Democrats, you know, have been sloppy in how they've done that

00:38:54.700 from time to time and on certain points continuously. So it does give the sense, again,

00:38:59.240 I'm uncertain about how much we should go back and try to clean up the mess of the previous

00:39:04.220 few years so as to bring some number of people along with us for this ride. But I mean, you take

00:39:10.360 something like the Steele dossier, which if I'm not mistaken, was first a piece of Republican

00:39:15.420 oppo research and then was taken over by the Clinton campaign. And then I think most ignominiously

00:39:22.620 was the used as the basis for a wiretap of Carter Page, if I'm not mistaken. That fact alone,

00:39:29.900 the fact that the Steele dossier has now been basically discredited, correct me if I'm wrong

00:39:34.000 there, that fact alone just vitiates everything, right? So what do we do with that? I mean, it's very

00:39:40.000 hard to unpick that and perform surgery on the facts in a way that can reclaim the attention

00:39:47.000 of people who have begun to succumb the way you just described and to this feeling of it's just

00:39:53.660 such a mess. I'm going to withdraw my attention from it all. It's like this, this is just who knows

00:39:58.240 what's happened to that claim.

00:39:59.580 Sam, Trump, according to the Washington Post, Trump told 35,000 lies during his presidency and

00:40:07.460 you cannot clean up that mess. The zone is so flooded with shit that Hercules himself

00:40:15.640 could not wade into it and begin to clean it up. But the really pernicious effect of those 35,000

00:40:24.380 lies, and especially the lies since the election, between the election and the insurrection, is,

00:40:31.500 yeah, it doesn't just make close to half the country believers in absolute absurdities like

00:40:41.900 the Russian lie about the Malaysian aircraft, which became something that some Russians no doubt believed

00:40:49.140 in. It also makes it harder for the rest of the country to distinguish lies from truth. You're holding

00:40:55.560 on to facts for dear life, but eventually you begin to feel that it doesn't make any difference

00:41:00.880 because every correction, every politifact, pants on fire has no effect whatsoever. And so the

00:41:08.960 temptation is to say, we're playing on the wrong playing field. We're playing by the rules and they're

00:41:16.540 not. And so one effect is that more and more Democrats now say that they are unlikely to believe

00:41:23.020 the next election's results if Trump wins or if a Republican wins. And there may be reasons not

00:41:32.040 to believe them, given how state legislatures are trying to rig the counting of votes through these

00:41:39.380 new laws. But it's a terrible situation where both partisan sides are now saying more and more that

00:41:47.020 they're not going to believe that those institutions are illegitimate. And that's the effect of the shit that

00:41:52.000 has been piling up over the last few years. Sam, you made a really interesting point about what

00:41:59.760 happens in the mainstream media, in the traditional values of a truthful conversation and truthful

00:42:06.180 journalism, which is what happens when the New York Times has to run a correction or when we find out

00:42:11.720 that the Steele dossier is largely unreliable. And it used to be when there was a reasonably common

00:42:21.640 consensus about the rules of conversation about the rules of evidence that a correction in the

00:42:30.780 Atlantic, say, actually bolstered the credibility of the Atlantic, which you would demonstrate your

00:42:37.980 credibility by owning up to and fixing your mistakes. But since Trump doesn't ever acknowledge

00:42:44.020 a mistake, there isn't ever a sort of commonly adjudicated lie or misstatement on the Trump side,

00:42:52.660 then the score is New York Times has had 10 errors and Trump has had none. And the volume of lies that

00:43:05.060 George is talking about does not just produce the nihilism that Anne was describing. It also produces a view

00:43:13.540 among those who are disposed to believe Trump, that with all this evidence, some of it must be true.

00:43:20.400 It bounces right off them if one point or another point seems to be discredited,

00:43:26.760 although they tend not to even acknowledge that. But since we're using the horseshit metaphor,

00:43:34.620 there's got to be a pony in there somewhere. And in my latest piece, I spent a lot of time talking to

00:43:44.060 and writing about a New York City firefighter who was overwhelmed by the quantity of lies in Trump land

00:43:52.440 and believed that some of them must be true, that with all the smoke, there had to be fire.

00:43:57.620 Yeah. And the problem is that's often a good heuristic, right? But it's not good when people

00:44:03.480 cynically leverage it, right? Quite consciously, as Anne has pointed out. And it is an asymmetric war.

00:44:13.720 And I've been at a loss for how to find daylight under these conditions with people who are not seeing

00:44:22.780 the dynamics of it. The Steele dossier is an interesting case in point. So the Steele dossier

00:44:28.380 was in almost entirely irrelevant to the Mueller investigation. It was not the reason why the FBI

00:44:37.520 investigated Trump in the first place. It was a sideshow. You know, if you read the Mueller report,

00:44:44.040 none of it is based on the Steele dossier. It all comes from different places. If you look at the

00:44:48.660 material that Mueller produced about the, you know, the Russian, the professional trolls from

00:44:53.600 St. Petersburg who worked inside the U.S. in the 2016 campaign, none of that is connected to the

00:44:58.720 Steele dossier. Right. But the Steele dossier had one advantage, which is that it had a few little

00:45:04.540 sensational anecdotes tucked into it. You know, the grotesque things that Trump was meant to have

00:45:11.300 done in a hotel room in Moscow, that kind of thing. And it seemed to, it had an element of sensation

00:45:17.140 that the real material didn't have. But this, I think, is another thing that Trump and the people

00:45:24.220 around him have understood, which is that people will focus on the sensation at the expense of the

00:45:31.400 reality. I mean, did, you know, all the people who say, well, if the Steele report is not true,

00:45:36.160 then it's all rubbish. Did they actually read the Mueller report? I mean, the Mueller reports actually

00:45:40.060 lays out pretty clearly, you know, what happened and why. And, you know, and as Bart said, it certainly

00:45:45.520 makes a case for Trump as a person of interest in terms of national security and certainly somebody

00:45:51.260 who should have been investigated for obstruction of justice. But the details that people remember,

00:45:58.840 the things that stick in their head are the sensational ones. And that's actually why maybe

00:46:03.560 David is right to try and pick them out on the other side. And that's a piece of human psychology

00:46:10.580 that Trump understood. I think the Russians understood it. Others have understood that you

00:46:15.580 can focus on details from people's private lives, sensational stories, and that will take people

00:46:20.860 away from, you know, the larger body of facts as well. When I was a young man, I was friendly with

00:46:27.540 an expat who come from Canada, where I grew up, from Czechoslovakia in 1968. And he's a well-known

00:46:34.660 writer named Joseph Skoretsky. And I once had the chance to ask him what he liked best about living in a

00:46:39.320 democratic society like Canada is compared to communist Czechoslovakia. And he said,

00:46:43.920 what I like about democracy is not voting. Because he was someone who was interested in jazz,

00:46:51.560 in literature, in his very complicated personal life. And he knew that however the election would

00:46:57.340 come out, all of that would be fine. He would be able to, and so he detached himself entirely from

00:47:03.520 politics. One of the reasons that democracy was so powerful, an idea from the GI Bill until name

00:47:10.880 your date, was that it really delivered results for ordinary people. You didn't have to have a

00:47:15.620 theory about communism versus free markets. You didn't have a theory about totalitarianism versus

00:47:20.740 democracy to see, we had blue jeans and bananas and fun music, and they didn't. Obviously, it was

00:47:27.640 better here. We were doing something right. And so a lot of the power of democracy comes from its

00:47:32.940 ability to deliver. One of the things that you do when you're trying to undermine democracy is you

00:47:38.640 blur that difference. You make things stop delivering. And so one of the, where you start at the beginning

00:47:44.060 of this conversation, which was in a way, why should people care? I mean, what is going on here? It's

00:47:48.460 Trump. It's non-Trump. Why do people care? That we are seeing attempts, increasingly acceptable

00:47:54.580 attempts in the United States to do things in politics that never would have been done before.

00:47:59.640 Threatening to default on the obligations of the United States in order to get your way in a budget

00:48:03.720 fight. Using violence and chicanery to try to overturn an election. Lying about the impact of

00:48:10.420 vaccines in order to make the economy worse so as to hurt the president of another party. Those are

00:48:16.100 things that, those are tactics that people just didn't use to do. And one of the reasons I think we are

00:48:23.160 all in so much trouble. And one of the reasons why we are going to have to reinvent a lot of how we

00:48:28.360 think about politics. You know, this question of what's in the Mueller report, what's in the

00:48:33.580 Steele dossier. If you watch the cable news conversation, you think that the, you would

00:48:37.300 think that the important question is what crimes did Donald Trump commit? And a drama I've been

00:48:42.680 banging since 2017 is we're going to find with Trump that most of the terrible things he did were

00:48:46.640 not criminal. And most of the criminal things he did weren't so bad. I mean, if somebody trips over

00:48:51.100 some technical statute or failed to file their individual personal income taxes properly,

00:48:55.940 that's, that's obviously they shouldn't do that, but that's not the end of the world.

00:48:59.160 But most of the American government rested on people not doing things just because you didn't

00:49:03.960 do those things. It turns out it's not illegal for the president to operate a business that solicits

00:49:10.100 money from people who want things in the United States government. A lot of that isn't illegal.

00:49:14.020 Just presidents just didn't used to do that because it was wrong and you didn't need a law.

00:49:18.040 And if the president did do it, it turned out the law was a weak recourse.

00:49:21.740 So we're into a world in the 2020s where a lot of things that were just, things that were not done,

00:49:27.520 things that were understood, things that parties, the parties didn't do to each other are now being

00:49:32.080 done. And we're taking a game, what was at once a very intense game, but that wasn't played with

00:49:37.220 working weapons. And we're playing that same intense game, but now with weapons that can kill.

00:49:42.600 Well, before we take the turn toward looking at the future here and our future concerns about,

00:49:47.880 especially the 2024 election, maybe I'll throw another, one more shibboleth at you guys from

00:49:53.260 Trumpistan just to see if we can do some good here. So obviously the problem is bigger than Trump,

00:49:59.680 right? So Trump's behavior is explained by his character, right? I mean, you know, I view him

00:50:05.840 as some sort of moral lunatic and I really would not be surprised by anything he does,

00:50:11.160 but he has a personality cult around him, which used to be the Republican party. And the people

00:50:19.880 who have risen to his defense, you would think have, you know, reputations to defend. I mean,

00:50:25.380 some of them were casualties of his campaigning, right? I mean, how, how do you explain someone

00:50:31.520 like, you know, Ted Cruz will defend Trump, you know, all along the way as he commits these

00:50:38.420 democracy straining indiscretions. I think many people who look at this think, well,

00:50:44.420 all of this, it may be this, some of this is irregular, but what's happened, I mean,

00:50:48.460 this is a reaction. What Trump has done and certainly what these Republicans who,

00:50:53.300 who have records of kind of normal political behavior have done is a response to some kind

00:51:00.780 of hysterical overreach by the Democrats and by the deep state, right? So that Trump represented

00:51:08.800 such a threat to the way things were, that we had a media infrastructure and a deep state

00:51:17.100 that tried to destroy him at any cost. And so what you saw on the Trump side and on the Republican side

00:51:24.100 was just an attempt to, you know, if they're going to play this dirty, you know, we're going to have

00:51:29.340 to play a little dirty to maintain our administration. What do any of you say to that charge? Maybe I

00:51:36.440 should start just so you're not all talking over each other. Anne, do you have anything to say to

00:51:40.120 that? So one of the strange things for me about coming to Washington in the years of the Trump

00:51:45.960 administration was I, I've spent a lot of my career writing about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,

00:51:50.160 and I've read lots of books about the agony of collaboration and why people collaborate and

00:51:56.160 their, their novels about it written by polls and checks and others. And one of the strange things

00:52:01.640 was discovering that in Washington, many of those same issues and the same conundrums arose,

00:52:08.220 that people were seeking to further their careers by telling stories to themselves about, you know,

00:52:15.740 I need to remain in politics because my position is so important. I can be influential from the

00:52:20.140 inside. You heard some people saying this openly, you know, or, you know, the, the knowledge that I

00:52:25.680 can bring to the table continues to matter even, even inside this context. And you also heard a lot

00:52:30.600 of people, you know, who wanted to stay in power, who wanted to stay, you know, in public life, you know,

00:52:37.700 coming up with excuses and explanations. I mean, if you look back on the history of Vichy France,

00:52:44.200 you will discover that nobody, nobody collaborated with the Nazis because they admired the Nazis.

00:52:49.900 Everybody collaborated with the Nazis because the threat from the left and the Jews and the

00:52:55.520 socialists was so enormous and so strong that they had no choice but to stand up and defend the honor

00:53:01.200 of France and be on the side of Vichy. I'm exaggerating a little bit there to make the point,

00:53:05.380 but you, you find that in almost any situation where you, where people are sort of in a captive

00:53:10.620 position, they have to either collaborate or drop out. And when they choose to collaborate,

00:53:15.580 they tell that story. And so I would say that that was the story that a lot of Republicans told

00:53:22.000 themselves and told one another as a justification for continuing to support Trump and for continuing

00:53:27.560 to mouth the slogans that many of us heard. And, and, you know, we, we see even now the price that

00:53:34.020 can be paid by people who refuse to do that is now can be exclusion from the party or certainly

00:53:39.780 exclusion from its, you know, from its, from its inner sanctum. And so people are continuing to do

00:53:46.180 that. They're continuing to, you know, to, to invent a, you know, a separate but equal or, or different but

00:53:54.200 equal left-wing threat that justifies their poor behavior. But this is the, this is the, this is a kind of

00:53:59.740 human reaction that we've seen in, you know, you can look at communist occupied Poland in the 1950s,

00:54:05.120 you can look at Vichy, you can look at many other states and you see, you know, very similar story.

00:54:10.220 But is that enough to explain the fact that there, you can count on really one hand, the number of

00:54:17.780 prominent Republicans who are willing to withstand these pressures? I mean, you take someone like Liz

00:54:24.740 Cheney, like what, why is, you know, why are there two or three people, you know, in her lane and the

00:54:31.820 rest of the Republican party has capitulated, even in the aftermath of January 6th?

00:54:39.200 Right. And I think the answer goes way back before Trump and will be with us after Trump is gone. And

00:54:47.120 perhaps we should talk about these broader things than just Trump, because I actually think Trump

00:54:52.440 keeps us for, in some ways, from understanding the broader forces and the deeper forces.

00:54:57.880 I think of it as happening at two levels. One is the top of the Republican party and the other is

00:55:04.040 the base of the Republican party. The base of the Republican party has been increasingly populist,

00:55:13.500 increasingly hostile to the mainstream institutions of the country, whether it's the media or schools

00:55:22.040 and universities or the CIA, the FBI, even the military. It didn't hurt Trump to trash the national

00:55:31.000 security institutions and the national security heroes. Or you had John McCain. I mean, it just-

00:55:36.260 Exactly. Because the base of the party had stopped revering those institutions and had begun to think of

00:55:44.060 them as elitist, self-serving, indifferent to the lives and the problems of the mass of people. So

00:55:55.500 the base of the party and the Tea Party period was a key moment in this, because that's when

00:56:00.800 the kind of nihilistic attitudes of Republican voters really set in. And it was not coincidentally

00:56:09.220 upon the election of the first black president. At the top of the party, you had a kind of

00:56:16.380 corruption that set in, not just financial, but the corruption of power, power at any cost,

00:56:21.760 power for its own sake, power without a real higher purpose. And conservatism, which had a set of goals,

00:56:29.260 political goals, ideological goals, sort of faded out. It lost its color and power itself became the

00:56:34.580 end of the party. And Mitch McConnell became the perfect embodiment of that. He was the one who

00:56:39.120 brought the filibuster to the floor of the Senate as the tool for preventing the other party from

00:56:44.620 doing anything when they had power. If you look at a graph of the use of the filibuster, it just

00:56:49.260 skyrockets once Mitch McConnell is the minority leader and the Republican Party's strategy becomes

00:56:55.740 simply to make sure that the Democrats fail. And so those two things, power at the top for its own

00:57:02.300 sake, and a kind of irrational populism that regards all mainstream institutions with distrust,

00:57:09.820 if not outright hatred, those two have turned the Republican Party into an authoritarian party

00:57:15.900 that no longer thinks that preserving those institutions and playing by those rules and norms

00:57:21.580 and upholding those laws, and when it loses, accepting that loss, that's no longer a winning

00:57:27.900 approach for either the leaders of the party or the base. And if a leader tries to play by those rules,

00:57:34.280 they're cast out. And not just by their colleagues at the top, but by the base. The reason why you can

00:57:39.660 count them on one hand is because the rest of the Republican office holders want to keep their seats.

00:57:45.960 And they understand that to keep their seats, they have to go along with the lies, because otherwise

00:57:51.320 they're going to face a primary threat, and they're going to face a lot of money coming at them,

00:57:55.200 and they're going to face Trump's ridicule and hostility, and that is going to be the end of

00:57:59.620 their career. There's a long line of Republicans who tried in some sort of weak, half-assed way to

00:58:04.220 take on Trump over the last few years, and they've either been co-opted by him like Ted Cruz, or they're

00:58:09.240 in other lines of work now. Yeah, I mean, the thing that unites what George and Anne have said is that

00:58:18.460 people respond to incentives. Incentives work. And the average Republican office holder subjected to

00:58:27.340 truth serum would not say that the election was stolen and would be, in fact, horrified by many

00:58:33.480 of the things that Trump says and does. They're not true believers. The base is filled with true

00:58:39.740 believers. The Republican elected officials are not, but there's a combination of opportunism and fear

00:58:45.880 behind their behavior because they're responding to incentives. They're afraid of the base. They're

00:58:52.360 afraid of Trump's ability to commandeer the loyalty of their own constituents and deploy it against

00:59:00.520 them. And they're opportunists because they understand that if they play along, if they out-compete

00:59:08.080 each other to be more Trumpist, or if at very minimum they don't fight back, they don't publicly

00:59:15.480 dissent, then their careers can assent. Sam, your question about why, it might be useful to look

00:59:22.120 in detail at how. How did Trump do this? We have to travel back a little bit in time. It's 2015,

00:59:28.300 early part of 2015, and everyone is assuming that Jeb Bush will be the nominee of the Republican party.

00:59:32.660 He's amassed money and endorsements on a scale never seen or seldom seen. A number of other

00:59:39.640 Republicans don't like that and are looking for a way to stop Jeb Bush. So Donald Trump materializes

00:59:44.100 in the summer of 2015. And a lot of people who are the second tier of candidates say,

00:59:48.620 obviously this is going nowhere, this joke Trump candidacy, but he might take out Jeb Bush and clear

00:59:53.760 the field for me. And so there was this game where Trump was simultaneously so useful to a number of

01:00:01.520 people that they stood out of his way hoping that he would wreck Jeb Bush. And Jeb Bush in turn hoped

01:00:06.180 that Trump would knock aside everybody else. Everybody was hoping to be left alone in the

01:00:11.040 room with Donald Trump on the assumption that they would win. And so there was never that moment

01:00:14.600 where people said, this is dangerous, this is threatening, this is destructive, let's all unite

01:00:19.000 together against him. 2015 comes to an end, Donald Trump becomes the front runner for the Republican

01:00:23.540 party in July and stays that way, except for one week or a week or two where Ben Carson is briefly in

01:00:29.100 the lead at the end of 2015. Trump is the front runner. Now we come to 2016, the primaries are

01:00:34.340 about to happen and the central brain of the Republican party more or less decides fun's fun.

01:00:40.160 That was fun. This has to stop now. And so you'll remember that I think it's the first or second

01:00:44.640 of the candidates debates took place in New Hampshire. And Megyn Kelly was then the hope and star and

01:00:50.520 future of the Fox News network was sent out onto the stage to give the career finishing killer

01:00:55.540 question Donald Trump about his abuse of women. And Trump fought her, smashed her back, and then

01:01:01.800 refused to take part in further debates hosted by Fox unless Fox got rid of Megyn Kelly. At this

01:01:07.060 point, I mean, Rupert Murdoch, by all reports, was hoping to make Chris Christie the nominee. Fun was

01:01:11.400 fun in 2015. Now it's time to get serious. Let's have Chris Christie, who's the governor of a state

01:01:16.640 where Fox does business. And Trump crushed them. It wasn't that they got out of his way because of

01:01:22.600 some theory about what he would do. They discovered that he would actually do it.

01:01:26.960 Many people fought him, fought him quite hard. Ted Cruz fought him hard. Marco Rubio fought him hard.

01:01:31.780 And then they lost. And out of that experience of loss, they gained a differing view about the

01:01:37.180 future of the party. As for the party base, there isn't a stable thing called a Republican.

01:01:43.000 People go, you know, it isn't you get a card. It isn't that you pay a fee. You go in and out.

01:01:46.660 So you saw in the elections of 2018, millions of people who had voted Republican all of their lives

01:01:53.820 voted for Democratic candidates for Congress. And districts, the district that had been George

01:01:58.620 H.W. Bush's district, the district that had been Newt Gingrich's district, the district that had

01:02:02.540 been Eric Cantor's district, one after another of the most core districts of the Republican Party

01:02:07.660 went Democratic. And you saw this giant reorientation of what it meant to be a Republican and what it meant

01:02:12.760 to be a Democrat. And that is the thing that Trump sort of rode and benefited from without always

01:02:19.000 understanding it. One last point that I think it might be worth saying. I mean, you're reflecting

01:02:22.460 what some people say when you quote this line about, well, Trump was such a threat. Trump shook,

01:02:28.300 threatened to shake up the American political system. Well, in one sense, it's true. I mean,

01:02:33.480 blowing up NATO, getting rid of free trade, institutionalizing bribe-taking, those are big

01:02:38.920 shakeups. But if you mean, is there something that wasn't unethical or criminal that Donald Trump

01:02:43.960 wanted to do? Actually, month by month, probably the least productive president of the post-Franklin

01:02:50.860 Delano Roosevelt era. I mean, he didn't do much. There was nothing much other than the stealing.

01:02:55.160 There wasn't much that he wanted to do. And so the idea of him as some big threat to the way

01:03:00.880 Washington does its proper policy business, that he became a very, very conventional Republican

01:03:06.280 president. Where he was unconventional is he did things that nobody, not Republicans,

01:03:11.920 not Democrats, nobody would want a president to do. Well, so all of that is psychologically

01:03:16.980 understandable to me because what you're describing is, for the most part, the work of incentives and

01:03:23.360 a fundamental miscalculation at every step along the way. Trump's campaign is going nowhere. We can

01:03:30.620 just support him for this instrumental reason. But then lo and behold, that proves to be untrue.

01:03:35.740 But what I find most mystifying, I mean, perhaps incentives somehow capture this, but I don't

01:03:41.200 know what those incentives really are, is that in the aftermath of the election, right, when he lost,

01:03:47.820 you know, when the case could be credibly made that he lost, and he should no longer have the power,

01:03:54.380 he would only have the power that you would insist upon maintaining for him at that point, right?

01:04:00.180 He's a loser. The one thing, you know, Trump can't stand to be and derides everyone else on earth for,

01:04:06.860 he now is. Why do you have the House Freedom Caucus and Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani? And I mean,

01:04:15.700 what explains, I mean, psychology awaits its, its Einstein to explain the characterological arc of Rudy

01:04:24.040 Giuliani. But what explains the behavior of so many people who are willing to subvert democracy on our

01:04:31.300 account, in order to maintain the power of someone who we now, we're now alleging they secretly hate, and

01:04:40.280 are, you know, merely suffering the company of, for their own perverse incentives? Why do they not leave the

01:04:47.500 sinking ship at that point? Well, because, as David just said, Trump's power was not primarily expressed

01:04:56.040 through the instruments of office, because he didn't have a policy program. His power was as

01:05:02.980 a demagogue and a politician, and as someone who had this tremendous control of the sentiments of a large

01:05:12.460 base. Republicans might have thought and hoped he would go away, and might have thought and hoped he would

01:05:18.660 stop talking about the election. And we've seen from the work of the January 6th committee, fascinating little

01:05:24.740 artifacts of that have come out in which people around Trump, on the government side, and among his outside

01:05:32.620 advisors, like Sean Hannity, are trying to persuade him to stop talking about the election. Let's fade away

01:05:40.460 quietly and build your posterity based on the fabulous record that you created as president.

01:05:48.640 But they don't understand that it's a core thing to him, that he's not going to stop talking about it.

01:05:53.280 And he still has command of the base. He still has command of tens and tens of millions of Republicans

01:06:00.920 who believe he won. He didn't lose. He hasn't lost his power. He hasn't lost his power over them.

01:06:07.280 And I would add, Bart, that by November of 2020, a lot of those Republicans really had stopped

01:06:15.680 believing in the importance of things like fair elections and majority rule and the norms of the

01:06:23.000 transfer of power. Those things no longer held any strong value for them. So it was not all that

01:06:29.460 difficult to kick them aside when it became convenient to do so. It's a bit like Anne was

01:06:36.380 talking about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In Darkness at Noon, Arthur Kessler's great novel,

01:06:42.760 the old Bolshevik Rubashev finally confesses to crimes that he didn't commit. And the question is,

01:06:49.460 why would he confess to crimes he didn't commit? And his answer is, because there's no reason not to.

01:06:54.060 He cannot find any reason in himself to go against what the party is finally asking him to do as his

01:06:59.820 last act. And I think these Republicans have nothing inside themselves to resist. That has worn

01:07:06.160 away. It's not as though attachment to democratic values is part of our DNA that we can't lose. We

01:07:14.280 can easily lose it. And we can see its loss when people who at one moment might seem somewhat

01:07:21.180 honorable. At the next moment, stop talking or give a speech that is wishy-washy or even

01:07:27.180 give a speech that suggests that they think the election was stolen. There was a lot of about

01:07:33.060 facing after January 2021 when Republicans who were shocked by the violence denounced it and then

01:07:40.060 almost immediately began to back away. And I don't think it's just fear of Trump in the base. I think

01:07:45.720 that's part of it. But I also think it's a lack of any strong attachment to whatever the values that

01:07:51.680 might have allowed them to be in the same camp as Liz Cheney.

01:07:57.720 Well, speaking of Cheney-

01:07:59.100 Can I add to that? I think some people also have come to understand the usefulness of undermining the

01:08:06.920 rules. If you undermine the rules, if you reduce faith in the system, if you convince people that

01:08:13.140 elections are rigged, that can be, if you're somebody who hopes to take advantage of that

01:08:17.600 lack of trust and to use that distrust in your own political career, then you can see the usefulness

01:08:24.360 of it. And I think quite a lot of Republicans have. They understand that one of the ways to win is

01:08:30.320 through extreme forms of gerrymandering, by playing games with who gets to count the votes.

01:08:37.120 All of this is a potential path to power. And once, as George says, once you're that cynical,

01:08:45.180 then you come to understand that any attempt to undermine faith in the system, undermine faith

01:08:50.640 not just in the rules, but also in the people who keep account of the rules, whether it's the media

01:08:55.980 or inspectors general or congressional committees, the January 6th committee, there's going to be an

01:09:02.060 attempt to undermine all of those organizations that produce knowledge and produce facts and confirm

01:09:09.400 what happened, because it might be useful for them down the road to have those institutions

01:09:15.060 undermined.

01:09:16.460 Maybe the secret answer to Sam's question is in something Trump said during that period when he

01:09:21.720 started to overturn the election. That key phrase, I'm looking only for 11,000 votes.

01:09:26.640 I think it's probably true that if Trump's plan had been to get the chairman of the Joint Chiefs

01:09:32.300 of Staff on the phone and put hundreds of thousands of troops into American cities and

01:09:37.360 round up people and put them in concentration camps, I mean, obviously, you know, not even

01:09:42.040 Tucker Carlson would support that, but probably right now. But he didn't ask for that. He just

01:09:49.120 asked for 11,000 votes. And I think maybe this, and this is maybe the key to understanding that

01:09:55.320 maybe the whole question, the whole thing we're going to spend this afternoon talking about

01:09:58.760 is that democracy is not like a light switch that is on or off. It's a dimmer switch that

01:10:03.420 is constantly being adjusted. And the history of American democracy is as the democracy has got,

01:10:09.640 it wasn't that the United States was ever an authoritarian country. It was just a country where

01:10:13.480 the circle of participation was narrowed in often very brutal ways, backed by violence.

01:10:20.020 I think in the 1940s, in the state of South Carolina, only about 50,000 people voted.

01:10:27.260 South Carolina didn't get a secret ballot until the 1950s. But in other places, it was done,

01:10:31.960 same idea, but less roughly. But since through the 20th century, and especially since the Second

01:10:37.360 World War, the circle of participation has broadened and broadened and broadened. And we now

01:10:40.500 think democracy means that every adult gets to participate to the extent that they want to.

01:10:45.320 Well, Trump wasn't talking about overturning all of that system, just dialing it back by 11,000 votes.

01:10:51.900 And in a fairly close balanced system, if you can say, look, there are just certain people

01:10:55.000 who shouldn't be participating in the system. Not every, most people. Yes, certainly anyone owns a

01:11:00.120 house, anyone who's over 40, anyone who owns a gun, those people obviously should participate.

01:11:05.900 Many of the people who don't meet those criteria, just not all of them, just not enough.

01:11:09.420 And that was the exciting proposition that emerged in 2020. Maybe if you just compress it enough

01:11:17.460 without overturning democracy altogether, you can ensure that we win much more often than

01:11:22.140 we otherwise would. I think that's really the question for the future. That's the thing that

01:11:27.340 people glimpsed was the possibility of limiting participation to enable the Republican Party not

01:11:32.600 to compete in the way that other parties do by saying, well, people aren't liking our message.

01:11:36.300 Why don't we propose some things that people like? Why don't we propose those and get power that way

01:11:42.080 and then get the benefits of power? So no, we can continue it with a message that is basically

01:11:46.360 pretty unpopular. But by shrinking the circle of participation, somewhat, 11,000 votes, we can win

01:11:52.440 even though people don't want what we're offering. And if I can just add just one sentence,

01:11:57.520 that's exactly how democracy has been undermined in other countries at other times and under places.

01:12:03.240 Not because there's a coup d'etat and millions of arrests,

01:12:06.300 but because there's been a little change to the constitution because some of the media are no

01:12:12.440 longer able to operate and it's a very slow and gradual process. I mean, something like eight

01:12:16.540 years after Hugo Chavez took over Venezuela, most Venezuelans still believed they were living in a

01:12:21.680 democracy. Although by that moment, it was no longer possible to change the leadership of the

01:12:26.300 country through a democratic ballot. And people just because it had been a series of small cuts over

01:12:31.620 time. They didn't notice it. They didn't feel it yet. And I think that's what Trump understood.

01:12:38.080 I worry sometimes that I'm overly cynical and maybe that all of us in this conversation

01:12:44.480 have been overly cynical about the cynicism of Republican elected officials or elected officials

01:12:51.240 more generally that so few of them have core convictions for which they're prepared to pay a

01:12:55.960 price politically. But Liz Cheney has come up several times in this conversation.

01:13:01.980 And I wrote a book about Dick Cheney. And Liz is very much a politician in his image,

01:13:09.200 almost an anti-politician. And whatever you think of her convictions, and many of them I disagree with

01:13:16.080 profoundly, they include respect for constitutional democracy, for the core tenets of our political

01:13:24.040 system. And in that way, like her father, she's a zealot. And in this case, her zealotry is

01:13:29.360 redounding to the public good because she's willing to pay possibly the ultimate political price.

01:13:36.420 She may lose her seat. She's certainly lost her leadership position by standing up for the truth

01:13:41.440 about the results of the last Democratic election. And we're just not seeing very many people who are

01:13:47.400 prepared to do that.

01:13:49.060 Yeah, there's one thing I would add. I don't want us to go down this rabbit hole, but I've gone down

01:13:53.880 it many times on the podcast. But it's not exactly exculpatory with respect to the anti-Democratic

01:14:02.220 tendencies of Republicans at the moment. But psychologically, it explains something. When you look at how

01:14:09.820 when you look at the degree of ideological capture on the left, you know, identity politics and wokeism,

01:14:18.440 and I'll give you all the buzz phrases now, cancel culture, and the way that has been disproportionately

01:14:24.720 represented in our mainstream institutions, including journalistic ones, when you move right

01:14:30.680 of center, you're meeting people who have no alternative politically to the Republican Party and

01:14:37.940 whatever it's up to now. And they're faced by people who, on very different topics and very

01:14:44.480 different ways, are also manufacturing a tremendous amount of dishonesty and misinformation.

01:14:52.800 And, you know, you have, you know, cities burning and literally, you know, like, buildings are burning

01:14:57.940 in the shot. And CNN is saying, it says it's covering a mostly peaceful protest, right?

01:15:04.300 And that just one image like that, you know, endlessly amplified on Fox afterwards, does enough

01:15:10.500 to just end the argument for people. It's like, whatever Trump is, he's not as bad as that. He's

01:15:14.660 not as bad as defund the police, right? Feel free to respond to that. But I just think that's been

01:15:19.860 working in the background for many, many millions of people this whole time.

01:15:22.840 I think not just, Sam, as a kind of catalyst to accelerate the liberalism of the right, but

01:15:29.780 a sign that liberalism doesn't really know a political party or a partisan orientation. And it

01:15:39.360 has a communicable effect. It can easily spread. And I think that is what's happening in our culture.

01:15:47.200 The liberalism of the left is mostly in culture right now. It's mostly in institutions like school

01:15:52.820 and universities and the media and philanthropy and the arts. The illiberalism of the right is

01:15:57.720 mostly in politics. It's mostly concentrated in a political party. And so it is a much more direct

01:16:04.120 threat to democracy. But to shift from Trump a bit, I worry most about simply the mental habits of

01:16:13.780 people who find themselves caught in a kind of a vortex or a vicious circle of responding to

01:16:22.360 liberalism. And it's very hard to get out of that once you get in it. And that's why I cite

01:16:28.240 these polls that show that Democrats are now more willing to say than they have been that they might

01:16:34.700 reject the results of the next election if they show a Republican winner. There's also more

01:16:40.240 willingness to use political violence across partisan lines than there have been in recent years.

01:16:46.180 So those are tendencies that are in the minds of people and that

01:16:52.360 have a way of intensifying and sort of driving each other to extremes. And that's something that

01:16:59.840 worries me a lot because it's just very hard to slow it down once the acceleration toward the extremes

01:17:06.020 and towards the liberalism of all kinds starts.

01:17:08.820 All right. So let's make a turn toward the present and future here. What are we most worried about? I mean,

01:17:18.420 to look at the public-facing machinations of the Democratic Party, it would seem that the Democrats

01:17:25.680 are most worried about voting rights, you know, again, sort of seen through the lens of identity politics,

01:17:32.900 right? The Republicans want to disenfranchise black and brown people by asking for voter ID,

01:17:39.820 essentially, is the concern. Whereas I think the real concern, I mean, that's a conversation that can

01:17:46.740 be had, but I think the real concern is we have a system where it might not matter how people vote

01:17:53.920 if the right people are in place to overturn an election. I mean, this is a machinery that I still

01:18:02.200 can't, I don't even count myself as someone who even dimly understands it at this point. But we were

01:18:08.200 all alerted to its existence in the 2020 election. And it's fairly dumbfounding that this is our system

01:18:15.420 and it's, it was hanging by a thread. It was hanging by the conscience of Mike Pence and a dozen other

01:18:22.020 people who didn't cave in to the demands that they just nullify the votes that were coming from the

01:18:28.580 disputed states. What are we worried about? Maybe I'll put it to Bart and George first. What are we

01:18:35.920 worried about with respect to the next few years and 2024, next two years?

01:18:41.200 Well, it's the difference between changing the rules of a football game so that it's a little

01:18:48.300 bit harder for one side to score on the one hand, which is like the voting rights you're talking about,

01:18:55.500 and then simply buying off the referee on the other hand so that you can directly control the outcome

01:19:05.140 of the game. And what you see is properly called election subversion. So as David has pointed out,

01:19:14.880 Trump tried to get the Secretary of State of Georgia, who oversaw the election and certified the vote,

01:19:22.700 to change seven, you know, 11,780 votes, which would flip the result after three separate counts

01:19:31.100 showed that Biden had won. And you had, in this case, the integrity of one man,

01:19:37.500 Brad Raffensperger, who refused to overturn the election, who refused to throw away the people's

01:19:44.280 votes and recorded the conversation with Trump and arranged for it to be made public.

01:19:49.400 And now, what concerns me most is, how does the Republican Party, how does the Trump-supporting

01:19:57.880 Republican Party respond to what Brad Raffensperger did? Well, what Trump and his people have done

01:20:03.840 is go around the country and find those obstacles, find those people and places which got in the way of

01:20:13.100 Trump's attempt to overthrow the election, and it's gone around systematically uprooting them.

01:20:17.460 So what's happened to Brad Raffensperger? Trump has endorsed another candidate to replace him

01:20:23.760 in this year's election, first of all. That candidate has pledged that he would not have

01:20:32.200 certified Biden's victory. That candidate is running explicitly on the platform that he would not

01:20:38.200 properly, honestly carry out his duty to count the votes of the people. He says Trump really won

01:20:44.780 on these fictitious grounds of fictitious fraud, and that he would not have certified the election.

01:20:52.760 They're, by the way, doing the same thing with the governor, because Governor Kemp

01:20:55.340 signed the state affirmation of resolve, and Trump has made him an enemy as well, and therefore

01:21:01.980 recruited someone to run against him and endorse former Senator Perdue to take on Kemp. But meanwhile,

01:21:08.820 while not being satisfied with that, the Republicans in the state legislature have passed a new law

01:21:15.620 that, just in case Raffensperger wins again, they have removed him from his voting seat on the state

01:21:22.500 board of elections. So if the election were held again today, a national election, he would not be

01:21:27.280 the one to certify it. They have simply defanged him. And while they were doing that, they gave

01:21:33.580 themselves the power to fire all the county election officials who certify the votes in their own

01:21:38.620 counties. And they've done that specifically with reference to Fulton County, which is Atlanta,

01:21:43.340 and the Democratic stronghold in the state. And so systematically, they've gone about undermining

01:21:48.840 and trying to replace the person who stood in Trump's way last time. And you're seeing that happening

01:21:54.380 around the country. There was an official in Michigan who was on the board of state canvassers,

01:22:01.620 which has two Democrats and two Republicans. And Trump was trying to get them to deadlock

01:22:06.120 so that Michigan's vote, which Biden also won, would not be certified. One of those two Republicans

01:22:13.120 resisted his blandishments and insisted that the vote was the vote and he was going to certify it.

01:22:20.180 And he's been hounded out of office. And you see the same thing going on around the country.

01:22:24.940 And all that's legal. There's no one's breaking the law, even though they're breaking norms that we

01:22:30.200 didn't know we were relying on. It's a big legal problem because you can't say

01:22:34.560 that you can't run for secretary of state on a lying platform that claims that Trump won the last

01:22:41.800 election. You can't prevent in advance the subversion of the next election count. You can

01:22:47.920 reasonably foresee it happening if this candidate wins. And it would probably become a matter for the

01:22:57.060 courts if someone actually did try to subvert the election and say that black is white and

01:23:02.940 that Trump defeated Biden.

01:23:05.820 Maybe let's just linger on that point for a second, just going back to the past for a second.

01:23:10.620 Do we know what would have happened if Pence had followed orders and not certified the election or

01:23:18.980 any one of the other people we're talking about at that stage, you know, in Georgia or any of the

01:23:24.700 other contested states had put forward other electors? Or was there, in fact, I mean, we would

01:23:31.780 have hit some kind of constitutional crisis. But what do we imagine would have resolved that crisis?

01:23:38.820 Well, this would have been a crisis precisely because we don't know how it could have been resolved.

01:23:44.060 And there was a sitting president who would have been the beneficiary of this gigantic electoral theft

01:23:52.980 who theoretically had the power to control federal law enforcement and military resources.

01:24:02.360 And if, as one could expect, this led to serious civic unrest, could have invoked the Insurrection Act

01:24:10.540 and given direct orders to the military. And we don't know what orders would have been followed.

01:24:15.760 But just because of the, you know, kind of astonishing ambition of the effort to get Pence to claim

01:24:24.520 authority over the congressional elector count, we don't know how it would have come out.

01:24:30.580 There are many opportunities for deadlock there. For example, if he had thrown away the votes of

01:24:35.620 at least three, possibly four states, and therefore reduced Biden's electoral count to below 270,

01:24:45.620 he could claim that under the 12th Amendment that Biden had failed to obtain a majority of the whole

01:24:51.860 of the electoral college, and therefore stated that the election would go to the House.

01:24:57.840 Although Democrats controlled the House, the vote in the House under the 12th Amendment

01:25:02.620 is done by state delegation, and each state gets one vote, and Republicans controlled 26 of the 50

01:25:10.600 state delegations. But Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, could have refused to call the House to

01:25:16.980 order to have that vote. And then you would have a completely failed presidential election for which

01:25:23.800 the Constitution doesn't offer a remedy. Under one reading, Nancy Pelosi would become the acting

01:25:29.600 president. But you could see the endless opportunities for mischief and unrest and all this.

01:25:36.460 That would have been a glorious, be careful what you wish for moment for Republicans.

01:25:40.580 In some universe that happened. So what, if anything, are we doing to rectify that problem? And we know

01:25:49.220 we came perilously close to flying off the road and into the abyss because there was no guardrail

01:25:56.380 right where we would have wanted it. Who is building the guardrail? And what process, I mean,

01:26:02.440 does it take a constitutional amendment? Or what process do we need to make sure that if this

01:26:07.700 happens again, it doesn't pose the same kind of risk?

01:26:12.640 Well, one part of the answer is to fix the Electoral Count Act, which is what interprets and

01:26:18.900 gives direction to the invocation of the 12th Amendment for how the electoral count is supposed to go.

01:26:25.140 This was passed in the 1870s and is one of the most confusing and horrible laws ever passed by

01:26:36.620 Congress. I defy anyone to read these 300-word sentences and make any sense out of them. There's

01:26:44.580 some possibility of consensus between Republicans and Democrats on fixing the Electoral Count Act

01:26:50.880 because Republicans are sitting around thinking they don't really want Vice President Harris to have

01:26:57.960 the powers that Trump thought Pence had to decide the next election. And so there may be a common

01:27:04.800 willingness to set rules of the road on how the procedure happens when the Electoral College votes are

01:27:11.860 delivered to Congress. They meet in joint session as they did on January 6th. The Vice President,

01:27:18.060 as President of the Senate, presides over this count. And reforms would include making explicitly

01:27:24.880 clear that the Vice President doesn't get to do the counting.

01:27:28.240 Right. Right. Well, that seems like that should be a major focus, far bigger than many of the other

01:27:35.260 things that the Biden administration appears to be focused on at the moment. I don't know why that

01:27:40.520 isn't the phrase Electoral Count Act isn't ringing in everyone's ears.

01:27:46.240 It might have seemed too small to them. They had a couple of bills that were really ambitious that

01:27:52.780 included not just expanding or securing voting rights through early voting, mail-in voting,

01:28:03.260 drop boxes, all those things, but also campaign finance reform, making Election Day a national holiday,

01:28:09.600 all of which I think are really good things. And I would have voted for them absolutely any time.

01:28:17.680 But they took the focus off what we're talking about, because there's very little data that shows

01:28:24.800 that if you restrict the number of days of early voting, or if you make it harder to do mail-in voting,

01:28:30.840 it's going to benefit one party or the other. It's really hard to fine-tune elections to that extent.

01:28:37.540 It was powerful politics because it connected to old and deep and terrible parts of our history

01:28:44.420 in which black Americans and others were kept from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests, etc.

01:28:53.380 But I haven't seen data that says these new state laws are likely to have a significant effect on

01:29:01.200 turnout, because in the past that laws like that have not had a significant effect on turnout.

01:29:05.720 So they became extremely passionate arguments for laws that were only important in the context of

01:29:13.180 what we're talking about. They were part of a Republican strategy to thwart the will of the

01:29:17.900 majority. But I don't think they were where the will of the majority was most likely to be thwarted.

01:29:23.240 It's most likely to be thwarted after an election with what Bart just called election subversion.

01:29:28.460 And I wish both parties, but especially the Democratic Party, were focusing on that and

01:29:34.480 really holding the Republicans' feet to the fire and say, do you not see a problem with laws,

01:29:40.740 state laws, state politicians, and a confused national law, the Electoral Candidate, that makes

01:29:47.020 it likely that the will of the majority is going to be overthrown? Because that's a harder thing for

01:29:50.760 a Republican to defend. And perhaps there could be some bipartisanship. I'm always skeptical because

01:29:58.240 every time we think there might be, just about, it doesn't happen, especially on election issues. But

01:30:05.020 I think that's where the focus should be. And perhaps I'm not a legal expert on this by any means,

01:30:10.100 but perhaps there should be some smart staffers in Congress drafting laws right now that make it

01:30:16.180 almost impossible for even the most corrupt state official or local official to rig the election,

01:30:24.980 to throw the election after the vote. That's actually not an easy thing to get. That last one

01:30:32.260 sounds like a great idea. I would love it if it were possible. But states have the majority of the

01:30:39.440 authority over the conduct of a state election, even when it's a national election, even when it's a

01:30:44.720 presidential election. And there is an open constitutional doctrine about, an open question

01:30:53.680 about the constitutional basis for that authority. One of the things that Trump Republicans are doing

01:31:00.000 is promoting a theory called independent state legislature. And it comes from the fact that Article

01:31:05.180 2 of the Constitution says that each state shall choose electors for president according to the

01:31:16.240 preferences of its state legislature. That the state legislature is the ultimate authority about how

01:31:21.000 you choose electors. And so what we saw in the last election was an attempt by Trump and his people

01:31:28.600 to persuade Republican state legislatures in seven states that Biden won, but that were controlled by

01:31:37.700 Republicans in the state House and the state Senate, to persuade those legislatures to discard the votes

01:31:43.640 of the people of that state and to substitute electors for Trump on their own authority. Because Article 2 of

01:31:50.560 the Constitution says in this extremely muscular and implausible reading of the Constitution, Article 2 says

01:31:57.620 that the legislature decides on the electors no matter what. It's almost certainly not true that you could get

01:32:03.860 the legislature to decide after an election is held that the election is not going to be the method of choosing

01:32:11.160 electors. But it can write the rules for how electors are chosen in that state for the next election. And I don't think that voting law experts are very optimistic about the possibility that Congress can write rules that would prevent subversion at the state level.

01:32:29.080 I would like to descend a little bit from the idea that this is a technical legal problem, which has a technical legal solution. The Electrical Count Act was a mess in 1960 when there was a Republican president and Richard Nixon, the Republican vice president, lost to John F. Kennedy and stepped aside. It was a mess in 1976 when Gerald Ford accepted his very, very close defeat at the hands of Jimmy Carter. It was a mess in 1992 when George H.W. Bush stepped aside. And it was a mess in the year 2000 when very bitter Democrats accepted the Bush v. Gore.

01:32:59.180 outcome. It's not because of the laws that Americans accept elections. And it's not because of the laws that President Trump and many of his supporters refused to accept this election. It's something deeper. So if you're thinking about the future, we should be studying periods in history where people have gone through periods where political systems have re-stabilized after periods of extremism. And one that catches my mind a lot is the period after the Second World War when there were communist and fascist parties all over Western Europe.

01:33:27.140 And the United States came out. The year 1946 was, I think, the year of the worst strike action in American history. And then over the next generation, these systems were stabilized. So how did we do that? And you can point to things, and I don't know that I have one, but material prosperity, that sure helps. Broadening participation helps.

01:33:49.460 And one of the things that the United States and its friends did to defeat the communists in Western Europe was to ensure that there was women's suffrage.

01:33:55.320 And in France and Italy, where the two places where the communists were strongest, the communists appealed strongly to men, didn't appeal to women.

01:34:02.220 Women got the vote. Communists suddenly became a very small party compared to what they had been when women didn't have the vote.

01:34:07.680 But what really, really helps is elite agreement, that there are things that elites won't do to one another.

01:34:15.340 And that was the difference in the politics of the 1950s and the politics of the 1930s. Traumatized by the war, frightened by the Soviet Union, people who had powerfully different views came to an understanding.

01:34:26.520 They're just things we can't do. They're just things we can't do.

01:34:28.680 All of those things are great, David, but we have two years. We're not going to get material prosperity across a broad middle class and elite agreement and the rest of it in two years.

01:34:38.500 So what do we do between now and what could be the really cataclysmic 2024 election?

01:34:44.320 Well, as between now and 2024, we're in a situation that reminds me of a different period of history, which is the period after the Civil War, when you had one party that accepted the outcome of the Civil War and another party that chafed at it.

01:34:55.980 And then the success or failure of the United States depended on the party that accepted the Civil War winning power most of the time and the party that didn't accept the Civil War losing power most of the time.

01:35:07.040 So to 2024, Biden has to win and protect himself against the risk of being impeached by a Republican House.

01:35:15.040 And that's going to take all the things I talked about. That's going to take success, the perception of success.

01:35:19.720 And that's going to take focusing the country on other kinds of challenges, of which there aren't a few.

01:35:24.440 And one of the things that is haunting all of us is that we may be about to confront in the very near future a major war on the European continent,

01:35:31.620 in which President Trump's former political chum, Vladimir Putin, is invading other European countries.

01:35:38.500 We face, and it's chronic, so it's hard to get people excited about it, but we face a climate challenge.

01:35:43.900 We face competition from China.

01:35:46.240 It is, I think, not fanciful to think that you could get Republican and Democratic political actors to believe, you know what, that the game,

01:35:53.360 it just, from the time that the Tea Party Congress began threatening default to get its way through 2020,

01:36:00.580 the game got played too roughly, the way it was being played in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, it's too rough.

01:36:05.440 We need to make this game more predictable.

01:36:07.800 Everybody would benefit from a more predictable game.

01:36:10.740 Anne?

01:36:11.180 I would add one other thing, which is a, you know, it's one of those mushy political things,

01:36:17.860 which is that the Democrats and those members of the Republican Party who want,

01:36:23.360 America, to remain a democracy, need to find better ways to talk about it.

01:36:28.520 Even the title of this event, you know, The Future of Democracy,

01:36:31.280 once you talk about democracy as an abstract thing, you know,

01:36:36.040 I mean, climate change, just debate, by the way, has the same problem.

01:36:39.720 I knew I was the problem somehow, Anne.

01:36:41.220 Yeah, it's your fault.

01:36:42.360 No, but once you talk about it as an abstraction, you know, our democracy is in danger.

01:36:47.320 For a lot of people, that's too distant a problem, or it doesn't seem to affect them personally,

01:36:52.000 or, and I've had several conversations with politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere

01:36:56.880 recently about how, you know, what is, is there a better way?

01:37:01.260 And one of the ways is if politicians talk about what it is that we could lose as a nation,

01:37:07.880 you know, you, you could, you could lose your right to choose who your governing is,

01:37:12.200 you know, but also you could lose something fundamental about the American identity.

01:37:17.420 You know, we are Americans, what brings us together, it's the fact that we, you know,

01:37:22.420 that we are able to, to come together to make these decisions, to have, to choose our leaders,

01:37:27.680 to follow a process, to follow the rule of law.

01:37:30.900 And you are in danger of losing that, you know, something fundamental is being challenged,

01:37:35.820 and you're, you're going to lose it.

01:37:38.060 You can appeal to people's sense of justice and injustice.

01:37:41.140 I mean, the idea of people cheating or being cheating or cheating you is something that's,

01:37:45.700 that's very powerful and finding a, and I, I don't think that the Biden administration has

01:37:51.040 found this language yet.

01:37:53.040 And I know some of them are aware of this, you know, the voting, the failure of this voting

01:37:58.060 rights bills is interesting because in a way they were seeking to address a problem.

01:38:04.120 And, you know, the, the problem of lots of Republican state legislatures passing laws to do with

01:38:08.940 voting, that was a warning sign because those, all of those laws were being promulgated and passed

01:38:16.140 on a kind of assumed basis that they needed to be passed because the election had been rigged.

01:38:22.200 They're a reflection of the big lie.

01:38:24.260 You know, we're going to, we're not going to say that the election was rigged, but we're going to

01:38:27.640 have better voting systems, you know, in 2022 or 2024, because we need to fix our voting system.

01:38:33.360 Actually, the voting systems didn't need to be fixed.

01:38:35.520 I mean, or maybe they need to be fixed in some places in specific ways, but there wasn't a

01:38:40.260 huge need for these laws.

01:38:42.400 And so the Biden reaction, the administration reacted by saying, we didn't need these laws.

01:38:46.040 These laws are, are designed to limit voting and, and so on.

01:38:49.500 And I think they hoped through the use of this act, and as George says, it was very ambitious

01:38:53.220 to raise the conversation about, about democracy, but it hasn't worked yet.

01:38:59.360 You know, that's not for lack of trying.

01:39:01.740 And also it's not an easy problem in, in the way that, again, you know, when you talk about

01:39:06.760 climate change abstractly, lots of people don't care when you talk about polar bears

01:39:10.420 dying, or when you talk about wildfires in your state, then they might feel differently

01:39:16.340 about it.

01:39:16.920 And I think the people who care about American democracy need to find that way of speaking

01:39:21.280 about it.

01:39:21.740 Well, I love Bard's point that this incentive runs on both sides of the tracks here.

01:39:28.120 And yeah, the prospect of Kamala Harris subverting a Republican victory is, has got to be galling.

01:39:34.840 So you would think that we could get some bipartisanship on that point.

01:39:39.020 Everything we're talking about here, at least out of concern for 2024, seems to presuppose that

01:39:45.360 Trump will run.

01:39:46.600 And I guess there's a Trumpist alternate candidate, perhaps, waiting in the wings who we would

01:39:53.680 also be concerned about subverting an election.

01:39:56.460 It also presupposes that the Democrats have a candidate that's electable, right?

01:40:01.060 And I think there's reason to worry that two years from now, Joe Biden may not be up to

01:40:06.560 it and that, or that his approval rating may be a deal breaker.

01:40:10.820 And there's certainly reason to worry that Kamala Harris is not electable, given her approval

01:40:17.460 rating and basic invisibility at this point.

01:40:22.220 I'm happy to cycle back on any loose ends we haven't covered here, but I just want to

01:40:27.200 get a sense of what you think the Democrats can and should do with respect to a candidate.

01:40:34.700 What do you think is likely to happen?

01:40:36.420 Does anyone have a political intuition here?

01:40:38.940 David, I'm going to start with you.

01:40:40.120 So you're into politics.

01:40:41.940 Yeah.

01:40:42.360 I don't think they have a mechanism.

01:40:43.860 The Democrats have a mechanism to change their candidates at this point.

01:40:47.420 It would require Kamala Harris to volunteer to step aside, that the project of making her

01:40:52.060 step aside if she didn't want to would be such a bloodbath.

01:40:54.880 It wouldn't be worth it.

01:40:56.380 And I don't say this, by the way, as any kind of personal reflection on her.

01:40:59.200 It's very difficult to go in American politics from the job of number two to number one.

01:41:03.160 And the politicians who have usually done it, there's usually been some catastrophic event

01:41:07.340 that has propelled number two into the number one role and gotten people used to the idea

01:41:11.460 of the former number two as the number one.

01:41:13.020 Actually, stepping through an election process has been quite difficult and maybe more difficult

01:41:18.080 even for her than for some others.

01:41:19.940 But it's a real issue.

01:41:21.540 And Democrats took a big risk with nominating the oldest candidate for president ever and

01:41:27.900 then backing that person up with someone who wasn't a tried and tested vote winner.

01:41:34.820 And so that's going to be a real issue.

01:41:36.540 And so the only thing one can hope for is a lot of economic success between now and 2024.

01:41:41.280 And one of the immediate challenges for the Democrats, there is a report on the day that

01:41:46.560 we speak, the Democrats are considering limiting attendance at the State of the Union address

01:41:50.760 to 25 members of Congress.

01:41:53.640 And that the idea that they would continue to accept the idea of COVID as something that is

01:42:00.480 an ongoing chronic problem that American society must be almost perpetually dislocated by

01:42:05.960 on their watch.

01:42:07.180 They need to find some way to declare that they have won a success over COVID, to focus

01:42:11.220 the economy, to focus on the economy.

01:42:13.780 And let's hope that Russia is deterred from invading Ukraine and then to claim that as

01:42:18.220 success if they can make that happen.

01:42:21.240 Does anyone else have anything on that point before we turn toward questions?

01:42:26.720 All right.

01:42:27.340 So, Stacey, let's get some questions here and see what it looks.

01:42:31.860 I have a few here and you can just stop me when you all hear one that you would like to

01:42:37.200 address.

01:42:38.060 Correct.

01:42:38.800 So there's one here.

01:42:39.820 It seems to me that democracy can only exist when the populace is educated.

01:42:44.480 Are American and other democracies' youth getting taught the civics necessary to sustain the

01:42:49.840 future?

01:42:51.980 Well, let's linger on that for a second.

01:42:54.080 Does anyone have, as someone pointed out, I think just a few minutes ago, we only have

01:43:00.820 two years for the immediate, you know, wolf at the door to be pushed back.

01:43:06.200 So educating the population is a heavy lift.

01:43:09.820 But does anyone have any ideas about education?

01:43:14.180 I've been thinking about it quite a bit because I despair of most of the other possible pathways

01:43:19.960 out of polarization, to use a word we haven't really talked about.

01:43:24.660 It may be a coincidence, but civic education has all but disappeared from a lot of American

01:43:32.480 children's schooling in the decades in which we have moved into these incredibly polarized

01:43:39.360 camps that don't seem to live in the same universe any longer.

01:43:42.920 And that's partly because it became controversial.

01:43:47.280 One side or the other denounced teachers and schools when their children were being taught

01:43:53.040 something in civics class that offended their view.

01:43:57.180 And there are a lot of very well-meaning and good ideas for how to bring civics back to

01:44:03.120 American classrooms.

01:44:04.080 You know, when I say that, I almost immediately hear derision and contempt, like you think you're

01:44:08.940 going to solve this problem by teaching children about all the amendments to the Constitution.

01:44:13.860 But I guess we should think about education and civic education in a much broader way as

01:44:19.320 simply giving children the chance to learn how to think, how to reason, how to argue, how to persuade,

01:44:28.960 how to hear views that they don't like, how to find some common ground if possible with people who hold

01:44:36.300 those views, and if not, to still agree to live together in this country.

01:44:42.340 For me, it's very hard to imagine exactly how we can teach those things because school is under so much

01:44:49.300 pressure and stress.

01:44:50.780 And in fact, public education seems to be facing a kind of existential crisis right now coming out

01:44:56.660 of COVID.

01:44:57.800 But for me, there has to be something like that.

01:45:01.740 And it may involve doing something to change the way we talk to each other on the internet

01:45:07.460 and the way the internet and algorithms encourage us to think and to react to one another.

01:45:14.260 These are all big, airy concepts.

01:45:17.520 But when I think of how we can turn around from the disaster we're headed toward, I think

01:45:27.480 about education and about how we're doing it wrong and how we might be able to do it better.

01:45:32.400 Can I challenge a little bit the premise of the question?

01:45:34.520 George has written, by the way, for The Atlantic very powerfully about civic education and what

01:45:37.700 has gone wrong with it.

01:45:38.360 And I recommend that to people.

01:45:40.220 But it really needs to be stressed.

01:45:42.700 The American electorate of 2022 is far and away the best educated American electorate ever.

01:45:49.280 Much more educated than the American electorate of stabler times like 1972 or 1962.

01:45:54.240 If more education were the path to stability, we should have the stability of a Barca lounger

01:45:59.880 right now.

01:46:01.340 I worry about the opposite.

01:46:02.720 What used to happen was politics was about material things.

01:46:06.800 Societies were poor and politicians offered people things that they desperately wanted.

01:46:12.420 In Tammany Hall days, it was literally a sack of coal or a turkey.

01:46:16.120 Later, it was a bridge or a road.

01:46:18.060 Today, more and more of us are in politics to realize a vision of ourselves.

01:46:22.260 And this is the thing that the political scientists always hoped for.

01:46:24.380 The day would come when we would transcend the physicality of politics and we would debate

01:46:28.500 ideas and modes of being and abstract.

01:46:32.220 And guess what?

01:46:32.740 That turns out to be the hardest thing of all to compromise.

01:46:36.560 So we may need to think about a different way for people to live each other.

01:46:40.100 We have these new communications technologies, which means we all have this experience.

01:46:44.120 Every day you turn on Twitter and somebody you've never heard of before, in some place

01:46:49.260 you know nothing about, has said something that you think of is offensive.

01:46:54.080 Did that happen 20 years ago?

01:46:55.680 It did.

01:46:56.300 Did you know about it?

01:46:57.180 It did not.

01:46:57.740 You did not.

01:46:58.460 Did it spoil your day then?

01:46:59.660 No, you didn't have to.

01:47:00.500 Now you're upset all day because of this thing, but this person you've never heard of.

01:47:04.200 And by the way, one of my rules for sanity on the internet is if you hadn't heard of

01:47:07.820 the person before they said this thing, don't let it bother you that they did say this thing.

01:47:12.020 But we have a politics now that is about self-realization.

01:47:16.300 And that's in a country that is so diverse and getting more diverse all the time, and not

01:47:20.120 just in the census categories.

01:47:22.480 But as people become richer, more prosperous, they become more different one from another as they

01:47:26.180 realize who they are.

01:47:27.740 I would just add one thing, which is that in addition to the way civics is taught in

01:47:33.660 school, which by the way, I think the first time I wrote about this subject was at least

01:47:37.200 20 years ago.

01:47:37.940 I was on the editorial board of the Washington Post and people said, it's terrible how civics

01:47:43.500 education is declining.

01:47:44.800 And I wrote something.

01:47:45.640 And there were, even at that time, all kinds of worthy organizations that promote civics

01:47:49.820 education and people writing civics textbooks that have thought a lot about left-right differences.

01:47:56.260 And a lot of this exists.

01:47:57.920 It's out there.

01:47:58.620 I mean, if teachers wanted to use it, it's available.

01:48:01.560 And so I have some cynicism about the possibility of incorporating that because it's not as if

01:48:06.240 it's, you know, it would be very hard for people to do more of it if they wanted to.

01:48:11.700 I wonder why people don't think more broadly about education, you know, whether there are

01:48:17.360 not online campaigns or whether there are not civic education for adults, you know, ways

01:48:23.740 of reaching people, whether there aren't ways of reaching people through the media or through

01:48:27.440 entertainment, you know, I'm a little disappointed in the American entertainment industry that

01:48:33.000 it hasn't thought harder, for example, about doing a Netflix series about the effect of propaganda

01:48:41.080 on ordinary Americans and how they stop speaking to one another.

01:48:44.940 You know, are there no, you know, is there no, there's no Hollywood drama that expresses the

01:48:49.820 anxiety of the last four years and the way in which it's affect personal relationships.

01:48:54.840 I mean, I think there's a lot of education that could be done or anyway, a lot of, if

01:48:59.840 education might even be the wrong word, but discussion and resolution of problems.

01:49:04.280 If we had more, you know, if more people were thinking about this as a problem that could be

01:49:09.100 resolved through reflecting different people's perspectives.

01:49:12.720 But and if it and I have I have talked to people about it, but it's if it won't work in

01:49:16.580 classrooms. Why will it work on Netflix? And I'm not saying no, no, I'm not saying it won't

01:49:21.600 work in classrooms. I'm saying that it's the material to do it is available. You know,

01:49:27.140 there are lots of good courses in civic education. People have invested. There are foundations that

01:49:33.140 will give stuff to your school if you want it. I'm not saying that it's it couldn't work. I'm saying

01:49:39.120 it's it doesn't happen. And and the reasons why seem to be to do with local school decisions and

01:49:45.600 teachers not having time and need to have more time for STEM now. And there are all these,

01:49:50.900 you know, regents tests that you have to pass in each state thanks to the no child left behind

01:49:55.940 laws. I mean, there there are all kinds of nonpolitical bureaucratic reasons why it seems

01:50:01.300 to be hard to fit civics into the day. So I'm not downplaying it. I'm just saying it's been it's

01:50:06.180 been a subject of conversation for two decades. And I'm just saying that there might be other

01:50:10.060 ways of discussing the problem if people were more creative about thinking about it.

01:50:16.220 Okay, Stacey. Next question. Next question. Sort of in that vein, how do we as reasonable

01:50:22.840 thinking humans take the level of fear, anger and tribalism in our communities down to a level

01:50:28.560 where people can reset and open their minds, use their brains and critical thinking to make

01:50:33.820 real decisions and have real mindful conversations? Yeah, well, that really is the impossible question.

01:50:39.860 If we were going to answer that, our problems would be solved.

01:50:43.000 Not only our problem. Yeah. Lots of people's problems. All problems. All problems admitting

01:50:48.320 of human solution would be solved by the answer to that question. I guess so someone just mentioned

01:50:54.520 social media in passing. I mean, that's certainly part of the problem here. I mean, the way we're

01:50:58.680 engaging one another and perpetually permeable to information and misinformation that wouldn't

01:51:05.400 otherwise be available. Well, let's just, this may seem like a lateral move here, but it's relevant

01:51:10.800 because it's so energizing in Trumpistan, the role played or not played by big tech in deciding who to

01:51:21.820 platform, who to censor, whose rights to violate. I think if you sample from the conversation

01:51:28.320 among Republicans at this point, you will tend to find people who think that Twitter is the public

01:51:36.380 square, you know, you to de-platform anyone for any reason is to violate their rights and leave it,

01:51:42.220 leaving aside that that doesn't make sense constitutionally. And Twitter is a private

01:51:45.920 company that can do whatever it wants. There is this perception that the fixes in from the elites

01:51:53.340 yet again in big tech. And so taking off Alex Jones and certainly taking off Trump was a

01:51:59.340 astonishing act of hypocrisy by people who claim to care about free speech and the free exchange of

01:52:06.460 ideas. And if the answer to bad speech is just more speech, you know, how could you de-platform

01:52:13.220 the president of the United States? I don't know if what you guys think about that to say, you know,

01:52:18.080 I'm, I'm on record many times calling for him to be de-platformed and celebrating when he was

01:52:24.440 because I view him as the most dangerous cult leader on earth at this point. But what, what do you think

01:52:30.840 we should do with respect to the role that these platforms play in our organizing our epistemology

01:52:37.440 and, and, or, you know, in this case, finding it impossible to coherently organize?

01:52:43.220 Let me try an analogy that supposing some, through some twist of the way railroads,

01:52:50.540 roads worked back in the 19th century, Cornelius Vanderbilt had found himself the owner of every

01:52:55.040 church in the United States and had to make a decision. The New York Central Railway had to

01:52:58.620 make a decision about what was preached in every, in every church in the United States. My guess is

01:53:02.620 they wouldn't have done a very good or satisfactory job. And so what you have are these giant companies

01:53:09.460 in the business of selling advertising for whom speeches actually, I mean, they give speeches

01:53:13.780 about it, but it's not what they care about. They, I mean, they, they want to, they want to sell

01:53:17.180 boots and gloves and perfume. And they suddenly found themselves in the, as arbiters of all these

01:53:23.940 questions. They're incompetent to do it. They're not, by the way, disinterested actors. They're,

01:53:28.440 they're, they're businesses, which with profit seeking. So I think there's a core of truth

01:53:32.960 in the writer's center complaint, which is who appointed and how did it happen that, that these

01:53:37.880 people are making these decisions that are so crucial. On the other hand, the rule can't be,

01:53:42.420 okay, tell you what you get to say anything about any met. I mean, we, we do have laws regulating what

01:53:48.460 you can say about medicines in the United States and have had it now for more than a hundred years.

01:53:52.840 It is not a violation of your freedom of speech, not to be able to say that cocaine will cure headaches.

01:53:57.000 So that's been regulated for a long time. So I, I just don't think there's any going to be any

01:54:02.700 alternative, but for government to step in and to say, you know what, that, that these things do

01:54:07.600 function as the equivalence of public squares and some competent authority is going to have to write

01:54:13.260 meaningful rules with democratic buy-in. We don't want to have Mark Zuckerberg making these decisions

01:54:17.880 for everybody. But let's see the, so there's two extremes here. There's the public square case,

01:54:22.780 which wherein Twitter or any other platform should function by the light of the constitution,

01:54:28.840 right? That it really is freedom of speech. And, and you are, you are in fact free to say

01:54:32.900 in the public square that cocaine cures headaches, but you're not, well, you're not, you're not as a,

01:54:39.760 you're not as a, I guess you're not as a corporation on television, but you can, I can say it on my

01:54:44.340 podcast. I mean, I can see it's like this, you know, you can write a book, you know, with your crazy

01:54:48.200 ideas about cocaine. And if someone publishes it, I don't know what law prevents that. And then

01:54:55.100 again, you have the slippery slope problem that once you start, you know, preventing that, then

01:54:59.220 where do you stop? But on the other extreme, there's treating these platforms like publishers

01:55:04.860 where they have, you know, whether they want to assume it or not, they do have an editorial

01:55:09.040 responsibility and they will, they're liable for the defamation of others or, you know, the

01:55:14.940 consequences of their publishing irresponsible things. Um, which is to say, you know, most

01:55:20.540 importantly, they can be sued effectively, you know, so that, you know, so Twitter could be sued

01:55:25.180 for what Alex Jones was able to do to the Sandy Hook parents on that platform, right? If, if Twitter's

01:55:32.080 a publisher and not just a platform, but if Twitter's like the phone company, you know, that, then what

01:55:38.060 are you going to start looking for what people say in their phone conversations and finding the phone

01:55:42.920 company? So you have to pick your, your metaphor that that's attractive here. So if I could, if I

01:55:50.140 could intervene, um, the problem with Twitter and the problem with Facebook is that it's actually

01:55:54.760 neither a publisher nor the phone company. And the reason is that, you know, oh, you're, you're

01:56:00.980 absolutely right. Everybody has the right to say whatever they want and free speech and so on.

01:56:05.420 Twitter does more than that. It doesn't just give you the right to speech. It publicizes your

01:56:11.580 speech. And, and the same is true of Facebook and it publishizes it according to a set of rules

01:56:19.000 that are semi-secret, but that we've had some insight into. So what spreads on Facebook? What

01:56:25.700 spreads the most quickly? It's Facebook has defined this as things that keep people on Facebook.

01:56:32.400 That's actually Facebook's goal is to keep you on the platform as long as possible.

01:56:36.660 And that is the, that is the, I mean, it's a little, it's a little more sophisticated than that,

01:56:42.320 but that is essentially the metric that decides what spreads and what doesn't. Then it turns out

01:56:48.560 that what spreads are things that are very emotional, things that are divisive, sometimes things that are

01:56:54.920 surprising and shocking. And the things that are surprising and shocking are often false stories.

01:57:00.700 I don't know. The Pope has endorsed Donald Trump was one of the most spread stories on Facebook in

01:57:06.140 2016, even though no Pope would ever endorse anybody. And so it's, you know, it was an absurd

01:57:11.760 thing, but it was one of the most read Facebook posts, you know, of that, of that election cycle.

01:57:18.000 And so the problem isn't that Facebook and Twitter allow people to say things. The problem is that they

01:57:23.280 have created a mechanism by which shocking emotional and angry things are reach more people than other

01:57:31.160 things, other things. So, so the thing that in my view needs to be regulated, and I have, I have

01:57:37.480 written about this and I think I've heard people discuss this on some of your shows, Sam, the thing

01:57:42.020 that needs to be regulated is the algorithm. And so you can imagine it is scientifically conceivable

01:57:48.520 that you could have algorithms that favor constructive conversation rather than emotion and, and

01:57:56.360 disagreement. It is conceivable that you could have forms of social media that reflected the values of

01:58:04.600 the public square that sought to bring people together or, or, or create compromise. I mean, for the,

01:58:11.900 these do exist. They've been experimented with in other places. Taiwan uses them a lot. It's a country

01:58:17.000 that cares a lot about democracy and has thought a lot about how to have better conversations in a

01:58:21.540 country where political division, especially if it's exploited by China could be kiss of death.

01:58:27.160 So they, they really understand it. So the thing is to get politicians and, and everybody really

01:58:32.820 focused not on what's taken down and what's allowed, you know, what they allow and don't allow,

01:58:38.020 not on censorship, but on what are the rules by which things spread most quickly? How is it that

01:58:44.260 people come to see things? What is the, you know, what, you know, what are, what, what is the algorithm

01:58:49.680 looking for? And I think that you would find that if you could regulate that, and it is technically

01:58:56.120 possible, it's just not legally possible. If we could have, if we could have insight into the sort of

01:59:01.340 black box of the algorithms, we could, I believe it would be possible to find a, to create a better public

01:59:07.860 conversation. But it's a, you know, we're still a long way away from it.

01:59:10.980 Hmm. What, one of the reasons, sorry about that. One of the reasons we're having a hard time

01:59:15.040 thinking about this is because a longtime article of faith in first amendment doctrine or in free

01:59:21.920 expression philosophy is, is under challenge here. You made reference to it earlier, Sam. I mean,

01:59:29.080 Lewis Brandeis is the one who wrote the famous counter speech doctrine, uh, in 1927 saying that the cure

01:59:35.940 for evil speech or wrong speech is more speech, uh, that the free market of ideas, uh, necessarily

01:59:43.000 will respond and correct itself. Uh, and as we discussed earlier, that just hasn't been true

01:59:50.260 in this Trumpian age. When you have, as, as George said, you have a president who, who lied 35,000 times

01:59:57.660 and who floods the zone and, and, and, and who overwhelms the truth with propaganda, then one of

02:00:06.560 the foundational reasons, uh, we have for not censorship, for not censoring speech, the idea

02:00:13.840 that you can cure bad speech with good speech that just has actually proved not to be correct.

02:00:19.440 And that leads us to potentially a very bad place in which we don't respect free speech rights

02:00:26.400 as much if we're worried about outcomes and we don't want to be in that place conceptually.

02:00:32.880 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Stacy.

02:00:36.300 Okay. Question here. Would it be achievable, feasible for the American voting system to switch

02:00:42.640 to the Australian voting system first past the post preferential voting and proportional

02:00:47.440 representation? Could the Australian voting system negate many of the flaws within the current

02:00:53.660 American voting system? Hmm. Yeah. This is a point that, um, Andrew Yang has, uh, devoted a fair

02:01:01.240 amount of words to, uh, does anyone have a, a sense that we could cure much of what ails us in democracy by

02:01:08.480 obviating the, the threat of being primaried in the way that currently exists? It's, it's worth a,

02:01:15.740 it's worth a shot. You'd like to see some of the States experiment with it and see, see whether

02:01:19.100 they get better results. It's certainly true historically and internationally that countries

02:01:24.040 that have proportional representation representation have a, you know, there's a wider variety of

02:01:29.240 parties and there's also greater pressure to achieve compromises. Um, and if you, if you look,

02:01:34.740 I've seen political science studies that show, that show depending on the system, cause there are

02:01:39.940 different systems that show better outcomes for PR countries that have it. And you certainly don't

02:01:45.760 get this very bitter two party divides that we have in some other countries have. Um, it's interesting

02:01:50.960 when, when we were all growing up, our two party system was supposed to be the source of our,

02:01:55.400 our great stability compared to all those crazy European countries with 17 parties. But now it seems

02:02:01.140 to be the source of our division, you know, and you could also throw in the, some of the state

02:02:05.400 referenda that have instituted independent commissions to draw congressional districts and which seems to

02:02:13.560 have worked pretty well in Michigan and in Ohio, a court throughout the state legislature's, uh,

02:02:21.560 redistricting because it, it violated, um, the, the state referendum that was passed by the people of

02:02:29.080 Ohio, uh, that wanted it to be taken out of partisan hands. And, and so maybe there are all

02:02:36.300 these sort of smaller fixes that could add up to a larger, not cure, but moving us away from the death

02:02:44.740 match that we're in from the, the war of attrition that we're in. Um, I don't know if the, some of them

02:02:50.080 is enough to do it. I I'm, I'm willing to try to spread anything within the rules.

02:02:54.920 Okay. We've passed the, uh, two hour mark here. So, uh, maybe just a few more questions,

02:02:59.880 uh, Stacy. All right. Can you weigh in on why previous American presidents have not been more

02:03:07.160 openly and regularly vocal on the topic of the undermining of democracy and its unraveling before

02:03:13.440 our very eyes and how their unifying message might engender more affinity towards protecting our

02:03:18.740 democracy? Uh, so this is a question about, uh, former presidents. Yeah. I mean,

02:03:24.920 this actually, this is something that has galled me, uh, to some degree, how invisible Obama has

02:03:31.900 been through this whole period. I mean, he, both, again, both with the indiscretions of coming from

02:03:37.780 Trump, but also with respect to what's happened on the far left. Is there a role for former presidents

02:03:44.040 here to, um, get us on track or is that just, uh, is the norm that presidents don't open their big

02:03:51.040 mouths after they're out of office and they just get lucrative Netflix deals? Um, is that just too

02:03:56.940 holy to, or no one, or no one cares what they have to say? Um, George Bush, didn't he just give a

02:04:04.980 whole bunch of money? Was it to Liz Cheney to Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney, both I think. And, uh,

02:04:11.700 Barack Obama did have something to say about cancel culture a couple of years ago. He got

02:04:16.040 practically canceled himself. A couple of sentences. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Yeah. But I think

02:04:21.260 the experience was probably so unsettling cause he himself got ratioed on Twitter, um, that he

02:04:26.980 hasn't done it since. So I don't know that they carry, you know, how much, how much authority they

02:04:31.300 carry anymore. Slightly different point about ex presidents and they may be contributors to the

02:04:37.340 problems of the system in a different way. The first president of the United States, if I'm

02:04:40.840 recalling this correctly, ever to give a speech for money was Gerald Ford. Before then,

02:04:46.020 and it was shocking. It was shocking. It was so shocking that his successor, Jimmy Carter sort

02:04:49.900 of made a point of not doing it. The point of building houses for the poor.

02:04:53.720 Yeah. Because he was so horrified. Jerry Ford did, uh, I mean, he was mad about the way he'd

02:04:57.880 lost office and he was in financial trouble. He did ads for like those mints and sold decorative

02:05:02.300 plates. I mean, he did all kinds of things. It was considered, it was considered really indecorous,

02:05:05.820 but the idea that you got rich as an ex president, that's, that's a new idea. And Ford was the

02:05:13.100 first, but because of age, Reagan wasn't really able to do it. Bill Clinton really introduced

02:05:17.560 this into American life. And now it's become a sort of a standard practice. But I think

02:05:21.200 one of the things that contributes to the feeling of Americans, that politics are not on the level,

02:05:27.440 that your politicians are not representing you, that they're in it for themselves,

02:05:30.360 has been some of the, what happens to people after they leave the presidency. And maybe, again,

02:05:36.300 there's no fix to this except maybe a more puritanical culture, but it would be interesting

02:05:43.020 if presidents stopped doing that, whether that would have an impact on how we feel about public

02:05:47.800 life. The problem with the fix though, is once these norms are, as we've been saying, it's kind

02:05:53.820 of an awful word, but I don't know what other word to use. Once these norms are trash, these taboos

02:05:58.380 are knocked down, it's really hard to reestablish them. Things just seem to keep moving in that

02:06:03.680 direction. Presidents are going to keep making more money. How do you get people to get off

02:06:08.100 Twitter? That's my answer to Twitter, get off it. But it's very hard to get off it because once

02:06:13.440 you're on it, you're in the thick of it and you want to keep experiencing it. And so self-restraint

02:06:19.160 as a kind of a cultural norm is an answer to all of this, including the legal corruption of ex-presidents

02:06:28.000 making a ton of money off their former office. But I don't know how you do it, except as I was

02:06:33.300 saying earlier, by trying to raise a new generation with new ideas. But I don't know, maybe education

02:06:38.480 is the wrong road to be thinking. Wait a minute, George, I have a question. Do you have a secret

02:06:42.560 Twitter account? Oh yeah, you're not on Twitter. I read it, so I must have some secret account,

02:06:48.480 but I never write on it. So you won't find me. Yes. Yeah. But I read all of you. I read all of you

02:06:55.260 and I know exactly what you're thinking and saying. I just am not going to lift my head up long enough

02:07:00.280 to get it shot off. Interesting. All right, Stacey, next question.

02:07:05.480 What are the panelists' views on the filibuster?

02:07:09.240 Anyone have strong views here?

02:07:11.880 I mean, historically, it was invented for and been used primarily in the service

02:07:17.300 of squashing civil rights legislation. And it's not in the Constitution. It is a Senate rule like

02:07:25.000 other rules. And it has gotten in the way of a lot of important legislation. I can't imagine why

02:07:33.160 anyone would privilege that rule over some of the things that's been used to squash.

02:07:42.900 Next question.

02:07:43.720 Next question. What is the likelihood of someone coming in trying to fundamentally change the system

02:07:50.960 in helping to create a more diverse, nuanced selection of candidates and actually end up

02:07:56.840 making it further down the line and maybe having a real shot at the presidency, sort of what Andrew

02:08:02.000 Yang is trying to do? Is it realistic to think that there can or will be a candidate who ends up

02:08:07.880 in that position and ultimately wins the presidency?

02:08:10.540 Well, given that we had President Trump, I think anything is possible. Let's go to the next

02:08:15.660 question.

02:08:16.820 Why do Americans insist on classifying between the left and the right? Surely most people are in

02:08:21.900 the center with fringes heading left or right. Why not create a new center party drawing on both

02:08:26.940 current parties?

02:08:28.720 Yeah. And also, it's confusing that left and right, that mapping doesn't really fully capture what's been

02:08:36.360 going on in our society of late. I mean, as we've observed here already, there's been a fair amount

02:08:42.260 of illiberalism on the left. How should we think about left and right? I mean, people have referenced

02:08:48.100 this concept of horseshoe theory, whereas you go far enough to the left and far enough to the right,

02:08:52.120 and you begin to resemble one another. I mean, Anne, do you have any thoughts about how we should

02:08:56.440 think about, should we have a different map of our politics here?

02:08:59.360 So even the phrasing left and right actually comes from the French Revolution. I mean,

02:09:05.020 it's a very old set of ideas, and our modern understanding of it really dates to the Cold

02:09:13.480 War era, when the left was about a larger state, and the right was about a smaller state,

02:09:21.340 although that was a little bit different in different countries too. But it was essentially,

02:09:24.740 the poll was around communism, anti-communism, how you felt about it, and so on. I mean,

02:09:30.780 I actually think that the words are now almost totally meaningless. And one of the advantages of

02:09:36.360 a multi-party system, which I hesitate, which I, you know, of course, we're still pretty far away

02:09:42.820 from that in the United States, but when you see them in other countries, is that they do make it

02:09:47.380 easier for parties to emerge that are neither, or that have different and new self-definitions. I mean,

02:09:54.480 so the emergence of the Green Party in Germany is a famous one. And the Greens in Germany aren't just

02:09:59.340 an environmental party. They're attached to a whole set of other issues. The foreign minister

02:10:03.340 of Germany is now a member of the Green Party. And that's a party that's relatively new that has

02:10:07.900 managed to emerge and focus on a different set of issues. I don't know, there are a lot of examples.

02:10:12.780 The president of Slovakia is now, is an environmental lawyer who comes from a kind of green movement

02:10:20.900 as well, but who is also neither left nor right. And there are a number of European politicians

02:10:26.000 who've also sought to create parties like this. Our system does make it really difficult, almost

02:10:31.560 impossibly difficult to create a third party, which is why, you know, our best bet is to try to create,

02:10:38.760 I don't know whether the word is centrist that you really want, because it's not, it's not a center,

02:10:44.000 but to try and create pro-democracy wings or movements inside the existing parties and to

02:10:50.660 think about it like that. I mean, it's the idea of creating, and people have tried so many times

02:10:54.680 in recent years to create new parties and failed. But you're certainly right that the division between

02:10:59.460 left and right has become pretty meaningless. You know, and what people are really, you know,

02:11:04.440 what moves people, as David was saying, what politics are really organized around now

02:11:08.260 are people's sense of identities. You know, I belong to this kind of group or that kind of group,

02:11:13.460 and that identity can adopt a number of different policies. And of course, once politics are about

02:11:19.660 identity and culture rather than concrete, you know, policies and plans that we can argue about or agree

02:11:28.200 to disagree about, politics becomes more difficult. So I mean, my solution is actually a little bit

02:11:32.840 different, which is to, as I said, create a pro-democracy wing inside both parties, and also

02:11:39.460 to get people to refocus on the reality of politics, what politicians can actually do, which is build

02:11:46.380 bridges, fund or not fund healthcare, make foreign policy decisions. You know, if we're focused on that

02:11:51.840 and not, I'm this kind of person, as opposed to that kind of person, then politics becomes more sane.

02:11:57.720 Yeah, I think the problem, one problem with identity politics is that it interacts with the

02:12:02.420 variable of partisanship unhelpfully, because it is a tribal sort of politics. And if you're going to

02:12:09.840 be tribal, then the extreme voices win, and you're certainly not rewarded for seeing the other tribes

02:12:18.640 point more or less ever, right? So if you're going to make the center stronger, you can't be tribal,

02:12:27.760 because being in the center amounts to, much of the time, acknowledging what your side got wrong,

02:12:34.680 you know, or what, you know, what just to the left of you, to use the old mapping, got wrong. And

02:12:40.980 you're just, I mean, I just, to take the N of one here, I mean, I just know what it's like to be someone

02:12:47.000 who sees all the problems with wokeness, and all the problems with Trump. And the net result of that

02:12:53.920 is to always have someone irate with your views, right? Like you're not, you're not having, you're

02:12:59.380 not safely in an echo chamber where you're the good guys, and everyone else is bad. So it just

02:13:05.540 seems like tribal politics has to be selecting for hyper-partisanship. Okay, let's do one more

02:13:11.400 question, and then I will close out. Okay, last question. Is it possible that the world has outgrown

02:13:18.500 democracy as a political system, much the way it outgrew previous dominant political systems,

02:13:23.840 and that we need a new system to cope with the challenges eroding it? And if so, what would

02:13:29.320 that potentially look like? That kind of tears everything down to the studs, but let's reflect

02:13:34.660 on that for a moment. Is there any concern here that democracy is not up to the challenge of 21st

02:13:41.440 century life in the end, and that we need to find some other mechanism? You know, keeping,

02:13:47.780 I think it's, well, isn't it Churchill's admonishment in mind that it's the best of the

02:13:52.200 worst systems? What, does anyone have an opinion on that? Well, in the days when we used to study

02:13:59.400 textbooks on the history of democracy, the place they usually started was with the debate that took

02:14:03.720 place in England in the 1640s, in which one of the most famous quoted sentences was,

02:14:09.400 the smallest he that live in England, liveth in England, has a life to live, as well as the

02:14:14.480 greatest he. So if that's what you mean by democracy, that idea is never going to go to

02:14:20.760 style, the equal dignity of human beings, that everybody has a right to consideration.

02:14:24.960 What may be going out of style, as I suggested before, and something else I was saying, is

02:14:29.060 that the idea of the style of democracy, which is the legislative horse trading of material benefits,

02:14:34.540 what you thought you saw when you took that school trip to Washington 20 or 30 years ago,

02:14:40.540 that may be going out of style, partly because maybe economies aren't growing as fast as they

02:14:45.380 used to be, so we can't exchange gifts or benefits as easily without feeling it's coming out of our

02:14:50.420 pocket. And it may be that as politics becomes more identity-based and more about self-realization,

02:14:55.120 that none of that is interesting to people. And it is striking how little of that Donald Trump did,

02:14:59.880 how infrastructure became a joke. He was never serious about it. And when Biden did do infrastructure,

02:15:04.940 it turned out how little anybody really ever cared about it in the first place.

02:15:08.580 So we may need a new set of rules of the road, new set of mechanics, but the idea of a politics

02:15:16.940 based on the dignity of everybody, that's never going out of style.

02:15:20.760 Well, not just the dignity, the consent. I think that if you do tear everything down to the studs,

02:15:27.140 the thing that you can't dispense with is the sovereignty of the people as the source of

02:15:33.260 ultimate power of government. As somebody who spends a lot of time studying and writing about

02:15:37.860 autocracies, I promise you that there is no alternative system out there that is better.

02:15:45.900 You can find the odd benevolent dictator who works for some short period of time,

02:15:51.360 but it's not a long-term system and there's always a succession problem.

02:15:55.060 In a way, the Olympic games that are about to start in Beijing are a real vision of the future

02:16:02.080 because the Chinese government has fulfilled all its promises to the International Olympic

02:16:08.200 Committee. It has created ski slopes where there was no snow. It has made it possible to get out to

02:16:15.280 the mountains where the slopes were created on trains that didn't exist a few years ago in no time at

02:16:20.480 all. In some ways, it's delivered. It's done the delivering that David was talking about on material

02:16:25.780 things, at least for part of its population. You're living in the most surveilled society in

02:16:32.120 human history with less freedom than any society in human history. That's the nightmare vision that

02:16:40.060 we really should never lose sight of because you don't get there all at once. You just get there a

02:16:45.680 little bit at a time by deciding this isn't worth it and this doesn't work any longer and it's too

02:16:51.000 hard to run for office and the people are incorrigible. Well, panelists, is there any topic we didn't touch?

02:17:01.360 Is there any question we didn't address that you think we might want to touch to close out here?

02:17:06.620 I have one thought on this that maybe bears mentioning. I think there's a kind of inevitably,

02:17:14.520 as I look back on this, an inevitable tone of anxiety, elegy, doubt that creeps into these

02:17:21.180 conversations and the future of democracy with the question mark behind it raises the possibility that

02:17:26.560 maybe it doesn't have a future. I think we're at danger of underestimating just what a tremendous

02:17:31.480 achievement it is, why the people who hate it also fear it because they know how powerful it is,

02:17:38.000 and what an amazing run of increasing success it has had. I just feel that one of the things we all

02:17:44.220 need to do is to encourage ourselves, not just to think about this and speculate and observe,

02:17:48.020 but to believe in it and to live in it. Sam, I think this is the attitude you've had and we've

02:17:53.960 talked about this through the Trump years. Who's going to win? I don't know, but they're going to

02:17:58.260 have to leave tire marks over me before I let those guys do it. And people who are listening,

02:18:03.420 I hope that they will come away from this conversation with some feeling of their own

02:18:06.880 personal efficacy. I mean, we're all here because we believe they count. Their voices count. They're

02:18:11.480 listening because they believe their voices count. And what people can do, this future is in your hands.

02:18:17.900 It's not something that's going to happen to you. Not anyway, if you don't passively accept that it's

02:18:22.180 going to happen to you. Yeah. Yeah. I would echo that by reminding everybody that nothing is

02:18:28.300 inevitable. The decline of democracy is not inevitable. And the success of democracy is

02:18:34.300 not inevitable. There is no law of history that means we will win or we will lose. That's not how

02:18:39.900 history works. Everything that happens tomorrow depends on decisions that we make today. The future is

02:18:47.200 always open. It's always been open. The possibility that American democracy would collapse was always

02:18:52.800 there. And the possibility that it will never collapse is also always there. And people should

02:18:57.800 remember that. And one of the reasons why democracy will succeed or fail is to do with how engaged citizens

02:19:03.240 are in it. Yeah. Well, that seems like a great spot to end on. I mean, the lesson I take away from this

02:19:08.920 in the last few years is that really there's no way to shirk the power and responsibility of ideas,

02:19:20.520 right? I mean, ideas are the levers that move everything in our lives. So how you apportion

02:19:24.560 your belief and what, you know, just what you talk about, what you pay attention to, what seems credible

02:19:30.960 to you, the importance of all of that, you know, at the individual level and at the collective level is

02:19:36.200 never going to go away. And insofar as organizing my own ideas about what's going on in the world and

02:19:41.700 in my own country, I'm very grateful to the four of you for helping me do that. And this has been an

02:19:47.520 experiment here on the podcast because we've never, we never record by video in this way. And we also

02:19:53.180 never have this many people on. And I just want to thank you, the four of you, for your time. I admire

02:19:59.520 each of you immensely as a reader. And it's great to speak with each of you here. So Anne,

02:20:05.120 David, Bart, George, it's really, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 11, 2022

#274 — The Future of American Democracy

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript