Sam Harris speaks with Anne Applebaum, David Frum, Barton Gellman, and George Packer about the ongoing threat to American democracy posed by Republican misinformation and disinformation regarding the 2020 Presidential Election and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
Okay, well in today's episode we are presenting audio from a live event we did on Zoom a couple weeks back, which was free for podcast subscribers.
And over 9,000 of you joined us live in the middle of the day, and most of you stayed for the full two hours, which was really great.
Anyway, upon re-listening to this, the conversation was even better than I had realized, and I'm very happy to get a chance to present it to a wider audience here.
The event was inspired by a recent issue of The Atlantic Magazine, which had several articles focusing on the ongoing threat to American democracy posed by the widely-believed lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
Something like 60% of Republicans believe this, and needless to say, that has consequences.
So to walk us through this grim situation, I enlisted the help of four Atlantic writers, Ann Applebaum, David Frum, George Packer, and Barton Gellman.
Anne Applebaum has been on the podcast before.
She is a journalist and prize-winning historian, a staff writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, where she co-leads a project on 21st century disinformation and co-teaches a course on democracy.
Her books include Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine, Iron Curtain, The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944 and 1956, And Gulag, A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
Her most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Twilight of Democracy, which is an essay on democracy and authoritarianism.
She was a Washington Post columnist for 15 years and a member of the editorial board.
She's also been the deputy editor of The Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers.
Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and many other publications.
David Frum has also been on the podcast several times before.
He is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse, Restoring American Democracy, which is his tenth book.
David spent most of his career in conservative media and research institutions, including the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.
He is a past chairman of Policy Exchange, the leading center-right think tank in the UK.
And a former director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
He also famously served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush.
David holds a B.A.
and M.A.
in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard.
George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about American politics, culture, and foreign affairs.
He is the author, most recently, of the book Last Best Hope, America in Crisis and Renewal, which I'm reading now, and it's really a great book.
He's also the author of The Unwinding, An Inner History of New America, which won the National Book Award.
And he also wrote a biography of Richard Holbrook, which also won awards.
And he has written seven other books.
And finally, Barton Gelman.
Bart is also a staff writer at the Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation in New York.
He is the author most recently of Dark Mirror, Edward Snowden, and the American Surveillance State.
He also wrote a biography on Dick Cheney.
And he has won no fewer than three Pulitzer Prizes, as well as an Emmy for Documentary Filmmaking.
Anyway, as you'll hear, I really just had to get out of the way and let my guests talk.
Any imputation of partisanship on their part makes no sense when you consider their biographies.
I actually don't know the politics of Barth and George offhand.
Not that it would really matter.
Anne and David have been quite esteemed in center-right circles, I think, for all of their political lives.
There are some disagreements between them, but generally they're on the same page with respect to the sordid history of how we got here and the problems that really must be solved.
I guess the question could be asked, why didn't have someone on the panel who was a contrarian on important points, and therefore someone who could help make it a proper debate?
However, the truth is, on this topic, I really would view that as a waste of precious time.
I have no interest in hearing from someone at this point who thinks that the 2020 election was stolen, or thought that the attack on the Capitol on January 6th last year was a non-event.
I raise points of this sort so that my guests can try to perform an exorcism on all that is happening in the Republican echo chamber.
But as to what happened here and the lies told about it, there's really not much of substance that we can be in doubt about.
And any real skepticism about the general picture here is quite ludicrous at this point.
So, I view this conversation much more as a PSA about an ongoing emergency than as a proper topic for debate.
To use an analogy that often occurs to me, imagine you're on an airplane that's about to land, and there's a commotion in the cockpit, and the door swings open.
And you can plainly see that things are definitely not okay.
You catch a glimpse of someone lying on the floor, and someone who's not dressed like a pilot appears to be randomly flipping switches.
And someone purporting to be the pilot just came over the PA system and told you to stay in your seats because the Jews have removed the plane's landing gear.
Right?
At that point, I don't want to hear from someone who thinks that this behavior might yet prove to be normal.
Right?
Or that perhaps some Jew somewhere may have sabotaged a plane, and we should talk about that.
That seems worth looking into, doesn't it?
No, what is absolutely clear is that what is happening right before our eyes is not remotely okay.
And that's the situation we have been in for several years now, with a Republican Party that has morphed into a personality cult, enthralled to a conman and crackpot who just happened to have been president.
And the plane that we really must land is to have a peaceful, orderly, and legitimate presidential election in 2024.
And there is no reason, currently, to think that that will be easy to do.
That cockpit door is wide open, and it's just chaos in there.
Now, as this is another PSA, this episode is not paywalled.
As always, if you want to support what I'm doing here, and generally listen to full-length episodes of the podcast, you can subscribe at SamHarris.org.
Actually, the last episode on the Joe Rogan controversy was also a PSA.
Perhaps I should say a few words about that.
Because I heard from thousands of you, in fact.
And the most common response I got was really enormous gratitude for what I said there.
Some of you hated it, of course, but there was a tremendous amount of thanks expressed for what I said about Rogan himself, but more importantly, for what I said about racism and the ethics of apology.
And almost everyone who commented seemed to think that I had really stuck my neck out in a way that's become all too rare among academics and journalists.
And many of you explicitly thanked me for my bravery.
Well, I'll let you in on a little secret.
There's not much bravery involved at this point.
Now, if I worked at a university, or at any institution where I could be fired, yes, then that would have been a very brave and even reckless podcast to drop.
If I had to worry about whether I'd be able to pay my mortgage, or afford college for my daughters, because a Twitter mob might successfully get me fired, or dropped by my sponsors, or demonetized on YouTube, Well then yes, I would probably hesitate before telling you what I honestly think on certain topics.
And that's why when many of you ask me about engaging culture war issues, I never offer blanket recommendations.
And I certainly don't say that everyone should take the risks that I take.
Because the truth is, I'm not taking much of a risk now.
I have deliberately built my platform so that I don't have to worry about these things.
Or at least I have to worry less than almost anyone in media.
And that's why The Making Sense Podcast is a subscription business.
And I don't rely on ads.
And that's why I don't depend in any important way on platforms like YouTube.
Because my goal, for years now, has been to remove any incentives that could keep me from being able to tell you what I really think.
And the only thing that makes that possible is you.
The fact that a sufficient number of you not just listen to the podcast, but support it directly by subscribing.
That is the secret to my apparent bravery.
Those of you who actually purchase monthly or annual subscriptions have given me greater job security than almost anyone on earth.
Now, that may sound like an exaggeration, but it's not.
And it's not a question of wealth.
I mean, I know billionaires and movie stars who have to be way more concerned about cancellation than I do.
And it's because they really are much more vulnerable than I am to having a comparatively small number of people decide to pull the plug on their careers.
I mean, just think about it.
I have no sponsors and no boss.
There's no board of directors who can tell me that I can't do this podcast tomorrow.
Or that it might be better if I just avoided certain topics.
So it really is not about my personal courage.
It's about our having built a platform together.
So, once again, I want to thank all of you who support the podcast.
When I say that I couldn't do this without you, I truly mean it.
Okay, and now I bring you an all-too-timely conversation about the future of American democracy.
I hope you find it useful.
I guess I should say that if we wind up crashing Zoom for some reason, we will apologize to the audience and then just re-sign in privately because I don't know what we will apologize to the audience and then just re-sign in privately because I don't I don't mean to disparage Zoom here, but anything's possible.
This is my normal book event, you know, six and a half, seven thousand, so I'm used to Zoom working here.
Yeah, it's comfortable.
We're getting to Madison Square Garden, I think, here.
All right, well, I'm going to start because I value your time, the four of you, And so just to be clear to the audience, this is not primarily considered a video event.
I love that you're all joining us to watch us record a podcast, but the final product here will be a podcast, so there may be some moments where we retake things just to get clean audio if we're talking over each other.
And I will also introduce the four of you more fully in my intro to the podcast, but I think we should just go around briefly here.
As I was saying offline, this conversation is born of my having read two articles in the most recent issue of The Atlantic.
The January-February issue, which is focused on the fundamental threat to American democracy that is posed by Trump and the Republican Party at this point.
And, you know, this will be a controversial claim that I want us to shore up any way we can over the next couple of hours.
But the two articles were Barton Gelman's article, Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun, And George Packer's article, Are We Doomed?
So I want to introduce, let's start with Bart.
Bart, thank you for joining us.
Barton is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
I will read your bona fides elsewhere.
Barton, thanks for being here.
Pleasure.
And George Packer, you have written several wonderful books.
As I was saying, I was reading your latest, The Last Best Hope.
You've won a National Book Award.
I also realize I studied with your mom in college.
I just discovered this in reading your bio.
So, your mom, Nancy Packer, taught an amazing course on the short story, which I remember fondly.
So, we have that connection.
That's great.
I'll tell her.
She's 96, but it'll still make her very happy.
Amazing.
Well, then tell her.
I can't imagine she would remember this even if she weren't 96, but I remember going into her office and I remember her consternation upon learning that I was dropping out of school to go to India and recapitulate the 60s for myself.
And I had to tell her because I was resigning I was editing the literary magazine, and it was on her to figure out who my replacement was going to be.
And I remember the look on her face where I was clearly making a wrong turn into the wilderness of self-absorption.
So just know that I'm a great disappointment to your mother.
I've seen that look every day of my life, Sam, so I know what it looks like.
And we're also joined by Anne Applebaum, who's been on the podcast before.
Really, Ann, you're one of the highest signal and lowest noise people I've ever come across, in particular on the topic of the threat of authoritarianism and the ubiquity of propaganda.
So, thank you for being here, and it's great to talk to you again.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks for having me.
And, last but not least, we have David Frum.
Also, I should have said Anne has also won a Pulitzer, at least.
I'm sure many other things.
She's a historian.
David, do you have a Pulitzer I need to worry about, or a National Book Award?
No, this is getting a little awkward, actually.
All right, good.
Well, you're pristine.
You're like me.
You don't have either of those debauched awards, so this is wonderful to be joining you here.
Thank you, David, for helping to organize this, because you helped to quarterback this, and you are a very frequent guest on the podcast, so good to see you again.
Thank you.
As I said offline, I view David and Anne as helping me in extracting as much as I can possibly get on this topic from Bart and George, in addition to contributing everything they have to say on it.
I just, I didn't want to drop the ball here.
And, you know, the two of them know as much as anyone about the topics we're going to discuss.
David is further distinguished in perhaps being The only person on earth who has a greater case of Trump Derangement Syndrome than I do, just by a touch.
We agree with, I think, on all points there.
So, let's begin.
I want us to talk about the future, you know, where this is headed.
This conversation is really summarized by a quotation that I have from Barth summarizing his article.
He wrote elsewhere, he said, January 6 was the initial milestone, not the last, in the growth of the first violent mass movement in American politics since the 1920s, and the Republicans have made up their minds to steal the 2024 presidential election and are well on their way to manufacturing the means.
There's a clear and present danger that the loser of the next election will be certified president-elect with all the chaos and bloodshed that that portends.
So that's where we're headed.
I want us to see if we are still that concerned.
This has been at least a month or so since Bart wrote that.
But I want us to try to establish what has already happened, because my concern here is that You know, out here in podcast-istan, there is quite a bit of controversy over what has happened, and the lies and misinformation about the past have taken hold to a degree that I find a source of considerable concern and even despair at this point.
So, here's just to give you the cartoon version, which is not too far from what is in fact I think many, many millions of people believe, and it's not just Republicans by any means, that virtually everything that has been said about Trump by people like ourselves has proved to be an exaggeration, right?
That there's, you know, he was really, he was a crass businessman who shook things up.
But all of the calumny about him, and certainly every claim that he was a fundamental threat to democracy or to our institutions, amounted to just a blizzard of partisan lies.
You know, the Russiagate hoax was just all hoax.
The Steele dossier vitiates everything.
The Mueller report never found anything.
The election may in fact have been stolen, or at least there's reason to believe that there were significant irregularities and Trump was totally within his rights to challenge it.
The significance of January 6th has been totally exaggerated.
Those were just, you know, there's just hysterical libtards on CNN and the New York Times who've been calling it an insurrection.
or an attempted coup, but they were, in truth, it was just a bunch of goofballs taking selfies, and there was nothing really fundamental was at stake.
And so what we are reacting to in this conversation, and any prognostications on that basis, is just a kind of grotesque media confection that is being amplified based on just because it gets clicks, essentially, You know, this is what is good for—this is the lifeblood of CNN and The New York Times at this point.
So, I want us to try to perform an exorcism on that set of claims, and perhaps we'll start with you, Bart.
Tell me where you think we are with respect to all of that, and then we'll kind of go around and everyone can—we can fill in the gaps here.
Well, yeah, I mean, all of that needs to be exercised because none of it is right.
I mean, Russiagate was not a hoax.
There were extensive efforts by the Russians to help Trump win the election.
Trump and his people solicited those and welcomed them.
And it did not rise to the level of conspiracy, but the Mueller report showed very clearly a roadmap to a successful prosecution for obstruction of justice.
It named multiple occasions on which Trump could be said to have obstructed justice, and at least three of them met all the elements of the crime.
And you can go down the rest of the list.
January 6th was part of a broad and vigorously fought attempt to overthrow the election.
We're learning more even in recent days since I wrote my piece about the extent to which Trump was trying to get people who had, theoretically, the power to do things, to do those things, that would have overturned the election.
Most recently, we're learning more about proposals That were discussed with Trump and that he solicited further information about that would have seized the voting machines.
I mean, an absolute sort of classic dictator move in which he was going to have in various iterations, either the Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security or the National Guard, go around the country and seize voting machines in at least six states.
And, quote-unquote, rerun the election under sort of national security establishment procedures yet to be named.
This is at the same time that he is trying to get Mike Pence to either simply declare him the victor.
on January 6th, or to throw away enough votes that the election would fail and would go to the House of Representatives for resolution.
I mean, January 6th was an attempt by a violent mob to stop the congressional count of the electoral vote, the final stage, the final sort of irrevocable moment in deciding the election.
And it was done at the beck and call and instigation of the president.
I mean, it couldn't be more serious.
George?
I completely agree with Bart, and I've learned a lot from Bart's reporting on this, just how carefully Trump read the situation he found himself in after the election and proceeded down the one path that might have Overthrown the results of the election, which is to say, to decertify the state results and the electors who were going to be sent to be counted in Congress.
Trump understood that he needed to delay the count on January 6th in order to find enough corrupt state officials, state legislatures, secretaries of state, county election board members, To throw the election his way.
And that was the way that Barthes outlined in an earlier piece, that Trump could throw it all into confusion, and then the confusion itself would become the grounds for him and key allies to declare that he was the winner.
And that's what he tried to do.
He tried very hard.
He didn't succeed.
Partly because of what you might call the civic virtue of some of those state officials and secretaries of state and legislators and county officials.
And now what we see happening, Bart again has written about this in his most recent piece, is again a concerted attempt by Trump and his allies to target those offices that most people have never even heard of.
And fill them with loyalists who next time around can be counted on to do the corrupt thing that others were unwilling to do in Georgia and in Michigan and in Arizona and in Pennsylvania last time.
So I don't know what more evidence anyone needs.
And the problem is this is The exorcism doesn't work if the degree of what you might call tribal irrationality is so great that it's simply not subject to the kind of argument and evidence that Bart brought in those pieces and that we're bringing here today.
And that's where we are.
My piece was about the failure of imagination, which has been Trump's great friend all along.
Simply the inability of most Americans to imagine That we could have a president as corrupt and indifferent to laws and norms and is prepared to trash the Constitution and even the majority will as Trump.
We couldn't imagine January 6th.
The intelligence agencies could not imagine January 6th.
That's what General Mark Milley said afterward.
We have to imagine this because if we can't imagine it, we are a big step closer to it happening next time successfully.
So what I tried to do in my piece was simply Lay out, you know, not convincingly to me, but just start out to think, what might it look like?
What could happen?
Is it going to be violent?
What form will the violence take?
How will the violence begin?
Or will we turn into a kind of sullen, cynical, formerly democratic populace, rather like Russia?
That doesn't believe anything.
It doesn't believe anyone that thinks the media lies, the politicians lie, so to hell with it all, and we withdraw.
And I think that is at least as likely a scenario following the next presidential election as outright mass violence.
But mass violence is not only possible, it's... We saw a very vivid foreshadowing of it on January 6th.
Hmm.
Yeah, I mean, there's...
Several things here that are especially troubling.
One is the degree to which our institutions still rely on the integrity of individuals, right?
You can't take the monkey out of the apparatus here.
And if just a few people had decided they were Trumpists to the core, things could have happened very differently.
And as you say, the ground for that is being prepared next time.
So some of this sounds like a conspiracy theory, right?
Some of it happens behind closed doors.
I mean, the evidence is there for those who want to see it at this point.
But I'm amazed by a phenomenon that David, you've pointed out a lot, really every time you've spoken about Trump, which is that some of the most egregious things he ever does, he does in plain view.
I mean, there is no debate about The fact, for instance, that he would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
That alone, that one detail, which is attested to by endless evidence, he was given multiple chances to do this on television, and he declined.
That alone should have alerted us that we were in uncharted territory and that this was an explicit threat to our democracy.
David, I just want to bring you in here to reflect on that.
Let me start by trying to answer the first question you posed in a way that I maybe will be Make it more vivid what we're talking about.
When my late father-in-law returned home from Korea, he'd had some distinction there.
He was invited to a party at the house of a general officer.
He was young and didn't drink in a party full of people who were older and did drink, and he got bored.
So he wandered away from the party and wandered into the general's private study.
On his desk, the general had a Luger, which he had brought back from the European theater.
Father-in-law was interested in weapons, picked it up, And the gun discharged.
It was loaded.
The bullet went through the general study, went through the wall of the other room, and embedded itself in the dining room.
And my father-in-law, Marisha, just It was like the worst three seconds, worse than anything he'd been in two wars.
This was the worst moment of anything.
And he walked out and everybody was laughing hysterically because the bullet had missed.
They were all drunk.
They thought it was funny.
No big deal.
He told that story for 50 or 60 years because it was a big deal.
The fact that the bullet doesn't hit anybody doesn't mean the gun wasn't loaded.
The gun wasn't fired.
We got real lucky.
We got real lucky.
We got luckier than we deserved.
But the fact is, the President of the United States, having lost an election, tried through, as Bart describes, a complicated scheme, and then by violence, and the two interlocked in a lot of ways we can talk about, to overturn the election.
That's incredible!
That's just incredible!
And we're now so used to it, as with so many things with Trump.
You know, as you say, it was public.
There have been presidents, and there have been certainly officials in the United States, who have taken bribes.
And when they have done so, they've usually made some effort to conceal the bribe taking, made some effort to cover it up.
The idea that you say, okay, my idea for taking bribes is I'm going to go to acquire a building on Pennsylvania Avenue and put my name on it and put a red carpet down to the street and cars will come up and people will come out and they will put money on the counter for me, the president.
And I will tell everybody, I will tell literally everybody, I will tell the New York Times, I will tell National Review, I will tell everybody that you don't get a meeting with me.
Unless you've given me the money first at my building on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Well, I guess he seems to have a clear conscience.
It can't be so bad.
Yeah, yeah.
It's amazing.
It's just this astonishing social phenomenon that if you have no shame and your indiscretions are big enough, a different physics takes over and you are really kind of beyond—one, people just can't keep track of of how fully you're trespassing on various norms.
Let me add a PS.
I find oftentimes the way you have to deal with this is through the building up of minute details rather than the big theoretical statement.
Here's one of these little stories.
I'm now going to forget which year of the Trump presidency this was, but Vice President Pence made a visit to Ireland.
He was stopping there on the course of another mission.
And He had meetings in Dublin with the Dublin government.
He opted to stay at the Trump golf course on the other side of the island.
Dublin faces toward England.
He stayed toward the Atlantic.
And in order to go to his meetings, he had to take military transportation from the Atlantic Ocean to the English side of Ireland in order to have his meetings at a cost of the taxpayer of something like a million dollars.
All of this in order that the United States could put a few thousand dollars into Donald Trump's personal pocket, because there are hotels, believe it or not, in Dublin.
And that was one day.
That was one day.
And then there was the next day, and then there was the next.
And so the accumulation of corruption had the effect, because these things are Often technically illegal, or certainly inappropriate, or certainly frowned upon.
Every day, the president had to tinker with the structure of law in order to cope with the thing that he was fundamentally about, which was stealing from the taxpayer.
Well, so Anne, you obviously have a very good view of all of this, but you have a perspective internationally that might be interesting to bring in, if not here, at some point, because the unraveling of our democracy and our commitment to democracy is of a piece with what's happening elsewhere.
I want to bring you in here.
How do you see the current state of the misinformation in our society that is allowing fully half of Americans to Not follow the plot here.
So, yes, I think the international perspective is important in one sense, because if you look around the world and you look at the way in which democracies fall in the modern era, you know, we all have this idea that there are going to be tanks in the street and there's a lieutenant colonel in the presidential palace and he shoots a gun in the air and, you know, that's how the coup d'etat happens.
When we think of coup d'etat, we have this kind of 1960s, 1970s vision of it.
In fact, most democracies fail, and I mean Venezuela, I mean Russia, I mean Hungary, it's happening in other places now as well, because elected officials who are unscrupulous take advantage of the current political system, they change the constitution, they ignore the rule of law, they ignore the sense of the law, and they seek to remain in power illegally or immorally, one way or the other.
And it's very common.
It happens over and over.
And much of what Trump did and much of what he continues to do is familiar from other times and places.
Let me just focus on one piece of it.
I think everybody has alluded to this one way or another.
This was the method by which Trump, after the 2020 election, the method by which he started to attack the validity of the vote.
If you remember, it wasn't just one form of, you know, the vote is rigged.
It was voter machines not working in Arizona.
It was people cheating in Georgia.
It was, you know, dead people voting somewhere else.
There was a theory about the Chinese having intervened in the machines.
There was a theory about the Venezuelans Having something to do with the machines.
The voting machine companies themselves were attacked.
Some of them sued.
And the cumulative effect of all of these things, I mean, of course they were, as Bart said, they were part of a tactic, you know, to try to get people to stop and consider whether the election was It was legal and to try to get people in particular states to change the rules by which the votes were counted.
But it had another effect, which I believe was also deliberate, which was to do what Steve Bannon once described as flooding the zone with shit.
And this is something that authoritarians and dictators in other places also know about.
If you tell one lie once in a while, you know, then people can argue about it.
It can be proved or disproved.
If you tell hundreds of lies, if you tell them over and over again, different lies from different directions every day, what you create is cynicism and nihilism and confusion and belief that no truth can ever be known.
A great example of how this was done was, if you remember the Malaysian plane that crashed in Eastern Ukraine in 2014.
If you remember that, it was actually shot down by Russians.
We know exactly how it was done.
They thought it was Ukrainian plane and so on.
What was the reaction of the Russian state after this happened?
The Russian state media put out literally dozens of explanations for why the plane was shut down, ranging from the totally improbable, you know, there were dead people on the plane in Amsterdam and they Took it down on purpose to discredit, you know, or the plane had flown too close to another plane.
It was trying to shoot down Putin's plane, whatever.
There were dozens and dozens of explanations.
And the point of that was to make sure that Russians had developed the attitude, which I heard one of them say in an interview in Moscow a few days later, namely, we don't know what happened and we will never know what happened because it's unknowable.
And Trump uses this same tactic.
He repeatedly lies.
He makes repeated different explanations for how and why the election was rigged.
And he creates a sense of falsehood and a sense of unknowability.
And he does this, of course, he's assisted in doing this by a huge range of right-wing propagandists, from Steve Bannon to Tucker Carlson, you know, from the famous ones to the much less famous ones on multiple channels.
And the effect is to create the cynicism and nihilism that you started out with.
You know, we don't believe any of this.
The mainstream media is lying.
It's all exaggerated.
None of this can be proven.
You know, whereas in fact, you know, all of it is provable.
I mean, there were no attempts to rig the election.
There were no problems with the voting machines.
Most of the votes, you know, in Georgia, the votes were counted multiple times by hand, by machine.
There was no proof of any irregularity whatsoever.
But by repeating the idea that there was regularity, by coming up with different theories, Chinese, Venezuelan, Italian explanations as to how it happened, they create the sense that, you know, there can't be smoke without fire.
People wouldn't be talking about all this unless there was something to it.
And that's a deliberate tactic.
And that is something that we can see being used by other people.
We can see Putin doing it.
We can see Hugo Chavez used to do it in Venezuela.
The more noise you create and the more distraction you create, the harder it is for people to believe anything.
And then you create the cynicism that you began with.
Yeah, as you say, it's a deliberate tactic and it creates a powerful asymmetry because, so what happens in response to that blizzard of lies is an increasingly frantic attempt to contain the damage and every single misstep there gets scored by a very different set of norms, right?
So if the New York Times gets a story wrong, Or the Atlantic gets a story wrong, or we wind up relying on, you know, the Steele dossier for anything to substantiate, you know, Russian influence here.
It seems for the people who care about just the integrity of facts and the coherence of an argument, the little missteps seem to pollute the entire case against Trump in this case.
Trump and his enablers and the propagandists on that side, all they have to do is create a mess, and in cleaning it up, people who care about the integrity of journalism have to be held to norms of honesty and coherence that become harder and harder to enforce when there are a thousand fires to put out rather than just one.
And so journalists and certainly Democrats, you know, have been sloppy in how they've done that from time to time and on certain points continuously.
So it does give the sense, again, I'm uncertain about how much we should go back and try to clean up the mess of the previous few years so as to bring some number of people along with us for this ride.
I mean, take something like the Steele dossier, which, if I'm not mistaken, was first a piece of Republican oppo research and then was taken over by the Clinton campaign, and then, I think most ignominiously, was used as the basis for a wiretap of Carter Page, if I'm not mistaken.
That fact alone, the fact that the Steele dossier has now been basically discredited, correct me if I'm wrong there, That fact alone just vitiates everything, right?
So what do we do with that?
I mean, like, it's very hard to unpick that and perform surgery on the facts in a way that can reclaim the attention of people who have begun to succumb, the way you just described, and to this feeling of It's just such a mess, I'm going to withdraw my attention from it all.
Who knows what's happened to that planet?
Sam, Trump, according to the Washington Post, Trump told 35,000 lies during his presidency, and you cannot clean up that mess.
The zone is so flooded with shit that Hercules himself Could not wait into it and begin to clean it up.
But the really pernicious effect of those 35,000 lies, and especially the lies since the election, between the election and the insurrection, is, yeah, it doesn't just make close to half the country, believers in absolute absurdities, like the Russian lie about the Malaysian aircraft, which became something that some Russians no doubt believed in.
It also makes it harder for the rest of the country to distinguish lies from truth.
You're holding on to facts for dear life, but eventually you begin to feel that it doesn't make any difference because every correction, every politifact, pants on fire has no effect whatsoever.
And so the temptation is to say, we're playing on the wrong playing field where we're playing by the rules and they're not.
And so one effect is that more and more Democrats now Say that they are unlikely to believe the next election's results if Trump wins or if a Republican wins.
And there may be reasons not to believe them, given how state legislatures are trying to rig the counting of votes through these new laws.
But it's a terrible situation where both partisan sides are now saying more and more that they're not going to believe that these institutions are illegitimate.
And that's the effect of the shit that has been piling up over the last few years.
Sam, you made a really interesting point about what happens in the mainstream media, in the traditional values of a truthful conversation and truthful journalism, which is what happens when the New York Times has to run a correction or when we find out that the Steele dossier is largely unreliable.
And it used to be when there was a reasonably common consensus about the rules of conversation, about the rules of evidence, that a correction in the Atlantic, say, actually bolstered the credibility say, actually bolstered the credibility of the Atlantic.
Which you would demonstrate your credibility by owning up to and fixing your mistakes.
But since Trump doesn't ever acknowledge a mistake, There isn't ever a sort of commonly adjudicated lie or misstatement on the Trump side.
Then the score is, you know, the New York Times has had 10 errors and Trump has had none.
And the volume of lies that George is talking about does not just produce the nihilism that Anne was describing.
It also produces a view among those who are disposed to believe Trump that with all their evidence, all this evidence, some of it must be true.
It bounces right off them if one point or another point seems to be discredited, although they tend not to even acknowledge that.
But, you know, since we're using the horseshit metaphor, there's got to be a pony in there somewhere.
And in my latest piece, I spent a lot of time talking to and writing about a New York City firefighter who was overwhelmed by the quantity of lives in Trump land and believed that some of them must be true, that with all the smoke, there had to be fire.
Yeah, and the problem is that's often a good heuristic, right?
But it's not good when people cynically leverage it, right?
Quite consciously, as Anne has pointed out.
And it is an asymmetric war, and I've been at a loss for how to find daylight under these conditions with people who are not seeing the dynamics of it.
The Steele dossier is an interesting case in point.
So the Steele dossier was almost entirely irrelevant to the Mueller investigation.
It was not the reason why the FBI investigated Trump in the first place.
It was a sideshow.
You know, if you read the Mueller report, none of it is based on the Steele dossier.
It all comes from different places.
If you look at the material that Mueller produced about the, you know, the Russian, the professional trolls from St.
Petersburg who worked inside the U.S.
in the 2016 campaign, none of that is connected to the Steele dossier.
Right.
But the Steele dossier had one advantage, which is that it had a few little sensational anecdotes tucked into it.
You know, the grotesque things that Trump was meant to have done in a hotel room in Moscow, That kind of thing.
It had an element of sensation that the real material didn't have.
But this I think is another thing that Trump and the people around him have understood, which is that people will focus on The sensation at the expense of the reality.
I mean, did, you know, all the people who say, well, if the Steele report is not true, then it's all rubbish.
Did they actually read the Mueller report?
I mean, the Mueller report actually lays out pretty clearly, you know, what happened and why.
And as Bart said, it certainly makes a case for Trump as a person of interest in terms of national security and certainly somebody who should have been investigated for obstruction of justice.
But the details that people remember, the things that stick in their head are the sensational ones.
And that's actually why maybe David is right to try and pick them out on the other side.
And that's a piece of human psychology that Trump understood.
I think the Russians understood it.
Others have understood that you can focus on details from people's private lives, sensational stories, and that will take people away from the larger body of facts as well.
When I was a young man, I was friendly with an expat who had come from Canada, where I grew up, from Czechoslovakia in 1968.
And he's a well-known writer named Joseph Skvoretsky.
And I once had the chance to ask him what he liked best about living in a democratic society like Canada as compared to communist Czechoslovakia.
And he said, what I like about democracy is not voting.
Because he was someone who was interested in jazz, in literature, in his very complicated personal life, and he knew that however the election would come out, all of that would be fine.
He would be able to, and so he detached himself entirely from politics.
One of the reasons that democracy was so powerful, an idea from the GI Bill until name your date, was that it really delivered results for ordinary people.
You didn't have to have a theory about communism versus free markets.
You didn't have to have a theory about totalitarianism versus democracy to see we had blue jeans and bananas and fun music, and they didn't.
Obviously, it was better here.
We were doing something right.
And so a lot of the power of democracy comes from its ability to deliver.
One of the things that you do when you're trying to undermine democracy is you blur that difference, you make things stop delivering.
And so where you start at the beginning of this conversation was in a way, why should people care?
I mean, what is going on here?
It's Trump, it's non-Trump, why do people care?
That we are seeing Attempts, increasingly acceptable attempts in the United States to do things in politics that never would have been done before.
Threatening to default on the obligations of the United States in order to get your way in a budget fight.
Using violence and chicanery to try to overturn an election.
Lying about the impact of vaccines in order to make the economy worse so as to hurt the president of another party.
Those are things, those are tactics that people just didn't used to do.
One of the reasons I think we are all in so much trouble, and one of the reasons why we are going to have to reinvent a lot of how we think about politics, this question of what's in the Mueller Report, what's in the Steele dossier, if you watch the cable news conversation, you would think that the important question is what crimes did Donald Trump commit?
And a drama I've been banging since 2017 is we're going to find with Trump that most of the terrible things he did were not criminal.
And most of the criminal things he did weren't so bad.
I mean, if somebody trips over some technical statute or failed to file their individual personal income taxes properly, obviously they shouldn't do that, but that's not the end of the world.
But most of the American government rested on people not doing things just because you didn't do those things.
It turns out it's not illegal for the president to operate a business that solicits money from people who want things in the United States government.
A lot of that isn't illegal.
Presidents just didn't used to do that because it was wrong and you didn't need a law.
And if the president did do it, it turned out the law was a weak recourse.
So we're into a world in the 2020s where a lot of things that were not done, things that were understood, things that the parties didn't do to each other, are now being done.
And we're taking what was once a very intense game, but that wasn't played with working weapons, and we're playing that same intense game, but now with weapons that can kill.
Well, before we take the turn toward looking at the future here and our future concerns about especially the 2024 election, maybe I'll throw another, one more shibboleth at you guys from Trumpistan, just to see if we can do some good here.
So, obviously the problem is bigger than Trump, right?
So, Trump's behavior is explained by his character, right?
I mean, you know, I view him as some sort of moral lunatic, and I really would not be surprised by anything he does.
But he has a personality cult around him, which used to be the Republican Party.
And the people who have risen to his defense, you would think, have, you know, reputations to defend.
I mean, some of them were casualties of his campaigning, right?
I mean, how do you explain that someone like, you know, Ted Cruz will defend Trump, you know, all along the way as he commits these democracy straining indiscretions?
I think many people who look at this think, well, all of this, maybe some of this is irregular, but what's happened, I mean, this is a reaction.
What Trump has done and certainly what these Republicans who have records of kind of normal political behavior have done is a response to some kind of hysterical overreach by the Democrats and by the deep state.
Right.
So that Trump represented such a threat to the way things were that we had a media infrastructure and a deep state that tried to destroy him at any cost.
And so what you saw on the Trump side and on the Republican side was just an attempt to, you know, if they're going to play this dirty, you know, we're going to have to play a little dirty to maintain our administration.
What do any of you say to that, George?
Maybe I should start just so you're not all talking over each other.
Anne, do you have anything to say to that?
So one of the strange things for me about coming to Washington in the years of the Trump administration was I've spent a lot of my career writing about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
And I've read lots of books about the agony of collaboration and why people collaborate.
And there are novels about it written by Poles and Czechs and others.
And one of the strange things was discovering that in Washington, Many of those same issues and the same conundrums arose that people were seeking to further their careers by telling stories to themselves about, you know, I need to remain in politics because my position is so important.
I can be influential from the inside.
You heard some people saying this openly.
You know, or, you know, the knowledge that I can bring to the table continues to matter even inside this context.
And you also heard a lot of people, you know, who wanted to stay in power, who wanted to stay, you know, in public life, you know, coming up with excuses and explanations.
I mean, if you look back on the history of Vichy France, You will discover that nobody collaborated with the Nazis because they admired the Nazis.
Everybody collaborated with the Nazis because the threat from the left and the Jews and the socialists was so enormous and so strong that they had no choice but to stand up and defend the honor of France and be on the side of Vichy.
I'm exaggerating a little bit there to make the point, but you find that in almost any situation where people are sort of in a captive position, they have to either collaborate or drop out.
And when they choose to collaborate, they tell that story.
And so I would say that that was the story that a lot of Republicans told themselves and told one another as a justification for continuing to support Trump and for continuing to mouth the slogans that many of us heard.
And we see even now the price that can be paid by people who refuse to do that.
is now can be exclusion from the party or certainly exclusion from its inner sanctum.
And so people are continuing to do that.
They're continuing to invent a separate but equal or different but equal left-wing threat that justifies their poor behavior.
But this is the, this is the, this is a kind of human reaction that we've seen in, you know, you can look at communist occupied Poland in the 1950s, you can look at Vichy, you can look at many other states and you see, you know, very similar story.
But is that enough to explain the fact that there, you can count on really one hand the number of prominent Republicans who are Willing to withstand these pressures?
I mean, you take someone like Liz Cheney, like why is, you know, why are there two or three people, you know, in her lane and the rest of the Republican Party has capitulated even in the aftermath of January 6th.
Right.
And I think the answer goes way back before Trump, and will be with us after Trump is gone.
And perhaps we should talk about these broader things than just Trump, because I actually think Trump keeps us, in some ways, from understanding the broader forces and the deeper forces.
I think of it as happening at two levels.
One is the top of the Republican Party and the other is the base of the Republican Party.
The base of the Republican Party has been increasingly populist, increasingly hostile to The mainstream institutions of the country, whether it's the media or schools and universities or the CIA, the FBI, even the military, it didn't hurt Trump to trash the national security institutions and the national security heroes.
Or do you have John McCain?
Exactly.
Because the base of the party had stopped revering those institutions and had begun to think of them as elitist, self-serving, indifferent to the lives and the problems of the mass of people.
The base of the party, and the Tea Party period was a key moment in this, because that's when the kind of nihilistic attitudes of Republican voters really set in, and it was not coincidentally upon the election of the first black president.
At the top of the party, you had a kind of corruption that set in, not just financial, but the corruption of power.
Power at any cost, power for its own sake, power without a real higher purpose.
Conservatism, which had a set of goals, political goals, ideological goals, sort of faded out.
It lost its color and power itself became the end of the party.
Mitch McConnell became the perfect embodiment of that.
He was the one who brought the filibuster to the floor of the Senate as the tool for preventing the other party from doing anything when they had power.
It If you look at a graph of the use of the filibuster, it just skyrockets once Mitch McConnell is the minority leader and the Republican Party's strategy becomes simply to make sure that the Democrats fail.
And so those two things, power at the top for its own sake.
And a kind of irrational populism that regards all mainstream institutions with distrust, if not outright hatred.
Those two have turned the Republican Party into an authoritarian party that no longer thinks that preserving those institutions and playing by those rules and norms and upholding those laws, and when it loses, accepting that loss, That's no longer a winning approach for either the leaders of the party or the base.
And if a leader tries to play by those rules, they're cast out.
And not just by their colleagues at the top, but by the base.
The reason why you can count them on one hand is because the rest of the Republican officeholders want to keep their seats.
And they understand that to keep their seats, they have to go along with the lies, because otherwise they're going to face a primary threat, and they're going to face a lot of money coming at them, and they're going to face Trump's ridicule and hostility, and that is going to be the end of their career.
There's a long line of Republicans who tried in some sort of weak, half-assed way to take on Trump over the last few years, and they've either been co-opted by him like Ted Cruz, or they're in other lines of work now.
I mean, the thing that unites what George and Anne have said is that people respond to incentives.
Incentives work.
And the average Republican officeholder subjected to truth theorem would not say that the election was stolen and would be, in fact, horrified by many of the things that Trump says and does.
They're not true believers.
The base is filled with true believers.
The Republican elected officials are not, but there's a combination of opportunism and fear behind their behavior because they're responding to incentives.
They're afraid of the base.
They're afraid of Trump's ability to commandeer the loyalty of their own constituents and deploy it against them.
And they're opportunists because they understand that if they play along, if they out-compete each other to be more Trumpist, or if at very minimum they don't fight back, they don't publicly dissent, then their careers can ascend.
Sam, your question about why, it might be useful to look in detail at how.
How did Trump do this?
We have to travel back a little bit in time.
It's 2015, early part of 2015, and everyone is assuming that Jeb Bush will be the nominee of the Republican Party.
He's amassed money and endorsements on a scale never seen or seldom seen.
A number of other Republicans don't like that and are looking for a way to stop Jeb Bush.
So Donald Trump materializes in the summer of 2015, and a lot of people who are the second tier candidates say, obviously this is going nowhere, this joke Trump candidacy, but he might take out Jeb Bush and clear the field for me.
And so there was this game where Trump was simultaneously so useful to a number of people that they stood out of his way hoping that he would wreck Jeb Bush, and Jeb Bush in turn hoped that Trump would knock aside everybody else.
Everybody was hoping to be left alone in the room with Donald Trump on the assumption that they would win.
And so there was never that moment where people said, this is dangerous, this is threatening, this is destructive, let's all unite together against him.
2015 comes to an end, Donald Trump becomes the front runner for the Republican Party in July and stays that way, except for one week or a week or two where Ben Carson is briefly in the lead at the end of 2015.
Trump is the front runner.
Now we come to 2016, the primaries are about to happen, and the central brain of the Republican Party more or less decides, fun's fun, that was fun, this has to stop now.
And so you will remember that I think it's the first or second of the candidates' debates that took place in New Hampshire.
And Megyn Kelly was then the hope and star and future of the Fox News Network, was sent out onto the stage to give the career finishing killer question to Donald Trump about his abuse of women.
And Trump fought her, smashed her back, and then refused to take part in further debates hosted by Fox unless Fox got rid of Megyn Kelly.
At this point, I mean, Rupert Murdoch, by all reports, was hoping to make Chris Christie the nominee.
Fun was fun in 2015.
Now it's time to get serious.
Let's have Chris Christie, who's the governor of a state where Fox does business.
And Trump crushed them.
It wasn't that they got out of his way because of some theory about what he would do.
They discovered that he would actually do it.
Many people fought him.
Fought him quite hard.
Ted Cruz fought him hard.
Marco Rubio fought him hard.
And then they lost.
And out of that experience of loss, they gained a differing view about the future of the party.
As for the party base, There isn't a stable thing called a Republican.
It isn't you get a card, it isn't that you pay a fee, you go in and out.
So you saw in the elections of 2018, millions of people who had voted Republican all of their lives voted for Democratic candidates for Congress.
And districts The district that had been George H.W.
Bush's district, the district that had been Newt Gingrich's district, the district that had been Eric Cantor's district, one after another, the most core districts of the Republican Party went Democratic.
And you saw this giant reorientation of what it meant to be a Republican and what it meant to be a Democrat.
And that is the thing that Trump sort of rode and benefited from without always understanding it.
One last point that I think it might be worth saying.
I mean, you're reflecting what some people say when you quote this line about, well, Trump was such a threat Trump shook, threatened to shake up the American political system.
Well, in one sense, it's true.
I mean, blowing up NATO, getting rid of free trade, institutionalizing bribe-taking, those are big shakeups.
But if you mean, is there something that wasn't unethical or criminal that Donald Trump wanted to do?
Month by month, probably the least productive president of the post Franklin Delano Roosevelt era.
I mean, he didn't do much.
There was nothing much other than the stealing.
There wasn't much that he wanted to do.
And so the idea of him as some big threat to the way Washington does its proper policy business, that he became a very, very conventional Republican president.
Where he was unconventional is he did things that nobody, not Republicans, not Democrats, nobody would want a president to do.
Well, so all of that is psychologically understandable to me, because what you're describing is, for the most part, the work of incentives and a fundamental miscalculation at every step along the way.
You know, Trump's campaign is going nowhere, we can just support him for this instrumental reason, but then lo and behold, you know, that proves to be untrue.
But what I find most mystifying—perhaps incentives somehow capture this, but I don't know what those incentives really are—is that in the aftermath of the election, right, when he lost, you know, when the case could be credibly made that he lost, and he should no longer have the power—he would only have the power that you would insist upon maintaining for him at that point, right?
He's a loser.
The one thing, you know, Trump can't stand to be and derides everyone else on earth for, he now is.
Why do you have the House Freedom Caucus and Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani?
What explains...
Psychology awaits its Einstein to explain the characterological arc of Rudy Giuliani.
But what explains the behavior of so many people who are willing to subvert democracy on our account in order to maintain the power of someone who we're now alleging they secretly hate and are merely suffering the company of for their own perverse incentives?
Why do they not leave the sinking ship at that point?
Well, because as David just said, Trump's power was not primarily expressed through the instruments of office, because he didn't have a policy program.
His power was as a demagogue and a politician, and as someone who had this tremendous control of the sentiments of a large base.
Republicans might have thought and hoped he would go away, and might have thought and hoped he would stop talking about the election.
And we've seen from the work of the January 6th Committee, fascinating little artifacts of that have come out in which people around Trump, on the government side and among his outside advisors like Sean Hannity, are trying to persuade him to stop talking about the election.
Let's fade away quietly and And build your posterity based on the fabulous record that you created as president.
But they don't understand that it's a core thing to him, that he's not going to stop talking about it.
And he still has command of the base.
He still has command of tens and tens of millions of Republicans who believe he won.
He didn't lose.
He hasn't lost his power.
He hasn't lost his power over them.
And I would add, Bart, that by November of 2020, a lot of those Republicans really had stopped believing in the importance of things like fair elections.
and majority rule, and the norms of the transfer of power.
Those things no longer held any strong value for them, so it was not all that difficult to kick them aside when it became convenient to do so.
It's a bit like Anne was talking about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Kessler's great novel, The old Bolshevik Rubashov finally confesses to crimes that he didn't commit.
And the question is, why would he confess to crimes he didn't commit?
And his answer is, because there's no reason not to.
He cannot find any reason in himself to go against what the party is finally asking him to do as his last act.
These Republicans have nothing inside themselves to resist.
That has worn away.
It's not as though attachment to democratic values is part of our DNA that we can't lose.
We can easily lose it, and we can see its loss when people who at one moment might seem somewhat honorable, at the next moment stop talking, or give a speech that is wishy-washy, or even give a speech that suggests that they think The election was stolen.
There was a lot of about facing after January 2021 when Republicans who were shocked by the violence denounced it and then almost immediately began to back away.
And I don't think it's just fear of Trump in the base.
I think that's part of it.
But I also think it's a lack of any strong attachment to whatever the values that might have allowed them to be in the same camp as Liz Cheney.
Can I add to that?
I think Some people also have come to understand the usefulness of undermining the rules.
You know, if you undermine the rules, if you reduce faith in the system, if you, you know, convince people that elections are rigged, that can be, if you're somebody who hopes to take advantage of that lack of trust and to use that distrust in your own political career, then you can see the usefulness of it.
And I think quite a lot of Republicans have.
They understand that they're, you know, one of the ways to win is through extreme forms of gerrymandering with, you know, by playing games with who gets to count the votes.
All of this is a potential path to power.
And once, as George says, once you're that cynical, then you come to understand that any attempt to undermine faith in the system, undermine faith in the, you know, not just in the rules, but also in the people who keep account of the rules, whether it's the media or inspectors general or Congressional committees, the January 6th committee, there's going to be an attempt to undermine all of those organizations that produce knowledge and produce facts and confirm what happened.
Because it might be useful for them down the road to have those institutions undermined.
Maybe the secret answer to Sam's question is in something Trump said during that period when he was trying to overturn the election.
That key phrase, I'm looking only for 11,000 votes.
I think it's probably true that if Trump's plan had been to get the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the phone and put hundreds of thousands of troops into American cities and round up people and put them in concentration camps, I mean, obviously, you know, not even Tucker Carlson would support that.
Probably.
Right now.
But he didn't ask for that.
He just asked for 11,000 votes.
And this is maybe the key to understanding the whole question, the whole thing we're going to spend this afternoon talking about.
Democracy is not like a light switch that is on or off.
It's a dimmer switch that is constantly being adjusted.
And the history of American democracy is, as the democracy has gotten... It wasn't that the United States was ever an authoritarian country.
It was just a country where the circle of participation was narrowed in often very brutal ways, backed by violence.
I think in the 1940s in the state of South Carolina, only about 50,000 people voted.
South Carolina didn't get a secret ballot until the 1950s.
But in other places, it was done, same idea, but less roughly.
But since, through the 20th century, and especially since the Second World War, the circle of participation has broadened and broadened and broadened.
And we now think democracy means that, you know, every adult gets to participate to the extent that they want to.
Well, Trump wasn't talking about overturning all of that system, just dialing it back by 11,000 votes.
And in a fairly close balanced system, if you can say, look, there are just certain people who shouldn't be participating in the system.
Not every, most people, yes.
Certainly anyone who owns a house, anyone who's over 40.
You know, anyone who wants a gun, those people obviously should participate.
Many of the people who don't meet those criteria, just not all of them, just not enough.
And that was the exciting proposition that emerged in 2020.
Maybe if you just compress it enough, without overturning democracy altogether, you can ensure that we win much more often than we otherwise Would.
I think that's really the question for the future.
That's the thing that people glimpsed was the possibility of limiting participation to enable the Republican Party not to compete in the way that other parties do by saying, well, people aren't liking our message.
Why don't we propose some things that people like?
Why don't we propose those and get power that way and then get the benefits of power?
So now we can continue with a message that is basically pretty unpopular, but by shrinking the circle of participation somewhat, 11,000 votes, we can win even though people don't want what we're offering.
And if I can just add just one sentence, that's exactly how democracy has been undermined in other countries at other times and under places.
Not because there's a coup d'etat and millions of arrests, but because, you know, there's been a little change to the constitution because there have been, you know, some of the media are no longer able to operate and it's a very slow and gradual process.
I mean, something like eight years after Hugo Chavez took over Venezuela, most Venezuelans still believed they were living in a democracy.
By that moment, it was no longer possible to change the leadership of the country through a Democratic ballot.
And people just because it had been a series of small cuts over time, they didn't notice it.
They didn't feel it yet.
And I think that's what Trump understood.
I worry sometimes that I'm overly cynical and maybe that all of us in this conversation have been overly cynical about the cynicism of Republican elected officials, or elected officials more generally, that so few of them have core convictions for which they're prepared to pay a price politically.
But Liz Cheney has come up several times in this conversation.
And I wrote a book about Dick Cheney, and Liz is very much a politician in his image, almost an anti-politician.
And whatever you think of her convictions, and many of them I disagree with profoundly, they include respect for constitutional democracy, for the core tenets of our political system.
And in that way, like her father, she's a zealot.
And in this case, her zealotry is Redounding to the public good because she's willing to pay possibly the ultimate political price.
She may lose her seat.
She certainly lost her leadership position by standing up for the truth about the results of the last Democratic election.
And we're just not seeing very many people who are prepared to do that.
Yeah, there's one thing I would add.
I don't want us to go down this rabbit hole, but, and I've gone down it many times on the podcast, but it's not exactly exculpatory with respect to the anti-democratic tendencies of Republicans at the moment, but psychologically it explains something.
When you look at how, when you look at the degree of ideological capture on the left, you know, identity politics and wokeism and I'll give you all the buzz phrases now, cancel culture, and the way that has been disproportionately represented in our mainstream institutions, including journalistic ones.
When you move right of center, you're meeting people who have no alternative, politically, to the Republican Party and whatever it's up to now.
And they're faced by people who, on very different topics and in very different ways, are also manufacturing a tremendous amount of dishonesty and misinformation.
And, you know, you have, you know, cities burning, and literally, you know, like, buildings are burning in the shot, and CNN is saying, says it's covering a mostly peaceful protest, right?
And that just one image like that, you know, endlessly amplified on Fox afterwards, Does enough to just end the argument for people.
So whatever Trump is, he's not as bad as that.
He's not as bad as defund the police, right?
Feel free to respond to that, but I just think that's been working in the background for many, many millions of people this whole time.
I think not just, Sam, as a kind of catalyst to accelerate the liberalism of the right, but a sign that liberalism doesn't really know a political party or a partisan orientation.
And it has a communicable effect.
It can easily spread, and I think that is what's happening.
In our culture, the illiberalism of the left is mostly in culture right now.
It's mostly in institutions like schools and universities and the media and philanthropy and the arts.
The illiberalism of the right is mostly in politics.
It's mostly concentrated in a political party, and so it is a much more direct threat to democracy.
But to shift from Trump a bit, I worry most about simply the The mental habits of people who find themselves caught in a kind of a vortex or a vicious circle of responding to a liberalism with more liberalism.
And it's very hard to get out of that once you get in it.
And that's why I cited these polls that show that Democrats are now more willing to say than they have been that they might reject the results of the next election if they show a Republican winner.
There's also more willingness to use political violence across partisan lines than there have been in recent years.
So those are tendencies that are in the minds of people and that have a way of intensifying and sort of driving each other to extremes.
And that's something that worries me a lot because it's just very hard to slow it down once the acceleration toward the extremes and towards illiberalism of all kinds starts.
All right, so let's make a turn toward the present and future here.
What are we most worried about?
I mean, to look at the public-facing machinations of the Democratic Party, It would seem that the Democrats are most worried about voting rights, you know, again, sort of seen through the lens of identity politics, right?
The Republicans want to disenfranchise black and brown people by asking for voter ID, essentially, is the concern.
Whereas, I think the real concern, I mean, that's a conversation that can be had, but I think the real concern is we have a system where it might not matter how people vote if the right people are in place to overturn an election.
I mean, this is a machinery that I still can't, I don't even count myself as someone who even dimly understands it at this point.
But we were all alerted to its existence in the 2020 election and it's fairly dumbfounding that this is our system and it was hanging by a thread.
It was hanging by the conscience of Mike Pence and a dozen other people.
Who didn't cave in to the demands that they just nullify the votes that were coming from the disputed states.
What are we worried about?
Maybe I'll put it to Bart and George first.
What are we worried about with respect to the next few years and 2024, next two years?
Well, it's the difference between changing the rules of a football game so that it's a little bit harder for one side to score on the one hand, which is like the voting rights you're talking about, and then simply buying off the referee, on the other hand, so that you can directly control the outcome of the game.
And what you see is properly called election subversion.
So, as David has pointed out, Trump tried to get the Secretary of State of Georgia Who oversaw the election and certified the vote to change 11,780 votes, which would flip the result after three separate counts showed that Biden had won.
And you had, in this case, the integrity of one man, Brad Raffensperger.
Who refused to overturn the election, who refused to throw away the people's votes, and recorded the conversation with Trump and arranged for it to be made public.
And now what concerns me most is how does the Republican Party, how does the Trump supporting Republican Party, Respond to what Brad Raffensperger did.
What Trump and his people have done is go around the country and find those obstacles.
Find those people and places which got in the way of Trump's attempt to overthrow the election.
And it's gone around systematically uprooting them.
So what's happened to Brad Raffensperger?
Trump has endorsed another candidate to replace him.
In this year's election, first of all, that candidate has pledged that he would not have certified Biden's victory.
That candidate is running explicitly on the platform that he would not properly, honestly carry out his duty to count the votes of the people.
He says Trump really won on these fictitious grounds of fictitious fraud.
And that he would not have certified the election.
They're, by the way, doing the same thing with the governor because Governor Kemp signed the state affirmation of result.
And Trump has made him an enemy as well and therefore recruited someone to run against him and endorse him.
Former Senator Perdue to take on Kemp.
But meanwhile, not being satisfied with that, the Republicans in the state legislature have passed a new law that just in case Raffensperger wins again, they have removed him from his voting seat on the State Board of Elections.
So if the election were held again today, a national election, he would not be the one to certify it.
They have simply defanged him.
And while they were doing that, They gave themselves the power to fire all the county election officials who certify the votes in their own counties.
And they've done that specifically with reference to Fulton County, which is Atlanta, and the Democratic stronghold in the state.
And so systematically, they've gone about undermining and trying to replace the person who stood in Trump's way last time.
And you're seeing that happening.
Around the country, there was an official in Michigan who was on the Board of State Canvassers, which has two Democrats and two Republicans.
And Trump was trying to get them to deadlock so that Michigan's vote, which Biden also won, would not be certified.
One of those two Republicans resisted his blandishments and insisted that the vote was the vote and he was going to certify it.
And he's been hounded out of office.
And you see the same thing going on around the country.
And all that's legal.
No one's breaking the law even though they're breaking norms that we didn't know we were relying on.
It's a big legal problem because you can't say that you can't run for Secretary of State on a lying platform that claims that Trump won the last election.
You can't prevent in advance the subversion of the next election count.
You can reasonably foresee it happening if this candidate wins.
It would probably become a matter for the courts if someone actually did try to subvert the election and say that black is white.
That Trump defeated Biden.
Let's just linger on that point for a second, just going back to the past for a second.
Do we know what would have happened if Pence had followed orders and not certified the election, or any one of the other people we're talking about at that stage, you know, in Georgia or any of the other contested states, had put forward other electors?
I mean, we would have hit some kind of constitutional crisis, but what do we imagine would have resolved that crisis?
Well, this would have been a crisis precisely because we don't know how it could have been resolved.
And there was a sitting president who would have been the beneficiary of this gigantic electoral theft.
Who theoretically had the power to control federal law enforcement and military resources.
And if, as one could expect, this led to serious civic unrest, could have invoked the Insurrection Act and given direct orders to the military.
And we don't know what orders would have been followed.
But just because of the, you know, kind of astonishing ambition of the effort to get Pence to claim authority over the congressional elector count, we don't know how it would have come out.
There are many opportunities for deadlock there.
For example, if he had thrown away the votes of at least three, possibly four states, and therefore reduced Biden's electoral count to below 270, He could claim that under the 12th Amendment that Biden had failed to obtain a majority of the whole of the Electoral College and therefore stated that the election would go to the House.
Although Democrats control the House, the vote in the House under the 12th Amendment is done by state delegation, and each state gets one vote, and Republicans control 26 of the 50 state delegations.
But Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, could have refused to call the House to order to have that vote, and then you would have a completely failed presidential election for which the Constitution doesn't offer A remedy under one reading, Nancy Pelosi would become the acting president.
But you could see the endless opportunities for mischief and unrest in all this.
That would have been a glorious, be careful what you wish for moment for Republicans.
In some universe that happened.
So, what if anything are we doing to rectify that problem?
We know we came perilously close to Flying off the road and into the abyss because there was no guardrail right where we would have wanted it.
Who is building the guardrail and what process?
I mean, does it take a constitutional amendment?
Or what process do we need to make sure that if this happens again, it doesn't pose the same kind of risk?
Well, one part of the answer is to fix the Electoral Count Act, which is what interprets and gives direction to the invocation of the 12th Amendment for how the electoral count is supposed to go.
This was passed in the 1870s.
And it's one of the most confusing and carbled laws ever passed by Congress.
I defy anyone to read these 300-word sentences and make any sense out of them.
There's some possibility of consensus between Republicans and Democrats on fixing the Electoral Count Act because Republicans are sitting around thinking they don't really want Vice President Harris to have the powers that Trump thought Pence had to decide the next election.
And so there may be a common willingness to set rules of the road on how the procedure happens when the electoral college votes are delivered to Congress.
They meet in joint session, as they did on January 6th.
The Vice President, as President of the Senate, presides over this count, and reformers would include making explicitly clear that the Vice President doesn't get to do the counting.
Right, right.
Well, that seems like that should be a major focus, far bigger than many of the other things that the Biden administration appears to be focused on at the moment.
I don't know why that isn't, the phrase electoral count act isn't ringing in everyone's ears.
It might have seemed too small to them.
They had a couple of bills that were really ambitious that included Not just expanding or securing voting rights through early voting, mail-in voting, drop boxes, all those things, but also campaign finance reform, making Election Day a national holiday, all of which I think are really good things, and I would have voted for them absolutely any time, but they
took the focus off what we're talking about, because there's very little data that shows that if you restrict the number of days of early voting, or if you make it harder to do mail-in voting, it's going to benefit one party or the other.
It's really hard to fine-tune elections to that extent.
It was powerful politics because it connected to old and deep and terrible parts of our history in which black Americans and others were kept from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests, etc.
But I haven't seen data that says these new state laws are Likely to have a significant effect on turnout, because in the past that laws like that have not had a significant effect on turnout.
So they became extremely passionate arguments for laws that were only important in the context of what we're talking about.
They were part of a Republican strategy.
To thwart the will of the majority.
But I don't think they were where the will of the majority was most likely to be thwarted.
It's most likely to be thwarted after an election with what Bart just called election subversion.
And I wish both parties, but especially the Democratic Party, were focusing on that and really holding the Republicans' feet to the fire and say, do you not see a problem with laws, state laws, state politicians, and a confused national law, the Electoral Count Act?
That makes it likely that the will of the majority is going to be overthrown, because that's a harder thing for a Republican to defend.
And perhaps there could be some bipartisanship.
I'm always skeptical, because every time we think there might be just about, it doesn't happen.
Especially on election issues, but I think that's where the focus should be.
And perhaps, I'm not a legal expert on this by any means, but perhaps there should be some smart staffers in Congress drafting laws right now that make it almost impossible for even the most corrupt state official or local official to rig the election, to throw the election after the vote.
That's actually not an easy thing to get.
That last one sounds like a great idea.
I would love it if it were possible.
But states have the majority of the authority over the conduct of a state election, even when it's a national election, even when it's a presidential election.
And there is an open constitutional doctrine about, an open question about the constitutional basis for that authority.
One of the things that Trump Republicans are doing is promoting a theory called independent state legislature.
And it comes from the fact that Article 2 of the Constitution says that each state shall choose electors for president.
According to the preferences of its state legislature.
The state legislature is the ultimate authority about how you choose electors.
And so what we saw in the last election was an attempt by Trump and his people To persuade Republican state legislatures in seven states that Biden won but that were controlled by Republicans in the State House and the State Senate, to persuade those legislatures to discard the votes of the people of that state and to substitute electors for Trump on their own authority because Article 2 of the Constitution
Says in this extremely muscular and implausible reading of the Constitution, Article Two says that the legislature decides on the electors no matter what.
It's almost certainly not true that you could get the legislature to decide after an election is held That the election is not going to be the method of choosing 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.
But I would like to dissent 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 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 refuse 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.
And the United States came, 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 like a one, but material prosperity, that sure helps.
Broadening participation helps.
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.
In France and Italy, where the two places where the communists were strongest, the communists appealed strongly to men, didn't appeal to women.
Women got the vote.
Communists suddenly became a very small party compared to what they had been when women didn't have the vote.
But what really, really helps is elite agreement, that there are things that elites won't do to one another.
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, there are just things we can't do.
There are just things we can't do.
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.
So what do we do between now and what could be the really cataclysmic 2024 election?
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.
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.
So to 2024, Biden has to win and protect himself against the risk of being impeached by a Republican House.
And that's going to take all the things I talked about.
That's going to take success, the perception of success.
And that's going to take focusing the country on other kinds of challenges, of which there aren't a few.
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.
in which President Trump's former political chum, Vladimir Putin, is invading other European countries.
We face, and it's chronic, so it's hard to get people excited about it, but we face a climate challenge.
We face competition from China.
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, it's just from the time that the Tea Party Congress began threatening default to get its way through 2020.
The game got played too roughly the way it was being played in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.
It's too rough.
We need to make this game more predictable.
Everybody would benefit from a more predictable game.
I would add one other thing, which is a, you know, it's one of those mushy political things, which is that the Democrats and those members of the Republican Party who want America to remain a democracy need to find better ways to talk about it.
Even the title of this event, you know, The Future of Democracy, once you talk about democracy as an abstract thing, you know, I mean, climate change, just debate, by the way, has the same problem.
I knew I was the problem somehow, Anne.
Yeah, it's your fault.
No, but once you talk about it as an abstraction, you know, our democracy is in danger, for a lot of people that's too distant a problem, or it doesn't seem to affect them personally, or, and I've had several conversations with politicians in the U.S.
and elsewhere Recently about how you know, what is there a better way and one of the ways is if politicians talk about what it is that we could lose.
As a nation, you could lose your right to choose who your governing is, but also you could lose something fundamental about the American identity.
We are Americans.
What brings us together?
It's the fact that we are able to come together to make these decisions, to choose our leaders To follow a process, to follow the rule of law.
And you are in danger of losing that.
You know, something fundamental is being challenged and you're going to lose it.
You can appeal to people's sense of justice and injustice.
I mean, the idea of people cheating or being cheating or cheating you is something that's very powerful.
And I don't think that the Biden administration has found this language yet.
And I know some of them are aware of this.
You know, the voting, the failure of this voting rights bills is interesting because in a way they were seeking to address a problem.
The problem of lots of Republican state legislatures passing laws to do with voting, that was a warning sign because those, all of those laws were being promulgated and passed On a kind of assumed basis that they needed to be passed because the election had been rigged.
They're a reflection of the big lie.
We're not going to say that the election was rigged, but we're going to have better voting systems in 2022 or 2024 because we need to fix our voting system.
Actually, the voting systems didn't need to be fixed.
I mean, or maybe they need to be fixed in some places in specific ways, but there wasn't a huge need for these laws.
And so the Biden administration reacted by saying we didn't need these laws.
These laws are designed to limit voting and so on.
And I think they hoped through the use of this act, and as George says, it was very ambitious, to raise the conversation about democracy.
But it hasn't worked yet.
You know, and that's not for lack of trying, and also it's not an easy problem.
In the way that, again, you know, when you talk about climate change abstractly, lots of people don't care.
When you talk about polar bears dying, or when you talk about wildfires in your state, then they might feel differently about it.
And I think the people who care about American democracy need to find that way of speaking about it.
Well, I love Bart's point that this incentive runs on both sides of the tracks here, and yeah, the prospect of Kamala Harris subverting a Republican victory is got to be galling, so you would think that we could get some bipartisanship on that point.
Everything we're talking about here, at least out of concern for 2024, seems to presuppose that Trump will run.
I guess there's a Trumpist alternate candidate, perhaps, waiting in the wings who we would also be concerned about subverting an election.
It also presupposes that the Democrats have a candidate that's electable, right?
And I think there's reason to worry that Two years from now, Joe Biden may not be up to it, or that his approval rating may be a deal-breaker.
And there's certainly a reason to worry that Kamala Harris is not electable, given her approval rating and basic invisibility at this point.
I'm happy to cycle back on any loose ends we haven't covered here, but I just want to get a sense of What do you think the Democrats can and should do with respect to a candidate?
What do you think is likely to happen?
Does anyone have a political intuition here?
David, I'm going to start with you.
You're into politics.
Yeah.
I don't think they have a mechanism.
The Democrats have a mechanism to change their candidates at this point.
It would require Kamala Harris to volunteer to step aside.
The project of making her step aside if she didn't want to would be such a bloodbath It wouldn't be worth it.
And I don't see this, by the way, as any kind of personal reflection on her.
It's very difficult to go in American politics from the job of number two to number one.
And the politicians who have usually done it, there's usually been some catastrophic event that has propelled number two into the number one role and gotten people used to the idea of the former number two as the number one.
Actually stepping through an election process has been quite difficult and maybe more difficult even for her than for some others.
But it's a real issue.
And Democrats took a big risk with nominating the oldest candidate for president ever and then backing that person up with someone who wasn't a tried and tested vote winner.
And so that's going to be a real issue.
And so the only thing one can hope for is a lot of economic success between now and 2024.
in 2024.
And one of the immediate challenges for the Democrats, there is a report on the day that we speak, the Democrats are considering limiting attendance at the State of the Union Address to 25 members of Congress.
And that the idea that they would continue to accept the idea of COVID as something that is an ongoing chronic problem that American society must be almost perpetually dislocated by on their watch, They need to find some way to declare that they have won a success over COVID, to focus on the economy, and let's hope that Russia is deterred from invading Ukraine, and then to claim that as success, if they can make that happen.
Does anyone else have anything on that point before we turn toward questions?
All right.
So, Stacey, let's get some questions here.
I have a few here, and you can just stop me when you all hear one that you would like to address.
Great.
So there's one here.
It seems to me that democracy can only exist when the populace is educated.
Are American and other democracies' youth getting taught the civics necessary to sustain the future?
Well, let's linger on that for a second.
Does anyone have... As someone pointed out, I think, just a few minutes ago, we only have two years for the immediate, you know, wolf at the door to be pushed back, so educating the population is a heavy lift.
But does anyone have any ideas about education?
I've been thinking about it quite a bit because I despair of most of the other possible pathways out of polarization, to use a word we haven't really talked about.
It may be a coincidence, but civic education has all but disappeared from a lot of American children's schooling in the decades in which we have moved into these incredibly polarized camps that don't seem to live in the same universe any longer.
And that's partly because it became controversial.
One side or the other denounced teachers and schools when their children were being taught something in civics class that offended their view.
And there are a lot of very well-meaning and good ideas for how to bring civics back to American classrooms.
You know, when I say that, I almost immediately hear derision and contempt, like you think you're going to solve this problem by teaching children about all the amendments to the Constitution.
But I guess we should think about education and civic education in a much broader way as simply giving children the chance to learn how to think, how to reason, how to argue, how to persuade, how to hear views that they don't like, how to find some common ground, if possible, with people who hold those views, and if not, to still agree to live together in this country.
For me, it's very hard to imagine exactly how we can teach those things, because school is under so much pressure and stress, and in fact, public education seems to be facing a kind of existential crisis right now, coming out of COVID.
But for me, there has to be something like that, and it may involve doing something to change the way we talk to each other on the internet, and the way the internet and algorithms encourage us to think and to react to one another.
These are all big, airy concepts.
When I think of how we can turn around from the disaster we're headed toward, I think about education and about how we're doing it wrong and how we might be able to do it better.
Can I challenge a little bit the premise of the question?
George has written, by the way, for The Atlantic very powerfully about civic education and what has gone wrong with it, and I recommend that to people.
But it really needs to be stressed, the American electorate of 2022 is far and away the best educated American electorate ever.
Much more educated than the American electorate of stabler times like 1972 or 1962.
If more education were the path to stability, we should have the stability of a Barker lounger right now.
I worry about the opposite.
What used to happen was politics was about material things.
Societies were poor, and politicians offered people things that they desperately wanted.
In Tammany Hall days, it was literally a sack of coal or a turkey.
Later, it was a bridge or a road.
Today, more and more of us are in politics to realize a vision of ourselves.
And this is the thing that the political scientists always hoped for.
The day would come when we would transcend the physicality of politics and we would debate ideas and modes of being and abstract.
And guess what?
That turns out to be the hardest thing of all to compromise.
So we may need to think about a different way for people to live each other.
We have these new communications technologies, which means we all have this experience.
Every day you turn on Twitter and somebody you've never heard of before, in some place you know nothing about, has said something that you think is offensive.
Did that happen 20 years ago?
It did.
Did you know about it?
It did not.
You did not.
Did it spoil your day then?
No, now you're upset all day because of this person you've never heard of.
And by the way, one of my rules for sanity on the internet is if you hadn't heard of the person before they said this thing, don't let it bother you that they did say this thing.
But we have a politics now that is about Self-realization.
And that's in a country that is so diverse and getting more diverse all the time, and not just in the census categories.
But as people become richer, more prosperous, they become more different, one from another, as they realize who they are.
I would just add one thing, which is that in addition to the way civics is taught in school, which by the way, I think the first time I wrote about this subject was at least 20 years ago.
I was on the editorial board of the Washington Post and, you know, people said, it's terrible how civics education is declining.
And I wrote something and there were even at that time, all kinds of worthy organizations that promote civics education and people writing civics textbooks.
That have thought a lot about left-right, you know, differences.
And a lot of this exists.
It's out there.
I mean, if teachers wanted to use it, it's available.
And so I have some cynicism about the possibility of incorporating that, because it's not as if it's, you know, it would be very hard.
For people to do more of it if they wanted to.
I wonder why people don't think more broadly about education, you know, whether there are not online campaigns or whether there are not civic education for adults, you know, ways of reaching people, whether there aren't ways of reaching people through the media or through entertainment.
I'm a little disappointed in the American entertainment industry that it hasn't thought harder, for example, about doing a Netflix series about the effect of propaganda on ordinary Americans and how they stop speaking to one another.
There's no Hollywood drama that expresses the anxiety of the last four years and the way in which it's affected personal relationships.
I mean, I think there's a lot of education that could be done, or anyway, a lot of, if education might even be the wrong word, but discussion and resolution of problems.
If we had more, you know, if more people were thinking about this as a problem that could be resolved through reflecting different people's perspectives.
And I have talked to people about it.
If it won't work in classrooms, why will it work on Netflix?
No, no, I'm not saying it won't work in classrooms.
I'm saying that the material to do it is available.
There are lots of good courses in civic education.
People have invested, there are foundations that will give stuff to your school if you want it.
I'm not saying that it couldn't work.
I'm saying it doesn't happen.
And the reasons why seem to be to do with local school decisions and teachers not having time and need to have more time for STEM now.
And there are all these regents tests that you have to pass in each state, thanks to the No Child Left Behind laws.
I mean, there are all kinds of non-political bureaucratic reasons why it seems to be hard to fit civics into the day.
So I'm not downplaying it, I'm just saying it's been a subject of conversation for two decades.
And I'm just saying that there might be other ways of discussing the problem if people were more creative about thinking about it.
Okay Stacey, next question?
Next question, sort of in that vein, how do we as reasonable thinking humans take the level of fear, anger and tribalism in our communities down to a level where people can reset and open their minds, use their brains and critical thinking to make real decisions and have real mindful conversations?
Yeah, well, that really is the impossible question.
If we could answer that, our problems would be solved.
Not only our problem.
Yeah, yeah.
Lots of people's problems.
All problems.
All problems admitting a human solution would be solved by the answer to that question.
I guess, so someone just mentioned social media in passing.
I mean, that's certainly part of the problem here.
I mean, the way we're engaging one another and perpetually permeable to information and misinformation that wouldn't otherwise be available.
Well, I guess let's just, this may seem like a lateral move here, but it's relevant because it's so energizing in Trumpistan, the role played or not played by big tech in deciding who to platform, who to censor, whose rights to the role played or not played by big tech in deciding I think if you sample from the conversation among Republicans at this point, you
You will tend to find people who think that Twitter is the public square, you know, to deplatform anyone for any reason is to violate their rights, leaving aside that that doesn't make sense constitutionally, and Twitter's a private company that can do whatever it wants.
There is this perception that the fix is in from the elites, yet again, in big tech, and so taking off Alex Jones, and certainly taking off Trump, That was an astonishing act of hypocrisy by people who claim to care about free speech and the free exchange of ideas.
If the answer to bad speech is just more speech, you know, how could you deplatform the President of the United States?
I don't know what you guys think about that.
I'm on record many times calling for him to be deplatformed and celebrating when he was, because I view him as the most dangerous cult leader on earth at this point.
But what do you think we should do with respect to the role that these platforms play in are organizing our epistemology and, in this case, find it impossible to coherently organize.
Let me try an analogy.
Supposing, through some twist of the way railroads worked, back in the 19th century, Cornelius Vanderbilt had found himself the owner of every church in the United States.
The New York Central Railway had to make a decision about what was preached in every church in the United States.
My guess is they wouldn't have done a very good or satisfactory job.
And so what you have are these giant companies in the business of selling advertising for whom speeches actually – I mean, they give speeches about it, but it's not what they care about.
I mean, they want to sell boots and gloves and perfume.
And they suddenly found themselves as arbiters of all these questions.
They're incompetent to do it.
They're not, by the way, disinterested actors.
They're businesses with profit-seeking... So I think there's a core of truth in the Ryder Center complaint, which is, who appointed... How did it happen that these people are making these decisions that are so crucial?
On the other hand, the rule can't be, okay, tell you what, you get to say We do have laws regulating what you can say about medicines in the United States, and have had it now for more than 100 years.
It is not a violation of your freedom of speech not to be able to say that cocaine will cure headaches.
That's been regulated for a long time.
I just don't think there's going to be any alternative.
For government to step in and to say, you know what, that these things do function as the equivalence of public squares.
And some competent authority is going to have to write meaningful rules with Democratic buy-in.
We don't want to have Mark Zuckerberg making these decisions for everybody.
But let's see, so there's two extremes here.
There's the public square case, which wherein Twitter or any other platform should function by the light of the Constitution, right?
That it really is freedom of speech.
And you are in fact free to say in the public square that cocaine cures headaches.
You're not.
Well, you're not, you're not as a, you're not as a, I guess, you're not as a corporation on television.
But you can, I can say it on my podcast.
I mean, I can, it's like, you know, you can write a book, you know, with your crazy ideas about cocaine, and if someone publishes it, I mean, I don't know what law prevents that.
And then, again, you have the slippery slope problem that once you start, you know, preventing that, then where do you stop?
But on the other extreme, there's treating these platforms like publishers, where they Whether they want to assume it or not, they do have an editorial responsibility and they're liable for the defamation of others or the consequences of their publishing irresponsible things, which is to say, most importantly, they can be sued effectively.
So Twitter could be sued for what Alex Jones was able to do to the Sandy Hook parents on that platform, right?
If Twitter's a publisher and not just a platform.
But if Twitter's like the phone company, you know, then what are you going to start looking for what people say in their phone conversations and finding the phone company?
So you have to pick your metaphor that's attractive here.
So if I... Yeah, go for it.
If I could intervene, the problem with Twitter and the problem with Facebook is that it's actually neither a publisher nor the phone company.
And the reason is that, you know, oh, you're absolutely right.
Everybody has the right to say whatever they want and free speech and so on.
Does more than that.
It doesn't just give you the right to speech.
It publicizes your speech.
And the same is true of Facebook.
And it publicizes it according to a set of rules that are semi-secret, but that we've had some insight into.
So, what spreads on Facebook?
What spreads the most quickly?
Facebook has defined this as things that keep people on Facebook.
That's actually Facebook's goal, is to keep you on the platform as long as possible.
It's a little more sophisticated than that, but that is essentially the metric that decides what spreads and what doesn't.
Then it turns out that what spreads are things that are very emotional, things that are divisive, sometimes things that are surprising and shocking.
And the things that are surprising and shocking are often false stories.
I don't know, the Pope has endorsed Donald Trump, was one of the most spread stories on Facebook in 2016, even though no Pope would ever endorse anybody.
And so it was an absurd thing, but it was one of the most read Facebook posts of that election cycle.
And so the problem isn't that Facebook and Twitter allow people to say things.
The problem is that they have created a mechanism by which shocking, emotional, and angry things reach more people than other things.
So the thing that, in my view, needs to be regulated, and I have written about this, and I think I've heard people discuss this on some of your shows, Sam.
The thing that needs to be regulated is the algorithm.
And so you can imagine it is scientifically conceivable that you could have algorithms that favor constructive conversation rather than emotion and disagreement.
It is conceivable that you could have forms of social media that reflected the values of the public square, that sought to bring people together or Or create compromise.
I mean, these do exist.
They've been experimented with in other places.
Taiwan uses them a lot.
It's a country that cares a lot about democracy and has thought a lot about how to have better conversations in a country where political division, especially if it's exploited by China, could be kiss of death.
So they really understand it.
So the thing is to get politicians and everybody really focused not on what's taken down and what's allowed, you know, what they allow and don't allow, not on censorship.
But on what are the rules by which things spread most quickly?
How is it that people come to see things?
What is the algorithm looking for?
And I think that you would find that if you could regulate that, and it is technically possible, it's just not legally possible.
If we could have insight into the sort of black box of the algorithms, we could, I believe it would be possible to find a, to create a better public conversation.
But it's a, you know, we're still a long way away from it.
One of the reasons—sorry about that—one of the reasons we're having a hard time thinking about this is because a longtime article of faith in First Amendment doctrine or free expression philosophy is under challenge here.
You made reference to it earlier, Sam.
I mean, Louis Brandeis is the one who wrote the famous counter-speech doctrine in 1927, saying that the cure for evil speech or wrong speech is more speech, that the free market of ideas necessarily will respond and correct itself.
And as we discussed earlier, that just hasn't been true in this Trumpian age when you have, as George said, you have a president who lied 35,000 times and who floods the zone and who overwhelms the truth with propaganda.
Then one of the foundational reasons we have for not censorship, for not censoring speech The idea that you can cure bad speech with good speech, that just has actually proved not to be correct.
And that leads us to potentially a very bad place in which we don't respect free speech rights as much if we're worried about outcomes, and we don't want to be in that place conceptually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, Stacy.
Okay, question here.
Would it be achievable, feasible for the American voting system to switch to the Australian voting system, first past the post, preferential voting and proportional representation?
Could the Australian voting system negate many of the flaws within the current American voting system?
Yeah, this is a point that Andrew Yang has devoted a fair amount of words to.
Does anyone have a sense that we could cure much of what ails us in democracy by obviating the threat of being primaried in the way that currently exists?
It's worth a shot.
You'd like to see some of the states experiment with it and see whether they get better results.
It's certainly true, historically and internationally, that countries that have proportional representation have a, you know, there's a wider variety of parties and there's also greater pressure to achieve compromises.
And if you look, I've seen political science studies that show, depending on the system, because there are different systems, that show better outcomes for PR countries that have it, and you certainly don't get this very bitter two-party divides that we have and some other countries have.
It's interesting, when we were all growing up, our two-party system was supposed to be the source of our great stability compared to all those crazy European countries with 17 parties, but now it seems to be the source of our division.
You know, and you could also throw in some of these state referenda that have instituted independent commissions to draw congressional districts, and which seems to have worked pretty well in Michigan and in Ohio, a court threw out the state legislature's redistricting because it violated the state referendum that was passed by the people of Ohio that wanted it to be
Taken out of partisan hands, and so maybe there are all these sort of smaller fixes that could add up to a larger, not cure, but moving us away from the death match that we're in, from the war of attrition that we're in.
I don't know if the sum of them is enough to do it.
I'm willing to try to sped anything within the rules.
Okay, we've passed the two-hour mark here, so maybe just a few more questions, Stacy.
All right.
Can you weigh in on why previous American presidents have not been more openly and regularly vocal on the topic of the undermining of democracy and its unraveling before our very eyes, and how their unifying message might engender more affinity towards protecting our democracy?
So this is a question about former presidents.
This is something that has galled me to some degree, how invisible Obama has been through this whole period.
Both with the indiscretions of coming from Trump, but also with respect to what's happened on the far left.
Is there a role for former presidents here to get us on track, or is that just the norm that presidents don't open their big mouths after they're out of office and they just get lucrative Netflix deals?
Is that just too holy to Or no one cares what they have to say.
George Bush, didn't he just give a whole bunch of money, was it to Liz Cheney?
To Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney, both I think.
And Barack Obama did have something to say about cancel culture a couple years ago.
He got Practically cancelled himself.
A couple of sentences, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, but I think the experience was probably so unsettling because he himself got ratioed on Twitter that he hasn't done it since, so I don't know that they carry, you know, how much authority they carry anymore.
Slightly different point about ex-presidents, and they may be contributors to the problems of the system in a different way.
The first president of the United States, if I'm recalling this correctly, ever to give a speech for money.
Was Gerald Ford.
Before then, and it was shocking.
It was shocking.
It was so shocking that his successor, Jimmy Carter, sort of made a point of not doing it.
Made a point of building houses for the poor.
Yeah, because he was so horrified.
I mean, he was mad about the way he'd lost office and he was in financial trouble.
He did ads for those mints and sold decorative plates.
I mean, he did all kinds of things.
It was considered really indecorous.
But the idea that you got rich as an ex-president, that's a new idea.
And Ford was the first, but because of age, Reagan wasn't really able to do it.
Bill Clinton really introduced this into American life, and now it's become sort of a standard practice.
But I think one of the things that contributes to the feeling of Americans that politics are not on the level, that your politicians are not representing you, that they're in it for themselves, has been some of what happens to people after they leave the presidency.
And maybe, again, there's no fix to this except maybe a more puritanical culture, but it would be interesting if presidents stopped doing that.
Whether that would have an impact on how we feel about public life.
The problem with the fix, though, is once these norms are, as we've been saying, it's kind of an awful word, but I don't know what other word to use.
Once these norms are trashed, these taboos are knocked down, it's really hard to reestablish them.
Mm-hmm.
Things just seem to keep moving in that direction.
Presidents are going to keep making more money.
How do you get people to get off Twitter?
That's my answer to Twitter.
Get off it.
But it's very hard to get off it, because once you're on it, you're in the thick of it and you want to keep experiencing it.
And so self-restraint, as a kind of a cultural norm, is an answer to all of this, including the Legal corruption of ex-presidents making a ton of money off their former office, but I don't know how you do it.
Except, as I was saying earlier, by trying to raise a new generation with new ideas, but I don't know, maybe education is the wrong road to be thinking.
Wait a minute, George, I have a question.
Do you have a secret Twitter account?
Yeah, you're not on Twitter.
I read it, so I must have some secret account, but I never write on it, so you won't find me.
Yes.
But I read all of you.
I read all of you, and I know exactly what you're thinking and saying.
I just am not going to lift my head up long enough to get it shot off.
Interesting.
All right, Stacy, next question.
What are the panelists' views on the filibuster?
Anyone have strong views here?
I mean, historically, it was invented for and been used primarily in the service of squashing civil rights legislation, and it's not in the Constitution.
It is a Senate rule like other rules, and it has gotten in the way of a lot of important legislation.
I can't imagine why anyone would privilege that rule over some of the things that's been used to squash.
Next question.
Next question.
What is the likelihood of someone coming in trying to fundamentally change the system in helping to create a more diverse, nuanced selection of candidates and actually end up making it further down the line and maybe having a real shot at the presidency?
Sort of what Andrew Yang is trying to do.
Is it realistic to think that there can or will be a candidate who ends up in that position and ultimately wins the presidency?
Well, given that we had President Trump, I think anything is possible.
Let's go to the next question.
Why do Americans insist on classifying between the left and the right?
Surely most people are in the center with fringes heading left or right.
Why not create a new center party drawing on both current parties?
Yeah.
And also it's confusing that left and right, that mapping doesn't really fully capture what's been going on in our society of late.
I mean, as we've observed here already, there's been a fair amount of illiberalism on the left.
How should we think about left and right?
I mean, people have referenced this concept of horseshoe theory, where you go far enough to the left and far enough to the right and you begin to resemble one another.
Maybe, Anne, do you have any thoughts about how we should think about this?
Should we have a different map of our politics here?
So, even the phrasing left and right actually comes from the French Revolution.
I mean, it's a very, you know, it's a very old set of ideas, and our modern understanding of it really dates to the Cold War era, you know, when the You know, the left was a being was about a larger state and the right was about a smaller state.
And although that was a little bit different in different countries, too, but it was essentially the poll was around communism, anti-communism, how you felt about it and so on.
I mean, I actually think that the words are now almost totally meaningless.
And one of the advantages of a multi-party system, which I hesitate, which I, you know, of course, we're still pretty far away from that in the United States.
But when you see them in other countries, is that they do make it easier for parties to emerge that are neither, or that have different and new self-definitions.
I mean, so the emergence of the Green Party in Germany is a famous one, and the Greens in Germany aren't just an environmental party, they're attached to a whole set of other issues.
The foreign minister of Germany is now a member of the Green Party.
And that's a party that's relatively new that has managed to emerge and focus on a different set of issues.
I don't know, there are a lot of examples.
The president of Slovakia now is an environmental lawyer who comes from a kind of green movement as well, but who is also neither left nor right.
And there are a number of European politicians who've also sought to create parties like this.
Our system does make it Really difficult, almost impossibly difficult to create a third party, which is why our best bet is to try to create, I don't know whether the word is centrist that you really want because it's not a center, but to try and create pro-democracy.
Wings or movements inside the existing parties and to think about it like that.
I mean, it's the idea of creating and people have tried so many times in recent years to create new parties and failed.
But you're certainly right that the division between left and right has become pretty meaningless.
And what people are really You know, what moves people, as David was saying, what politics are really organized around now are people's sense of identities.
You know, I belong to this kind of group or that kind of group.
And that identity can adopt a number of different policies.
And of course, once politics are about identity and culture rather than concrete, you know, policies and plans that we can argue about or agree to disagree about, Politics becomes more difficult.
I mean, my solution is actually a little bit different, which is to, as I said, create a pro-democracy wing inside both parties and also to get people to refocus on the reality of politics, what politicians can actually do, which is build bridges, fund or not fund healthcare, make foreign policy decisions.
If we're focused on that and not, I'm this kind of person as opposed to that kind of person, then politics becomes more sane.
Yeah, I think the problem, one problem with identity politics is that it interacts with the variable of partisanship unhelpfully because it is a tribal sort of politics and if you're going to be tribal, then the extreme voices win, and you're certainly not rewarded for seeing the other tribes point, more or less ever, right?
So if you're in the middle, if you're in, if you're going to make the center stronger, you can't be tribal, because being in the center amounts to much of the time acknowledging what your side got wrong, or, you know, or what, you know, what just to the left of you
To use the old mapping, got wrong, and you're just, I mean, to take an N of 1 here, I mean, I just know what it's like to be someone who sees all the problems with wokeness and all the problems with Trump, and the net result of that is to always have someone irate with your views, right?
Like, you're not having, you're not safely in an echo chamber where you're the good guys and everyone else is bad.
So it just seems like tribal politics has to be selecting for hyper-partisanship.
Okay, let's do one more question and then I will close out.
Okay, last question.
Is it possible that the world has outgrown democracy as a political system, much the way it outgrew previous dominant political systems, and that we need a new system to cope with the challenges eroding it?
And if so, what would that potentially look like?
That kind of tears everything down to the studs, but let's reflect on that for a moment.
Is there any concern here that democracy is not up to the challenge of 21st century life in the end, and that we need to find some other mechanism?
You know, keeping, I think, isn't it Churchill's admonishment in mind, that it's the best of the worst systems?
Does anyone have an opinion on that?
Well, in the days when we used to study textbooks on the history of democracy, the place they usually started was with the debate that took place in England in the 1640s, in which one of the most famous quoted sentences was, the smallest he that liveth in England has a life to live, as well as the greatest he.
So if that's what you mean by democracy, that idea is never going to go out of style.
The equal dignity of human beings, that everybody has a right to consideration.
What may be going out of style, as I suggested before in something else I was saying, is that the idea of the style of democracy, which is the legislative horse trading of material benefits, what you thought you saw when you took that school trip to Washington 20 or 30 years ago, that may be going out of style, partly because Maybe economies aren't growing as fast as they used to be, so we can't exchange gifts or benefits as easily without feeling it's coming out of our pocket.
And it may be that as politics becomes more identity-based and more about self-realization, that none of that is interesting to people.
And it is striking how little of that Donald Trump did, how infrastructure became a joke.
He was never serious about it.
And when Biden did do infrastructure, it turned out how little anybody really ever cared about it in the first place.
So we may need a new set of rules of the road, new set of mechanics, but the idea of a politics based on the dignity of everybody, that's never going out of style.
Well, not just the dignity, the consent.
I think that if you do tear everything down to the studs, the thing that you can't dispense with is the sovereignty of the people as the source of ultimate power of government.
As somebody who spends a lot of time studying and writing about autocracies, I promise you that there is no alternative system out there that is better.
You can find the odd benevolent dictator who works for some short period of time.
But, you know, it's not a long-term system and there's always a succession problem.
In a way, the Olympic Games that are about to start in Beijing are a real vision of the future because the Chinese government has fulfilled all its promises to the International Olympic Committee.
It has created ski slopes where there was no snow.
It has made it possible to get out to the mountains where the slopes were created on trains that didn't exist a few years ago in no time at all.
So in some ways it's delivered.
It's done the delivering that David was talking about on material things, at least for part of its population.
But you're living in the most surveilled society in human history with less freedom than any society in human history.
And that's the nightmare vision that we really should never lose sight of because you don't get there all at once, you just get there a little bit at a time by Deciding this isn't worth it and this doesn't work any longer and it's too hard to run for office and the people are incorrigible.
Well, panelists, is there any topic we didn't touch?
Is there any question we didn't address that you think we might want to touch to close out here?
I have one thought on this that maybe bears mentioning.
I think there's a kind of, inevitably as I look back on this, an inevitable tone of Anxiety, elegy, doubt that creeps into these conversations, and the future of democracy with the question mark behind it raises the possibility that maybe it doesn't have a future.
I think we're at danger of underestimating just what a tremendous achievement it is, why the people who hate it also fear it.
Because they know how powerful it is, and what an amazing run of increasing success it has had.
I just feel that one of the things we all need to do is to encourage ourselves, not just to think about this and speculate and observe, but to believe in it and to live in it.
Sam, I think this is the attitude you've had, and we've talked about this through the Trump years, is who's going to win?
I don't know, but they're going to have to leave tire marks over me before I let those guys do it.
And people who are listening, I hope that they will come away from this conversation with some feeling of their own personal efficacy.
I mean, we're all here because we believe they count.
Their voices count.
They're listening because they believe their voices count.
And what people can do, this future is in your hands.
It's not something that's going to happen to you.
Not anyway if you don't passively accept that it's going to happen to you.
Yeah, yeah.
I would echo that by reminding everybody that nothing is inevitable.
The decline of democracy is not inevitable, and the success of democracy is not inevitable.
There is no law of history that means we will win or we will lose.
That's not how history works.
Everything that happens tomorrow depends on Decisions that we make today, you know, the the future is always open It's always been open the possibility that American democracy would collapse was always there and the possibility that it will never collapse is also always there and People should remember that and one of the reasons why democracy will succeed or fail is to do with how engaged citizens are in it Yeah, well that seems like a great spot to end on.
The lesson I take away from this in the last few years is that really there's no way to shirk the power and responsibility of ideas, right?
I mean, ideas are the levers that move everything in our lives.
So how you apportion your belief And, you know, just what you talk about, what you pay attention to, what seems credible to you, the importance of all of that, you know, at the individual level and at the collective level is never going to go away.
And insofar as organizing my own ideas about what's going on in the world and in my own country, I'm very grateful to the four of you for helping me do that.
And this has been an experiment here on the podcast because we've never, we never record by video in this way.
We also never have this many people on, and I just want to thank the four of you for your time.
I admire each of you immensely as a reader, and it's great to speak with each of you here.
So, Anne, David, Bart, George, it's been a pleasure.
