Is Democracy Dying
00:30:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Democracy around the world faces a set of unique threats.
00:33:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Authoritarianism is spreading, corruption is festering, and the worst could be yet to come.
00:38:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Today we've gathered some preeminent thinkers to discuss one important question.
00:44:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Is democracy dying?
00:46:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
This is Radio Atlantic.
01:02:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
So welcome, everybody.
01:04:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
This is Jeff Goldberg.
01:05:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I'm the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and I'm here with my colleague, Alex Wagner.
01:09:
(Alex Wagner)
Oh, it's so good to be in the same room with you, Jeff.
01:13:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
We're doing this in the same room for once, not in different cities.
01:16:
(Alex Wagner)
Highly unusual.
01:17:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's unusual.
01:17:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And then we have people in other cities that I'm going to introduce.
01:20:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's very exciting.
01:21:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
We have multiple cities.
01:22:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Very globalist.
01:23:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
We'll get to that.
01:25:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
We have Jeffrey Rosen, the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center.
01:30:
(Crosstalk)
Womp womp!
01:32:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That was very good.
01:32:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That's the theme music to his podcast, We the People, by the way.
01:35:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That usually has an air horn intro, doesn't it?
01:37:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
There's an air horn.
01:38:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
01:40:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Wait, we're going to have singing today.
01:43:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And in London, we have Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize winning author, columnist of The Washington Post.
01:50:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Anne, can you hear us?
01:51:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I can hear you.
01:52:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That's wonderful.
01:53:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's amazing.
01:53:
(Ann Applebaum)
I can.
01:54:
(Ann Applebaum)
It works.
01:54:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's amazing how this technology works.
01:57:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
The reason we have Anne and Jeff with us today for a very special episode is
02:02:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Radio Atlantic is that we're just launching our October issue of The Atlantic.
02:07:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's an issue, a special issue organized around a single theme, asking the question, is democracy dying?
02:14:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And Jeff has written one of the anchor pieces, and Anne has written an equivalent anchor piece, both taking on this issue from different perspectives.
02:23:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Our goal, and I could say this, and Jeff will correct me if I'm wrong, is
02:27:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
When I say our goal, I mean my goal with Jeff.
02:31:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
This whole issue emerged out of a series of conversations I've had with Jeff Rosen over the past year or more, starting with a, I would say, narrow question.
02:46:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's actually not narrow, as you'll see in Jeff's piece.
02:49:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And the narrow question was, what would James Madison make of today's America and make of today's political processes and make of
02:57:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
the presidency itself.
03:00:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Our goal in pulling together this issue, and we have amazing pieces from Ibram Kendi and Yoni Applebaum and Justice Stephen Breyer and Yuval Harari and David Fromm.
03:10:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's an amazing set of pieces, and I hope you read the whole issue.
03:14:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Our goal was not merely to talk about Donald Trump, because part of the theory of the case is that Trump is as much a symptom of a problem as the cause of
03:26:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
a problem in democracy.
03:28:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
So why don't we just start with Jeff for a minute and then Ann for a minute and talk about, I want you both to talk about what's at the core of your pieces.
03:40:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And Jeff, maybe you could start by giving us an overview
03:45:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
From your perch there at the National Constitution Center, where you are probably literally overlooking Independence Hall right now, talk about what the founders and specifically James Madison would make of the state of our democracy at this moment.
04:01:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Well, thank you so much, Jeff, for this great collaboration and for your homework assignment, which was to ask me to think about what Madison would make of American democracy today.
04:12:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
It prompted a lot of reading and thought.
04:15:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And the piece that resulted argues that Madison would be appalled by the rise of passion over reason.
04:22:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
It turns out that as a man of the Enlightenment, Madison and his fellow founders were centrally concerned about designing political systems that promoted reason rather than passion.
04:34:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And the big way that they hoped to do that was to slow down deliberation so that passionate mobs could not mobilize quickly.
04:43:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
They're centrally concerned about mob rule.
04:45:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
because they've read about the histories of failed democracies, of Greece and Rome.
04:50:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And Madison, after spending a year reading about the fall of Athens, is convinced that in large assemblies, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason.
05:00:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Even if every Athenian had been Socrates, Athens would still have been a mob.
05:05:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
He's consumed by the notion of silver-tongued demagogues who seduce the people with appeals to emotion and passion rather than reason.
05:14:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And he thinks that only by slowing down deliberation can you prevent demagogues from rising up.
05:19:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And that is why the Constitution is so determined to separate and divide power, to prevent mobs from mobilizing quickly.
05:28:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Because we the people have the sovereign power, but our power is divided among the three branches of the federal government and then between the government and the states, Madison felt that majorities when they formed would have to be reasonable.
05:40:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And he was especially focusing on those large size of America, the geographic extent, which would make it hard for information to travel and for mobs to discover each other.
05:50:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And then, of course, the point of the piece is that all of the cooling mechanisms that Madison was relying on to slow down.
05:56:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
impetuous mobs have atrophied.
06:00:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And the piece goes through the political polarization driven by geographic self-sorting and by media filter bubbles and echo chambers that's made Madisonian deliberation impossible.
06:12:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
The rise of an imperial tweeting presidency, which has the kind of direct communication between the president.
06:18:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Imperial tweeting.
06:20:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Or tweeting imperialists as well.
06:23:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Darth Vader.
06:23:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Absolutely.
06:24:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
But, you know, remember, Obama was the first tweeting president.
06:29:
(Alex Wagner)
Though he used the mechanism slightly differently than this president.
06:32:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
He did.
06:33:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
It was a little bit more highbrow.
06:37:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
But the final point is just the tremendous importance of social media and all this.
06:42:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
because it turns out that, as Anne and I found, with the runaway success of our pieces online, arguments—actually, we're a counterexample.
06:50:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Generally, arguments based on passion travel faster and further than arguments based on reason.
06:56:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
I guess The Atlantic is the Madisonian exception, but given the fact that you can make decisions at warp speed, all of the barriers to mob rule have atrophied, and as a result, we have a lot to do to resurrect Madisonian reason today.
07:11:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I want to go to Ann in a minute, but Alex just wants to jump in with a quick question for you, Jeff.
07:16:
(Alex Wagner)
Jeff, I found the piece enlightening and fascinating and depressing all at the same time.
07:22:
(Alex Wagner)
One of the things you point out, though, in addition to sort of the miscalculation, which is maybe laying more fault at the feet of Madison than is fair, but one of the things that you talk about beyond the sort of the fact that he couldn't account for social media and the direct communication of presidents, sort of the emotional weight of the presidency that it now has in the 21st century, you make this note, you say...
07:44:
(Alex Wagner)
that the representatives who are willing to support the party line at all costs.
07:49:
(Alex Wagner)
And you point that out as sort of a byproduct of political and geographical self-sorting.
07:53:
(Alex Wagner)
But was it just that the founding fathers couldn't envision partisanship in the way that it is now?
08:01:
(Alex Wagner)
I mean, that seems less a function of the 21st century.
08:05:
(Alex Wagner)
I don't know.
08:05:
(Alex Wagner)
Maybe you can expand on this a little bit.
08:07:
(Alex Wagner)
Did that sort of fervor just not exist when they were creating the foundations of our democracy?
08:13:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
It's a great question.
08:14:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And no, partisanship completely existed.
08:16:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
I mean, the election of 1800 looks a lot like the one today, to the degree that the outgoing Federalists reduced the size of the Supreme Court in order to deny the incoming Republicans the ability to make any appointments.
08:29:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And people are fighting duels over the invective in the newspapers.
08:33:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So what's the difference?
08:34:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
They didn't anticipate the rise of parties, but parties for most of American history were a good thing.
08:40:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
They were a moderating force.
08:41:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
They were organized around constitutional principles, states' rights versus national power and so forth.
08:48:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
I think it's the decline of party authority combined with the increasing responsiveness of representatives to parties.
08:57:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
the most ideologically extreme base of both parties that's created the polarization.
09:03:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So without lionizing the golden age of the Senate, which John McCain's mourners properly lamented,
09:12:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
In an age when the Senate was less directly responsive to the people, then you can have senators and representatives going across party lines and making decisions in the public interest.
09:22:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Now that you have to tweet out your purity to the base in real time, the kind of deliberation behind closed doors that made the Constitution itself possible isn't possible.
09:32:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So without understating the partisanship at the time of the founding or the polarization that led to the Civil War, which is as great as it is today,
09:40:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
It's the direct communication between the people and the representatives that's so important.
09:45:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And that's why Madison was so determined not to make this a direct democracy, but instead a representative republic.
09:51:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And I want to jump on a couple of things that Jeff said, but I want you first, if you can, to describe a little bit about the European experience of democracy.
10:03:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Your piece is a totally fascinating piece, and I really recommend it to people.
10:07:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's part memoir.
10:08:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
part analysis.
10:10:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And one of the things that comes through in your writing here and elsewhere is that Europeans don't make the same assumptions about the durability and stability of democracy that we in America have made, at least until this last couple of years.
10:30:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Could you talk about that theory of circularity?
10:34:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
of history's circular quality in the context of what you learned by doing this article?
10:44:
(Ann Applebaum)
Sure.
10:44:
(Ann Applebaum)
Well, as you know, this article started with a slightly different question, which is me trying to figure out why so many people who I was friends with 20 years ago, I would no longer speak to, and they would no longer speak to me.
10:58:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that's, I suppose, the personal element of the piece.
11:00:
(Ann Applebaum)
And really it's a story about how polarization happened in Poland, which is a country I'm affiliated with.
11:07:
(Ann Applebaum)
I lived there in the late 80s.
11:09:
(Ann Applebaum)
I lived there and then also in the 90s.
11:12:
(Ann Applebaum)
I'm married to a Polish politician.
11:13:
(Ann Applebaum)
I'm a kind of figure in Polish politics.
11:16:
(Ann Applebaum)
I explained that in the piece.
11:19:
(Ann Applebaum)
Many people who were my friends at one point have attacked me in the media in some quite nasty ways and so on.
11:25:
(Ann Applebaum)
So the question is how that happened.
11:27:
(Ann Applebaum)
And what I wound up pointing to and underlining was exactly what you've just said.
11:34:
(Ann Applebaum)
We made an assumption, we being me, and quite a lot of people in what was, I don't know, the ruling class or the leading group of Polish politicians in the 90s and the first part of the 2000s.
11:47:
(Ann Applebaum)
we made the assumption that the transition to democracy that Poland made in the 1990s was a kind of permanent thing.
11:55:
(Ann Applebaum)
We were now on a path.
11:56:
(Ann Applebaum)
We were part of NATO.
11:57:
(Ann Applebaum)
We were part of the European Union.
11:59:
(Ann Applebaum)
We were aligned with the United States.
12:02:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that the decisions that people had made, the constitution that was adopted, the norms that were beginning to be taught in school, the independent judiciary that was set up, that that was now, that couldn't be changed.
12:13:
(Ann Applebaum)
And, you know, this was the era when Frank Fukuyama's complicated essay about the end of history was interpreted to mean now we will all have liberal democracy forever and ever.
12:24:
(Ann Applebaum)
And partly that misinterpretation was because that's kind of what people wanted and what people thought had really happened, that we'd made this leap and that it was over.
12:34:
(Ann Applebaum)
And as I began kind of picking apart the last couple of decades and reading books
12:42:
(Ann Applebaum)
history, not just of Poland, but of other countries, you know, you really see that this kind of transition had happened before and the kinds of arguments that were happening in Poland and are happening now have also happened before.
12:53:
(Ann Applebaum)
And I found some odd echoes.
12:57:
(Ann Applebaum)
So I was looking, you know, I was trying to avoid the obvious comparisons, you know, the Nazis, the 1930s, because those are particularly extreme examples.
13:05:
(Ann Applebaum)
But if you look, for example, at the Dreyfus trial, you know, this was a moment that split France when France became incredibly polarized.
13:13:
(Ann Applebaum)
People who thought they were on the same side, that they'd agreed about everything, that they had a similar idea of what France was and what their position in society was, suddenly found that they couldn't even be at the same dinner party at one another.
13:26:
(Ann Applebaum)
And they had terrible arguments.
13:28:
(Ann Applebaum)
They never spoke to one another again.
13:30:
(Ann Applebaum)
And the fight was over two different definitions of the nation.
13:33:
(Ann Applebaum)
On the one hand, the nation as this kind of almost holy religious institution to which I am devoted and we are all devoted and can do no wrong.
13:44:
(Ann Applebaum)
And these were the anti-Dreyfusards who believed that it was impossible that the French army could have lied and framed Alfred Dreyfus, who was a Jewish officer who was accused of treason, falsely accused of treason.
13:55:
(Ann Applebaum)
And then there was the other side who had a different definition of the nation.
13:58:
(Ann Applebaum)
No, the nation is a set of laws and rules that apply to everybody and treat everybody equally.
14:03:
(Ann Applebaum)
And it was a kind of one idea of the nation versus a more universal idea about justice and so on.
14:09:
(Ann Applebaum)
And this of course is exactly the echo of the political division that you have in Poland today.
14:13:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's the echo of a division you have in other European countries.
14:18:
(Ann Applebaum)
And these two ideas of the nation compete.
14:21:
(Ann Applebaum)
And the people who believe one and the people who believe the other
14:24:
(Ann Applebaum)
each side thinks that they should rule and they should be in charge of the country and they should decide who wins the elections and who runs, you know, also who runs the economy and who should have the lead in education and culture and so on.
14:40:
(Ann Applebaum)
And our assumption that one particular group and one set of ideas had won, and this was an idea about rule of law and
14:46:
(Ann Applebaum)
being part of a Western community, essentially an idea of small L liberalism, you know, liberal democracy, we had assumed that had won.
14:55:
(Ann Applebaum)
And actually there was another group inside Poland who were unhappy with that vision as, you know, as the anti-Dreyfusards had been unhappy with a particular vision of France.
15:05:
(Ann Applebaum)
And they were trying to replace us.
15:07:
(Ann Applebaum)
And in fact, replacing the liberals in their case meant you have to change the rules and you have to, you know, if democracy favors, you know,
15:16:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, one particular elite and another elite wants to take over, then they have to end democracy in order to get it.
15:21:
(Ann Applebaum)
So in other words, I found a lot of historical echoes in France, in Greece and in other places that show that there is this constant fight to decide who's in charge, who rules.
15:34:
(Ann Applebaum)
according to which rules, according to which idea of the nation, whose definition of the nation wins.
15:39:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, this fight is not ever over.
15:41:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, and our idea in the 1990s that we had solved this problem and we fixed it forever was simply wrong.
15:48:
(Ann Applebaum)
And, you know, I'm writing most of the pieces about Poland.
15:51:
(Ann Applebaum)
Some of it's about Hungary.
15:52:
(Ann Applebaum)
A little bit is about some other European countries.
15:53:
(Ann Applebaum)
But obviously...
15:54:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's true of any democracy.
15:56:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, in Americans, we have this idea that our democracy is a kind of progression upwards with this little blip of the Civil War.
16:02:
(Ann Applebaum)
And it can never go backwards.
16:06:
(Ann Applebaum)
But actually, this kind of cycle, you know, this competition for which elite gets to rule, whose set of ideas wins, which culture dominates, you know, why should that ever be over?
16:16:
(Alex Wagner)
Anne, I have a question on sort of like a parallel question to what you're talking about now.
16:22:
(Alex Wagner)
The argument about who gets to rule is never over is something you write about in the piece.
16:27:
(Alex Wagner)
But you also talk about this dynamic and it's so brilliantly encapsulated in the story about your New Year's Eve party on December 31st of 1999 where –
16:37:
(Alex Wagner)
this huge group, 100 plus friends gather together and have a merry evening.
16:42:
(Alex Wagner)
And then, you know, two decades later, nearly half of these people aren't speaking to the other half.
16:48:
(Alex Wagner)
And it sort of begs this question, what happened here?
16:51:
(Alex Wagner)
I think a lot of Americans can sympathize with that because we look out at our country and we say, oh,
16:57:
(Alex Wagner)
But 20 years ago, we thought we were in a different place.
17:00:
(Alex Wagner)
We really thought of this as these United States, though we had our partisan differences with one another.
17:05:
(Alex Wagner)
This chasm that has opened up, where did it come from?
17:09:
(Alex Wagner)
Did these people always have these sort of latent ideas about authoritarianism and race and all the rest?
17:17:
(Alex Wagner)
What's your sort of theory on the origin of all of that?
17:21:
(Ann Applebaum)
Yeah, so obviously, you know, I was writing about Poland, which I have this particularly weird, strong experience of having been involved in it as kind of an outsider and kind of an insider for two decades.
17:32:
(Ann Applebaum)
But of course, this is the same story in the United States.
17:35:
(Ann Applebaum)
There's even a parallel story in Britain where, you know, the divide over Brexit has split my friends here as well.
17:42:
(Ann Applebaum)
I have friends who are on both sides of that argument, and some of them will no longer speak to one another either.
17:46:
(Ann Applebaum)
So...
17:47:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's not uncommon.
17:48:
(Ann Applebaum)
I think what's happened is that the stakes of the arguments changed, the dividing lines moved.
18:00:
(Ann Applebaum)
And whereas, I mean, this is a little bit different in each country, but whereas if the big arguments for two decades were about this, basically we were all arguing about the size of the state, right?
18:11:
(Ann Applebaum)
Is the
18:11:
(Ann Applebaum)
There was a left-right divide that was about economics.
18:16:
(Ann Applebaum)
Now we're arguing about immigration, national identity, culture, and within those arguments, suddenly people find themselves on different sides.
18:30:
(Ann Applebaum)
People who are on the same side of the argument when we were talking about the size of the state and taxation suddenly realize they're on completely different sides of the argument when we're talking about
18:39:
(Ann Applebaum)
race and immigration.
18:43:
(Ann Applebaum)
Because some of these issues, they simply didn't come up before in the same form that they're taking now.
18:49:
(Ann Applebaum)
And so people didn't have that.
18:51:
(Ann Applebaum)
But once the argument shifts, once the paradigm shifts, which is what happened in France during the Dreyfus trial, which is what happened in Europe during the 1930s as well, suddenly people find themselves on much different sides.
19:02:
(Ann Applebaum)
That's how I would explain it.
19:03:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, again, you have to be specific about each country.
19:06:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, I think in
19:07:
(Ann Applebaum)
In Poland, in my piece, I try and talk about particular people even and how the course of somebody's life makes them choose one side or the other.
19:17:
(Ann Applebaum)
And, you know, you often have to look in quite a detailed way, which I wasn't even able to do in that article about particular people and why they make one choice or the other.
19:25:
(Ann Applebaum)
But I think essentially we're talking about the argument shifting.
19:28:
(Alex Wagner)
Jeff, you isolate a number of factors that have led to these sort of inflamed passions.
19:36:
(Alex Wagner)
Do you place the blame more squarely in one area than the other?
19:40:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
I guess the blame would be the fact that they are now easier to express and enact into law and constitutional change.
19:49:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So Brexit couldn't happen in America now because we don't make fundamental constitutional decisions by one-off referenda.
19:57:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
But we just did elect a president who's pandering or playing to the same populist agenda.
20:03:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
impulses in a way that he couldn't have been elected in the 1930s, because party leaders would have filtered out the demagogue and instead chosen a politician like Franklin Roosevelt, who could respond to economic populist needs and frustration with corporate
20:23:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
power, but also accommodate the interests of white southerners and of poor people in a way that wasn't as directly responsive to the mob.
20:34:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So the hypothesis, and I wonder if Anne thinks it's right, because she'll have a, her historical perspective is unraveled in the comparative perspective.
20:42:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
is that America is now giving voice to the populist passions that have long bubbled up in the country and which transformed Europe in the 30s and earlier because the constitutional cooling mechanisms have been undermined.
20:56:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So we're becoming more like Europe in that
20:58:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
sense.
21:00:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And yet still, I wonder if it would be harder for American populism to completely redefine the country as long as the constitutional structures hold and easier in Europe because they don't separate power with written constitutions the way we do.
21:17:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Is that right or wrong?
21:19:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
I wonder.
21:21:
(Ann Applebaum)
Well, I mean, in theory, what's happened to the Polish constitution shouldn't have happened.
21:26:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, in essence, the constitution has been broken in order to change the composition of the judiciary.
21:35:
(Ann Applebaum)
So what happened in Poland is the equivalent of Donald Trump saying, right, I don't want just to appoint one new Supreme Court justice.
21:43:
(Ann Applebaum)
I want to sack all of the justices and reappoint nine new ones.
21:47:
(Ann Applebaum)
That's, in effect, what's happened.
21:49:
(Ann Applebaum)
And at the moment, that seems kind of inconceivable in the United States.
21:53:
(Ann Applebaum)
How could that happen?
21:55:
(Ann Applebaum)
Maybe because our Constitution is older, maybe because we're used to these things happening, maybe because people would object.
22:00:
(Ann Applebaum)
But in effect, that's what's happened.
22:02:
(Ann Applebaum)
The Constitution has been—the Constitution existed—
22:05:
(Ann Applebaum)
and it had separation of powers, and it had many of the checks and balances.
22:10:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, it's different from the United States, but it does have checks and balances, and it did have—you were meant to have an independent judiciary, and without a constitutional majority and without any formal form of constitutional change, and simply by a regular parliamentary vote, they changed it.
22:26:
(Ann Applebaum)
And so the question is, could something like that happen in the United States?
22:30:
(Ann Applebaum)
And as I said, right now it seems inconceivable to me, but on the other hand—
22:33:
(Ann Applebaum)
The election of Donald Trump also would have seemed inconceivable to me three years ago.
22:37:
(Ann Applebaum)
So so I don't know.
22:40:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, you know, you're you know, what if a U.S. president, say, with the backing of a majority party in Congress decided he could change the Constitution and fire the Supreme Court?
22:52:
(Ann Applebaum)
What would happen?
22:54:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
You know, there's enough of a culture of an independent judiciary in America that if Trump tried to fire the judiciary, the Supreme Court would check him, I think.
23:06:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
But it's not inconceivable that if the Democrats take both houses of Congress and the White House, they will expand the size of the Supreme Court to 13, the same way that the Jeffersonian Republicans did in response to the Federalists.
23:19:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And that could set us down the path of a challenge to the culture of judicial independence that looks more like Poland than we might have thought.
23:29:
(Ann Applebaum)
Yeah, I mean, maybe it would happen differently in the United States.
23:31:
(Ann Applebaum)
But it's that kind of, you know, this fundamental challenge of the system.
23:35:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, it clearly can happen because it just did happen in both Poland and Hungary.
23:41:
(Ann Applebaum)
The question is, could it happen in the United States?
23:52:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
We're gonna pause here to thank our sponsor, and we'll be back in a minute.
25:16:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
This is Radio Atlantic.
25:18:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Alex Wagner and I are talking with Jeff Rosen and Ann Applebaum about the future of democracy.
25:24:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Can I ask you both a question on Alex, too?
25:28:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
In another piece in this issue of The Atlantic, Amy Chua and Jed Rubinfeld from Yale Law School quote Abraham Lincoln, who made the obviously astute observation that America, as a multi-ethnic democracy, is not organized around blood or religion or ethnicity, that
25:50:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
We have a political religion which is based on reverence for the Constitution and the rule of law.
25:59:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Obviously, we've been imperfect in revering these two things.
26:03:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
But my question to all of you is, are we in a wholly new period in American history?
26:11:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
in the sense that we have a president now who does not even pay lip service to the idea that reverence for the Constitution and for the rule of law is paramount and it is the glue that binds this country together.
26:27:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Not yet.
26:30:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
The president is breaking— I don't like the yet.
26:33:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Yeah, wait, wait, wait.
26:34:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
What's the yet about?
26:35:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Well, I'll withdraw it and say not yet, and I believe that the Constitution will save us because we have a norms-breaking president who is challenging constitutional ideas, but so far the institutions are—
26:48:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
fighting back.
26:49:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
The judiciary, especially the lower courts, are checking presidential excesses.
26:53:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
If the president were to try to fire the judges or throw journalists in jail, the U.S. Supreme Court would unanimously say no to him.
27:01:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
The Republican opposition led by Senator Ben Sasse makes their appeals in constitutional terms.
27:08:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Plus, the limits of the president's power are evident daily by his inability to put his opponents in jail or delay their prosecutions.
27:16:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And the
27:16:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
outrage that follows attempts to manipulate the rule of law.
27:20:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So I think the Constitution has saved us so far, and I will venture to predict that it will in the future.
27:28:
(Ann Applebaum)
Jeff, let me ask you something else.
27:29:
(Ann Applebaum)
So the other thing that's happening in Poland and in several other countries is that the ruling party is essentially a minority party.
27:38:
(Ann Applebaum)
It doesn't have a majority of support.
27:40:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's
27:41:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's a long story how they won and so on and why they control the parliament, but they don't have like 51 percent support of the public.
27:47:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's more like 30 something, which is very similar to Trump's level of support.
27:52:
(Ann Applebaum)
And a lot of what they're trying to do is rig the system so that next time they can't lose.
27:57:
(Ann Applebaum)
And what worries me about the United States is one sees...
28:01:
(Ann Applebaum)
In North Carolina, to some degree, even at the national level, what I'm beginning to be afraid of is that if the Republicans begin to fear that they are permanently the minority party, you know, because they become identified with racism, because they lose black and Latino support for whatever reason, that they will choose fixing the Constitution or fixing the vote over democracy.
28:27:
(Ann Applebaum)
Because that is essentially what's just happened.
28:29:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And how deep a worry is that for you?
28:31:
(Ann Applebaum)
And I'm very worried about it, partly because, I mean, I've literally just seen it happen.
28:35:
(Ann Applebaum)
Again, it's in a much weaker democracy and one that's not so old and doesn't have this constitutional religion in the same way.
28:42:
(Ann Applebaum)
But when I read about the, you know, the North Carolina...
28:47:
(Ann Applebaum)
state house and state senate changing the rules to restrict the the ability of a democratic governor to the republicans to restrict the the democratic governor from um you know from having the rights of a governor then i worry that these are the same kinds of impulses and they're and i would say they're kind of human imp i mean you know if you can't win democratically then you try to win undemocratically it's not it's not it's not that illogical
29:14:
(Alex Wagner)
To further Anne's point, I mean, that's what voter fraud efforts are.
29:19:
(Alex Wagner)
I mean, I think if we're being honest about the sort of root of that, it is to disenfranchise a large number of voters who would otherwise vote Democrat.
29:29:
(Alex Wagner)
And, you know, you see inclinations.
29:33:
(Alex Wagner)
by the part of the Republican Party that are disturbing in terms of, you know, being a sort of tyrannical minority.
29:39:
(Alex Wagner)
The thing that worries me, and this is something that both Anne and Jeff talk about, is information.
29:45:
(Alex Wagner)
You know, Anne points out that sort of conspiracy theory can be the sort of root cause of or litmus test for the rise of authoritarianism in a society.
29:56:
(Alex Wagner)
And Jeff talks about
29:58:
(Alex Wagner)
the media was supposed to be one of those coolants.
30:01:
(Alex Wagner)
But the media now, what is the media?
30:04:
(Alex Wagner)
What is real news?
30:05:
(Alex Wagner)
We're in a time where a serious subset of the American electorate has given up on
30:11:
(Alex Wagner)
settled fact.
30:12:
(Alex Wagner)
And my question, I guess, for all of us is in the wake of Donald Trump, because in theory, he's not going to be president forever.
30:19:
(Alex Wagner)
Is there a reset or has some part of society embarked on a different trajectory entirely?
30:29:
(Alex Wagner)
And can we put the pieces back together?
30:32:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Well, first, we do have to say that the fact that Anne and my pieces are doing so well is a total vindication of Madison's hope.
30:39:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
That a group of journalists that Madison called the literati would allow the slow voice of reason to travel quickly across the land.
30:46:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Clearly, my expectation is that this special issue of The Atlantic will help the White House change course.
30:51:
(Alex Wagner)
Rebuild our democracy.
30:53:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Madison would be proud.
30:55:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
But the problem of fake news, of disinformation, and of filter bubbles is really troubling.
31:00:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
There was a very distressing survey published just last week since our pieces came out that shows that exposing people to differing points of view on Twitter hardens polarization rather than counteracting it.
31:14:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
People dig into their heels and become more attached to their pre-
31:17:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And then the sort of modest efforts at combating fake news that Facebook is trying, like prioritizing on the news feed, articles that people actually read rather than stuff that they share quickly without reading are modest indeed.
31:33:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And the First Amendment is and should be a serious barrier to any government efforts to try to tell Facebook and Twitter how to regulate speech.
31:43:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
But I guess I would want more empirical.
31:46:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
The polarization seems like a greater problem than fake news.
31:50:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And the polarization problem is caused mostly by geographic and virtual self-sorting.
31:58:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And that does not have an easy solution.
32:01:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Let me ask the three of you, if I may, the simple question, is democracy dying?
32:08:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And if you don't want to grapple with that question.
32:10:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
What, you mean like yes or no?
32:13:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Lightning round.
32:14:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
True, false.
32:17:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Yeah.
32:18:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And if that's not a question that you want to grapple with, then let me rephrase it as what would keep democracy from dying here and in Western European democracies?
32:32:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Alex, go first.
32:33:
(Alex Wagner)
I'm going to take the first.
32:36:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
You want to go past?
32:38:
(Alex Wagner)
No, I want the true false.
32:39:
(Alex Wagner)
Is democracy dying?
32:40:
(Alex Wagner)
I just – I read Anne's story and I just – that fundamental sort of truism, the argument about who gets to rule is never over, right?
32:49:
(Alex Wagner)
It's obvious, right?
32:50:
(Alex Wagner)
And yet as an American, as someone who has sort of like believed in the idea of the moral arc of the universe –
32:57:
(Alex Wagner)
is long but bends towards justice, it's really hard for me to embrace the idea that that argument isn't over.
33:04:
(Alex Wagner)
Right.
33:05:
(Alex Wagner)
That, in fact, there might be, you know, a door in the floor where all the ground falls out from underneath it, I guess.
33:13:
(Alex Wagner)
So my answer to the question, Jeff, is.
33:14:
(Alex Wagner)
While cerebrally, I know that, you know, maybe democracy is dying.
33:20:
(Alex Wagner)
And there's a lot of indications that suggest some sort of metastasizing cancer.
33:25:
(Alex Wagner)
I believe, and maybe it's articles and magazines like this one that make me believe that we are still invested in trying to make it work and keep it alive.
33:35:
(Alex Wagner)
So I'm an optimist.
33:37:
(Alex Wagner)
I do not think it's dying.
33:38:
(Alex Wagner)
There you go.
33:39:
(Alex Wagner)
There's my answer.
33:39:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That was a good answer.
33:40:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Anne, Jeff?
33:42:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, dying is tough because, you know, well, at some point it will end.
33:48:
(Ann Applebaum)
All civilizations end.
33:50:
(Ann Applebaum)
Don't say that end.
33:51:
(Ann Applebaum)
Oh, my God.
33:54:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I guess that wins the vote for cheeriest observation of the last half hour.
33:59:
(Ann Applebaum)
Sorry, guys.
34:01:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Next you're going to tell us that we're all going to die, right?
34:04:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That's the next line.
34:06:
(Ann Applebaum)
No, no, that's definitely never going to happen.
34:08:
(Ann Applebaum)
No, but, you know, maybe one should be more philosophical about it.
34:15:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, yes, there are these challenges and it might falter for a while.
34:20:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, if you look at, you know, you look at the history, let alone, leave alone ancient Greece, look at the history of modern Greece.
34:27:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, you have a country that is, you know, over the last hundred years has been alternately a democracy, a dictatorship occupied by foreign countries.
34:35:
(Ann Applebaum)
a democracy again, you know, then there's a populist, then there's a liberal.
34:41:
(Ann Applebaum)
So, you know, it's been through all kinds of different governments and, you know, some of them have been more successful than others.
34:49:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, it may just be that the United States has had this unusually long run as a liberal democracy and there will be a period of something else at some point and then maybe we can revive liberal democracy.
34:59:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, the idea that it's an upward trajectory
35:03:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that there's no, you know, that there's, you know, and by the way, we've forgotten really how extreme the Civil War was and how dead democracy must have seemed to people who were alive at that time as well.
35:15:
(Ann Applebaum)
But that's, you know, that's kind of, we've kind of buried that in our collective consciousness.
35:20:
(Ann Applebaum)
But, you know, but I think it's very possible that there will be a period when it's not working and people will try the things.
35:26:
(Ann Applebaum)
And why, why wouldn't there be?
35:28:
(Ann Applebaum)
There are always people who aren't succeeding within the system, whether it's because they're the minority or because they've lost out or whatever.
35:39:
(Ann Applebaum)
They didn't like the system because it's not working for them.
35:41:
(Ann Applebaum)
And whether they're the Bolsheviks in 1919 or they're the far right 10 years ago who thought they were on the fringes.
35:48:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, there's always somebody who feels the system isn't working and will therefore want to change the system.
35:54:
(Ann Applebaum)
And it's true in every country.
35:56:
(Ann Applebaum)
And of course, it's true in the United States.
35:58:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Alex used the word metastasizing, which is a great word.
36:01:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Thank you, Jeff.
36:03:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And I was going to say Madison would have said the same thing, that democracy is not dying.
36:07:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
It is metastasizing.
36:08:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
We have too much democracy, not too little.
36:11:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
The cooling mechanisms are gone.
36:13:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
The idea of Republican government, which filters passion, is undermined.
36:17:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And then the question is, can you put the genie back in the bottle?
36:22:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And it's really tough in a democratic age with democratic technologies, which is properly suspicious of elitism and properly much more inclusive than the 18th century.
36:31:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
It's hard to create new cooling mechanisms to slow things down.
36:36:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So that would lead us to ask, you know, are the old ones going to save us?
36:42:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And they might, you know, if we have a normalized president the next time around, not another celebrity, but a Republican or a Democrat who looks more like predecessors.
36:55:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And federalism allows California and New York to flourish and to say Roe v. Wade were overturned, which I think.
37:04:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Many think it won't be, but if it were, things went back to the states.
37:09:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Most states would protect abortion rights and the Republican Party would suffer and so forth.
37:14:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So yeah, these challenges are tough, but it's still very difficult to make fundamental constitutional change without convincing lots of branches of government over a long period of time.
37:26:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And so therefore, maybe the system will work.
37:29:
(Ann Applebaum)
Jeff, can I ask you something?
37:30:
(Ann Applebaum)
It often seems to me, I worry that the American constitution is too rigid, you know, that in with changing technology and with changing geopolitics and so on, that it isn't, you know, that it's not up.
37:44:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, just for example, the gun laws, you know, which seem, which are so outdated and so belong to an 18th century idea about militias and so on.
37:54:
(Ann Applebaum)
And have not caught up with the idea that, you know, I don't think the founding fathers ever thought that 18-year-olds would be able to buy automatic weapons or people who are mentally ill would be able to, you know, have huge arsenals of rifles at home.
38:09:
(Ann Applebaum)
And I worry that the U.S. Constitution is so hard to change that we risk, you know, it risks becoming broken because it's just simply insufficient to keep up with the times.
38:21:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
That's a powerful concern.
38:22:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
In other words, since you can't throw out the bathwater, you have to throw out the baby, too.
38:26:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That's the attitude of the attitude.
38:28:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Actually, I mean, in that Amy Chua, Jed Rubinfeld piece, they notice a lack of reverence on the part of their students for the Constitution in a way.
38:38:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And maybe it's that rigidity, Jeff, that that that is causing a distaste.
38:42:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And I know you're in the business of defending the Constitution, so here's your big chance.
38:46:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
What kind of question is that?
38:47:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Here's your big chance.
38:48:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
No, well, it's true that young people are more likely to support alternatives to democracy and prefer authoritarianism and so forth.
38:58:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So is it the Constitution's fault?
39:00:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
If it is, it's based on a misunderstanding of the Constitution and the Supreme Court.
39:03:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
The fact that we don't have serious gun control in the United States is not the fault of the Supreme Court's decision in the Heller case.
39:10:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
which said that reasonable regulations, including regulations of guns in schools and so forth, are perfectly reasonable.
39:17:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
It's the fact that the gun lobby so polarized the debate that Congress and the states won't pass the regulations that most Americans are using.
39:26:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So we may well have a political pathology in America that's stemming from polarization, but it's not because the Supreme Court is constraining reasonable policy choices.
39:37:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
I guess you could say, and some do, that the weaponization of the First Amendment, as Justice Kagan put it recently, in cases like Citizens United is making meaningful campaign regulation.
39:48:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
difficult.
39:50:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And because the Constitution is so hard to amend, overturning Citizens United will be difficult.
39:57:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
But that's the, I don't think anyone would claim that that's the major source of our vexation.
40:04:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
So although Anne's concern is
40:07:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
serious and venerable.
40:09:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And for a long time, liberals and progressives, especially in the 70s and 80s, worried about an anti-democratic constitution that was too hard to amend.
40:19:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
I think suddenly liberals, as well as conservatives, are rediscovering the virtues of the constraints and of these structural limitations that slow things down and want to shore them up.
40:30:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
And as a result, I don't think it's the constitution's fault.
40:33:
(Ann Applebaum)
Although, you know, another source of popular frustration with democracy in a lot of countries is precisely the fact that it's slow.
40:41:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, that nowadays you can do so many things so quickly, you know, you press a button online and, you know, package arrives the next day and everything happens really rapidly.
40:51:
(Ann Applebaum)
And yet, in a lot of European countries, you have this process of forming coalitions to create governments.
40:57:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that can take weeks and weeks.
41:00:
(Ann Applebaum)
And, you know, the processes by which, you know, that you need to go through to make democracy work are very tedious and cumbersome.
41:07:
(Ann Applebaum)
And some to a lot of people seem to belong to another era.
41:10:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
You know, and it's interesting, the analog here is the way certain people in the West talk about China's ability to
41:19:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
build new airports and new railroads and new everything so quickly.
41:24:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And it's, well, the reason they can do that is because the state is of absolute power.
41:29:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And there's jealousy.
41:30:
(Ann Applebaum)
The envy of the globe.
41:31:
(Ann Applebaum)
Or envy that people have for Putin.
41:33:
(Ann Applebaum)
Look, Putin can just decide to invade Ukraine.
41:35:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, he doesn't have to consult.
41:36:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, who among us can't, though, Anne?
41:38:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I mean, really.
41:39:
(Alex Wagner)
I gotta say, Jeff, I'm not trying to do your job for you, but at the National Constitution Center, if you had t-shirts that said, don't blame the Constitution...
41:49:
(Crosstalk)
I think they'd sell.
41:52:
(Alex Wagner)
Thank the Constitution.
41:54:
(Alex Wagner)
It ain't the Constitution's fault.
41:56:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Absolutely.
41:58:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Just a suggestion.
41:59:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Alex Wagner is also a branding expert.
42:03:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
If you have anything to buttress Polish democracy in a t-shirt, please let us know.
42:07:
(Alex Wagner)
Something about Smolensk.
42:08:
(Ann Applebaum)
That's all I know.
42:10:
(Ann Applebaum)
Actually, no, you'd find it very amusing.
42:12:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know what people do wear on their t-shirts, and they do put on their car bumper stickers right now, is the word constitution.
42:20:
(Ann Applebaum)
That's like the slogan of the resistance.
42:24:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I knew that somehow this conversation would merge around branding.
42:29:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Somehow.
42:30:
(Ann Applebaum)
Swag.
42:31:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Swag.
42:31:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I mean, we could do this all day, but unfortunately we can't.
42:34:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And I don't think we've solved anything here, but at least we've
42:38:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
illuminated some of the issues.
42:39:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's great to have two of the world's leading experts on this set of subjects with us.
42:45:
(Alex Wagner)
They're great, great, great stories.
42:46:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
They're great stories.
42:47:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Please read The Atlantic.
42:48:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Please read everything Jeff Rosen and Ann Applebaum have to say about everything.
42:52:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Ann and Jeff, thank you for joining us today.
42:54:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
We really appreciate it.
42:56:
(Jeffrey Rosen)
Thank you.
42:56:
(Ann Applebaum)
Thank you.
43:13:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
What's your keeper?
43:14:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Call us at 202-266-7600 and leave a voicemail at
43:33:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And we'll be back here next week, assuming we still live in a democracy, which I think we will.
44:02:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Thank you.