How can we “restore the guardrails” of democracy? We examine that question and consider ways to strengthen American constitutional and democratic institutions against current and future threats and insurrections in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Leading commentators Anne Applebaum, SNF Agora Senior Fellow, Pulitzer-prize winning historian, and staff writer for The Atlantic; Daniel Ziblatt, political scientist and a professor at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die; Pulitzer-prize winning journalist George Will; and political scientist William Allen join moderator Jeffrey Rosen for a wide-ranging conversation.
This program is presented in partnership with the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
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PARTICIPANTS
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also an SNF Agora senior fellow and associate professor of the practice at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. A Washington Post columnist for 15 years and a former member of the editorial board, she has also worked at Spectator magazine, Evening Standard, Slate, and among others. She is the author of several books, including Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
Daniel Ziblatt is Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and is director of the Transformations of Democracy group at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He specializes in the study of Europe and the history of democracy. His is the author of three books, including How Democracies Die (co-authored with Steve Levitsky), a New York Times best-seller and Der Spiegel best-seller, which has been translated into twenty-two languages.
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. He is also a regular contributor to MSNBC and NBC News. His books include: The Conservative Sensibility; One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation; Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy; among others.
William Allen is Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science and Emeritus Dean, James Madison College, at Michigan State University. He also currently serves as Chief Operating Officer at the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, in Washington, D.C. He previously served on United States National Council for the Humanities and as Chairman and Member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He is the author or editor of several books, including George Washington: America's First Progressive.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Edmund Burke, Speech to the Electors at Bristol (1774)
- Federalist No. 51
- Federalist No. 55
- George Washington, Farewell Address (1796)
- Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, Iolanthe; or the Peer and Peri (1882)
- Columbia University, "Rexford Guy Tugwell"
- United States v. Carolene Products Company (1938)
- Anne Applebaum, The Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
- Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, "Coexistence is the Only Option"
- Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, "What Trump and His Mob Taught the World About America"
- Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Dies
- Daniel Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy
- Noam Gidron and Daniel Ziblatt, Annual Review of Political Science, "Center-Right Political Parties in Advanced Democracies"
- Juan Linz, Totatlitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
- George Will, The Washington Post, "Trump and many of his ‘woke’ critics are more alike than they realize"
- George Will, The Washington Post, "Biden charged the people of this republic with fixing it. So the people need to grow up."
- Ed. William Allen, George Washington: A Collection
- William Allen, George Washington: America's Fist Progressive
- William Allen, Imprimis, "The Civil Rights Revolution"
- William Allen, The Colorado Magazine, "2020: Year of Destiny"
- Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times, "‘Trump Just Used Us and Our Fear’: One Woman’s Journey Out of QAnon"
This program was presented in partnership with the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. This episode was produced by Jackie McDermott, John Guerra, and Lana Ulrich. It was engineered by David Stotz and Greg Scheckler.
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
Jackie McDermott: [00:00:00] Welcome to Live at the National Constitution Center. I'm Jackie McDermott, the show's producer. Last week, we hosted a discussion on how to restore the guardrails of democracy and strengthen American institutions. The panel featured leading commentators, historian Anne Applebaum, political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and William Allen, and journalist George F. Will Here's Jeff to get the conversation started.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:00:24] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the National Constitution Center and to today's convening of America's Town Hall. I am Jeffrey Rosen, the president of this wonderful institution. We're so excited to cohost this program in partnership with the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Our partnership with SNF Agora has led to a series of important programs about the future of democracy and the constitution.
And it's spreading a lot of light. Thank you so much for joining, dream team of thinkers, about the future of our Republic: Anne Applebaum, George Will, Daniel Ziblatt and William Allen. I want to begin with a propostion. And that is that the events of January 6th, where an armed mob stormed the U. S. Capitol , inflamed by demagogic statements and false facts, was the Founders' nightmare.
They came to Philadelphia with fears of Shay's Rebellion in their mind. That was the group of farmers in Western, Massachusetts, who were mobbing the courthouses because they didn't want to pay their debts. And Madison said in Federalist 55, "In all large assemblies of any character composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Even if every Athenian had been Socrates, Athens would still have been a mob." I want to begin with you, George Will, because your recent column about the need to resurrect prudence among American voters argued that grownup American politics requires voters as well as those they elect to have the patience to respect constitutional processes.
My question to you, and that will be to all of your colleagues, is what is the reason that patience or reason seem to have been displaced by passion and polarization? In your piece, you quote Ben Sasse on America's junk food diet, the underlying economics of dialing up rhetoric to increase clicks, eyeballs and revenue.
You have other diagnoses of the problem. If you had to sum up the causes of this democratic distemper, what would they be?
George Will: [00:02:33] In a word, populism, but that's a word that didn't exist when the Founders were founding. It's commonly said that they talked so much about the problems of democracy, they must've been tepid fainthearted Democrats. Not at all.
They talked only about democracy because they were determined that we were to have a democracy, but then they looked at the many failings in the past and the pitfalls in the future and talked about the problems. Madison's nightmare is populism in this sense: populism postulates first that the people are virtuous, or even if they're not, they--in the dyspeptic words of. H.L. Mencken--"Know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." Second, that because they are virtuous and because they need prompt fulfillment of their appetites and desires and preferences, there should be no mediating institutions to refine their opinion. It's just fine the way it is.
And therefore, there should be no nonsense about separation of powers and slowing things down; that there should be a strong executive with a personal relationship with the masses who can directly articulate what they want and translate it into action. That's in a way, what we saw, what happened in the morning of, and then in the afternoon of the 1st of January : they clamored, the President said, "I agree. Let's go get it." And of course the, the target of their March was the place where deliberation is supposed to occur and things are supposed to slow down, and compromises are supposed to be mandatory. At the heart of this, Jeff, and then I'll subside, is a peculiar and simple and simpleminded understanding of representation.
Josh Hawley, when asked why he was doing this, challenging this, says, "Well, the people of Missouri want it." So that's a sufficient explanation . Even if true, of course it's insufficient, and Mr. Hawley should be sent to his room without dessert and required to read several times Burke's speech to the electors at Bristol, where he said, I owe you my judgment. I don't check my judgment at the door and simply respond to promptings from you folks. So at the heart of this is, is an entire rejection in the name of populism of separation of powers, the structure that exists to encourage prudence and compromise, and finally a simple, and as I say, simpleminded understanding of representation.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:05:16] Thank you so much for summing up your diagnosis of the problem so well. Anne Applebaum, the same question to you. You wrote in the Atlantic on January 6th or 7th, about how America had lost the power of its moral example for the rest of the world. But how would you answer the question of what are the causes of our democratic distemper that led to January 6th?
Anne Applebaum: [00:05:37] So I'd like to first pick up on something that George just said, which is the concept of virtue. Which, which the founders did speak about. Sometimes they spoke about it as something that had existed in the Roman Republic that they wanted to inspire in America. Sometimes Thomas Jefferson spoke about it as something that was somehow inculcated in the American way of life.
But they did have an idea that, you know, whatever their political differences, whatever their economic differences that the electorate, which was of course, a more narrowly defined group at that time. You know, it, you know, the, the nature of its virtue was that it-- was that they accepted this set of virtuous institutions, including Congress and including the, the rule of law and including the other, you know, the other elements of the political system.
And of course, what was so striking about January the 6th was that it was an attack. You know, it wasn't Republicans attacking Democrats, you know, it wasn't actually, what you were not watching was a, kind of, was a sort of partisan clash. What you were watching was a group of a part of the electorate or representative of a part of the electorate that was attacking the system itself. You know, they were attacking Congress. They were trying to prevent Congress from from recognizing the, the Electoral College's vote for the President. They were, you know, they were indiscriminate, they were happy to hang Mike Pence. They were happy to shoot Nancy Pelosi.
And they were-- and, and it was the system itself. The institutions of Congress, the neutral institutions, you know, the Congress is of course a very political place, but the actual institution is bipartisan. We all share it. You know, we all elect people to go and sit in it. And it's very clear that a part of the American electorate has lost its respect for our neutral and shared institutions.
And I think there are a lot of reasons for that. And you know, w we could spend the rest of this hour speaking about them. I would point to, let me, let me talk about one of them which is the effect that online and media polarization has on the electorate. The fact that we all now live in separate filter bubbles, that what I see in Google is different from what you see when we, when you Google the same thing.
The fact that we are so deeply divided by what, where we get our information and what it is. One of the impacts of polarization is that it by definition makes people suspicious of those shared institutions, because if you're, if you come to see your political opponents as fundamentally evil or fundamentally wrong, or fundamentally illegitimate then the institutions that they occupy or work in also become illegitimate.
So we now have a portion of the American electorate that has lost that Republican virtue, that faith in, you know, in these bipartisan and shared institutions and which sees Congress, the White House you know, the CIA, the State Department, the, the institutions that-- the officials in 50 States who count votes , the electoral system itself as equal.
And that, that is precisely why that movement was so dangerous and precisely why the still relatively high support for it around the country is so dangerous. We now have a part of the American electorate that doesn't accept the system. Doesn't accept the rules of the system and, and, and is going to go on being a challenge to the system in years to come..
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:08:58] Daniel Ziblatt, you are part of projects that are studying this program and you have written about political polarization. Anne Applebaum just mentioned the way that online environments contribute to it. You've talked about asymptomatic polarization . Is that one of the causes of our distemper, and if so, tell us more about it.
Daniel Ziblatt: [00:09:20] This was certainly one of the Founders' nightmares, what happened on January 6th. But I think in addition to that, it's also the nightmare of people who've studied the breakdown of democracies in the 20th century as well. There's a great Spanish political scientist, Juan Linz, who, who taught at Yale University for many years. You know, he was born in Weimar Germany, grew up in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.
And one of the things he identified as a great threat to democracy is the emergence of what Anne just described also as anti-system movements. So these are groups or individuals or political parties that don't accept the basic rules of the game, that are willing to use violence to gain power or to cling onto power.
And I think in many ways, what we saw on January 6th was that kind of movement. So that's something that we've seen in the breakdown of democracies and other places, you know, we've survived this, but this continues to be a major threat to us. One point I would add though, drawing again on Linz is that one of the things that Linz emphasized is a great danger for democracy is not only emergence of anti-system movements and parties, but the emergence of, of semi, what he called semi-loyal political parties.
And semi-loyal political parties are parties that are essentially establishment parties that play footsie, essentially, with anti-system groups and that don't unambiguously separate themselves from groups that are willing to use violence to gain and to hold onto power. And, you know, he Linz wrote, wrote about this in the 1970s, looking at the breakdown of democracy in Latin America. Also looking at the breakdown of democracy in Germany, in the 1930s, Italy in the 1920s.
And one of the warning sort of signs that he identified as a threat to democracy is when mainstream parties think it's in their interest to at least not entirely unambiguously separate themselves with, with these kinds of forces and my great fear is that what we've seen and part of what we've seen has been exacerbated by the unwillingness of key elements in the Republican party to sufficiently distance themselves from these groups.
Now, after January 6th, you know, certainly some Republican leaders came out and clearly denounced this, that's absolutely right. But in some ways, you know, that the cows had already left the barn. I mean, we, the reason we were in this situation, I think is there's been insufficient distancing from the most extremist elements in our society. In order for democracy to, to endure going forward there has to be a clear line drawn by both Democrats and Republicans that this kind of behavior is unacceptable and an unwillingness to use these kinds of forces to mobilize support for themselves. So, so I think that's one of the great lessons of the 20th century for our current moment,
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:11:51] WIlliam Allen, you've written so powerfully about the American national character in, in light of January 6th and the polarization, technological, political, and otherwise that's been discussed. Do we still have a single national character? And, and how would you diagnose, through the lens of the Founders, the cause of our democratic distempers?
William Allen: [00:12:13] Well, I thank you. I find myself in a curious position in which I agree with all my, those who spoke before me with regard to the general question of what is the danger of the hour. But I don't agree with the assessment of how we got there. I think we're somewhat overwrought in describing what happened on January the 6th as an insurrection.
I don't think it was quite the same as firing on Fort Sumter, or the same as the raid at Harper's Ferry, or the same as the Whiskey Rebellion, where magistrates were tarred, feathered and killed and dragged away from their courtroom, very targeted and very deliberate. So I think this was a mob in the classic sense, in the [indecipherable] sense, this is in effect an organism, it lost its mind rather than found its purpose.
And we must make that distinction with great clarity. It is not so much that they were informed by Trump's purpose and therefore had a purpose. They were simply as Anne Applebaum pointed out and others have indicated indirectly people who no longer had confidence and who were outraged by not having confidence, more than anything else, in the institutions and in the system. So the American character question comes down to that as its central point, as it seems to me, what has eroded confidence in our institutions, those guard rails, the constitutional guard rails they republicanism of the system.
George points out how the Founders were so emphatically in favor of popular government, they did everything they could to try to protect it. I agree completely. That's quite right. But they did so by building in protection that negates mere majoritarianism. They were understandably concerned that they didn't want to recreate an Athens, for one reason only: there is no constitution in majority rule, period.
So how do we lose our character? Well, somehow it seems to me that started when we lost faith in all of those institutional guard rails, the very republicanism itself. We announced that in 1938, when we said, in the Carolene Products case that minorities cannot be protected by majority rule in the system. And ever since then, we've been elaborating a structure in which we try to discriminate protected from unprotected classes.
And what does that mean? Except to communicate that some people shouldn't have confidence in the government, and eventually that means no one should have confidence in the system. So I think we have a much deeper problem than the problem with technology of online communication. The whole idea of whether the problem is the people know too much, or the people know too little it seems to me is quite beside the point. The fact is what the people know is not comforting. And we must explore the reasons why what the people know is not comforting.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:15:16] Fascinating. Thank you very much for that intervention. George, professor Allen says that the problem is not the guardrails themselves, but the fact that we've lost faith in their character. Do you agree that the institutions are holding, but it's the people's faith in them are not, or do you disagree? And if that is your diagnosis, then how can, how would you resurrect people's faith in the guardrails?
George Will: [00:15:43] I agree that they've lost faith in them to the extent that they even understand them.
I don't think we have a rising generation of Americans who are taught what they are and why they are what they are, that is, what premises underlie them and what evils they're supposed to to prevent. So, first of all, there's a vast failure of public education, ongoing civic education. It seems to me a nation that can not educate elites that and an intelligency on educators that actually believe in the nation's premises is ominous, particularly when you are, as we are, a credal nation, that believes certain things as constituent of, of what it means to be a citizen.
I think it's very, it is important to understand that because the events of 1st of June--6th of January filled our television screens, it looked as though they were filling in a way the nation, it was a pretty small uprising. Shay's rebellion was probably a larger, although trivial in size, was probably a larger percentage of the population at the time than those people were on the 6th of January. It's very important to understand that there are 330 million of us in this country. And at any given moment, 323 million of them are not watching cable, television, or listening to talk radio. They're raising children and fixing the screen door and getting on with life.
So the tone of American life in part, because of mass media and graphic journalism, the tone of American life is often set or distorted by graphic images that have no larger resonance in the country.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:17:32] Fascinating. Anne, I think that the four of you have said in different ways, agreed that Americans have lost faith in the mediating institutions.
You did say that in your opening comment. If we're on the solutions round, how can Americans regain their faith in the institutions?
Anne Applebaum: [00:17:54] So to be clear, I'm not sure that one is not that I'm not sure. I'm sure that not all Americans have. What we're talking about is a small minority and you know, how you measure that minority is very difficult.
One proxy measurement might be the number of Americans who say they sympathized with the insurrection of the Capitol. And that's one, one poll that was taken soon after that was 20%. Maybe it's a bit lower now. And maybe that didn't really reflect full knowledge or understanding of the incident.
So, but even if we call it 10%. That's a very large number of people for the rest of us to deal with. And when you think about the consequences of that 10%, I mean, we were actually very lucky in this election that we had state officials like Brad Ratzenberger and others in Georgia who counted the votes correctly, tabulated them correctly and stood by those, you know stood by the count, even when they were under a lot of pressure from the President, and from other people in their party to change it.
Two years from now or four years from now, we might not be so lucky at having those kinds of officials in place. Remember some of them are elected officials and, you know, we could, we could see this 10% or 20% pushing for the election of a different kind of person. But that means, it seems to me that we need to think about the problem in a way that Americans are not used to thinking about this kind of problem at all, and then to think about it as a kind of insurgency.
You know, it's a, you know, it's, you know, think about it the way that the Colombian government, for example now thinks about reintegrating the FARC terrorists who for, for 50 years, lived in the jungles, lived off, you know, drug deals and, and, and kidnapping. And once a peace deal was done, had to be brought into society and reintegrated. And some of the lessons from Columbia, from Northern Ireland, from other places where there has been a problem of integrating war or reconstituting, a society after civil war, when you have people who have graphically different visions of what society is and how it should run , some of that thinking, you know, counter-intuitive though it seems and far away though Columbia and Northern Ireland may seem from us, is something that might help us get through this.
And this is not as simple or quick or easy process. And of course it should go along with what George Will talks about, which is civic education to go along with reform of the internet, regulation of the internet. That's a whole huge, separate problem. We can maybe discuss another time. But thinking about reintegrating an insurgency, you know, leads to some conclusions, for example, one counterintuitive, but frequently used method in places like Northern Ireland is that actually you don't focus on the big issues, the existential issues that divide you.
So you just don't talk about them. Instead you change the subject and you talk about -- you do constructive projects together. So, you know, at a local level you build a road or you build a bridge or you bring people together to discuss not their feelings about high politics, but for example, how are we going to, you know, increase security at the state Capitol in Ohio, and then you would bring representatives from all different groups just to say, well, we don't want anyone to be heard in all these different kinds of demonstrations, what do you propose to do?
And so getting people to speak about constructive problems like that is something that's used, you know, in societies all around the world in that you know, in, in, in that kind of situation. And, and again, it's, as I said, counterintuitive, cause people think we should argue things out or we should convince each other. Actually we might not be able to convince each other, you know, it might be that if you bring one insurrectionist in the room with a constitutional scholar, like Jeffrey, Ruth they just, aren't going to agree and, and no, no amount of time spent together is going to make them agree.
And so instead they should turn around and go work together at a vaccine clinic or something, you know, volunteer somewhere and do some jointly useful project. And that's just, as I said, that's just -- you know, you would have to work out what that meant at the local and regional and state and national level. But that, that way of thinking , which by the way, I think the, I think the Biden political campaign, the Biden administration intuitively understands, I don't know if they're using the same rubric, but that, that what you need to do is not focus on what divides us, but on these other kinds of projects you know, that's, that's a, that's a way out.
At least if you're talking about reducing violence, ending conflict that's something that we can, that's a way that officials, mayors governors can start thinking along those lines and that that's a way to usefully move forward.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:22:29] Daniel Ziblatt, we have two powerful guardrails or proposals on the table. George Will emphasizes civic education, Anne talks about bringing people who disagree together to solve constructive problems. Can you propose the resurrection of a guardrail, and perhaps since we've been talking about some of the populist attacks on counter-majoritarian institutions, do you agree that we need to strengthen the counter-majoritarian checks or, or, or should the institutions become more majoritarian?
Daniel Ziblatt: [00:23:00] Well, I think both George and Anne's points are really well taken and what they address are as in a sense a social transformation. You know, and looking at the level of voters and citizens and, and, you know, our political, our political culture needs to change. And I think that's absolutely right, but I think we can also operate in another level, which is that the level of our political elites, because certainly our elites and politicians respond to what voters want, but politicians act in ways based on the incentives facing them.
I mean, certainly they're constrained by norms and some of these norms and soft guard rails have decayed over time. And so I, I just don't think it's going to work any longer to kind of wag our finger at misbehaving politicians and say, no, no, that's an inappropriate, this is unprecedented. You can't behave this way.
I think we have to address the incentives facing politicians so that it's no longer in their interest to try to tap into these groups. Because at some level, one might say that throughout American history, at least 20% of the American electorate, maybe not as mobilized as this population, but has, has had, there's been an illiberal strand in the American electorate.
And 20% is a fair estimate. If one could, could do survey research going back to the 19th century, right? So the question is not what, you know, how to eliminate that segment of the population or to transform them, but rather how to make it so that politicians don't think it's in their interest to tap into those groups.
And I think one way of doing this, I mean, one of the fundamental problems facing our country today is that we, that today more than any point in the 20th century, the correlation between population density and partisanship is much higher than ever before. So in other words, Republican, as in the past, Republicans and Democrats had both urban and rural wings, today, we have two parties, one party, the Democratic party, which essentially represents urban areas and other party, which represents rural areas.
The districts they represent are increasingly homogenous. And so there's very little incentive for a Republican in a 90% Republican district, a Republican member of Congress, to try to reach out to more moderate stances or to separate themselves from these most extremist wings of our society.
And so if anything, they're afraid of being primaried on the right. And so what I would suggest is that we need to transform the incentives facing our politicians. And so, you know, this is, this is a, I know this is a steep hill to climb, but just to give you one very blunt example. I mean, the electoral college certainly is something.
If we had nationwide elections, you would have a transformed set of incentives facing presidential candidates. If you, if you know the HR-1, the Senate bill one, which expands voting rights, if we made it easier for people to vote across the United States, essentially we would be increasing the, the the need to appeal to majorities.
I mean, at the end of the day, I think at this, at the current moment, the Republican party is is relying on crutches to win power. I mean, it doesn't need to win majorities to win power. I think competition is the great moderator. If we had increased the level of competition in all of our districts there would be a need to moderate.
And so, you know, I think any, any institutional reforms that-- we could talk about the institutional reforms, any institutional reform that increases competition I think would increase moderation. And so if those are majoritarian reforms, I think we need to do that. And to be clear, you know, I think, you know, I'm all democratic rules, not just majority rule, that's certainly the case, but the democratic rule without majority is certainly no democracy.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:26:16] Professor Allen, you reframe the problem. How would you reframe the solution of encouraging citizens to recover virtue and self-restraint that the Founders took for granted as part of the national character?
William Allen: [00:26:30] In a word, I would follow the example of Washington's farewell address. It quite specifically addressed that question and which elaborated the principle that the institutions cannot be trusted by the people if the institutions do not trust the people. It's a very straightforward formulation. It doesn't require a lot of sophisticated analysis.
If we're looking for constructive projects in which to engage people, for example, in 2021, what could be more constructive than to get people to focus on solving the countless numbers of personal crises they're all going through in the presence of a disease, than getting together to figure out how to open their schools and how to run their businesses, rather than being in a supine position of waiting for instructions. This binary structure of thought we have that there are some who know, and the vast number who have to be deprogrammed, formed, tutored, otherwise structured for participation in free government is exactly upside down.
The solution is a powerful dose of humility on the part of those who think they know. And the recognition of the necessity to abandon the country, to the potential of goodwill's abandonment by the people, because trust in the people ultimately recognize that recognizes that the people themselves must make these decisions.
They can't be made for them. They can't be shaped by institutions. They can't be shaped by redesigning the democracy. They can't be shaped by someone speaking from on high. What we have to understand, what has been true from the beginning, what James Madison brooded over countless times for more than 35 years, because we've reached that point at which Madison described where the power stands in the hands of the suffrage, when the suffrage has passed into the hands of the propertyless many. For all practical purposes, that's where we are. Either they will exercise that power with the prudence George Will has talked about or they'll exercise it otherwise. But in the main they will make their choices, including their bad choices with goodwill.
And therefore there's a potential for goodwill's abandonment. Having been born as I was before the era of lynching had expired and having lived through for the first substantial portion of my life, the era of Jim Crow. Very much aware of where majority it is can go astray. I remember George Wallace campaigning and saying "I will be out-niggered."
I also remembered how he ended his career. We have to recognize that we cannot shape this experience from an elite pedestal. We can learn a lot, historically speaking. We can communicate with one another in curious introspective and speculative ways, which profits us philosophically and otherwise. But none of that has anything to do with the character of the people who must sustain the nation. The people must be trusted before the institutions can operate properly.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:29:46] Thank you very much for that. George Will raises a profound question that the Founders struggled with as we learned from Federalist 51: if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
Madison was uncertain about whether the people had enough virtuous self-restraint to govern themselves. And I'd like your candid thoughts about whether in light of the online environment that we are seeing, you ultimately believe that the people can muster that virtue.
And I want to put a very concrete example on the table, the New York Times a week or so ago, ran a piece about a woman who has become an enthusiastic Q Anon conspiracy theorist. As it happened, she was a high school and college classmate of mine. She would have the beneficiary of a superb elite education, but that did not prevent her from being radicalized by these algorithms into conspiracy minded falsehoods.
In light of these incentives, do you believe that the people have enough virtue to be governed by reason rather than passion.
George Will: [00:31:01] Before getting to virtue, do they have enough information, Jeffery? The bigger the government gets, the less people know about it relative to what it's actually doing. In the 19th century, they could wrap their minds around the great issues.
Immigration became came later, but the expansion of slavery under the territories ,internal improvements as we Whigs still call infrastructure , there were big issues, the disposal of public lands, people understand that. And a great many people can't understand what the government does nowadays.
And I, I, I sympathize with that. As you know, Jeffrey, I I've been tiresome for years now about the the modern presidency and how it's distorted our life. The problem with the modern presidency is it teaches people bad lessons about government. They want to go back to my definition of populism, the idea that the public will, should be instantly trans translated into action by a strong executive.
They're taught this. Mr. Trump wanted to build a wall. So he declared an emergency and repurposed funds to build the wall that had been appropriated for other purposes. But he could only do that because Congress is --has scattered the legal code with all kinds of discretion that are for, for presidents to seize . He's declared a national security urgency to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum from our tranquil, placid, not to mention military ally, neighbor, Canada, and this sort of applied populism-- and he, and it was done with the passive consent of, of a Congress that has simply decided that governing is too much too tiresome and too time consuming. And, and so the way the modern presidency functions, not to mention its ubiquity in our, in our our taking up residence in our, in our heads from one end of the day to the other, teaches people bad lessons about the way the government works.
I heartily agree with what Anne said that change the subject to try and break the fever, get people to relax, take a deep breath and then exhale. Actually the President has done that. President Briden's picked up of what used to be, it isn't quite so much anymore, a hot issue, immigration right out of the box.
I wish he'd picked up infrastructure because there's something in it for everyone, it's splittable differences. Everyone gets to build a bridge or an airport and everyone's happy and you lower the tone because you're in the realm of splittable differences.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:33:44] Anne, George just agreed with you about the virtue of of changing the subject and shaping these deliberations. My question to you is, are you, is this distemper -- it's obviously not unique to America and given your international perspective, does it make sense to focus on American institutions like the peculiarities of the electoral college or the incentives of the gerrymandering system, or are these problems of internet polarization, disinformation, and radicalization transnational, and are the solutions therefore transnational and having more to do with things like internet regulations and the structure of conversations among polarized groups rather than reforming the Constitution.
Anne Applebaum: [00:34:24] So I can, although I can imagine that both can be true. We can have outdated institutions in our country and at the same time you know, be part of an, of an international you know a set of international problems.
It's true that one of the, one of the reasons I'm so biased to this conversation about it's not just about the internet, but about the media more generally. Is that what is happening in America really is very similar to what's happening in other places. I mean, I just can't stress it enough how similar , same kinds of language, same kinds of divisions, same kinds of arguments are being made in countries that are really very different from the United States. I mean, I, as, as you know, I spent a lot of time in Poland, which is. I don't know, it's, it's, it's got about as different a history from the history of America as any country in the world. And yet it is extraordinary how similar some of the arguments sound there and here.
And the only explanation for that, that I can see is that all democracies are right now being put to the test by some similar sets of problems, including the impact of the internet on, on media, the downgrading of commercial media , the, the, the, you know, the ways in which the, you know, the, the, the, the internet focuses your attention and creates divisions between people.
So the fact is that that's happening in a lot of places at the same time. So maybe it's not surprising that we're seeing these similar patterns in a lot of places at the same time. And I would argue that there, there is a, there is an international dimension to the solution. One thing that I know that Biden ministration wants to do is find a way to reignite our alliances.
So our alliances with Europe, our alliances with democracies of Asia , our alliances with democracy is actually all around the world. And one of the things I'm worried about that is I'm worried that that will just be a bunch of meetings and some slogans and, you know, holding hands, or I don't know, they go to Berlin and they all have photograph taken together.
And that will be the sum of it. Actually reinvigorating those alliances, actually focusing on some of the international problems that afflict all of our democracies. And one of them is the absolutely crucial issue of internet regulation, which is by the way, happening in Europe. I mean, it's kind of, it's part of the European Union's program for the next few years. It's under discussion in London and Paris, it's going to happen.
And so focusing on doing that together so that we can create an internet that reflects our democratic values of open and transparency and transparency, openness and transparency, sorry. Rather than an internet that reflects the oligarchic values of a few companies and rather than the autocratic internet, that China has, that that reflects the values of surveillance and censorship.
So doing that as a project together with not only reinvigorate alliances, it would also strengthen all of our democracies. I mean, another big project for all of us to do together is to look really hard at kleptocracy and the movement of illicit money around the world and the way in which dirty money affects and shapes all of our politics.
I mean, it's a terrible problem inside the U.S. But also across Europe and again, in democracies around the world, those are joint things that, that we could do together. And just as a one thing I've been thinking about a lot recently is the way in which we always assumed that America's involvement in spreading democracy and talking about democracy, leading this democracy alliance around the world since the Second World War, we always talked about that as something America did for the world. I suspect we've underestimated the degree to which being part of that group and having that as a national project actually reinforced our democracy at home.
The fact that democracy was at the center of our foreign policy also meant that, you know, that, that it was that it was at the center of national policy in a, in a sense of national gave us a sense of national purpose in a way that we really underestimated for, for a long time. And so there are there, you know, just, you know, it's not just about, you know, making friends with the EU again, it's about reinvigorating all of our democracies by focusing on how we can make the international environment better for all of them.
So, so although I don't disagree that there may be changes we could make here. I do think we have always underrated the international dimension and how it affects us.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:38:45] Daniel, you're getting lots of comments. "Daniel makes some great points, but what can be done about current Republican moves in state legislatures to restrict and make voting more difficult?" Other questions about your proposals for the electoral college.
But I wonder if you could sort of take up Anne's invitation to make an international comparison. Are there institutional and political reforms in other countries that have reduced polarization and the influence of faction, such as, for example, rank choice voting, just to take an obvious one, that we might learn from so that we don't make the mistake of assuming that our vexations are unique to our particular institutions?
Daniel Ziblatt: [00:39:23] Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. Our, our, our vexations aren't unique to us and there's similar trends exactly as Anne has described. And I think the causes are very similar.
I mean, both demographic changes within countries, you know, in Europe, the rise, the refugee crisis certainly sparked the rise of the radical right, even if in many countries there weren't many refugees or it was exactly in those regions where there weren't many refugees within countries where the radical right did that did the best, but that was certainly a kind of a specter hanging over politics.
Social media, internet technology. These are all common causes. I guess the interesting issue though, that faces the United States is unlike a lot, at least of Western European countries where the, or radical right parties are, you know, 20, 25, 30% of the vote if they get lucky, but at the margins of their political systems-- we're in a situation where our, one of our two main parties looks a lot more like those far right parties than it does its former counterparts, the center-right conservative Christian democratic parties of Western Europe. And that, that was the group of parties that our center-right party used to be compared to. And increasingly in terms of its ideology and its stance on a lot of these issues we've been talking about, it looks more like the far right parties.
The challenge of course, is that this is one of our two main parties. So in terms of what kinds of institutional reforms have existed in other countries? I mean, I think. One, you know, we, we, of course, as, as viewers of this know, we have a very old Constitution you know, the oldest written constitution and a lot of the countries that we're talking about in Western Europe for instance, have new constitutions.
And there's a lot of virtues to having our old Constitution, but you know, one interesting dynamic is that over the course of the post 45 period and a lot of Western Europe, a lot of these kind of older institutions have been reformed. Think of the house of Lords being weakened in recent years or a Swedish upper chamber.
I mean, there are a lot of institutional reforms, a lot of activity in the changing of institutions, renewing of institutions. And I think, you know, as, as important as our Constitution is, is as well as it served us, I think we should also be open to the possibility that at times we need to update our institutions.
I mean, you know what, we, we are not our Constitution. We cannot treat it as if it's the most unique thing in the world and that nobody, you know, and that it can't be touched. I mean, it's difficult of course, to reform our Constitution, but it's hap it's happened before the beginning of the 20th century.
And I know a lot of people don't think a lot of the progressive reforms or, were all great. But on the other hand, you know, the 20th century was a pretty good century for the United States. And I think it was a no small part to the institutional reforms that clustered at the beginning of the 20th century.
And I think the time is right for us to begin to rethink some of these reforms and it does essentially put us in the same categories, a lot of other advanced democracies.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:41:57] Thank you for that reminder that even the most venerable institutions are being reformed abroad. You reminded me of that line from Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe: if there's any institution in great Britain, which is not susceptible to any improvement whatsoever, it is the House of Peers, but of course they did just re redo the whole thing without much fuss . William Allen, you were getting a lot of plaudits in our chat room, "applause applause for William Allen, Bravo, William Allen, the so-called elites who think they know better than the people are an existential danger to the Republic."
My question is, is your suggestion quote from George Washington's farewell address that the elites that the government should simply trust the people rather than second guessing their wisdom. And how does that address the, the challenge of my, my, my college classmate, who, because of algorithmic radicalization and is embracing falsehoods?
William Allen: [00:42:48] To address the tail end of that, I'm not sure how to account for your high school classmate. I I'm quite sure of one thing though, that she wasn't merely a passive victim of impersonal forces. I think that our tendency today to resolve human experience into the passive reception of external influences discounts character too greatly.
And that's part of what I was describing earlier. We don't see people as agents. We see them as victims. We don't see them people as who can do things. We see them as people who have to be nursed and nudged as patients as if they were somehow a native born class of surgeons tending all the rest of us.
I think we have to break out of that and we have to revert to the model that is present in the farewell address when Washington says, look, I'm not responsible. You are responsible. What I've done, I want you to evaluate, to assess, to hold me to account for, but at the end of the day, you, the people are responsible and that's the language that makes the difference.
And that's the language that was subverted at the start of the 20th century. When the presidential model that George Will complains about arose and was defended by Woodrow Wilson, the so-called Tribune of the people who was alone going to express the national voice. Well, of course it was a fiction then, but it was a harmful fiction.
For it set in train in motion, all the perverse tendencies of executive power we've experienced ever since then. It isn't the case, it seems to me, that we can reconcile or reduce the American experience to the universal experiences of humankind around the world. Even though human beings are the same everywhere, human institutions are not.
They are by definition, quite distinct. And even when they look alike, they're going to be quite different. So that it is important. I believe for us to recognize something that is really critical. The United States can cease to exist in its constitutional form. It will not disappear as a geographic space.
It will not disappear as a congerie of peoples. It will not disappear in many respects, including all the geopolitical. And can still disappear as a constitutional form. Therefore, the analysis has got to be more sensitive and not assume the perduring, the lasting, the enduring forms of political life, whether here or elsewhere. Deliberate choice is what makes a constitution in the highest sense of the expression.
Not just evolved experience. And what we have to offer those who think about these things is to inform what deliberate choice means. I think that's what Daniel Ziblatt's trying to get at, but you do that in the most interesting way, only by carrying out that conversation directly with the people in the role of public representative.
Most of our so-called constitutional experts today, who are grieving about remaking the constitution are not public officials. They're the Rexford Tugwells of this day, and even he was a public official. But they're constantly rewriting really by any redesigning constitutions, anonymously in some cases. And I pointed out to them, that's quite the opposite of what happened at the founding.
Yes, the Federalist papers were written pseudonymously, but not before those who wrote them had taken public roles in drafting the Constitution and presenting it to the people. It is the responsibility of public representatives who most directly determined national character and political prospects.
And I will always submit that that is a solution. If the wrong people are in those offices, then those people who think they have better solutions have better get there. Otherwise they should be silent.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:46:50] It is the responsibility of public representatives to carry out discussions directly with the people to inform deliberate choice. An eloquent note on which we will have to end the superb discussion, because the Constitution Center fora, like Supreme Court arguments, must end on time. The only thing I'll ask of our panelists is that we reconvene, I think this discussion was so productive and each of you was so illuminating that I know that we could benefit from another session together. So we'll hope to schedule that before too long.
And in the meantime, I want to thank the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins for co-hosting this wonderful panel with us. And I want to thank you fellow citizens, dear listeners , more than a thousand of you taking an hour away from your busy days in order to educate yourself about democracy and the Constitution.
Thank you for that. Thank you. Anne Applebaum, Daniel Ziblatt, George Will and William Allen for an illuminating, marvelous discussion and hope we can reconvene soon. Thanks to all.
Jackie McDermott: [00:47:53] This program was presented in partnership with the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. This episode was produced by me, Jackie McDermott, along with Lana Ulrich and John Guerra. It was engineered by David Stotz. Please rate, review and subscribe to Live at the National Constitution Center on Apple Podcasts or follow us on Spotify, and join us back here next week for another live constitutional conversation. On behalf of the National Constitution Center. I'm Jackie McDermott.
