Not Another Politics Podcast – Episode 23

One of the defining discussions of the Trump presidency centers on the fate of our democracy. In the aftermath of his populist presidency, and as we transition to the Biden era, we’re wondering whether the future is bright or dim.

There’s no better scholar to put this question to than the University of Chicago Professor and co-author of “Why Nations Fail”, James Robinson. We look forward and backward with Robinson to diagnose the health of our democracy.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Transcript

William Howell:

I'm Will Howell, and this is Just Another Politics podcast. With all that's happening in the world, we thought it would make sense to pause and try to take stock of the state of our democracy to reflect upon threats to our democracy and what a solution or a corrective to those threats might look like. And so this past week, Anthony and I joined in conversation with our colleague James Robinson. James is the director of the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts here at the Harris School of Public Policy. He is a university professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author, with Daron Acemoglu, most recently of The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty. But he's also written with Daron, a widely renowned book called, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, and another book entitled, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.

And you can hear just in the titles alone, the deep investments James has made into the study of democracy. And he's able to put our current condition here in the United States into comparatives perspective. And as you'll see in the conversation that we had with him last week, he draws all kinds of useful insights into what's happening here by reference to trends and developments in Latin America and in Africa, let's give a listen to the conversation that happened last week.

In the aftermath of a day that began with Trump, well, setting off—

Tape (Donald Trump):

Hey, goodbye. We love you. We will be back in some form.

William Howell:

He got behind the microphone and touted his policy achievements, claimed that he had laid the groundwork for Biden's success and beckoned us not to forget him when those success stories became a reality. Then our attention, our collective attention turned to well, the inauguration ceremony itself.

Tape:

This ceremony is the culmination of 244 years of a democracy.

William Howell:

It looked very different from previous inaugurations. There were not hundreds of thousands of people gathered. There were hundreds of people gathered amidst strong police presence. Biden then beckoned us to reclaim some notion of unity.

Tape (President Joe Biden):

To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words, it requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy, unity.

William Howell:

To re-imagine our democracy, recommit ourselves to a national project of coming together, it was quite a day. I wonder, James and Anthony, what you were struck by the most of the day? What did you think was sort of... that that was to notice and remember?

James Robinson:

Should I go? James, you said.

William Howell:

Yeah, James, tell us what you're thinking?

James Robinson:

What I appreciated is the ritual, the gravitas... We've had four years of sort of bombast and flouting of precedent and procedure and institutions. So just having something with gravitas and kind of seriousness. I think there's a lot that needs to be repaired, and probably we forget how important such simple things, doing such simple things collectively are actually very important for underpinning the institutions that make things work so well as they do in this country. So that's what, for me, that was the big takeaway that I appreciated.

Anthony Fowler:

I agree with that. I think that's a good sign. What stands out most, is that Jennifer Lopez is still as talented as ever, that was great. And in some sense, at least, these kinds of things are a little bit silly. It's all pageantry, but at the same time, I agree with James that these kinds of symbolic things are important. It was important to see Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell and John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, people like that there in support of Joe Biden and lending legitimacy to this next presidency. It would have been even better if Donald Trump had been there as well.

William Howell:

Yeah, if I could add to the list... I mean, I agree with all of that. I mean, the star that emerged from yesterday was a 22 year old Black poet who we'd never heard of before, and now we have heard Amanda Gorman. I guess what I appreciated from that fact is that in addition to having a new president, we have a president who throughout that day made a point of speaking to the broader country and to seed space for other people to step into. To shift away from the greatness and glory that is all things, Donald Trump, to a recognition of talent and possibility and diversity. I don't know, it spoke well of the incoming president and also spoke to the chance for something that approximates renewal in moving forward. But before we turn to that, we should look back and think a little bit about, what is Biden inheriting? And pointing to and characterizing the events of January sixth—

Tape:

It is hard to put into words what exactly we witnessed today because we have not seen this before, thousands storming the Capitol after a rally with President Trump, during which he urged them to March on the Capitol.

William Howell:

How that also speaks to much larger things. When you guys think about the state of our democracy and not just the vulnerabilities that have been revealed, but maybe the, I guess what I would say, the harms that have been done to it over the last four years. James, what do you see? How would you characterize it?

James Robinson:

For me, the most important thing is you see that there's much less commitment within the political class to the institutions of democracy in this country. It's not just Trump, it's enormous numbers of people in the Republican political elite are quite happy to see democracy overthrown, it turns out. As Trump has deinstitutionalize the state, he's done all sorts of illegal things and everyone has sat on their hands in the Republican party.

So I think what you see is that actually people are much less committed to the institutions in this country than I would have thought four or five years ago.

William Howell:

Anthony, what do you think?

Anthony Fowler:

Well, I mean, I share James' concerns. I think, these kinds of concerns have been around even before Trump, hyper partisan concerns and anti-democratic concerns. Some of you probably remember that Mitch McConnell stated when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, that his number one goal-

Tape (Mitch McConnel):

Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama of second term.

Anthony Fowler:

It was a shocking statement coming from a congressional leader to say, "My number one goal is not to make good policy, but just to harm the other party, essentially." So these kinds of concerns have been relevant for a long time, but at the same time, I think you can take some solace in the fact that we had a president and lots of other elites as well, who didn't care very much about democratic institutions, actively tried to undermine those democratic institutions, and yet they seem to survive that challenge reasonably well.

And so throughout the Trump presidency, despite all of the things we've had to be concerned about, we had a president with highly autocratic tendencies who would have been happy to use his power to put all of his political enemies in jail and enrich himself and undermine elections as much as possible. He did to some extent, but I think our democratic institutions came out maybe better than one might've thought, given the extent of the challenge that we had. So in some sense, I do come out being somewhat reassured. It wasn't the case, for example, that Trump was able to get all of these Republican appointed judges to go along with all of his claims of voter fraud, for example. So, not everyone behaved as partisan as you might've expected, and the institutions prevailed, and the electoral outcome was the right one and enough people have honored that, that there's no question about the legitimacy of the Biden administration, which is a good thing.

William Howell:

On the other hand, you've got massive levels of disinformation. The kinds of attacks on small democratic commitments set on the bureaucracy and on the press, have done damage. And the events of January 6th, for people who are on the far right, is going to be kind of a proof of concept about what can be accomplished, which is going to potentially lead to greater political violence. And in that sense, yes, we can find some comfort that we withstood that onslaught, but our institutions and our democracy itself is diminished or is softened. James, what do you think?

James Robinson:

I agree with that. Trump is just too self-centered and too disorganized to actually overthrow democracy. I think, if you look at successful attempts to fix the elections by incumbents, take Peron—

Tape:

Peron was first elected president of Argentina in 1946. From the beginning, he drew his support from the great mass of underprivileged Argentinians. For many of them, he was an idol, the first Argentinian leader who really did something for the common man.

James Robinson:

Peron was fairly elected in 1945 in Argentina. And then you have time to pack the juries and pack the Supreme Court and kind of prepare the way.

Tape:

Despite his adulation by the masses, Peron was often a ruthless president, crushing opposition and ruling through the army, the police and the labor unions.

James Robinson:

And now it could be Anthony's right, that institutions are stronger here. It's much more difficult to do that here than it is in Argentina or Columbia or wherever. But I don't think he tried very hard either. He wasn't strategic, he didn't have a plan. He didn't prepare properly, because he's too interested in parochial things like his real estate business or his golf course or whatever. He's just not serious as an autocrat, it seems to me. That I think is frightening because somebody who's more serious may make more progress.

William Howell:

Do you think that the challenge presented to that more serious person that you're imagining, that you're inviting us to imagine has been made easier by virtue of Trump's presidency?

James Robinson:

Yes, I think it's softening, that it's been revealed that political elites could go along with this and that there's fewer barriers to doing this than one might have thought before.

William Howell:

James, can you think about other instances wherein the kinds of attacks that we did see under Trump on our democracy, albeit not as serious and focused and laser-like, as you've suggested they could have been, are there instances where they've played out, and what lessons they might afford about what the future of our democracy looks like? You've done just a tremendous amount of work in Africa and/or in Latin America or in Europe, what correlators do you look for?

James Robinson:

I think the lessons there would suggest that it's not really a threat, it's the softening up, or it's the future that sort of very concerning. That Trump, he doesn't really have a project. To be a successful autocrat you need to have what looks like a project. You could say he has a project like, Make America Great Again, but all successful autocrats, take Chavez or Peron or whatever, they deliver. The President was 70, who just got himself reelected again in Uganda.

Tape:

For more now from Uganda where the election commissioner that says that Yoweri Museveni has extended his 35 year rule.

James Robinson:

They deliver to a core constituency.

Tape:

You find if there's a lack of peace, you are all affected. If you don't have food, you are all affected. Transport... So we said, why don't you emphasize needs of the people?

James Robinson:

It doesn't have to be half the people in the country, it could be 15% or 20%, but they really deliver. There's people who really benefited from Chavez as being in power in Venezuela, who really benefited from Peron being in power. And I don't know that Trump actually delivered to anybody except rich business tycoons by cutting corporate taxes. He wanted to take people's healthcare away from them, did he really deliver jobs, and opportunity and... That's a problem for him, because I think that means the symbolic stuff won't endure. That seems to be missing to me.

He also, he seems to have no links to the military. Chavez and Peron were military people before they got into politics and Museveni invaded the country at the head of a rebel army. I think it's very difficult to find examples of successful autocrats who are either not military people, who were unable to kind of really build bridges to the military. Trump didn't do this, he didn't bring generals into the government. He didn't seem to have ways of connecting with the military. And the military could sit on their hands when a coup happens, but you can't sustain yourself in power without the support of the military. And the pieces for that don't seem to be in place for the US and that's a very consoling factor also. So I think if you look at collapses of democracy, either it's people from the military, or you need to have strong links or a coalition with at least some fraction of the military, maybe not all of the military, but some fraction of the military.

Those are the sorts of messages I see, which kind of lead me to think there wasn't really a serious threat of a coup. But the question is, what's the transition path? You look at Peron, for example, how was Peron able to do what he did? He was able to do it because it followed a 15 year periods of institutional erosion, kind of increasing meddling in the Supreme Court, in political institutions, in... And so it took time to get there, the country had to be kind of in a position. And it was also a period of very rapid socioeconomic change in the 1930s in Argentina, which is also very interesting in the US like a lot of very rapid urbanization, a lot of dislocation, big waves of immigration, a lot of things that the political system had to adjust to but it wasn't capable of doing so.

William Howell:

There are the lessons that, look, boy, you can make some inroads. You can't actually deliver all the fruits of autocracy all at once, but you can make inroads. So there's the learning part, but that there also is, I guess I'd say, the softening is the damage rot. We don't know how many people think that the election was stolen, but whatever it is, it's way too many. The fact that there are significant portions of the American public now, their levels of trust in government have gone down by virtue, not just of Trump's performance, but his entreaties to say, you shouldn't trust government, right? This deep state, and the would be champions of the public are deemed enemies of the people, right? Thinking about the press. And that has done damage to our democracy too. And in that sense, to the extent that the work of an autocrat is to push back against democracy, their job is made easier by virtue of Trump's presidency.

Anthony Fowler:

I share your concerns completely. But I guess just to play devil's advocate, I think I'm not convinced that huge numbers of people really do distrust the results of the election. You can get lots of people to say partisan sounding fun things in surveys like, "Do you believe that Donald Trump is the spawn of Satan or something?" Sure, people will say yes to that, but do they actually believe it? Or does it actually spill over into anything that matters? I think that that's an open question. And there's lots of evidence of that kind of partisan cheerleading in surveys, for example. So I'm not sure, there's always some healthy amount of distrust of government and some healthy criticism anytime there's a close election, or... You can think of lots of examples, just like the last three times the Democrats lost there were lots of accusations of wrongdoing and accusations that the Democrats should have one for various reasons—

Tape:

Trump knows he's an illegitimate president who got illegitimate foreign help, and...

Anthony Fowler:

That didn't completely undermine democracy, but there were lots of people who were upset. I think some of that is natural and not necessarily a terrible thing, but I do share your concerns that suppose a more effectual motivated person comes along and says, "Let's take the lessons we learned from the Trump presidency and figure out how we really could wrangle the government in our favor." I think that's a scary thought because I agree with James that Trump wasn't nearly as motivated and maybe nearly as savvy is as the next potential autocrat will be.

James Robinson:

One thing that impressed me a lot is just the strength in the US state is maybe not where we thought it was. It's the people certifying the votes in Michigan, or these people you'd never heard of on some bipartisan committee and the two Republicans and two Democrats, and they kind of do their job and they believe in the system. And I think that's the sort of strength that you don't see in the state in Sierra Leone or Liberia. And so then it's more difficult to sort of topple the things at the top, because the thing at the top in Sierra Leone is already so personalized and so focused on an individual without this kind of institutionalized strength in the state...

One can see many things like this elsewhere in the world, but in the US it seemed difficult to have that same kind of impact as 25 soldiers capturing the presidential palace in Freetown. You don't have the same leverage here, capture the radio station and start announcing that, "I'm Valentine Strasser, and I'm now the president of Sierra Leone." Well, somebody could have tried that on Fox News, but it's more difficult. Yeah.

William Howell:

And it's more difficult... I mean, what we've seen over the last few months, because of the principled stand that a set of election administrators have taken in Georgia—

Tape:

Like other Republicans, I'm disappointed our candidate didn't win Georgia's electoral votes. As secretary of state, I believe that the numbers that we have presented today are correct.

William Howell:

And a set of judges that refuse to give any credence to the claims of electoral fraud that were being propagated by Trump administration. Or, I mean, this is kind of frightening too, when you think about the actual police response on Capitol Hill on the 6th, that we've held up this one hero who led the mob away from the Senate chambers. To me, at least, I don't find much comfort in that, the idea that they were that close. I mean, that they could have... And the senators who were there just barely got away, and you see the images of people with not just the flags and whatnot, and the insignias of white supremacy, but also the weaponry that they had available to them. Nonetheless, so there you have a police officer, election administrators, judges, they're the ones that give strength to our democracy, but they're also the ones whose motives are called into question. Their expertise has been marginalized over the last four years.

William Howell:

And so, I mean, I think that's where, again, where I would say that the things to worry about and the damaged propagated by Trump is that those kinds of people and those kinds of commitments have been not just questioned, but harmed.

Anthony Fowler:

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William Howell:

So how do we think about this going forward, what does this mean for Biden and Harris? Yeah, James, seeing what you see and what lessons you can draw from abroad, what does a constructive response look like to this threat?

James Robinson:

I don't know, it's interesting. I was thinking about Biden's initial policy initiatives, re-engaging with the Paris Climate Agreement, which apparently Ted Cruz believes is sort of there to benefit Parisian citizens, from Twitter. I know that it's an interesting interpretation of the Paris Agreement. And normalizing international... Allowing people to come from Sudan and Somalia and these Muslim countries that president Trump vilified, and trying to find a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants in the country. And I think it's an interesting balance that now is the time to sort of emphasize principle. We've had four years of throwing principal to the wind, let's establish some principles and talk about rights. And I appreciate that, but it's a fine line because at the same time, none of those policies are sort of reaching out to the Trumpistas.

As political scientists, we might say, "Well, what Biden should really focus on is figuring out how to reach out to these people who are so disillusioned about the stakes of the country and try to mend some of these divisions." But then he immediately adopts a sort of policy suite, which seems to almost sort of antagonize these people as opposed to reaching out to them or placating them, so I found that interesting.

William Howell:

Yeah, if you have an ear, what do you tell him? On the one hand, do you go small or do you go big? Do you say, "Look, what we need to do is act in principled ways, or in the service of building the unity that you say is so important, we need to kind of accommodate a range of views."

James Robinson:

I mean, I wonder whether the solution to this problem is not... Speaking as a former colleague of Bob Putnam at Harvard, and Bob's book Bowling Alone, he traces the problems in the United States to this kind of eroding associational life. And this is something which has only accelerated since he wrote that with the rise of Facebook, social media and COVID. I mean, society gets more fragmented, people are more isolated. His emphasis was, we need nonpolitical spaces or how to rebuild society, how to empathize.

I was really struck a few years ago by reading one of Studs Terkel's book about this, where he tells a lot of stories about reconciliation in the South, in some sense, between Black and white people. And it doesn't look like a policy, but you do something which will make attack on you create opportunities, or you create spaces, or you create contexts where it could happen. That seems to me to be an interesting way to maybe combine principles that you believe in with something which is maybe going to bring people together. And I think maybe it's difficult to do that with tax policy or healthcare, because these issues have become so polarizing.

William Howell:

So this is a feature of your... I don't know, you don't need Bob Putnam to make this argument. It's in your most recent book, no? That what you need are effective, capable well-functioning institutions on the one hand, but you also need a vibrant civil society and therein lies the narrow corridor, and how you get and secure, not just liberty, if I can abstract beyond your book, but to a healthy democracy. When we think about repairing the damage of Trump's populous reign, wouldn't the Robinsonian lesson be that we need to, at once, enliven the civic space at the same time we revisit our institutions and ensure that they can act in ways that are effective to address the harms and anxieties that people feel.

James Robinson:

Yeah, I think that's right. I thought you were going to say to Tocqueville, not The Narrow Corridor.

William Howell:

No, Robinsonian.

James Robinson:

But yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, it's easier said than done as well. So one needs concrete, actionable things that you can do to create these spaces. And one of the things about the United States is that the United States is very good as a country at doing things like that. Think of even the Tea Party, which is probably not exactly what I have in mind at the moment. But again, it's society organizing and mobilizing... In some sense the government, President Biden needs to encourage that without looking like he's encouraging it. Because if you look like you're encouraging it, then you risk tarnishing it, it seems to me. And so how does one do that? I don't know, that seems like an interesting discussion to me.

William Howell:

That's what I constantly think about when you're try to raise children, right? How do you get the idea that going outside in the middle of a pandemic and going for a walk would be a good idea into their head without them thinking that it's your idea, because then that will spoil it immediately.

James Robinson:

I mean, one other thing which was a sort of Achilles' heel, you could say of Trump's populist appeal was that he was also very anti state. He sort of hates the government, and look at the disorganization of the vaccine rollout. He just couldn't bear to kind of strengthen the capacity of the state in a context where it was desperately needed. And in some sense, what most of these populists do is they leverage the states, they create jobs, they create employment, they use the power of the state in a more discretionary way, and that might be good too. I think it's okay to do that. There are genuine problems here that people are concerned about, and Biden he's not kind of hamstrung by antipathy to using the power of the state to actually achieve stuff. And so he actually has an advantage over Trump in delivering to people, it seems to me.

William Howell:

And the pandemic requires as much. I mean, that's... But there's this other layer of the challenge that he faces, no, which has to do with kind of accountability for the harms and maybe the illegality of actions taken under Trump. So how can reconciliation be achieved in the US civil society in the wake of the January 6th events? I mean, Biden and Harris want to move forward and are thinking, "How do we meet the challenges?" And there's multiple layers of how to do that. But he doesn't have the luxury, or should he insist upon doing that? Or does he not have a luxury of just sort of ignoring what just happened? There's going to be a Senate trial and there's going to be ongoing investigations, and should that be part of his project as well?

James Robinson:

I don't think you can escape that, I think you have to enforce the law here. For me, as a foreigner, as an Englishman, one of the most bizarre circuses in American political life is the presidential pardon. Trump just engaged in an orgy of patronage and favoritism under the full force of the constitution, it's just absolutely bizarre the whole thing. So there he is flouting legal decisions made with due process and evidence and everything, I just kind of wave my hand and I can overturn. So I think you know application of the rule of law here is a good thing. What happened was outrageous, and they should be prosecuted, it seems to me, and put in prison. Trump was running on a law and order agenda for heaven's sake, prosecuting them will drive home what hypocrisy that was.

Anthony Fowler:

I agree with that completely. Although it's not Joe Biden's job to stand up and say, "Prosecute these particular political enemies of mine." It's his job to hire competent prosecutors and bureaucrats who are going to uphold the law, I think that will be a very important part of...

William Howell:

Anthony, when you think about the trial in the Senate, it's coming. When we think about productively moving forward, is this something that should be sort of attended to quickly, put aside, it was basically a mistake to move on? Or is it something that should be held up, and it's an opportunity for the Republican party to reclaim a more principled set of positions and to drive out Trump and Trumpism from its ranks?

Anthony Fowler:

I think it is an opportunity for the Republican party, actually. It's a great opportunity for them, in the sense that if they come out and show some principles, and if a bunch of Republicans vote to convict Trump, they'll regain a lot of the credit they lost over the past four years without paying any real costs. I don't think it hurts them at all. Trump's already gone, they're not losing their president. So yes, it's a bit of an opportunity for the Republicans. I don't know if they're going to take that opportunity or not.

As far as what's the level of priority and the level of attention that it should get? I think, the senators have an obligation to conduct the trial and to conduct a fair trial and to hear the evidence and to hear the arguments. And I think that's an important thing for the country to move forward is to realize that there is accountability in our system and the president is not above the law. And if the senators decide to convict, and if they have good reasons for doing so, I think that will be a good thing for the country to see that.

William Howell:

In the aftermath of an autocrat's hold on power, the followers of that autocrat, is this an opportunity for them... What does redemption look like for them? And does them repudiate the autocrat lead to a cleansing and therefore a recovery of a kind of a healthier politics? Or do we instead see that in the repudiation of the autocrat, you see a hardening of opinion among some segments of the population, right? kind of a doubling down.

James Robinson:

That's the danger. I mean, the Athenians, in classical Athens they had this institution of ostracism. The assembly could ostracize people, but that you had to leave Athens, you had to get out of Athens for 10 years. And I think that's actually, like Peron, once they got rid of Peron, they forced him into exile, or you want to get him out to the country. It's difficult to leave someone in the country, it's sort of festers. And if I would say there's any sort of systematic thing behind successful transitions, it's you get the person out of the country. You get, Idi Amin, they got him out of Uganda. Baby Doc, they got Baby Doc out of Haiti.

William Howell:

What does that do? What is that doing for the followers of those autocrats? Does that then lead them to... Is it temper their fervor? What is that accomplishing?

James Robinson:

And maybe you're going to tell me that those examples don't work so well with modern media. Maybe if Baby Doc had Twitter or Facebook, he could have carried on stoking... But I think the lesson is that these movements are very, very personalized. And if you sort of detach the autocrat from the social base and the context, they're not able to manipulate things the way they could when they were in the middle of it all. Again, that may be conditional on, maybe modern technology makes it easier to stoke the flames in absentia, but it does seem to be something of a stylized fact.

William Howell:

And yet Trump getting kicked off of Twitter, I don't know, it felt pretty quickly a bit calmer, no? And maybe that was just... we were given a little bit of room to breath.

James Robinson:

Yeah, I would say there's huge incentives to replace Twitter with something else. He'll find a way of communicating with his base very easily. The question is, can he do this in a broader way, and that remains to be seen, but I would guess the answer is yes. There's huge incentives, commercial incentives to create such a vehicle.

William Howell:

So what are we at now? We're at the 25 hour mark of a Biden presidency. Do you guys come away feeling a little more hopeful? A little, sort of way too soon to say? Where do you come out in terms of thinking about the possibilities of, if not renewal than at least some correction to the damage rot to our democracy under the Trump presidency? Anthony, why don't you go first.

Anthony Fowler:

I'm certainly hopeful about a Biden presidency. Obviously it's way too early to say exactly what Biden is going to do, But I think he's a moderate who has had success working with Republicans in the past. One thing we didn't talk about at all this session is really, within the democratic party, what the heck is going on there? And why did the democratic party, even though they won the presidency and the House and the Senate, barely, right? They barely won the presidency. They barely won the Senate by drawing an inside straight, as somebody wrote on Facebook, which is, I think is an apt analogy, despite the fact that we had an extremely unpopular president who was impeached twice, there was a global... We could talk all about that, but the democratic party is not that popular right now. So Biden has his work cut out for him. And I think how he handles these first few months are going to matter a lot for just the future of our country and the future of our democracy, but I'm hopeful.

James Robinson:

He seems like a very serious and principled person. I'm a little bit anxious that he's too inside the box. He's been so involved in this process in DC with Obama and he doesn't really get how big the problems are and the nature of the risks. But I think Anthony, I totally agree with that, which is, given what's going on in the last four years, how narrow the victory was is sort of... I mean, had it not been for COVID we'd be mulling over the Trump reelection, it seems to me. And not just that, but people who got organized in Georgia got people out to vote, there was a lot of little things that helped as well, that were important. But I sort of feel it's rather astonishing, and that makes me worried because it makes me think that the Democrats don't really get it.

William Howell:

I would just simply pile on in two ways, by pointing to Anthony, you suggested that the Republican party has an opportunity to kind of cleanse itself. In the immediate aftermath of the January 6th assault, 139 Republicans, nonetheless, in the House saw fit to reiterate the false claims and to lay their bets back down on the lies about the election. You see all of 10 Republicans voting for impeachment in the House, and... And there goes my dog. And then you see the structural conditions for the rise of populous and very much remaining in place.

William Howell:

Thanks for listening to Not Another Politics podcast.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Our show is a podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy and is produced by Matt Hodapp. Thanks for listening.