Speaker 1: Pushkin. I feel like we got to start with the
Speaker 1: Archive intro. Do you want to do it?
Speaker 2: What do you imagine? Imagine a place in our world
Speaker 2: where the known things go a quarridor of time bookshelves
Speaker 2: lined with old ballots, political campaign posters, and television ads.
Speaker 2: Step over a threshold to the Electoral College as if
Speaker 2: it were an actual place, a university of knowledge about
Speaker 2: the past of American politics, at.
Speaker 1: Place many people hate. Not actually surprisingly, application numbers are
Speaker 1: dropping this year. It's a very staid old college.
Speaker 2: It used to be held in such high esteem electoral call. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and now it's ratings have fallen.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, we're here to talk about the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four election in the context of history, but also in
Speaker 1: the context of these three Last Archive episodes we've brought
Speaker 1: back from the archives. But I thought maybe to start,
Speaker 1: we could talk about how the Last Archive was kind
Speaker 1: of born out of an election. It kind of came
Speaker 1: from the twenty sixteen election and the panic over fake news,
Speaker 1: alternative facts, the kind of Trump era epistemological crisis. And
Speaker 1: I guess now that we're eight years past that moment,
Speaker 1: those concerns you had when you started the show, like
Speaker 1: what do you think about them now? Like, how do
Speaker 1: they fit into this election cycle?
Speaker 2: H Yeah, So when we came up with the idea
Speaker 2: you and I for the last archive, it drew a
Speaker 2: lot from a course that I'd been teaching at the
Speaker 2: Harvard Law School on the history of evidence that looked
Speaker 2: at changing ideas and standards of proof in history, the law, science,
Speaker 2: and journalism since the Middle Ages, of the kind of
Speaker 2: invention of trial by jury and the what historians call
Speaker 2: the cult of the fact, And that course maybe itself
Speaker 2: kind of came out of the the sort of two
Speaker 2: thousand and five Stephen Colbert coining of truthiness and the
Speaker 2: kind of panic in the first decade of the twenty
Speaker 2: first century and the aftermath of the non existent weapons
Speaker 2: of mass destruction, and the idea that was pursued that
Speaker 2: somehow truth had died if the Second Push administration was
Speaker 2: willing to present to the American people essentially fabricated evidence
Speaker 2: to call for a war. But like any historian watching that,
Speaker 2: did you not read the Pentagon papers? What part of
Speaker 2: how the Vietnam War was also a war that depended
Speaker 2: on wholesale misrepresentation of conditions in the other on other
Speaker 2: parts of the world to the American people. So the
Speaker 2: class was an attempt to kind of historicize a panic,
Speaker 2: and then the podcast was.
Speaker 3: Like, wait, the panic is even greater, and it's not.
Speaker 2: Like it's a misplaced panic, right, Like there are all
Speaker 2: kinds of reasons to think about the kind of crisis
Speaker 2: of truth. The last archive was kind of an attempt
Speaker 2: to say, well, here's a way to calm down. Not
Speaker 2: that it's comforting, but like, let's try to historicize this
Speaker 2: and have fun thinking about the history of some of
Speaker 2: these ideas over the course of a century, at least,
Speaker 2: not looking back five centuries or six centuries, but just
Speaker 2: looking in the last one hundred years of American life.
Speaker 2: What has been the kind of trajectory of our shared
Speaker 2: ideas about evidence and proof and truth. And I remember,
Speaker 2: like our big commitment was we didn't want to go
Speaker 2: after the usual suspects, Like we didn't want to have
Speaker 2: a podcast that attempted to prosecute Mark Zuckerberg or Trump
Speaker 2: ultimately prosecute. Yeah, I'd much rather prosecute Mark zucker work. Yeah,
Speaker 2: what was the third big postmodernism?
Speaker 1: I've also got to.
Speaker 2: Mention y yeah, yeah, yeah, So we didn't do the
Speaker 2: best job steering clear of our easy.
Speaker 1: Villains, but still, I mean, they are kind of mentioned
Speaker 1: on the side, but I do think it amounts to
Speaker 1: a more textra portrait of the thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope so. Well.
Speaker 1: One thing I was thinking about when I was listening
Speaker 1: back to Project X, it's like all about polling and forecasting,
Speaker 1: and I feel like if the Trump era is kind
Speaker 1: of like the mainstreaming of the panic about truthiness and
Speaker 1: the epistemological crisis. One of the first experiences of that
Speaker 1: for people, I think, was like, how could the polls
Speaker 1: be so wrong? That was like the same moment as Brexit.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, we miscalled Brexit. You really miscalled the
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen election and the like. There was you know,
Speaker 1: that Princeton professor who was so certain that it would
Speaker 1: be a Clinton victory that he was like, I'll eat
Speaker 1: an insect on television and then you'll eat a cricket
Speaker 1: on CNM. It was like that everybody was eating crickets.
Speaker 1: Basically post twenty sixteen, a panic I now feel has
Speaker 1: sort of vanished, Like you still hear this kind of
Speaker 1: like oh well, like maybe Trump vhoters just don't answer polls.
Speaker 1: But when we don't really know. We might be still
Speaker 1: under representing his support. But Project X feels like a
Speaker 1: kind of early history of some of that. We can
Speaker 1: predict the future with these new machines. We don't even
Speaker 1: really need to run the election anymore. And I was
Speaker 1: wondering if you could contextualize our poll crisis if it
Speaker 1: still exists in that historical context, like what is the
Speaker 1: promise of polling originally?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember that in the twenty fifteen primary season.
Speaker 2: For the twenty sixteen election, I did a lot of
Speaker 2: reporting for The New Yorker, which I don't, you know,
Speaker 2: often just do researched pieces from archives. And I had said,
Speaker 2: you know, I really want to kind of go out
Speaker 2: and repreests. So I went to, you know, rallies in
Speaker 2: New Hampshire during the New Hampshire primary, and I ended
Speaker 2: up going to both conventions. And one of the things
Speaker 2: I did is I went to one of the debates
Speaker 2: and I remember there going into I think it was
Speaker 2: like a CNN media tent or something. I mean it's
Speaker 2: like a jed. Those places like a circus, like with
Speaker 2: all the kind of outbuildings that are popped up, and
Speaker 2: they were doing kind of live polling through the whole
Speaker 2: debate sort of moment by moment, and it was like, wait,
Speaker 2: this is everything that is wrong with our political culture
Speaker 2: and life. Like it was a like a Piranha like
Speaker 2: frenzy on the America. That's what you think? What do
Speaker 2: you think?
Speaker 3: You know, I'm gonna eat your own head.
Speaker 2: Like it was just it was it was just so
Speaker 2: mannic and crazy and fruitless, and was.
Speaker 1: Just people with like dials like well yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know like.
Speaker 2: What methods they were using. Was like a kind of
Speaker 2: like instapule web calling thing, and like it just defied
Speaker 2: it possible scientific method around public opinion surveying, which is
Speaker 2: a legitimate social science that has, you know, real standards
Speaker 2: of evidence. And it was completely unhinged. And I wrote
Speaker 2: a piece that year called Politics and the New Machine
Speaker 2: that was about how data science is replacing polling because
Speaker 2: you couldn't just call landlines. People don't have landlines. The
Speaker 2: people own landlines don't represent most of the population. You know,
Speaker 2: they tend to be really older, moral whiter. Like it's
Speaker 2: just not you can't get a good sample of the
Speaker 2: electric if you ever get a hold of like a
Speaker 2: young Hispanic man on a landline. You have to wait
Speaker 2: that person's opinion like seven thousand times because that person
Speaker 2: has to represent like all young male Hispanics, whereas you know,
Speaker 2: you talk to an old white woman, it's just her,
Speaker 2: like she just represents one person. So it's just a
Speaker 2: real field of distortion. So I wrote a piece about
Speaker 2: that because I just was really surprised at the incongruity
Speaker 2: of it all that the worst polling got, like the
Speaker 2: less reliable polling seemed to be getting, the more our
Speaker 2: political arrangements were dependent on it. So that was the
Speaker 2: year that for the first time when Fox News they
Speaker 2: hosted the first of the GOP primary debates, where they
Speaker 2: used polling an average of I think four polls to
Speaker 2: decide who would stand where, and they had try to
Speaker 2: stand in the middle. And it was really early on,
Speaker 2: and there had been very little coverage of anything, but
Speaker 2: Trump's name was better known. He's a guy who had
Speaker 2: add like a television show for years, and a lot
Speaker 2: of the most reputable polling agencies I think you know,
Speaker 2: Gallop and Pew and NBC, Wall Street Journal refused to participate.
Speaker 2: They're like, you can't use our national polls that are
Speaker 2: like two hundred and ninety days before the election to
Speaker 2: determine who gets the most because where you stand on
Speaker 2: the stage determines how many questions you get and how
Speaker 2: much camera coverage you get. So you're just propping up
Speaker 2: a candidate. You know, you're just deciding what would get
Speaker 2: you the best audience. It's like one poll driving another poll. Right.
Speaker 2: That's around when I was working on this piece, and
Speaker 2: you know, the reputable polling people are like, yeah, this
Speaker 2: is unconscionable, like, and then the polling organizations that did
Speaker 2: participate in that had the least reliable polls, right, Like
Speaker 2: there were the you know, least principled ones. But so
Speaker 2: I know, it's like a trendy thing to talk about
Speaker 2: the Overton window, but you do really kind of see
Speaker 2: even with the history of polling, right, polling's not gotten
Speaker 2: better since then, and it's only made our politics messier
Speaker 2: and lousier. So I don't know, I mean to go
Speaker 2: back to your question of historicizing it. One of the
Speaker 2: things that's different about say, in nineteen forty eight, when
Speaker 2: famously Gallop predicted that Dewey would win and then the
Speaker 2: Chicago Tribune Prince Dewey beats Truman and then you see
Speaker 2: that this is a photograph of Truman holding up the
Speaker 2: paper with this giant you know, grin polling really righted
Speaker 2: itself from that. There was a big invest mitigation. The
Speaker 2: I think his social sciences counsel did an investigation. Gallup
Speaker 2: investigated itself. You know, there was a kind of reckoning
Speaker 2: with that because there were still in place institutional guardrails
Speaker 2: against like a real failure. But even that, even that,
Speaker 2: like if you look at the history of that, Gallup
Speaker 2: had said, So Gallup, George Gallup, who's not an academic,
Speaker 2: but he opens this organization called the American Public Opinion
Speaker 2: Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, so that it can
Speaker 2: so that people will think it's part of Princeton University.
Speaker 2: So his address is Princeton. It's very canny. I mean,
Speaker 2: he has guys a piece. Yeah, it is a town,
Speaker 2: so listen not you know, he had a PhD. Like
Speaker 2: the guy was a real quantitative social scientist. But he's
Speaker 2: trying to sort of cloak his endeavor in the venew
Speaker 2: year of academic legitimacy when really he's a syndicated newspaper column.
Speaker 2: It's like that's what he's kind of churning out, but
Speaker 2: in order to get newspapers to pick up his column
Speaker 2: because the people like, who cares what you say? Like
Speaker 2: with the American people believe about that, Like we have
Speaker 2: reporters to go out on the street and they talk
Speaker 2: to people in pubs and they go to pta meetings.
Speaker 2: We have like man on the street stories all the time.
Speaker 2: We know it are the people in our town, in
Speaker 2: our city, whatever our newspaper is. We know what they're
Speaker 2: reporting on, what they believe. We have reporters to do
Speaker 2: that work. Why would we take your calum or like
Speaker 2: you had, you know, you called people on telephone. How
Speaker 2: many people have phones? It's nuts. So he did this
Speaker 2: big gimmicky thing, which is he said that, you know what,
Speaker 2: our opinion research is so good that we can ask
Speaker 2: people who they're going to vote for and we will
Speaker 2: successfully predict the next president. And that's when they started
Speaker 2: doing it. And he said all the time, like this
Speaker 2: would be a really dangerous thing to do if we
Speaker 2: were doing this in order to guide candidates or you know,
Speaker 2: drive funding of candidates. So this is just to demonstrate
Speaker 2: that our public opinion research is sound. But then it
Speaker 2: was such a big hit. People love that horse race
Speaker 2: stuff that it kind of took on its own life.
Speaker 2: So it kind of then came to a crescendo of
Speaker 2: a crisis in nineteen forty eight, when like his whole
Speaker 2: business model had then become like no, no, no, no, My
Speaker 2: election predictions that were were making money, like that's how
Speaker 2: we're gaining subscribers from my syndicated column. But then so
Speaker 2: you kind of see a kind of writing of that ship.
Speaker 2: But then this guy Lindsay Rodgers writes this book right
Speaker 2: after that, or it comes out, you know, right after that,
Speaker 2: and he was like, I don't care whether the polling
Speaker 2: is accurate, interaccurate. It's bad for democracy. It's not how
Speaker 2: our democracy is supposed to work. And I it was
Speaker 2: surprising to me to discover how every critique that this
Speaker 2: political theorist Lindsay Rodgers offered in this book called The
Speaker 2: Pollsters in nineteen forty eight really still applies. And it's
Speaker 2: just it's a business model that's extremely successful, and there's
Speaker 2: not really a way you can say. And every generation
Speaker 2: has its you know grouch like me who comes along
Speaker 2: and says, wait, this stuff's actually really bad for our
Speaker 2: political culture. But it's like, well, white sugar is really bad,
Speaker 2: but all the food in the supermarket is laced with it.
Speaker 2: Like it's not going to be like saying that sugar's
Speaker 2: not so great for you. It's not going to stop it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny because there was did you listen to
Speaker 1: the Nate Cone interview recently where he talks about finding
Speaker 1: a historical precedent for the twenty twenty four election, and
Speaker 1: the one he finds is nineteen forty eight because Truman
Speaker 1: suffered from high inflation, high prices and had actually successfully
Speaker 1: managed them and the lead up to the election. But
Speaker 1: the thing that's like not mentioned in his account is
Speaker 1: that after nineteen forty eight there's a huge crisis. It's funny,
Speaker 1: and then that ties into the Project XT thing where
Speaker 1: it's like the reason they don't share the UNIVAC prediction
Speaker 1: is because they're like, poles were so oft in forty eight,
Speaker 1: we can't come out with this landslide prediction early in
Speaker 1: the evening because it's just who knows. But I guess,
Speaker 1: like from the episode perspective, I mean, you talk about
Speaker 1: responsible polling, people who understand what the limitations of polling
Speaker 1: actually are, what the appropriate use of it is. It
Speaker 1: seems like it's a media demand or like a voter demand.
Speaker 1: People want to know how things are going to turn out,
Speaker 1: or even like a Wall Street demand, people want to
Speaker 1: be able to project forward. Like there's already all this
Speaker 1: attention given to predicting the next election because it's going
Speaker 1: to bear on how the markets do. It has a
Speaker 1: lot to do with futures in an economic sense and
Speaker 1: also in a kind of like entertainment sense. But in
Speaker 1: the Project X version of this has all of those things.
Speaker 1: It's got the sort of like we're making a show
Speaker 1: out of projections, but it also has the behind the
Speaker 1: scenes blurring of the line between how the campaign is
Speaker 1: being run, which is Rosser Reeves making the ad spots
Speaker 1: based on the gallop polling about what are people most
Speaker 1: concerned with, you know, like Miami gets after me about
Speaker 1: high prices. The Dwight Eisenhower thing. Is that the moment
Speaker 1: that those things really come together, or is it like
Speaker 1: the thirties campaigns inc moment.
Speaker 2: Or well, I think the nineteen fifty two story remains
Speaker 2: deeply resonant because it's kind of the superbolification of election night. So,
Speaker 2: you know, when we talk to Archanoi and his work.
Speaker 2: You know, he kind of relays these tremendously interesting stories
Speaker 2: about early technologies of reporting results, like yeah, we'll have
Speaker 2: the New York Times building the you know, the the
Speaker 2: will light up red if it's going this way and
Speaker 2: green if it's going that way. They have this like yeah,
Speaker 2: like we'll blink, you know, we'll blink fast if the
Speaker 2: Democrats are ahead, and like just crazy, like it's lighthouses
Speaker 2: and it's no one really knows and they're kind of
Speaker 2: out in the street. Only in the city. Maybe you
Speaker 2: would get like any kind of updates. But in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty two they do all this elaborate setting up of cables, right,
Speaker 2: Like they have the studio and that's got all these
Speaker 2: reports going on, and they have this map, and you know,
Speaker 2: Kronkite's gonna go to the map, and then they have
Speaker 2: the guy with the UNIVAC, the fake UNIVAC, and then
Speaker 2: there's also the real UNIVAC, and they have people are
Speaker 2: calling in with precinct results and they're trying to do tabulation,
Speaker 2: and they have punch cards and and it's a whole
Speaker 2: sort of fun circus to watch, and the clock is
Speaker 2: in the background and we'll have new results at the
Speaker 2: top of the hour, and they're trying desperately to make
Speaker 2: people watch television instead of listen to the radio. And
Speaker 2: there's very little to report. They're just not going to
Speaker 2: have the results into the morning, but they're trying to
Speaker 2: you know what we call must watch television, right, and
Speaker 2: they're really pretty successful. People are like, well, this is fun.
Speaker 2: I mean, if what else are you gonna do? It's
Speaker 2: like a Tuesday night in the vent it's very cold
Speaker 2: outside much of the country, Like it's you know, it's
Speaker 2: a civic lesson for your kids. It is pretty interesting,
Speaker 2: Like what are all these machines the TV's and brand new?
Speaker 2: It's exciting that you even have one. And oh, it's
Speaker 2: like it's like you're in the war room at the
Speaker 2: White House, Like it's like you're part of a campaign.
Speaker 2: You're wrapped into the drama of it all and there's
Speaker 2: really nothing else quite like it. And it's really successful
Speaker 2: for them, their Project X. And then there's a kind
Speaker 2: of a level raising, like you have to up your
Speaker 2: game every four years. You have to come up with
Speaker 2: a more exciting election.
Speaker 1: We have to invent both flits there, yeah, coman.
Speaker 2: So like you know, and if then I write about
Speaker 2: when the cinematics company is hired to go do election
Speaker 2: prediction uh in nineteen sixty by CBS, and it's just mayhem.
Speaker 2: No one knows how to program the mainframes. There's all
Speaker 2: these women trying to type in you know, who are
Speaker 2: the computers trying to type in the results that are
Speaker 2: coming in by phone, and people are falling down tripping
Speaker 2: over the cables and it's a comedy of hers. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's still great television. And it also obscures, you know,
Speaker 2: the reality of like knocking on doors and driving people
Speaker 2: to the polls and what election day is really about.
Speaker 2: That's why I'm making the case that that's nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: two Project X is more resonant than ever before. Is
Speaker 2: because what happened in twenty twenty two, twenty twenty. In
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, remember it was the pandemic. Most people did
Speaker 2: not want to go to the polls and wait in
Speaker 2: those lines or go indoors. And you know, the best
Speaker 2: news organizations said every once in a while, like Orson
Speaker 2: Welles saying in nineteen thirty eight at War of the
Speaker 2: World's weally this is not real, you know, and they
Speaker 2: would say, like we won't really know the results tonight
Speaker 2: because mail in ballots and absentee ballots are not going
Speaker 2: to be counted over to the next few days. And
Speaker 2: right now really looks like, you know, Republicans are winning
Speaker 2: all over the country and Trump's going to win enough
Speaker 2: electoral votes. But this is a red mirage. It's you know,
Speaker 2: most people expect this to change in the coming days
Speaker 2: or even weeks as the late coming votes are counted.
Speaker 2: But you know, they said that, look maybe once every
Speaker 2: two hours. And meanwhile, except for the like thirty seconds
Speaker 2: every two hours that they're pointing out that their results
Speaker 2: are completely useless and meaningless, like really truly meaningless, the
Speaker 2: most meaningless Election night results probably ever in American history.
Speaker 2: They're selling the whole thing to keep their audience is
Speaker 2: if they have to watch second by second because the
Speaker 2: election is about to be called, and then they start
Speaker 2: calling it. And so, I mean, this is where like
Speaker 2: one can exert a lot of sympathy for Americans to
Speaker 2: believe the election was stolen because they watched that coverage
Speaker 2: and look, we watched, you know, we watched though John
Speaker 2: King he had the panels and the thing flipped and
Speaker 2: then the color turned and then we looked like this
Speaker 2: state was going this way in Arizona, in Michigan, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2: And then you know, I went to bed and then
Speaker 2: they're like no, we no, no, no no, And then they've
Speaker 2: called it for Biden, No that was stolen. Like I'm like,
Speaker 2: I know, it's just an incredible amount of perfidy in
Speaker 2: terms of the planning up to the election, that Trump
Speaker 2: knew he was going to lose, that his supporters expected,
Speaker 2: you know, his inside like team knew he was going
Speaker 2: to lose, and they came up with these cockamamie plans
Speaker 2: to pursue a contest of the results they knew in advance. Like,
Speaker 2: I don't mean to diminish the nefariousness of their planning,
Speaker 2: but in terms of well people being willing to believe it,
Speaker 2: when he said the election was stolen.
Speaker 3: No one is ever held.
Speaker 2: I'm not talking about the pollsters, but the television producers
Speaker 2: accountable for what happened that night, you know, why not
Speaker 2: say and you don't even hear this now. And there's
Speaker 2: a ton of mail and we would expect a lot
Speaker 2: of mail in voting in November. We would also, I
Speaker 2: think expect really low turnouts in a lot of places
Speaker 2: that I have and I couldn't really would be really
Speaker 2: hard to account for with your polling results. And we
Speaker 2: are not going to hear an election night people saying
Speaker 2: we've decided tonight that we are gonna re examine the
Speaker 2: results of the twenty twenty election and investigate our own
Speaker 2: coverage as a public service to the American voter, and
Speaker 2: explain one the ways in which we as a news
Speaker 2: organization contributed to the chaos and American political life over
Speaker 2: the last four years. We'll be getting back to you
Speaker 2: tomorrow night. We'll have full coverage of amended election results,
Speaker 2: but for tonight, we're going to set that aside and
Speaker 2: we're going to do what we think is right. Maybe
Speaker 2: that would be bad television. I think that'd be awesome television.
Speaker 2: But I think that reckoning and accountability is genuinely required.
Speaker 2: Like I just can't even picture like Jake Tapper or whoever, like,
Speaker 2: and I don't know, these are the best people, right,
Speaker 2: like saying we really screwed up, like we are in
Speaker 2: big part responsible. It's just much easier to do something different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, they're working within the framework that's established
Speaker 1: in fifty two, which is received and can't be changed,
Speaker 1: so they're not going to question it. I totally buy
Speaker 1: that the election night coverage contributed to this, but it
Speaker 1: does seem to me like over the last decade, you
Speaker 1: have so many crazy lies that are just convenient lies
Speaker 1: that people just like take up and believe just because.
Speaker 2: No I mean, in the campaign, you know, the false
Speaker 2: selectors that like this. I thought about this a lot
Speaker 2: when I was asked to write a review of the
Speaker 2: January sixth report from the House Select Committee.
Speaker 1: You're like, could have been more fun?
Speaker 2: Could? Yeah? Like it was like a I don't know,
Speaker 2: fifteen hundred perce long, you know, I read every word
Speaker 2: of it and that I wrote this piece, but I
Speaker 2: was and it's in many ways, you know, an excellent report,
Speaker 2: and it served basically as the bill of indictment for
Speaker 2: the federal prosecution of Trump and other conspirators, and so
Speaker 2: really meaningful kind of bill of indictment against Trump. But
Speaker 2: it is laser focused on Trump, and it is a
Speaker 2: list of really indictable allegations about Trump. And you know,
Speaker 2: that was a decision that the committee made, you know,
Speaker 2: I think partly to accommodate, largely to accommodate Liz Cheney,
Speaker 2: who did not want to be indicting other Republicans aside
Speaker 2: from Trump, and who did not want to lose sight
Speaker 2: of Trump as the leader of the conspiracy. But among
Speaker 2: the things that that committee had done in its hearings,
Speaker 2: which I think are barely in the public eye at all,
Speaker 2: was investigating the role of the media, and there was
Speaker 2: another investigation into social media. And none of that stuff
Speaker 2: is in the report. And so you read that report
Speaker 2: and you're just like, wow, single handedly Trump and you
Speaker 2: know the occasional like Giuliani, Sidney Powell, other lunatic you know,
Speaker 2: you see their villainy, their outright criminality. Could there have
Speaker 2: been like three paragraphs about you know, networking cable television
Speaker 2: on election night and how it made it harder to
Speaker 2: undo that, like because you kind of you do kind
Speaker 2: of puzzle over all. Right, there were sixty one different
Speaker 2: court cases and Trump lost sixty of them, and the
Speaker 2: one that he won had no consequences in terms of
Speaker 2: a recount. Like, there's so many ways in which there's
Speaker 2: just such abundant evidence that strikes down, you know, the
Speaker 2: criminal misrepresentations and lies of Trump and his lackeys. Remember,
Speaker 2: like people remembers of the Republican parties still have not
Speaker 2: essentially conceded the election to Biden and were, you know,
Speaker 2: very close to the next election. So and you're like,
Speaker 2: why they clearly don't want to disappoint their followers. They
Speaker 2: think their constituents believe this, so they need to defy
Speaker 2: their constituents. But why would their constituents keep believing this
Speaker 2: has been disproven in every possible forum where we arbitrate truth,
Speaker 2: and like, it's among the places where we might consider
Speaker 2: asking for some accountability would be news organizations.
Speaker 1: Especially because in twenty sixteen, that is what happened with
Speaker 1: social media. There was like an attempt at that kind
Speaker 1: of reckoning, and you don't really see any of that
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty. It is interesting to think about Project
Speaker 1: X as like a comparison for the twenty twenty election.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about framing it as they are like
Speaker 1: two separate epistemological crises. Twenty sixteen election, we no longer
Speaker 1: can predict the future because we just don't understand what's
Speaker 1: happening anymore, and then twenty twenty we lose faith in elections.
Speaker 1: But I think it's compelling the idea that they are
Speaker 1: linked in this way. I do wonder, though, to what
Speaker 1: extent do you think voters earnestly believe the election was stolen?
Speaker 1: And do you think it's going to have an impact
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty four beyond how Trump campaigns.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm not a you know,
Speaker 2: inside Beltway DC reporter. I would love to talk to
Speaker 2: someone who does that kind of work, you know, like
Speaker 2: a Susan Glasser from the New York or Dan Baltz
Speaker 2: from the Washington Post and say, are people preparing for
Speaker 2: the election denihalism? Like what is in place? Not only
Speaker 2: preparing for you know, assuring election integrity. I feel like,
Speaker 2: you know, the states and down to the municipal and
Speaker 2: town level actually do a ton of that stuff in place,
Speaker 2: Like that's why the twenty twenty election actually went so
Speaker 2: well as in terms of the election, the country is
Speaker 2: really reliable reporting of results and you know, any audits
Speaker 2: were revealed just really tremendously impressive accuracy with the counting.
Speaker 2: So I'm not worried about the election results, but everybody
Speaker 2: should be worried about the election denialism that is likely coming.
Speaker 2: And I still think honestly, when we talk about we're
Speaker 2: talking about polling that you know, if we had a
Speaker 2: national popular vote, polling would be more reliable than any
Speaker 2: When people do those national polls, they just don't talk
Speaker 2: about the electoral college. So there's like so many ways
Speaker 2: in which we are not positioned to know who is
Speaker 2: going to win an election. And this is likely to
Speaker 2: be an extremely close election. I don't think that we
Speaker 2: can expect anything other than extremely close elections at the
Speaker 2: presidential national level anytime soon. And surely the Trump campaign
Speaker 2: is thinking of all kinds of ways to undermine the
Speaker 2: outcome of the election. If Trump loses, which she's pretty
Speaker 2: likely to do, He's pretty likely to have been convicted
Speaker 2: of a felony by then, which is at least expected
Speaker 2: to cut some dent in his support among independents at least.
Speaker 2: So I'm sure they have a really elaborate plan in
Speaker 2: place for exactly what to do. And Eve, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think it's really worrying.
Speaker 1: Do you remember so one of the episodes that we've
Speaker 1: rerun is Hush Rush, which is the Rush Limbaugh al
Speaker 1: Franken episode, And I was remembering when I listened back
Speaker 1: to it that one of the things we read for that,
Speaker 1: but then didn't include in the episode. Was that David
Speaker 1: Posen the Columbia Law Scholars that awesome article Transparency's ideological Drift,
Speaker 1: and one of the claims in that essay that I
Speaker 1: had never seen before, and it really stuck with me.
Speaker 1: So we think of transparency laws like the progressive era
Speaker 1: in the sixties and seventies, as these like super liberal
Speaker 1: progressive reforms, but then actually they have these right wing
Speaker 1: functions when you like Foia, the EPA to death or whatever.
Speaker 1: But another way that they contribute to dysfunction and government
Speaker 1: is when you have everything broadcast on c SPAN. Everything
Speaker 1: is accessible to lobbyists and private interests especially, but like
Speaker 1: really just everybody. You have to keep acting as if
Speaker 1: the things you do as campaign strategies or the things
Speaker 1: you think your constituents want from you are like exactly
Speaker 1: how you believe and behave, and you refuse to make
Speaker 1: any kind of compromises. And that I think it speaks
Speaker 1: to that idea of we might have plenty of Congress
Speaker 1: people who don't for a second and believe that the
Speaker 1: election was stolen, but they have to act as if
Speaker 1: because this is one of the consequences of the like
Speaker 1: everything's a culture war because you can see everything behind
Speaker 1: the scenes. Do you think a way of answering the
Speaker 1: kind of crisis in the media is to take some
Speaker 1: of the work of governing offline or would that just
Speaker 1: create a whole other raft of problems.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think there is a lot offline, but
Speaker 2: we are kind of offered the illusion that we can
Speaker 2: see at all. So you hear all the time, if
Speaker 2: you know anybody involved in politics or you know members
Speaker 2: of Congress that like, oh, yeah, these guys who still
Speaker 2: say that publicly that Trump won the election, privately they'll
Speaker 2: laugh and laugh and laugh at him and like, obviously
Speaker 2: he totally lost. The guys a complete fraud, and they
Speaker 2: want you to kind of forgive them privately, to allow
Speaker 2: them to kind of make amends by being honest with you.
Speaker 2: You know, that they can kind of feel like they're
Speaker 2: acting in good faith because really, you know, it's like
Speaker 2: a kind of weird penance for like I hear, I've
Speaker 2: heard this multiple times, like to kind of confess and
Speaker 2: try to like almost like erase your public persona by
Speaker 2: insisting yes, like to kind of have a camaraderie around
Speaker 2: that privately, and it's it's incredibly contemptible, right, Like I
Speaker 2: you can think of more sinister ways to act as
Speaker 2: a politician, like to vote for a war that you know,
Speaker 2: for you know, new caster vote in Congress to declare
Speaker 2: a war when you don't believe in it, or to
Speaker 2: withhold funding for something that is a crucial kind of
Speaker 2: humanitarian aid in order to gain some you know, really
Speaker 2: self serving pork for your state, or like things that
Speaker 2: kind of compromises that people make surely all the time
Speaker 2: that largely involve money. And yeah, you can think of
Speaker 2: worse things, but it's a pretty short list.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just like you have this performance personality or
Speaker 1: there's this like unreality to the way you behave and
Speaker 1: everybody accepts it. But then it's like the only way
Speaker 1: you're behaving in public, so it becomes real. Which is
Speaker 1: this like reality TV phenomenon which is very trumpy.
Speaker 2: But is it trumpy because I think regress is it's
Speaker 2: the whole version of that. Like the progressives are really
Speaker 2: trumpy too, Like that that's that's the that's the difference
Speaker 2: between twenty sixteen and twenty twenty four. Right, the American
Speaker 2: political style across the board imitates Trump.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that is like part of the premise of
Speaker 1: the last archive is that this thing that appears to
Speaker 1: have taken this this thing that like you might think
Speaker 1: Trump has caused, is actually just like he's the man
Speaker 1: for the moment because he fits all of the structures
Speaker 1: we have in place, which are these varying degrees of
Speaker 1: unreality and like right fantasies we have about the That's.
Speaker 2: Why you know, when you look at Rush Limbo and
Speaker 2: then you look at Al Frank and you're like, I
Speaker 2: really wish Frank and were significantly different, And no he's not.
Speaker 2: He's different. You know, he's not nearly as bad. But
Speaker 2: there's you know, a real leaning in that direction of
Speaker 2: you know, let me kick you in the crotch.
Speaker 1: Like the entertainment, like politics is entertainment, which is the
Speaker 1: CBS Election Night thing too. Yeah, well, I guess part
Speaker 1: of the point of this conversation is to find precedence
Speaker 1: for the twenty twenty four election, which is kind of
Speaker 1: funny because I feel like a lot of the narrative
Speaker 1: of the selection is that it's totally unprecedented, you know,
Speaker 1: like Trump having so many criminal cases, Biden's age, like
Speaker 1: two candidates who are historically old, And I guess maybe
Speaker 1: that's a place to start in trying to think about
Speaker 1: how you historicize these things that feel like they come
Speaker 1: out of nowhere or like they've never happened before. So
Speaker 1: like maybe to begin with the age questions, And we
Speaker 1: don't need to think about this in terms of like
Speaker 1: should Biden be the nominee for the Democratic Party, but
Speaker 1: more just like how did we get to this place
Speaker 1: where we have two historically old candidates and the bigger
Speaker 1: picture thing behind that the tear intocracy? Where does that
Speaker 1: come from? What does it mean for democracy?
Speaker 2: Right? So, one of the reasons that I wanted to
Speaker 2: do the last archive in the first place is because
Speaker 2: as a historian, the rhetoric of the unprecedented development was
Speaker 2: really driving me crazy. Like by the time we started,
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess I really noticed that after Bush v.
Speaker 2: Gore in two thousand, which you know was unprecedented, there's
Speaker 2: like on an eighteen seventy six moment you could point to,
Speaker 2: but the it became a very lazy journalistic move for
Speaker 2: journalists writing about pretty much anything in American politics to
Speaker 2: call their rolodex American presidential historians, right, which is like
Speaker 2: five people that like you'd see David Gergan and Michael
Speaker 2: beschlass Endors, Karns Goodwin, pretty much every story commenting on
Speaker 2: whether this whatever it was, was unprecedented, and like it's
Speaker 2: a stupid question, is the thing, And there's no answer
Speaker 2: that can be satisfying because every answer reduces the past
Speaker 2: to you know, like an ice cube training like you
Speaker 2: pop out an ice cube. This one would be good
Speaker 2: with this drink like it just it's like a meaningless thing.
Speaker 2: So you know, when the two thousand and eight financial
Speaker 2: crisis happened, I remember, because then you know I would
Speaker 2: start getting these is this is this financial crisis unprecedented?
Speaker 2: And you know, how does it compare it to nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty one, nineteen thirty two? And what are you talking about?
Speaker 2: It is like nothing, there's nothing in common between two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight and nineteen thirty one nineteen thirty two,
Speaker 2: Like we're not eating our shoes. This is a completely
Speaker 2: different set of problems with finance and globalism and like
Speaker 2: and chicanery among financiers.
Speaker 1: Like it's a that's the argument that it is unprecedented,
Speaker 1: that like everything is new because everything is a totally
Speaker 1: different set of.
Speaker 3: Com Yes, well, they're always you could always call upon say, well,
Speaker 3: would actually be really quite interesting to compare two thousand
Speaker 3: and eight to nineteen thirty two, But it's an act
Speaker 3: of extended comparison.
Speaker 2: There are some things that are similar. And one of
Speaker 2: the things that as a historian you're interested in doing
Speaker 2: is measuring the distance between two points and then trying
Speaker 2: to figure out what's the engine that drives you from
Speaker 2: point day to point b. You know, is it is
Speaker 2: it changes in the economy, is it US foreign policy?
Speaker 2: Is it changing to technology? Is it the circulation of
Speaker 2: goods due to new transportation infrastructure? Like, there are a
Speaker 2: lot of interesting questions you could ask, but you can't
Speaker 2: ask those questions and answer them in you know, a
Speaker 2: three minute phone call with a reporter or popping up
Speaker 2: on MSNBC or something like. It's very hard to offer
Speaker 2: up an account of the relationship between the past and
Speaker 2: the present to the media as it is currently configured.
Speaker 2: So the past is really flattened. It's like available for
Speaker 2: the occasional bond mo oh fgr once said, you know,
Speaker 2: this reminds me of something that Kennedy did, like what
Speaker 2: like as the history, especially because everything becomes narrative presidential action.
Speaker 2: So all those accounts fall prey to what historians call presidentialism, right,
Speaker 2: just just inflating the presidency as the sole mover of
Speaker 2: all events in the United States, like, oh, the economy's down,
Speaker 2: Well it's President Biden, Like what the hell did he do?
Speaker 2: I don't know, Like it's a weird. But then since
Speaker 2: the go to people among historians are like these kinds
Speaker 2: of celebrity presidential biographers, it's not their fault that they're
Speaker 2: getting the phone calls, and their answer is going to
Speaker 2: involve something that a president said or a president did,
Speaker 2: and so those answers are just really not going to
Speaker 2: be illuminating, and they're going to distort American's perception of
Speaker 2: how change happens. There's nothing that's ever structural, and nothing's
Speaker 2: really driven by economic forces or technological forces. Everything is
Speaker 2: somehow driven from the White House, and it corrupts our
Speaker 2: sense of our own capacity as voters and as citizens
Speaker 2: to act right or as parents or as you know, children,
Speaker 2: or as school principles or whatever. Like somehow everything's nationalized
Speaker 2: and partisanized, so that like is this ever precedented? As
Speaker 2: that go to or even like you know, the swine
Speaker 2: flu panic or you know, the coronavirus, like everything has
Speaker 2: to answered that question. And it sort of drove me
Speaker 2: crazy because I don't know, Like it just seems like
Speaker 2: you would you call up a chemist and say, can
Speaker 2: we turn out, uh, you know, steal into gold? Like
Speaker 2: it just doesn't. It's like that's not how chemistry works,
Speaker 2: Like that's alchemy, Like that just doesn't. It defies the
Speaker 2: method of being a chemist. Why would you ask me
Speaker 2: such a question?
Speaker 1: Because they want like unprecedented is another way of saying newsworthy, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is then like I have a peg. This has
Speaker 1: never happened before.
Speaker 2: This happens before, Like so I get it, and I'm
Speaker 2: like I do there's I mean, like I'm I get
Speaker 2: why a journalist want to do that. But as a story,
Speaker 2: and there is a lot to be learned from the past,
Speaker 2: so you kind of want to say, like wait, but yeah,
Speaker 2: actually there's something and let me tell you about the
Speaker 2: election of eighteen seventy six. It's really different from this,
Speaker 2: but here's how that went. So anytime I was asked
Speaker 2: to do something because a story in like rhinesse or
Speaker 2: whatever about something in the present, and I had to
Speaker 2: be a way that something in the past illuminates it.
Speaker 2: But then to try to tell that story in a
Speaker 2: way that doesn't reduce the past to the prologue to
Speaker 2: the present, like everything is somehow explained by the past,
Speaker 2: and therefore we should either like get really worried or
Speaker 2: not worry at all. Like people want to talk about
Speaker 2: the lack of civility in Congress. Remember that guy who
Speaker 2: screamed out you lie to Obama during the State of
Speaker 2: the Union. And then there was all like everybody would
Speaker 2: call this history and at Yale Joan Freeman who'd written
Speaker 2: about the fisticuffs on the floor of Congress City in
Speaker 2: eighteen fifties and eighteen forties, and it was like, somehow, sure,
Speaker 2: that's important history. We should know that. But does it
Speaker 2: mitigate the cruelty and just vulgarity of members of Congress today?
Speaker 2: Does it make us sleep easier that people were crap
Speaker 2: in the past? I don't know, Like what's the I
Speaker 2: don't get. I don't even understand what that is meant
Speaker 2: to offer, Like as a citizen, I just actually want
Speaker 2: my members of Congress to being better. I get the
Speaker 2: fact that people bashed each other over the head in
Speaker 2: eighteen fifty six doesn't actually make me think it's okay
Speaker 2: to do it today.
Speaker 1: Well, it is interesting to think about this in the
Speaker 1: context of the conversation we're having around polling though in
Speaker 1: sofar as they're I mean, they're both entertainment oriented products
Speaker 1: that are sort of like Newsy in a way, but
Speaker 1: they're also about conveying a sense of security, like if
Speaker 1: something is precedented, if it's happened before, we've seen this before,
Speaker 1: we know everything's gonna be okay in the future, saying
Speaker 1: if you think you can predict what the future is
Speaker 1: going to be. So there is this way in which
Speaker 1: they both serve to manage anxiety about shame.
Speaker 2: But you know what it also did. It diminished the
Speaker 2: threat that was Trump because I don't know if you
Speaker 2: can mervous, but I have really strong people trying to
Speaker 2: come with like he's he's like thirty percent Goldwater, forty
Speaker 2: percent Nixon, and the other thirty percent is George Wallace,
Speaker 2: or you know, he's fifty percent P. T. Barnum and
Speaker 2: fifty percent Charles Lindberg. It'll be like what, like, yes,
Speaker 2: there are frogs and tycoons and showmen and want to
Speaker 2: be dictators in the American past. But wait, this guy's
Speaker 2: looking like he's gonna win. Like, this guy is a
Speaker 2: huge following, And I don't place myself outside of like
Speaker 2: diminishing what that was, or what his presidency might do,
Speaker 2: or his likelihood of getting elected. But it really was
Speaker 2: a disservice to people's ability to understand him, and like,
Speaker 2: as a voter, I would say to me, one of
Speaker 2: the great mistakes of that the twenty fifteen twenty sixteen
Speaker 2: moment was the Democratic Party deciding to defer to Hillary Clinton,
Speaker 2: to drum Bernie Sanders off of all possible stages, and
Speaker 2: to discourage anyone else from running. Elizabeth Warren wanted to run, right,
Speaker 2: I would have so loved to see, Okay, they have
Speaker 2: a lot of people lining up in these Republicans, and
Speaker 2: have the Democrats say to themselves, let's see who's out there,
Speaker 2: Like why Hillary Clinton, who was a terrible candidate and
Speaker 2: a terrible candidate to put off against who became the
Speaker 2: mentual nominee. But like that to your question of like,
Speaker 2: what the how do we get here to twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four with this gerontocracy? The from the Democratic point of view,
Speaker 2: you see that real lack of faith in the people's
Speaker 2: ability to discriminate and choose the best candidate, where the
Speaker 2: party has the party will anoint Hillary Clinton, or the
Speaker 2: party will you say, of course Joe Biden is going
Speaker 2: to run. No one. Everyone has to agree not to
Speaker 2: contest that, not to even publicly challenge it, but certainly
Speaker 2: not to run against him or to give money to
Speaker 2: someone who might run against him. It's completely anti democratic
Speaker 2: with a lower case D. And the fact that the
Speaker 2: Democratic Party is allegedly running as the Party of Democracy
Speaker 2: when they can't actually even tolerate a competition for the
Speaker 2: party's nomination for president is appalling. But I think that
Speaker 2: risk aversion is somewhat I think as you're kind of
Speaker 2: suggesting tied to that fetish around unprecedented, like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: because this is the most important election that's ever happened,
Speaker 2: you know, Hillary Clinton must be our candidate. She's you know,
Speaker 2: or whatever like that. Somehow the nature of the rig
Speaker 2: you have to be willing to lose. And yeah, I like,
Speaker 2: if you don't trust the voters or the voters in
Speaker 2: your own party, then you're not doing your job. I
Speaker 2: think the reasons that that what looks like as the
Speaker 2: moment we're talking that Trump and Biden will be the
Speaker 2: major party nominees. I think the reasons for their elevation
Speaker 2: to those positions are different, but I mean, they're both
Speaker 2: representations of many political failures, the chain of political failures,
Speaker 2: but the failures are different.
Speaker 1: Along the way, we're talking last night about the calls
Speaker 1: for an open convention from people who are concerned about
Speaker 1: Biden's age, and it's kind of a lovely fantasy in
Speaker 1: some sense, but one of the big concerns I have
Speaker 1: about that is, like, do you really trust the Democratic
Speaker 1: Party to pick a candidate that meaningfully represents what the
Speaker 1: voting base would want? And it seems like twenty sixteen
Speaker 1: is a good example of why you might be suspicious
Speaker 1: that that's actually going to yield a result that they
Speaker 1: would be happy with.
Speaker 2: But it's not. Unlike there's currently a pretty major effort
Speaker 2: on the part of Republicans of the kind of Greg Abbott,
Speaker 2: Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum armed the party to get enough
Speaker 2: state legislatures to call for a second constitutional convention that
Speaker 2: there would be one, And that's been going on for
Speaker 2: a number of years and they're getting closer year by year,
Speaker 2: and it has been the position of the left since
Speaker 2: the nineteen eighties to oppose such a convention on the
Speaker 2: theory that it would lead to results that liberals and
Speaker 2: progressives would not like. And you can keep doing that,
Speaker 2: but you can't then also call yourself the party of Democracy.
Speaker 2: And if there's going to be a convention, maybe you
Speaker 2: should prepare for it and actually have a plan and
Speaker 2: an agenda and a proposal for what the rules of
Speaker 2: such a convention would be, and have a wish list
Speaker 2: and have a platform. Start thinking about delegates, like maybe
Speaker 2: start initiating smaller convention like meetings that involve not just
Speaker 2: the party elites but actual voters. So a reason that
Speaker 2: you don't have a lot of faith in a democratic
Speaker 2: national convention choosing a candidate that you would be happy
Speaker 2: with is you've probably never been a participant in any
Speaker 2: kind of a convention of any kind. Whereas historically, you know,
Speaker 2: state constitutional conventions were held all the time, constitutional like
Speaker 2: constitution like conventions held in towns and cities for all
Speaker 2: kinds of activities. It was like the main mode other
Speaker 2: than voting, people participated as citizens and sometimes they're called
Speaker 2: citizen assemblies. But that very act of like gathering together
Speaker 2: with a bunch of random people to kind of make
Speaker 2: a decision about something. That's what polling replaced. So we
Speaker 2: now have this like weird now now it's like tech
Speaker 2: driven thing instead of getting together at the town library.
Speaker 2: You know, we're talking here in Vermont, where there's still
Speaker 2: our town meetings, but a lot of the town meetings
Speaker 2: have become zoom meetings. Like that was the kind of
Speaker 2: consequence of COVID and also of diminishing attendance at town meetings.
Speaker 2: But we just don't We're not in the habit of
Speaker 2: sitting in a room and arguing things out, building a coalition,
Speaker 2: arriving at some kind of decision. Excepting that nobody gets
Speaker 2: what they want. That compromises important. And so no one
Speaker 2: trusts the convention as a anymore than they trust elections.
Speaker 2: I think people trust conventions a lot less because they
Speaker 2: just don't even know what that means. Like there has
Speaker 2: not been a state constitutional convention in the United States
Speaker 2: since nineteen eighty six. Was Rhode Island like it was
Speaker 2: voted on in nineteen eighty four as a ballot initiative?
Speaker 1: Why was that a ballid initiative for them?
Speaker 2: So they have a regular they're a number of I
Speaker 2: think it's maybe ten states that it's it's in their
Speaker 2: constitution that the voters will be asked at a regular interval,
Speaker 2: would you like to hold a convention? So I think
Speaker 2: Rhode Islands is every ten years. So there there were
Speaker 2: some of these votes in twenty twenty two. They are
Speaker 2: going to be some in twenty twenty four. Voters keep
Speaker 2: saying no because they just don't trust conventions anymore because
Speaker 2: no one even even really knows what that means. Well,
Speaker 2: how do you picked delegates and how that happened? But
Speaker 2: like a convention. I would love to attend a convention,
Speaker 2: like like actually in a meaningful way to participate in one.
Speaker 2: But it's one of the biggest holes in our system
Speaker 2: of representative government because it's a major historically, it's like
Speaker 2: a major way that Americans involved themselves in political decision making.
Speaker 2: You know, no one's going to run for the legislature
Speaker 2: and first pulling and now like social media posting is
Speaker 2: somehow like you civic conusity. Yeah, and so I get
Speaker 2: that not trusting, like or if you were a Republican
Speaker 2: and they said, you know, we're going to have an
Speaker 2: open convention because Trump's in jail now or whatever. People
Speaker 2: would really freak out. It's not on either party, like
Speaker 2: it's across the board. People don't trust the idea of
Speaker 2: letting the people decide about.
Speaker 1: Something there was I mean this, this connects to the
Speaker 1: pos and thing also because there's that Okay, sure you
Speaker 1: can put everything about everything Congress does is now on television,
Speaker 1: but like, who's actually watching. It's lobbyists, it's private interest groups,
Speaker 1: the people who actually have the time, which most of
Speaker 1: us don't. And it reminds me of two moments in
Speaker 1: the episodes that we just reran in Hush Rush. There's
Speaker 1: the Rush Limbok quote, something that effective. If you listen
Speaker 1: to me, you never have to read another newspaper, never
Speaker 1: have to read another magazine. I do it for you,
Speaker 1: and best of all, I tell you what to think
Speaker 1: about these very complicated issues. And there's the Eisenhower ad
Speaker 1: from the fifty sixth election that we love so much
Speaker 1: that we almost made the avatar of the last archive,
Speaker 1: that little cartoon guy who's surrounded by all his voices.
Speaker 1: High prices, low prices, unemployment like full employment. Why stop?
Speaker 1: I read the papers and the magazines, like you know,
Speaker 1: but who's right what's right? How can I tell like
Speaker 1: that that kind of increasing complexity, the like daily burden
Speaker 1: of democracy is heavier every day because it's a more
Speaker 1: and more complicated world.
Speaker 2: And I mean, no, it's just a more and more
Speaker 2: nationalized political conversation. So I think if you were just
Speaker 2: do you participate, like in your neighborhood in a neighborhood
Speaker 2: council or in your borrow in New York in borough meetings,
Speaker 2: Like if you were doing those things, it wouldn't actually
Speaker 2: be that hard to keep up with what you needed
Speaker 2: to know, like, well, there's a new budget line about
Speaker 2: our public library and this.
Speaker 1: Mole, you know, like.
Speaker 2: We've most of us completely abandoned our responsibility to the
Speaker 2: civic institutions that are part of our local lives.
Speaker 1: No, well, I mean we do do that, and it
Speaker 1: is like we want to reroute traffic on this street. Maybe, yes,
Speaker 1: that is still simple in a way that it was before.
Speaker 1: Although I do think I mean, especially with neighborhood determinations
Speaker 1: and building and things like that. There's environmental reviews, like
Speaker 1: my dad is on the conservation committee. I think it's
Speaker 1: called for the suburb where my parents live, and those
Speaker 1: are like they have to do these really intensive reviews,
Speaker 1: so like, in some way, I actually do think those
Speaker 1: things are more complicated now than they were before. But
Speaker 1: I guess I'm talking more about the you know, our
Speaker 1: season two, episode five and six moon Landing argument of like,
Speaker 1: there's just stuff now that you could not possibly understand
Speaker 1: on your own, both geopolitically and technologically. The scale of
Speaker 1: the problems we face, or at least the scale the
Speaker 1: we can now comprehend that perhaps we could not before,
Speaker 1: does feel master And if.
Speaker 2: You really believe that, then then why does everybody get
Speaker 2: to vote?
Speaker 1: Because I do still believe in people's capacity to understand
Speaker 1: these things. I'm just saying I think it takes more work,
Speaker 1: and I think one of the problems is you get
Speaker 1: all these shortcuts from doing the work, and some of
Speaker 1: them can be trusted and others of them can. But
Speaker 1: maybe there ultimately is no real substitution for like taking
Speaker 1: the time to think hard about these issues, and we've
Speaker 1: all just gotten comfortable with substitutions that we shouldn't be
Speaker 1: comfortable with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that the sense though, of helplessness
Speaker 2: around do I even know enough to figure out how
Speaker 2: to vote?
Speaker 1: Here?
Speaker 2: In this you know from the Senate seat in my
Speaker 2: state is exacerbated by just a tremendous deterioration of support
Speaker 2: for local news organizations, which means that the kind of
Speaker 2: daily reporting about what's going on in your town, your neighborhood,
Speaker 2: your state, at your state house is really hard to find,
Speaker 2: and it's really hard it's hard to figure out who's
Speaker 2: going to pay for that. So, you know, in the
Speaker 2: absence of that local news coverage, people turn to the
Speaker 2: drama of the national news coverage, and they get kind
Speaker 2: of radicalized by their news sources. And you know, we
Speaker 2: can think of all kinds of problems that fall from that,
Speaker 2: but I don't think until we solve the problem of
Speaker 2: local news we can solve those larger problems.
Speaker 1: Yeah, something that's interesting about twenty twenty four is it's
Speaker 1: the biggest selection year in history. You know, roughly four
Speaker 1: billion people are going to go to the polls this year.
Speaker 1: That's like about half the global population who are going
Speaker 1: to participate in self determination. That's an incredible thing. But
Speaker 1: then there's this sad undercurrent to that, which is that
Speaker 1: in so many of these elections there's this you know,
Speaker 1: cliched thing that's kind of true that democracy is on
Speaker 1: the ballot, And I guess it brings me to this
Speaker 1: question about twenty sixteen, in the panic around democratic norms,
Speaker 1: how do you actually promote a democratic cast of mind?
Speaker 1: Which we've talked about in the radio episodes too. What
Speaker 1: is your answer to that? How do we inculcate in
Speaker 1: voters the spirit of democracy, the tolerance for the complexity,
Speaker 1: and the daily work of it.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of really smart people have thought
Speaker 2: about that like that. The new Zublett and Levitsky book
Speaker 2: on the Tyranny of the Minority really kind of spells
Speaker 2: out what the stakes are, but there have been some
Speaker 2: great efforts made at thinking through what the solutions are too.
Speaker 2: So one of my favorites is the report that the
Speaker 2: American Academy Arts and Sciences put out several years ago
Speaker 2: after like a multi year study involving, you know, hundreds
Speaker 2: of people all over the country. Was led by Daniel Allen,
Speaker 2: political theorist at Harvard, and among their recommendations were these
Speaker 2: kind of small steps, like the kind of obvious thing
Speaker 2: like election Day should be a national holiday, it should
Speaker 2: be held on Veterans Day. It would honor veterans to
Speaker 2: do so. Then you sort of kind of instead of
Speaker 2: election night being a television and social media spectacle, you
Speaker 2: could have the day itself as a kind of July
Speaker 2: fourth celebration of the act of voting and the great
Speaker 2: privilege that that is, and people wouldn't have to go
Speaker 2: to work, and you know, the sort of federal holiday
Speaker 2: piece of it. And so it was for instance, really
Speaker 2: discouraging to me personally when Biden's big move was to
Speaker 2: make Juneteenth a federal holiday. It was like, okay, you
Speaker 2: could have met you Like there was another that was like,
Speaker 2: this is this is a kind of real bipartisan project,
Speaker 2: Like there's not. It's like just there's really not a
Speaker 2: ton of objection to that. And the only objection is
Speaker 2: it would make it possible for more people to vote.
Speaker 2: So it's hard to state that as an objection publicly.
Speaker 2: You know, there should be a year or two of
Speaker 2: mandatory national service that could be civil or military, that
Speaker 2: would bring together people, you you know, serve with people
Speaker 2: from all over the country and it would sort of
Speaker 2: mix Americans up more. Like things like that that just
Speaker 2: seem they seem kind of you know, for giving student debt,
Speaker 2: it's gonna was always going to be challenging to enforce,
Speaker 2: to implement, to get through to defend budgetary grounds. But
Speaker 2: the National Service, which would have also provided funds for
Speaker 2: students to go to college, right like, in recompense of that,
Speaker 2: there're you know, there's just like a much better idea
Speaker 2: and it actually achieves in terms of support for college
Speaker 2: education for people that can't afford. It is a much
Speaker 2: better solution because it meets all these other civic goals,
Speaker 2: whereas the forgiving student debt is like become a really
Speaker 2: bad pub you know, partisan hot potato. Like. So it's
Speaker 2: frustrating to see these really good ideas not having been
Speaker 2: quite taken up yet. But that doesn't mean there aren't
Speaker 2: really good ideas out there. So in terms of how
Speaker 2: to implement those things or why they haven't been implement
Speaker 2: men did because they're you know, they've been supported by
Speaker 2: so many different people. I sidedly think you have to
Speaker 2: look at who's making money off of not implementing that stuff.
Speaker 2: If I think about twenty twenty four as the product
Speaker 2: of a series of political failures, and you have made
Speaker 2: the case for media accountability for some of those failures,
Speaker 2: I really just think historically, so much of the blame
Speaker 2: is going to be placed on the Republicans and the
Speaker 2: Senate who voted against convicting Trump of impeachment and the
Speaker 2: second of impeachment after the January sixth insurrection. That was
Speaker 2: just a complete abdication of their constitutional duty as members
Speaker 2: of the Senate. It was a completely clear cut case.
Speaker 2: And among the arguments that you now see, For one thing,
Speaker 2: you know, Mitch McConnell famously said, oh, you know, he's
Speaker 2: subject to criminal indictment and prosecution, and that's the way
Speaker 2: this should happen. He's immune from criminal proscription. But for another,
Speaker 2: you know, when you read memoirs of people like Mitt
Speaker 2: Romney or Liz Cheney, you learned that a lot of
Speaker 2: those members of the Senate who voted against conviction did
Speaker 2: so because they had been subject to threats of violence
Speaker 2: against their wives and young children. And as terrifying as
Speaker 2: that isn't as terrible as that is, as itself, as
Speaker 2: you know, the symptom of the pathology of our politics.
Speaker 2: You are a member of the Senate and your obligation
Speaker 2: is to cast the correct vote. And it is like
Speaker 2: a trial by jury. It is a trial by jury,
Speaker 2: is it? It is our constitutional trial by jury? And
Speaker 2: you can't choose to vote not to convict out of
Speaker 2: fear and and and and stand by that. And I mean,
Speaker 2: I just think when we think about all the things,
Speaker 2: all the kinds of compromises to what is true and
Speaker 2: what is not true, how do people know what is true?
Speaker 2: How are we to know who to believe? At the
Speaker 2: end of the day, those guys, the guys who voted
Speaker 2: not to convict Trump in the Senate, I think they're
Speaker 2: the heaviest burden for you know, the New York catastrophe
Speaker 2: that is our current political culture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to wrap up, We've talked about a lot of
Speaker 1: sort of bad habits of American democracy, and I think
Speaker 1: one of them is this idea that the election is
Speaker 1: all that matters. And it's hard to escape that idea
Speaker 1: in an election year. And obviously it is an extremely
Speaker 1: important thing, but it's not the only thing. If you
Speaker 1: were to come up with three rules for keeping your
Speaker 1: head during an election year, what would they be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that the rules that I live by
Speaker 2: are just like completely unpalatable. Most people never ever go
Speaker 2: on social media, just refuse to participate, and it is
Speaker 2: bad for the human condition. I've just never heard a
Speaker 2: really powerful defense of social media as being good for
Speaker 2: you psychologically, emotionally, politically, culturally. So that's me though I
Speaker 2: can't like, that's not a prescription. People don't live that way,
Speaker 2: Like that's just my own quirkiness. But I think, come
Speaker 2: up with some decision for yourself about what amount of
Speaker 2: that or what exposure to that, or what participation in
Speaker 2: that seems to you defensible and where does it cross
Speaker 2: the line. This is good. I feel good about this.
Speaker 2: This is how I learn about new music, this is
Speaker 2: how I stay in touch with these people. Whatever it is.
Speaker 2: That's good. But I think to think really carefully about
Speaker 2: where to draw the line yourself between what's good for
Speaker 2: you politically and not just good for you, good for
Speaker 2: your community, for the polity to which you belong, good
Speaker 2: for our political culture. More more people make more responsible
Speaker 2: decisions about that, things would things would better. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, going to the neighborhood council meetings, getting involved
Speaker 2: in the local convening of whatever kind of convening it is.
Speaker 2: You know, the suggestion like join a knitting group, like honestly,
Speaker 2: like figure out a way to meet with other people
Speaker 2: in each other's houses and talk about what you're going
Speaker 2: to do next, Like are we going to knit a sweater?
Speaker 2: We gonna We're gonna work on a hat next time.
Speaker 1: Like just a massive campaign.
Speaker 2: I just disagree with people about something with very low
Speaker 2: stakes and accept that how compromises work, and like just
Speaker 2: kind of exercise those muscles around, like being with a
Speaker 2: group of people that are not your own family and
Speaker 2: not your workmates and which you make some decisions like
Speaker 2: don't really matter. You know, we're a book club or whatever,
Speaker 2: like get together, you know, talk about the podcast. I
Speaker 2: don't know, it doesn't really matter what you do, as
Speaker 2: so long as you like meet with other people like
Speaker 2: in person and make decisions that involve compromises. Like that's
Speaker 2: just a good place to be in terms of figuring
Speaker 2: out like what do you actually believe in? In terms
Speaker 2: of like if people get together and decide things together
Speaker 2: and consent to them as a group, was that a
Speaker 2: good outcome? I think the reason people are so vulnerable
Speaker 2: to authoritarianism is they have very little experience of civic
Speaker 2: participation any longer. Or you know, it's the declining church membership, right,
Speaker 2: Like if you were going to your church board meetings
Speaker 2: all the time, and many people do, but many people don't.
Speaker 2: You'd have a model for like, yeah, actually, when we
Speaker 2: get together with a bunch of other people and we
Speaker 2: argue it out, like we usually come up with a
Speaker 2: good app Like you have to find some way to
Speaker 2: have to be a part of your life. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It goes to the like at the end of the
Speaker 1: Epiphany episode when you're talking to Steve Shapin and he
Speaker 1: reads that passage from the Social History of Truth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: where a knowledge is a collective good. This kind of
Speaker 1: like bears on our social relationships. It bears on trusting people,
Speaker 1: and to trust somebody you have to know them, not
Speaker 1: just in the way you might know someone at a
Speaker 1: distance online.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so you know there has to be
Speaker 2: a way. Is it not that hard to put that
Speaker 2: back into your life if you had it once, or
Speaker 2: to find it if you don't have it yet. Third role,
Speaker 2: Oh oh, my third role is it's like actually expose
Speaker 2: yourself to ideas that you think you really disagree with
Speaker 2: and try to understand why they are persuasive to other people.
Speaker 2: It's you know, that's not a it's not a bold
Speaker 2: or new idea, but it's still that's I think that's
Speaker 2: much harder for people to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well this was awesome.
Speaker 2: Happy twenty twenty four, man, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Happy twenty twenty four. Maybe live to see twenty twenty five.