Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. We're about a month out now from
Speaker 1: what promises to be a historic election and what might
Speaker 1: become a historically chaotic election. Before Donald Trump tested positive
Speaker 1: for the stars Cove two virus, he refused in a
Speaker 1: presidential debate to commit to a peaceful transfer of power
Speaker 1: if he lost. Now his diagnosis has plunged things even
Speaker 1: further into uncertainty. The question that is preoccupying me is
Speaker 1: not just the health of the president, but the health
Speaker 1: of our democracy. How worried should we really be about
Speaker 1: the pressures that are currently being put on our electoral
Speaker 1: system and our pacity to transfer power. To discuss this,
Speaker 1: we are joined by one of the most renowned scholars
Speaker 1: of democracy in the world and someone whose work has deeply,
Speaker 1: deeply influenced my own throughout my career. That's Adam Chavorski.
Speaker 1: He's a professor emeritus at New York University. He was
Speaker 1: the twenty ten recipient of the Skyte Prize, which has
Speaker 1: been nicknamed the Nobel Prize for political scientists. Adam, thank
Speaker 1: you so much. For being here. When I was watching
Speaker 1: the presidential debate and I saw Donald Trump refusing to
Speaker 1: acknowledge that he would peacefully transfer power, I thought to myself,
Speaker 1: there's only one person I can have on the podcast
Speaker 1: to talk about transitions of power, and that is Adam Chavorski.
Speaker 1: And I want to start with the most fundamental question
Speaker 1: of all, which is transitions into democracy. What makes them
Speaker 1: work when they do work, so that we can then
Speaker 1: explore what makes them not work when they don't work. Well,
Speaker 1: I really appreciate the introduction. I have been at this
Speaker 1: for probably forty years, so yes, I've thought about it
Speaker 1: different ways. I recently published a book on Why Bothered
Speaker 1: with Elections, and what really struck me is how a
Speaker 1: routine elections are for us? Yes, I mean what happens
Speaker 1: in elections. People vote, somebody is declared winner according to
Speaker 1: the rules. The winner moves into some palace, the White House,
Speaker 1: the pink House in Argentina, the blue House in South Korea.
Speaker 1: The loser goes toward bridge called back benches. Were governed
Speaker 1: for a few years, and then the rituals repeated again,
Speaker 1: and we just completely take it as routine. It's not
Speaker 1: quite routine. Because there are sixty countries in the world
Speaker 1: as of today which never experience peaceful transfer of power
Speaker 1: through elections, including China and Russia. So why does it work.
Speaker 1: It works because typically not too much is at stake,
Speaker 1: in the sense that whoever loses elections will suffer from
Speaker 1: policies that supporters of the losers don't like, but not
Speaker 1: too much, and we'll have a chance to win again.
Speaker 1: Just thinking about the US Bush following Clinton Bush versus
Speaker 1: Gore election that hung on the hair the Supreme Court decided,
Speaker 1: even as though it wasn't clear that it was the
Speaker 1: court that was supposed to decide, and basically what the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party and what the Gore decided decided, it's just
Speaker 1: too costly to fight. We got to suffer from Bush policies,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna have a chance to win again. And
Speaker 1: then Obama one and we probably thought, what we're going
Speaker 1: to suffer through four years maybe eight years, and then
Speaker 1: we're going to win again, And what happened. Trump won. Yes.
Speaker 1: So I think that what makes it work specifically are
Speaker 1: two conditions. One that the winner does not hurt the
Speaker 1: loser too much. That is that the stakes in the
Speaker 1: election are not too high, and two that the loser
Speaker 1: is not denied the chance to win again. As long
Speaker 1: as these two conditions hold, elections work. These two conditions, though,
Speaker 1: aren't naturally occurring, as you point out. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: one reason why you have sixty eight countries that haven't
Speaker 1: had a peaceful transfer. They're each the product of certain customs, practices,
Speaker 1: and norms that maybe derived from the self interest of
Speaker 1: both parties in some way, but nevertheless have been routinized.
Speaker 1: So when you say an election is routine, it feels
Speaker 1: routine because we have some custom that makes it a routine.
Speaker 1: So what happens when one side starts to believe that
Speaker 1: it might be able to play around the edges of
Speaker 1: that routine and maybe change things around, and the other
Speaker 1: side starts to think, well, maybe the other side isn't
Speaker 1: going to follow the routine, maybe they'll do things differently.
Speaker 1: I mean, for me, the first moment when I saw
Speaker 1: a real breaking of this was in the twenty sixteen election,
Speaker 1: when Trump was leading supporters in the lock her up formulation.
Speaker 1: You said, the first condition is the loser doesn't suffer
Speaker 1: that much, but the threat he didn't actually do it,
Speaker 1: but the threat of locking up your opponent is a
Speaker 1: break from the routine of saying the opponent won't suffer
Speaker 1: that much. And similarly, the idea of being able to
Speaker 1: run again works well if you have a chance of winning,
Speaker 1: but if the winner tries to institutionalize its power, it
Speaker 1: can make it harder for the other side to win
Speaker 1: the next time. So how do we sustain these customs
Speaker 1: to make it routine? Well, all I can tell you
Speaker 1: is that I know that the mechan doesn't works under
Speaker 1: the conditions which I just specified, and I'm utterly, utterly surprised,
Speaker 1: as much as anybody else, in spite of forty years
Speaker 1: of work on this topic, that that would break down.
Speaker 1: Let me just say what I heard, lock her up.
Speaker 1: I found it ominous, But not just this. You know,
Speaker 1: the first time Trump said that the only possible way
Speaker 1: he could lose would be because election would be fraudulent
Speaker 1: was three years ago. It wasn't just now. I remember
Speaker 1: that exactly was my experience with this phenomena. It just
Speaker 1: started smelling very badly to me already at that moment.
Speaker 1: What I know is this, you have correct that it
Speaker 1: becomes a habit, and that interests are codified as norms.
Speaker 1: So one study I did was I looked what is
Speaker 1: the probability that the elections will break down as a
Speaker 1: function of past alternations in office between parties in the
Speaker 1: history of a particular country. And it turns out that
Speaker 1: once a country has four or five alternations, the probably
Speaker 1: that the mechanism will stop working is almost zero. United
Speaker 1: States had twenty two or twenty three alternations. I calculated
Speaker 1: that probability for the United States. It turns out to
Speaker 1: be one in one point eight million. That is how
Speaker 1: unprecedented that event is. So how much do you believe
Speaker 1: your study? I mean, the good news would be and
Speaker 1: then our listeners could feel very happy that all that
Speaker 1: President Trump is talking in ways that break our norms
Speaker 1: about how we should speak. He hasn't actually done that yet.
Speaker 1: He did not lock up Hillary Clinton, he has not
Speaker 1: yet refused to leave office after a transition. And so
Speaker 1: there's an argument that says this is all talk. And
Speaker 1: then we would hear you tell us that you know
Speaker 1: the odds are one and one point eight million based
Speaker 1: on this analysis that Trump would break the rules, and
Speaker 1: then we can sleep a little better at night. Or
Speaker 1: do you think, well, it's just a probability and of course,
Speaker 1: unlikely things sometimes happen. What is your instinct in reaction
Speaker 1: to that, to your own study. My instinctive reaction is
Speaker 1: that I am in a deep intellectual crisis, and perhaps
Speaker 1: my entire discipline should be. The way we study things
Speaker 1: is basically, we observe past patterns and we tried to
Speaker 1: row lessons from history. That's what most of our work
Speaker 1: and political science and to a large extent, economics is.
Speaker 1: And the lessons of studying the past is exactly where
Speaker 1: just Storgy it's one in one point eight million. So
Speaker 1: suddenly there's a feeling of learning lessons from history is
Speaker 1: much less certain of an endeavor that we believe it
Speaker 1: may end up peacefully institutionally without a major collapse. But
Speaker 1: in some sense it has already happened. The fact that
Speaker 1: we are discussing the role of the armed forces in
Speaker 1: a constitutional crisis, the fact that we are discussing wondering
Speaker 1: about political postures of the police, the fact that we're
Speaker 1: wondering about potential be behavior of the actions of the
Speaker 1: Secret Service, the fact that relations of physical force have
Speaker 1: come to be a subject of public discourse. For me,
Speaker 1: this means that has already happened. That the unprecedented, unexpected,
Speaker 1: unimaginable has already happened. I wasn't Jill in August of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, a month before an extraordinary bloody good
Speaker 1: at time. And I remember at that time people were
Speaker 1: counting how many generals are adhering to a constitutional position
Speaker 1: that the president cannot be removed was sort of a
Speaker 1: daily count. And this sounds similar. Let me try to
Speaker 1: use Sworsky against Sworsky, now, okay, So let me try
Speaker 1: to offer a more sanguine picture, and it would be
Speaker 1: based on a distinction between unwritten norms that one person
Speaker 1: can challenge and written norms that many institutions would have
Speaker 1: to participate in challenging. And so the counterargument, again based
Speaker 1: on your premises, would be like this, Sure, Donald Trump
Speaker 1: on his own can say things that have never been
Speaker 1: said before, like I might not leave office, never been
Speaker 1: said in the United States, and then that drives the
Speaker 1: discourse in just the ways that you were describing, And
Speaker 1: then we have to have this discourse that was before
Speaker 1: unimaginable and that on the surface sounds like Chile in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three. But the counter argument would be for
Speaker 1: Trump actually to take these steps. He couldn't act alone.
Speaker 1: I mean, if the election clearly went to Biden, and
Speaker 1: Biden were sworn in with Trump refusing to participate, the
Speaker 1: Secret Service would then escort Donald Trump out of the
Speaker 1: White House. If Congress got involved and tried to change
Speaker 1: the electoral outcome, then that would be an institution. It
Speaker 1: would take hundreds and hundreds of people. If the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court got involved, that would take at least a majority
Speaker 1: of the nine people. And so the argument then would
Speaker 1: be that the fact that the discourse has changed is
Speaker 1: a product of one man, whereas a change in our
Speaker 1: institutions would take many, many people. So this is an
Speaker 1: attempt to tell a different story again based on your premises. Well,
Speaker 1: here's there were Stu. The situation. I study what I
Speaker 1: think is the best model predicting the distribution of electoral
Speaker 1: vote as a result of election, which is the five
Speaker 1: thirty eight model. So, according to that model, as of today,
Speaker 1: more or less, Trump has one chance in five to win,
Speaker 1: Biden has probably about one chance in two about fifty
Speaker 1: to win by a landslide. If Trump wins, Hu wins,
Speaker 1: if Biden wins by a landslide, I think there's every
Speaker 1: reason to think that all the other potential institutional actors
Speaker 1: will force Trump to comply with the result. So there is,
Speaker 1: as I see it, about thirty percent that Biden will
Speaker 1: win a little by a small margin, and then this
Speaker 1: country turns out to be weird. I never studied the
Speaker 1: US much, and I'm not a constitutional lawyer like yours.
Speaker 1: You should be thinking about it, not me. But the
Speaker 1: rules defineing who is the victor extraordinary uncleared. This is
Speaker 1: the only country in the world which doesn't have clearer
Speaker 1: rules about what determines the winner. I think that in
Speaker 1: that thirty percent area in which Biden would win by
Speaker 1: a little, it's going to be a complete mess. The
Speaker 1: analogy that I like to use in thinking about this
Speaker 1: is that the US constitutional system and then the statutes
Speaker 1: that govern what happens in an election are like a
Speaker 1: bridge built in seventeen eighty seven when there were only
Speaker 1: horse drawn carriages to cross it, and then over time,
Speaker 1: as people said, well now we have some cars, there
Speaker 1: was an effort to reinforce it. You know, some metal
Speaker 1: was tacked on the bottom, and we said, well it's okay,
Speaker 1: because we just haven't had a problem with it. It's
Speaker 1: shaken a few times. In eighteen seventy six it almost
Speaker 1: collapsed and then they made a temporary solution to it.
Speaker 1: Then again in two thousand in the Bush Vigor election,
Speaker 1: it almost collapsed, and that time we had Dao sex Machi.
Speaker 1: Now we had the Supreme Court come in, which is
Speaker 1: not anywhere in the design, and the Supreme Court said, well,
Speaker 1: we've solved it. And at first that looked illegitimate, but
Speaker 1: within a few weeks everyone said, well, at least somebody
Speaker 1: resolved it. At least the bridge is still functioning. And
Speaker 1: the dangerous part, of course, is if the tank were
Speaker 1: to go across that bridge, the bridge might just literally
Speaker 1: not be able to support it anymore. So there is
Speaker 1: a problem with having very old institutions at work, not
Speaker 1: by an explicit rule, not because a proper engineer has
Speaker 1: designed the bridge to work, but because it's always worked
Speaker 1: and there's an expectation of it working. So I agree
Speaker 1: that that's a tremendous vulnerability, but it's also a sign of,
Speaker 1: in a sense, the success of the system. Right. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons that most global systems of elections or
Speaker 1: even global constitutions are newer is that they have broken
Speaker 1: down more recently and been replaced. The US Constitution broke
Speaker 1: once disastrously in the Civil War, but for you know,
Speaker 1: around one hundred and sixty years, it's been more or
Speaker 1: less functional. But that's no guarantee that it will continue
Speaker 1: to function. Yes, this is what made it unimaginable. Precisely
Speaker 1: it worked. The system worked, I agree with you, And
Speaker 1: to what extent it's interest to all extens rules, to
Speaker 1: all extend its norms, to what extent has just habit.
Speaker 1: We just could never imagine that it will break down.
Speaker 1: And it turns out the one to cons possibly broke down.
Speaker 1: Then the institutional assistance. I'm sorry to say, the constitution,
Speaker 1: it's just useless. We'll be back in a moment. One
Speaker 1: of the central themes that I learned from the work
Speaker 1: you were doing in the early nineties in the immediate
Speaker 1: aftermath of the Eastern European transitions was that one way
Speaker 1: to look at democracies that work that alternate power, is
Speaker 1: that there are powerful people on both sides who know
Speaker 1: that they have a lot to gain from the system
Speaker 1: working and who know that they have a lot to
Speaker 1: lose from the system failing. And in one of the
Speaker 1: formulations that you sometimes used in that period of time,
Speaker 1: you suggested that really democracy can be understood almost as
Speaker 1: just a pact or an agreement between these different elites
Speaker 1: that they're going to alternate in power and the elections running.
Speaker 1: At the time, you were suggesting it almost didn't matter
Speaker 1: if we used elections, if we could flip a coin
Speaker 1: and the parties could change power, that might not be
Speaker 1: as good, it wouldn't be as legitimate publicly. But from
Speaker 1: the standpoint of the elites who knew that I'm going
Speaker 1: to have my next chance at power, and that you
Speaker 1: the other side, are not going to put me in prison,
Speaker 1: You're not going to take away my wealth, and you
Speaker 1: will allow me to run and defeat you the next time,
Speaker 1: the alternation was just powerfully in self interest. Now that
Speaker 1: self interest among elites is still very present in the
Speaker 1: United States. If we actually had a constitutional crisis, it
Speaker 1: would be a disaster for the stock market, and tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of wealth would be destroyed. Almost certainly, it would
Speaker 1: be probably okay for the regular economy, but the elites,
Speaker 1: a lot of whose wealth is bound up in the markets,
Speaker 1: would have a great deal to lose. So what about
Speaker 1: the thought that those elites of whom Donald Trump is
Speaker 1: won just can't tolerate the destruction of wealth that would
Speaker 1: be associated by a genuine constitutional crisis, and so they
Speaker 1: will not allow it to happen. Those elites will say
Speaker 1: to other Republicans, and indeed maybe to Donald Trump personally,
Speaker 1: you can't do this. We have too much to lose,
Speaker 1: and we're not going to allow this kind of an outcome,
Speaker 1: because that is I will say, again, under your influence.
Speaker 1: That is often the way I look at this transfer
Speaker 1: of power. But I can see you're shaking your head.
Speaker 1: Shaking my head for the following reason. I believe exactly
Speaker 1: what you said. But why haven't they done it already?
Speaker 1: Why couldn't they have constrained Trump already? Why such a
Speaker 1: large segment of business establishment still supports it? Somehow, I
Speaker 1: have an impression that a large part of business establishment
Speaker 1: in this country is willing to trade lower taxes and
Speaker 1: der regulation for the cost of a violent conflict. And
Speaker 1: I'm amazed by that. Well, that is amazing. If that
Speaker 1: were true, I think that would be really amazing. So
Speaker 1: let me offer a different interpretation of the business elites position.
Speaker 1: It's that they don't believe that Trump is serious about
Speaker 1: not stepping down from office. That's always difficult to interpret
Speaker 1: the stock market perfectly. But the stock market seems not
Speaker 1: to be worried about Trump actually doing that. And if
Speaker 1: you speak to business elite, many will tell you, and
Speaker 1: I've had many people say this to me, doesn't matter
Speaker 1: what Trump says, it matters what Trump does. What he's
Speaker 1: done has been good for us. And then there are
Speaker 1: also some very high ranking Republicans whom I sometimes speak to,
Speaker 1: always confidentially. They don't want to me to tell anybody
Speaker 1: that I'm speaking to them, and maybe I don't want
Speaker 1: to tell people that I'm speaking to them either, but
Speaker 1: they say, look, he's not going to do this, He's
Speaker 1: not insane. This is a form of political rhetoric. Now
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that they're right about that. What I'm
Speaker 1: telling you is the perception. And if that perception we're
Speaker 1: shared by business elites, they would say, look, we want
Speaker 1: Donald Trump to win because we want to continue with
Speaker 1: the low tax rates and the low regulation. So we
Speaker 1: support him, but we don't think that the risk of
Speaker 1: disruption to the system is really all that high. And
Speaker 1: the market agrees with us, and so it's all going
Speaker 1: to be fine. And if liberals and scholars want to
Speaker 1: get all panicky. Let them. You know, we reasonable people
Speaker 1: who do everything in terms of dollars and cents, just
Speaker 1: aren't really that worried about this. I hope you're right.
Speaker 1: I would have expected you to be right. But there
Speaker 1: are two aspect of the situations which were me and
Speaker 1: I don't attach probabilities to them. These are worries, no probabilities.
Speaker 1: One is that to some extent the genie of violence
Speaker 1: may have already been out of the bottle, that militious
Speaker 1: paramilitary groups. Now I wonder to what extent Trump controls
Speaker 1: them or could control them. But more and here, if
Speaker 1: you know, this is pure speculation, and again it touches
Speaker 1: on laws. But I wonder now whether Trump can afford
Speaker 1: to lose given all the disclosures about his financial You know,
Speaker 1: locking up is not impossible anymore, it seems, at least
Speaker 1: from what I read and talk to my lawyer friends,
Speaker 1: it seems that he could be very easily charged with
Speaker 1: committing several offenses. And if that's what's at stake, then
Speaker 1: he will fight to the last ditch. He may be abandoned,
Speaker 1: and hopefully he would be abandoned, but that he can
Speaker 1: be persuaded. I don't know. Well, let's take those in
Speaker 1: reverse order. So in terms of criminal liability, I think
Speaker 1: it's almost impossible to imagine Joe Biden in office allowing
Speaker 1: a criminal prosecution of Donald Trump to proceed at the
Speaker 1: federal level. And I think the reason for that is
Speaker 1: that Joe Biden is, you know, as we keep hearing
Speaker 1: from the president forty seven years in Washington, he's a
Speaker 1: product of the system and he follows the norm. So
Speaker 1: he wouldn't do it. And no president has done that
Speaker 1: in the past, and it's not just of presidents, but
Speaker 1: even of lower down officials. I think Trump doesn't have
Speaker 1: to worry about that. He might have to worry about
Speaker 1: state prosecution in New York State, but so far, there's
Speaker 1: nothing that would politically force the New York State prosecutors
Speaker 1: to go forward. There may be some things where they
Speaker 1: could go forward with respect to what Trump said to
Speaker 1: various banks when he borrowed money, but it's relatively rare
Speaker 1: for those things to be prosecuted criminally. Formally, they can be,
Speaker 1: but the prosecutors have enormous discretion and it would be
Speaker 1: so controversial for the prosecutor to do so. That, although
Speaker 1: it's possible, again, it's possible to imagine. I think Trump's
Speaker 1: vulnerability to criminal prosecution is actually very low on leaving office,
Speaker 1: so of course it's conceivable. But I think it's a
Speaker 1: mistake to confuse the formal fact that he has done
Speaker 1: things that could get him prosecuted with a credible fear
Speaker 1: of prosecution. I don't think Trump really fears prosecution. You've
Speaker 1: just made me feel better. With respect to the militias
Speaker 1: and the paramilitary groups, that's a trickier and more complicated question.
Speaker 1: The first thing that has to be acknowledged is these
Speaker 1: groups exist, and this is the United States. So they
Speaker 1: have guns, and not just handguns, but assault style weapons,
Speaker 1: and you can see them on television. So their existence
Speaker 1: is serious and can't be ignored. We had a professor
Speaker 1: from the Unity of Chicago on this podcast one of
Speaker 1: our first episodes we did. She's an expert on white
Speaker 1: supremacist groups and she's written a very compelling book tracing
Speaker 1: the history of the white supremacist movement in the United
Speaker 1: States back actually to the post Vietnam era, and she
Speaker 1: makes a very strong case that it's coordinated, that it's organized,
Speaker 1: that it has objectives, and she sees the Proud Boys
Speaker 1: whom Trump referred to the other day in the debate,
Speaker 1: as you just wrote an not bed. This professor just
Speaker 1: wrote an not bed in the New York Times saying
Speaker 1: their Proud Boys are squarely a part of that movement.
Speaker 1: So it's real, and I want to acknowledge that it's real.
Speaker 1: That said, it's not very organized internally. These are not
Speaker 1: very well organized militias. And although they no doubt feel
Speaker 1: allegiance to Trump, he doesn't control them in the sense
Speaker 1: in which a dictator in an authoritarian state might control
Speaker 1: paramilitary groups. They don't have senior group of leaders who
Speaker 1: answer to them, there's no financial source of funding. It's
Speaker 1: an ideological kind of loose affiliation. And it's also not
Speaker 1: clear that their numbers are very great. And there's debate
Speaker 1: about this, but it's not clear that the numbers are
Speaker 1: very great. There are enough people to do damage because
Speaker 1: they have weapons, and I don't want to minimize this,
Speaker 1: and I don't want to minimize the handful of deaths
Speaker 1: that they have caused, nor do I want to minimize
Speaker 1: the risk that they pose. They do pose a great
Speaker 1: risk to our sense of social order, but I guess
Speaker 1: I don't see them as rising to the level of
Speaker 1: the kinds of organizations they could make any kind of
Speaker 1: a credible attempt to take control of insta atitutions or
Speaker 1: to take control of streets in that sort of way,
Speaker 1: And I think we're still very, very far from them
Speaker 1: having that kind of capacity. Again, you made me feel better.
Speaker 1: I suppose there's a saying in Polish that a pessimist
Speaker 1: is but an informed optimist. Perhaps I tend to error
Speaker 1: in this direction, perhaps just because I'm just overwhelmed by
Speaker 1: the unprecedented character of our discussion. But if I may
Speaker 1: diverge from the narrow issue of democracy, transfer of power, etc.
Speaker 1: This whole situation is deeper. This is not just a
Speaker 1: matter of elections. It's not just a matter of political strategies.
Speaker 1: It has deep roots into society. We are polarized, not
Speaker 1: just in the sense that different people want different things.
Speaker 1: We are polarized in the sense that people are willing
Speaker 1: to do nasty things to others with whom they disagree.
Speaker 1: That's what I find new, the fact that some people
Speaker 1: are pro abortion and others against abortion. That some people
Speaker 1: have higher taxes, lower taxes. We've always lived with it,
Speaker 1: and if they diverge, they diverge. That doesn't bother me.
Speaker 1: What bothers me is how deep the roots are. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, about four percent or five percent of
Speaker 1: partisans would have objected if the offspring married an offspringing
Speaker 1: of an opposite party, and now it's in the fifty
Speaker 1: sixty percent range. There's a beautiful study in proceedings of
Speaker 1: National Academy of Science of Thanksgiving a year ago in
Speaker 1: which if at the Thanksgiving dinner is de traditional American
Speaker 1: family holiday, there were people who came from congressional districts
Speaker 1: controlled by different parties. The Thanksgiving dinner lasted thirty minutes
Speaker 1: less because they couldn't talk politics. Yes, one question that
Speaker 1: we should not lose. From perspective, this is why I
Speaker 1: raised this is so the election is over, Biden assumes,
Speaker 1: and then we're going to change in the society. This
Speaker 1: is I think this current situation undermines too many deeply
Speaker 1: held beliefs, including mind well. It will be fascinating to
Speaker 1: discover in the next few months whether those beliefs and
Speaker 1: mine which are formed by learning from yours may actually
Speaker 1: have been correct, and which ones are being challenged in
Speaker 1: ways that creates the kind of intellectual crisis that you're describing.
Speaker 1: Let's hope that our crisis remains only an intellectual crisis
Speaker 1: and doesn't become a constitutional crisis. That you're right, Noah,
Speaker 1: and that my fears aren't founded. I really do. You've
Speaker 1: made me feel somewhat optimistic. Thank you very much for
Speaker 1: a wonderful, thoughtful conversation. Thank you, Adam, Thank you. I
Speaker 1: was extremely excited and fascinated to speak to Professor Adam Trevorski.
Speaker 1: It's rare that you get a chance to interview someone
Speaker 1: who's influenced your own thinking so much. And it was
Speaker 1: also a little scary because what optimism I have tried
Speaker 1: to sustain and maintain about the capacity of the United
Speaker 1: States to transfer power in this coming election peacefully is
Speaker 1: derived I would say ninety five percent from my reading
Speaker 1: of his work over the years, and so it was
Speaker 1: a little dispiriting and disconcerting to put his arguments to
Speaker 1: him and hear that he himself is skeptical. Was very
Speaker 1: struck that he said that for him, this was a
Speaker 1: moment where political science was facing a deep intellectual crisis.
Speaker 1: That's a very open minded thing of him to say
Speaker 1: but it's also pretty disturbing because that crisis might prefigure
Speaker 1: a deeper crisis for the country and indeed for the world,
Speaker 1: if our democratic institutions break down in the coming election.
Speaker 1: Over the course of the conversation, what you heard me
Speaker 1: doing was trying to reassure myself by using Professor Savorski's
Speaker 1: arguments to see if I could get him to back
Speaker 1: down from the degree of uncertainty and concern that he feels.
Speaker 1: And I would say I was pretty unsuccessful in that regard.
Speaker 1: I think Adam has a strong sense that the fact
Speaker 1: that Donald Trump began to speak about potentially not leaving
Speaker 1: office opened up a vein of discussion and discourse about
Speaker 1: transition that just would have been unimaginable to use his
Speaker 1: word in the United States beforehand, up to and including
Speaker 1: asking ourselves what the US military would do if Donald
Speaker 1: Trump disputed the presidency. The only good news I can
Speaker 1: take away from this conversation is that we're going to
Speaker 1: know the answers relatively soon. The election is coming, the
Speaker 1: court fights that may follow that will ensue, and then
Speaker 1: in just a few months we're supposed to inaugurate a
Speaker 1: new president. Whoever that turns out to be. Here's hoping
Speaker 1: it goes as smoothly as it can until the next
Speaker 1: time we speak. Be careful, be safe, and be well.
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