Two past conversations that warned of democracy’s structural weaknesses years before they became headlines. Prescient insights needed now more than ever.
America’s democratic crisis didn’t start with Donald Trump’s reelection — it was predicted by experts who studied democracy’s fundamental weaknesses years before November 2024.
Two conversations from the WhoWhatWhy podcast archive show our commitment to understanding these challenges before they reached critical mass.
In these remarkably prescient interviews, scholars Yascha Mounk and Daniel Ziblatt identified the structural problems now threatening American democracy: our Constitution’s counter-majoritarian features, the psychological pull of tribalism, and the historical pattern of backlash against diversity.
Mounk’s 2022 conversation revealed how democracies throughout history have struggled with diversity — often relying on homogeneity for stability. He noted that “never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal.” At the same time he argued that the US’s experiment in government of, by, and for the people remains possible if we develop new civic bonds across tribal lines.
In another podcast, a year later, Ziblatt warned that our Constitution inadvertently enables minority rule, with partisan minorities wielding disproportionate power through mechanisms like the Electoral College and the filibuster. He observed that while about 30 percent of voters support authoritarian populism across democracies worldwide, “our Constitution allows that 30 percent into power in a way that other countries don’t.”
Both scholars offered pathways forward, from institutional reforms to generational change. Their insights — which remain pertinent in the post-2024 landscape — demonstrate why WhoWhatWhy’s analysis consistently outpaces mainstream discourse.
As America endures another Trump presidency, these conversations provide essential context for understanding not just how we got here, but how, despite institutional inertia and other inherent vulnerabilities, we can fight to preserve democratic norms — and succeed.
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Original Interview Full Text Transcript (Yascha Mounk):
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. We live in a moment when ideas move at the speed of social media, transforming them from academic theories into institutional practices almost overnight. Concepts that once percolated in university corridors for years now reshape boardrooms, classrooms, and the fundamental ways we govern ourselves. Few thinkers have been as prescient or as sharp, and dissecting these transformations as my guest Yascha Mounk. Since arriving in America in 2005, he’s witnessed and analyzed a profound shift in the nation’s character from a culture of optimistic self-awareness to one of deepening cynicism.
He spent years warning about the threats to liberal democracy from the rise of right-wing populism to the challenges of maintaining democratic institutions in an increasingly fractured world. His most recent book, The Identity Trap, examines how well-intentioned movements for social justice and identity politics can evolve in unexpected ways that undermine the very social cohesion they seek to achieve.
Through his recent writings, he analyzes everything from what he calls Trump Zero-Sum presidency to the shifting landscape of global power. Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and the host of The Good Fight podcast, and the Persuasion Substack brings both intellectual rigor and a deep sense of urgency to these debates.
His conversations with leading thinkers help illuminate the complex interplay between democracy, technology, and social change. While his personal observations chart how America has transformed from a nation defined by its perfectability to one increasingly focused on its divisions. At a time when liberal democracy faces challenges from both within and without, we’ll explore with Yascha Mounk how these forces are reshaping our institutions, our media, and our politics, and whether we can forge a path forward that preserves both democratic vitality and social cohesion. It is my pleasure to welcome Yascha Mounk here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Yascha, thanks so much for joining us.
Yascha Mounk: Thank you so much for having me on, Jeff.
Jeff: A delight to have you here. You and I originally started talking about doing this about six months ago. It was back in August over the summer. And at the time, what inspired me was a column you had written in your substack about how much had changed since you came to America in 2005, that many of the original virtues of the country had fundamentally changed, particularly with respect to how Americans saw themselves. Given what’s transpired in the past six months, how has that change been even more profound?
Yascha: I have had a sense that a lot of American culture has shifted quite radically since 2007 when I really moved to the United States. And it somehow came together for me a little less than a year ago, perhaps, when I was sitting on the New York subway, and I look up and I see a woman sitting opposite me with a baseball cap that reads, “I don’t give a fuck.” And you know there’s 10 million people riding the New York subway every day or something like that, and sometimes it feels like a 10th of them have stupid slogans, some blazing on the cap or the t-shirts.
So I don’t want to over-interpret this one particular thing, but there’s something about that proudly cynical attitude that feels to me like it speaks to this moment. I arrived in the country just as Barack Obama was starting his improbable run for presidency, talking about hope and change. He obviously had come to national attention first a couple of years earlier by saying there’s not a red and a blue America. There’s not Americans split into these different identity groups. That it’s just the United States of America. We’e all our brother’s keeper, our sister’s keeper. We should look out for each other and feel that we stand in solidarity with each other, and together we can accomplish great things.
It feels to me that on the right, but also on the left, that feeling has given away to one of deep division, to one which vilifies people who have different political opinions to this perhaps, especially on the left, a deeply identitarian view of a world in which the fundamental fact about you is much as whether you’re from Red America or from Blue America, but whether you are born to this ethnic group, or to that ethnic group, and hand-in-hand with this great pessimism about the future, and a proud cynicism.
That has one incarnation in the world in which I’m more familiar in America, of progressives who think that our society is fundamentally racist and sexist and corrupt, that we have not been able to make any progress on “social justice” over the course of the last 50 or 100 years. But in a different way, as you’re seeing the Trump administration with a complete disdain for political norms for existing institutions with a proud trolling attitude that I think is born of a cynicism of its own. And so I’m just struck by that change in mood over the course of 15, 20 years.
Jeff: And in so many ways, we talk about this today in terms of the way our politics has changed, but in fact, I would argue that it’s really more the culture that’s changed, and politics is simply downstream from culture.
Yascha: I think that’s right. One thing that I’m struck by is, what we are the most dominant cultural products at the time when I came to the United States. One of the biggest sitcoms that had just started around that time was 30 Rock. The biggest show on broadway around that time was The Book of Mormon. I could come up with other examples. And those were all quite progressive actually, but all I think had quite clearly left in politics. But they were able to laugh at themselves. They were self-ironic. They knew the shortcomings of their own social and political milieu. They had a facility of irony and gave you a sense that nothing is quite off limits in terms of what you can joke about.
And that of course, feels very different from the culture that has dominated in the last 5 or 10 years. One that has been much more censorious, much more earnest in certain kinds of ways, but also much more cynical about what people are like. Perhaps, the last great television show that got a lot of buzz and was widely acclaimed is Succession, which I did watch and there was part of it I enjoyed. But I was struck by the basic worldview of everybody fundamentally being a bad person. And I think part of the enjoyment of watching that show was supposed to be to think, “Oh, look at these terrible people. Thank God I’m not like them.”
That’s very different even from a show like The Wire, which was the most veneered show when I came to the United States, which obviously showed a lot of violent crime, a lot of the drug trade, a lot of really horrible and difficult things. But I was quite cynical, perhaps, about the structures of American life, but which strangely enough included many more inspiring characters, many more characters who were good people, many more characters who in some kinds of ways you might even wish to emulate, even for it was set in this very violent milieu than a show like Succession.
Jeff: And yet Succession comes at the end of a long line of shows that in many ways seems like it set the bar for where we are now, whether it was Walter White or Tony Soprano or Don Draper, and we could go on coupled with reality television that these people that really had very little in terms of redeeming values, we invited into our living room week after week after week.
Yascha: Jeff, I guess I would say that there is a difference between those different characters. Tony Soprano and Walter White, as well as many of the protagonists in The Wire are doing things that are obviously and objectively, morally bad. The mobsters, the drug dealers, and yet those shows with the sensible instinct of good literature, were trying to complicate those moral narratives and trying to get us to see that perhaps those things to simplifies with even in an Italian mobster in New Jersey perhaps even this self-made drug king in New Mexico was somebody whose motivations we could in some ways understand and who we could in certain respects regard as our hero.
They were characters, which in the famous line from literature, 55% bad, but 45% good. You watch Succession which shows people who whatever you think about high finance and the upper ends of a capitalist world are much less obviously doing horrible things. They’re not killing and murdering people in nearly the same way as those other characters. But they’re much worse. They’re 90% bad and perhaps 10% good. And that shows I think, a much more cynical worldview.
Jeff: And to what extent do you think that that change in culture, these kind of shows, all the things that you’re talking about, really set the stage for Trump and where we are today?
Yascha: Well, in two ways. The first is that I think somebody like Barack Obama was only possible in a culture that didn’t take itself too seriously. I think the fact that it was a time in which liberals and progressives could laugh at themselves, made the country much more receptive to someone with idealism about the future of optimism, about the future. Because we didn’t think we were going to be lectured all the time. We didn’t think we were going to be judged all the time.
Whereas I think the much more, to call it by its name, woke culture of the last 5 or 10 years, made people really tired. Make people feel like if I’m not on board with every single one of your opinions and every single one of your attitudes, you think I’m a bad person. You think I’m beyond the pale. And so do I want to vote for somebody who’s going to judge me even more? Perhaps I’ll vote for the person who’s willing to say horrible things, willing to say offensive things, but he wouldn’t judge me, who’s going to relieve me of that fear of being judged.
And obviously some of the actual excesses of that culture, even in terms of social practices, institutional rules, missteps in terms of bigger political questions like immigration, is a lot of what Donald Trump exploited in order to win voters. Many of whom were the kinds of voters who were always supposed to vote for Democrats. Many of whom were Latinos, for example, who on this very simplistic identitarian worldview of Democratic Party strategists for the last 20 years, are always going to vote for Democrats because they’re people of color while it turns out that they see themselves quite differently and they think about politics quite differently from how they were expected to.
Jeff: And again, this comes back to the idea of politics being downstream of culture. And it’s some of what you talked about in the identity trap and the inherent problems with this kind of woke identity politics.
Yascha: Yes, absolutely right. My last book is trying to take seriously this body of ideas that started in intellectual circles and some university campuses, perhaps started to bleed out a little bit to certain activist groups, but felt very marginal to our politics and our culture as a whole. And then over the course of a surprisingly short span of time, really become dominant, at least for a while. Really became the culture of the American mainstream.
And these ideas, which you can call woke, if you like, I’ll refer to them as the identity synthesis of the woke, started in a sense from a sensible point of departure, which was that we want to overcome injustices and disparities, but are very real. But obviously in the history of the United States and of other countries, we have marginalized and discriminated and excluded members of minority groups in very real way. That it advocated for a solution to those problems, which really rejected any universalist moral conception, really rejected some of the fundamental basis of philosophical liberalism and on the constitutional tradition of the United States.
And that envisaged a world in which, as with Obama in 2008, we might to some extent overcome the deep dividing lines that have tragically shaped American history, but rather one in which they remain forever present and perhaps more present in our minds. One in which the way I speak to you should really be deeply influenced and inflected by what your ethnicity is, what your sexuality is, what your belonging in various identity groups might be. One which we should be afraid of being inspired by the cultures of our fellow citizens.
Seeing things like fusion cuisine from a very critical point of view. And one in which the way we’re going to be treated by institutions to which we apply, by medical authorities, perhaps even by the state in granting basic rights and duties differently depending on the identity group to which we belong. Well, the point of departure is in some ways understandable and even sounds noble is actually an incredibly pessimistic view of a kind of society which we might end up.
Jeff: And one where we’re potentially heading. Talk a little bit about what you see and the way in which this is taking hold seemingly in Europe today.
Yascha: Yes. So I think what we’re seeing is that many of these ideas spread and perhaps it was inevitable. One way of thinking about European culture since the end of World War II is simply as n plus five, which is to say, American culture plus 5 or 10 years. Italians and French fought for a while where they would resist the import of McDonald’s, and I’m sure there’s many fewer branches of McDonald’s per capita in Italy and France today than the United States but there’s plenty of branches of McDonald’s in those places as well. So to some extent, this is a question of just cultural influence expanding particularly to the Anglosphere to Canada and Australia and the United Kingdom, but also to places in continental Europe.
The extent to which those ideas have spread varies a little bit from place to place, and I think there’s a little bit of a religious dimension to that as well. While I don’t agree with the brilliant writer, and my friend, John McWhorter, that we should think of wokeness as quintessentially a religion, I do think that it’s filling a religion-shaped hole for many people and in our public life.
And perhaps, Protestant cultures and particularly Puritan cultures are more conducive to that religion-shaped hole being filled with a form of purity politics. The sets of things that people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, believe today is very different from what we believed 300 years ago, but the idea of a moral community as one that needs to be pure and protected from wrong thing, and which must expel anybody who violates its strictures, is I think, one that stands in great continuity to its own past.
In Catholic countries like Italy or Spain, that have always had a very different way of thinking about moral community in which the inevitability of sin and the importance of reintegrating people once they have gone through the private forms of confession and regret, I think make it less easy for this form of purity politics to take shape today.
So you end up with countries like Sweden that speak accent English, are quite integrated into the Anglosphere and have a Protestant background culture, being more influenced by these ideas when a country like Italy where people speak less English, where the society is a little bit more divorced from England and might have its Catholic inheritance, but leads, I think to quite a different way of thinking about the nature and shape of moral community.
Jeff: To the extent that it is taken on that moral aspect and that puritanism that you talk about, one wonders here, how this will play out as more and more of this wokism or whatever we want to call it, is taken away, is pulled out by its roots just by virtue of what we’re seeing Trump do at the present. What fills that hole?
Yascha: And I think we’re going to see a pretty interesting clash of different instincts here. One of the things that allowed these ideas to become so dominant in big parts of the left and the mainstream in the middle of the 2010s was that Donald Trump’s victory made it impossible to criticize any of those ideas while being accused in certain circles of secretly supporting Donald Trump or something like that. So even though the form of right-wing populism of Donald Trump and this form of left-wing identity politics seem dramatically opposed, I think historically they’ve actually helped and served each other.
And I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence, but after the real peak of the influence of these ideas, the uncontestability of these ideas in the summer of 2020, once Joe Biden was in office, that space for criticizing these ideas in a serious way opened up within the mainstream and the central lab to some extent, at least.
So now that Trump is back in office, I think we’re going to see two very different trends. One of them is that his administration is taking very active steps to combat these ideas. Some of them in ways that might in fact be justified, others in ways that both go well beyond the appropriate pushback from the baby out with the bath water and may themselves be a liberal because they use coercive state power to meddle with decisions of institutions that should remain independent.
But all of that will weaken the power of this ideology. At the same time, I could also easily imagine the same dynamic that was present during his first term reasserting itself in many activist organizations, NGOs, schools, universities, in which it’ll become very tempting to embrace those ideas or parts of them as a form of resistance against Trump. And anybody who dares to criticize those ideas is, once again, going to be tarnished as just secretly doing the bidding of Donald Trump.
So it’s very hard, I think, to foresee at this stage, at this juncture, what power these ideas will or won’t have in four years’ time. It may be that it feels like we’ve moved on from them, but given how easily American society polarizes and how culture and society often moves in the opposite direction of political power, I wouldn’t want to draw that conclusion in a precipitative manner.
Jeff: One of the things you’ve written about is how not to resist what we’re going through now both in terms of individuals but also with respect to journalism and journalism taking an advocacy position in many cases. Talk a little bit about that in the time we have left.
Yascha: So I would say two things. The first is that journalists, for a long time, had a self-conception, first of all, as a kind of workaday job. I’m just a reporter, obviously quite a working-class profession, trying to tell you things as they are, tell you what’s going on in the world. And what often went along with that is a professional skepticism. Not a cynicism as I was evoking earlier, but a skepticism saying, look, people all have their own interests. They all spin stories in their own benefit. People with power always have something to hide. And so, whoever I talk to, I should be a little bit of skeptical of them. I should keep some distance from power. I should be the one who doesn’t quite buy anything anybody says fully.
And I think around 20– Well, I think there’s been two transformations of that. One is more longstanding, where journalism became, even as often as renumeration decreased the kind of more prestigious profession. One that is particularly desirable to some of the fanciest people in society. It’s very striking when you look at about half of journalists at The New York Times having gone to top elite colleges, particularly Ivy League universities, and about two-thirds of young journalists at places like The New Republic and other kind of left-leaning magazines. It’s really quite striking to what extent they’re now recruited from a very elite of society.
And then around 2016, 2017, when Trump rose to power, there was also the self-conscious transformation of the role that journalists have as defenders of democracy, as people who should self-consciously try and think about how it is that they can use their profession to save democratic institutions. Now, I take seriously the risk to democratic institutions that comes from some of these authoritarian movements. I think it’s perfectly appropriate in your private life as a citizen to think that you have an obligation to try and preserve democracy.
I think those are positive things. But when a reporter is framing every single news story with a background view as to how to save democracy, and assuming, of course, that if a Democrat gets elected, that’s good for democracy, and if a Republican gets elected, that’s bad for democracy, all you’re doing is to transform institutions that once used to have some amount of bipartisan trust into partisan institutions.
And journalists overestimate how much influence and power they have on their own readers. They think, “This is going to make my readers vote the right way.” But what actually happens is that those readers smell that they’re being lied to, that they’re being managed, that journalists are making an effort to make them come to the right conclusion. And what they actually do is either be stubborn and go in the opposite direction, reach the opposite conclusion, or simply switch off and consume other kinds of news sources. So I think this has been a big own goal by journalists.
Jeff: Or they develop an audience and subscribers or what have you that are there for the confirmation bias.
Yascha: Yes, absolutely. The model of advertising had some bad incentives as well, but the model of really making your money from subscribers can have risks as well when you get captured by that audience. The New York Times, which continues to have some great content and is beaten up to somewhat too readily sometimes, has really become a lifestyle brand that tells upper-middle-class, coastal, highly educated Americans what political opinions to have, but also which pasta to cook and what cushion to buy for the bed. It’s really become a kind of all-purpose lifestyle guide for a very particular political cultural set of people.
Jeff: And what negative effects does that have, as you see it then, on the discussion of politics?
Yascha: One of the negative effects is that it keeps the Left and Democrats from seeing the world for what it is. It allows them to think that America is fundamentally divided into whites and people of color, and therefore to miss that a lot of Latinos are deeply unhappy with the policies they pursue and have been moving very rapidly into the Republican column and supporting Donald Trump. It’s made it hard for democratic decision-makers to recognize just how extensive the mental decline of Joe Biden was and how costly that would be in electoral terms. So often, it actually ends up being counterproductive.
And of course, it also radicalizes the Right, because even for American conservatives have mistrusted The New York Times for many decades at this point, they would still read it. And because The New York Times does have some good reporting, that tethered them to reality in some important ways. Elon Musk doesn’t read The New York Times or anything else like that. He gets his information from the platform he owns, X. And that has radicalized him and allowed him to just really be misinformed.
And I don’t like that word, “misinformation”, but in this case, I think it applies. It’s just to be wrong about a lot of important things in the world where he buys the unreported, unsupported assertion of some random Twitter account, rather than, as might have been the case if mainstream media outlets hadn’t lost their credibility so completely on the right, from an article that for all of its potential biases is actually deeply reported.
Jeff: And finally, Yascha, talk about what you’re looking at now. You’ve written about so many things. You talk about and write about so much. What keeps you up at night? What are you most worried about right now? What are you most looking at and looking to write about?
Yascha: So one of the things that I’ve been loving and writing a lot, my own substack, which all of your listeners can subscribe to at the yaschamounk.substack.com, is my liberty to write about whatever I wish at the moment. And I wrote an article last week with observations about artificial intelligence. I spent some time in France in the fall and wrote about what I saw there. And obviously, I write a lot more political things, about the zero-sum approach to politics that I see from the Trump administration, for example, this week. And I’m going to continue following the very rather turbulent political events that we likely have ahead of ourselves as well.
Look, I do worry that we have seen the rise of a set of anti-establishment politicians who don’t have a deep commitment to the constitutional order, who don’t have a deep commitment to the rule of law, and who don’t want to recognize legitimate limits on their power because they feel that they and they alone truly represent the people.
And then on the other side, we have a political force that clearly is not capable of capturing with zeitgeist, of actually speaking to a majority of fellow citizens, of actually putting forward a convincing or optimistic vision about what kind of future they want, and that therefore is defaulting increasingly to total opposition and to name-calling and to fancying itself as some kind of rerun of the hashtag resistance to Nazism or fascism or something like that. And I worry about the kind of political dynamic that that combination of forces is likely to entail, not just in the next 4 years, which I’m concerned about, but in the next 10 or 20 years.
Jeff: Yascha Mounk, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Yascha: Thank you so much. Really enjoyed this conversation.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate
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Original Interview Full Text Transcript (Daniel Ziblatt):
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host Jeff Schechtman. Today, America finds itself at a crossroads, caught between two conflicting currents. On one side, there’s an aspirational vision of a multicultural, multiracial democracy centered on equity and inclusion. On the other side, a reactionary force aims to preserve a misguided notion of the past driving us towards authoritarianism. According to my guest, Harvard Professor of Government Daniel Ziblatt, the events of January 5th and 6th serve as a stark illustration of these opposing dynamics.
We’re in the midst of seismic shifts, technological revolutions, demographic changes, and a widening class divide. But the problem isn’t confined to institutions or parties or politicians. It also lies with the people. Our nation has been conditioned for more than a century to distrust institutions, a sentiment that has only intensified over the years — from the turn of the last century’s era of industrialization and racial conflict through the Cold War, the Kennedy assassination, and more recently to the COVID pandemic. While Donald Trump may have been the catalyst, the real fuel comes from the voters willing to discard democratic norms to protect their vision of a “real America.”
Certainly, we’ve faced challenges before and risen to meet them, but the pressing question now is: Can we rise to meet this one? In his new book, Tyranny of the Minority, Ziblatt argues that our Constitution inadvertently encourages counter-majoritarian rule. We’ve fallen behind the rest of the world by failing to modernize our political operating system, thereby allowing partisan minorities to wield disproportionate power.
For the GOP, electoral losses have become a signal to double down and consolidate power within a minority base. All of this is about the bedrock of American democracy. Tyranny of the Minority — Professor Ziblatt’s latest work, coauthored with his colleague, Steven Levitsky — serves as a clarion call, urging us to confront the institutional inertia and democratic backsliding that are plaguing the nation. It is my pleasure to welcome Daniel Ziblatt here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us.
Daniel Ziblatt: Yes. Great to be with you.
Jeff: Well, it is great to have you here, even on a subject that is a little bit depressing in and of itself. One of the things that has been written about and that you and your co-author talk about is this idea that multiracial, multi-ethnic democracies don’t have a very good track record. And it seems that when you add in technology, the speed at which events are moving today, the distrust that’s inherent in our process, plus the state of our Constitution, it’s not a very promising picture. Talk about that first.
Daniel: Yes. Well, first, I should say that these developments that you talk about in many ways are very welcome developments. I think America is a much stronger, much more vibrant society because of its diversity and this is a dynamic that’s been part of America from its early days as a country of immigration. So the question is, how do we cope with the challenges that accompany this?
And one of the things that we make the case for in our book is that there’s a reaction to this, one with historical precedent. Our first attempt at creating a multiracial democracy, after the end of the Civil War, in the US South, where voting rights were extended to African American men, though not to women. This was a valiant effort, but it faced a backlash and a reaction of those who were being displaced or felt they were being displaced. The White property holders of the US South pushed back against this and dismantled the emerging democracy.
So similarly, today, we have an increasingly diverse society, and after 1965 really a fully democratic society, in which Americans of all races, all citizens, have the right to vote. And, as throughout history — and we really studied, both my co-author and I spent a lot of time studying democracies in other parts of the world — moments of inclusion, though it’s not an automatic reaction, often tend to be followed by moments of exclusion, pushback efforts to restrict the vote and political rights. And so that’s essentially what we’re living through today.
Jeff: And as we see that pushback, I guess the broader question is — and it goes to the constitutional arguments and some of the things that you talk about in the book — this notion that we don’t have the operating system to accommodate this change. It’s difficult to deal with the pushback because of the system that we have.
Daniel: Yes. So the first point that we just talked about is something that I think a lot of people have pointed out. I think where we have a distinctive angle on this is really pointing out that our political institutions and our Constitution, which in many ways are admirable and have served us very well at different points in our history, do have a problem in that we have not updated our institutions. The thing to remember about our Constitution is that it’s a pre-democratic document. It’s the oldest written constitution in the world, which at some level, your listeners may say, well, that must mean it’s worked pretty well. And I think that’s right.
It’s a remarkable document. It’s worked very well throughout our history in producing stability. Yes we did have a civil war, but compared to other countries around the world, it’s been a remarkably successful document. It’s given us our prosperity, I think, in many ways. But one of the reasons why the Constitution has worked so well is that from the very beginning, we have amended it, we’ve changed it, we’ve updated it. Think of the Bill of Rights immediately after the convention. Think after the Civil War, the expansion of voting rights to African American men, the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal rights for all citizens.
The beginning of the 20th century, women were given the right to vote; and, also the beginning of the 20th century, we began to elect our senators rather than appointing them. These all required changes to our Constitution. This continued all the way up. People did the hard work of improving our democracy up through the 1960s. And what we note is that really beginning around 1970, we stopped doing that work.
And unlike other democracies, which have continued to— which often began in much less democratic situations than we did/ I mean, our Constitution was, for all of its flaws, more republican and democratic, small-d democratic, than any other constitution at the time; but, whereas other countries have continued to improve their constitutions and make them more democratic, partly because of the difficulty of changing our Constitution, we’ve stopped doing that work. And I think you can’t understand the crisis that we’re in today without understanding the failure to continue to democratize our Constitution.
Jeff: Which raises the question of why we have entered this stasis period with respect to the change in the Constitution?
Daniel: Yes. It’s a really good question and we contend with that a bit in the book. And there are a couple of different things I would point to. One thing is that the US Constitution is actually the hardest constitution of the world to change, which is not a small detail. Again, if you want to understand why we are where we are, there’s two paths in the Constitution for amending the Constitution. One is the constitutional convention, which I don’t think is— we don’t make the case for that. I think that would be quite a dangerous path to go.
But there’s a more common route, which is to amend the Constitution through a procedure where two-thirds of the House of Representatives approves of something, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-quarters of the states. Now, that’s really a cumbersome process and the founders were right to make this difficult because we don’t want any political leader to come into office and be able to change the Constitution. And most countries do make it difficult to change their constitutions. But other countries do things such as — it’s quite common in Scandinavia, for instance — to make it that you have to have two-thirds of two successive parliaments do it.
So, you know, essentially, it has to be done twice and with the supermajority requirement, but that makes it easier. So to take a country that we dig into a bit in the book: Norway. We’re really interested in Norway — it’s fascinating because it has the world’s second oldest written constitution after the US and yet it’s been amended hundreds of times. And today, Norway by all accounts, in these international indices that measure how vibrant a democracy is, Norway is among the most vibrant and enduring democracies in the world today. And that’s because it’s been easier to change the constitution.
So the first part of the answer to your question why we stopped doing this is that it’s always been difficult. But what’s different about now? And I think there’s two points I would make here.
One is we live in a highly polarized time. Which is part of the source of the problem but also a barrier to solving the problem, so it’s hard to get representatives of both parties to agree on these things. But I think an even more critical point, in a way that’s somehow underappreciated, is we’ve lost our constitutional imagination. I think most Americans respond to the idea that we could make our system more democratic with a sense of “Well, that’s never going to happen.”
And we’ve forgotten that this is part of the American tradition — and it’s what we’re doing today that’s actually radical. Our proposals are not radical. What we’re doing today is radical: engaging in this experiment of non-reform. And so part of the purpose of the book is to tell the stories of how the Constitution has been changed in the past in the US, as well as in other countries, to remind Americans that this is our democracy and we can change it.
A poll that just came up, which I just saw this morning before I came on the air, is a survey done by Pew that finds that overwhelming majorities of Americans want to get rid of the Electoral College. We’re the only democracy in the world with an electoral college for selecting a president. So, between the fact that we’re a total global outlier and that most Americans want to change this, this is something that we should begin to think about.
Jeff: How much difference does it make in a country like Norway, that the population is so much more homogeneous than it is with what we’re trying to do here in America?
Daniel: Well, very interesting you raised that point. Twenty percent of Norwegian people living in Norway today are foreign-born, which is a number very similar to our own numbers. So it’s true that the US is a country that has been a pioneer in a sense, in diversity, and a country of immigration historically and since the 1960s as well.
But what’s so fascinating is that a lot of Europe’s countries facing different history — not Norway, but other countries with history of colonialism, let’s say France — are the counterpoints to our history of slavery. And also then have become, in the last 30 years, much more diverse political societies.
So, in a way, I think we have more substantial challenges on this front, given our direct history of slavery. But all societies are becoming more diverse, and everywhere this is prompting a backlash. And there’s authoritarian backlash in Sweden; there’s a right-wing party that’s in power, in a coalition government. There’s Le Pen in France, almost won the presidency. In Germany, there’s far-right movements, and so there’s a real backlash everywhere.
And what’s so fascinating is that these patterns of backlash look very similar from country to country. It’s usually around 30 percent of the electorate, which is a similar number according to most estimates of the MAGA core of the Trump base.
The difference between the United States and a lot of these other countries is that our Constitution allows that 30 percent into power in a way that other countries don’t. So even in a place like Sweden or in Italy, where you have far-right parties in power, they’re always in coalition; they have to form coalitions. And so this contains the damaging effects, I think, of these movements. In the United States, our system empowers this minority, and that’s why we call this the tyranny of the minority.
Jeff: How much does distrust of government and distrust of institutions play a role in this? That seems to be amped up here more than it is, for example, in some of the European countries we’re talking about.
Daniel: I think you are right. And you mentioned this in your opener that this is part of the problem, but I think this is a barrier to reform. It’s also a source of alienation that provides fertile terrain for extremist forces who appeal to voters by saying, “The system is rigged. Come support us.”
But I think one way of thinking about how we get out of this situation— certainly there’s lots of avenues of trying to address this, but I think one of the sources of alienation and disaffection and distrust is the fact that very popular things are often getting thwarted.
Take gun control. Overwhelming majorities of Americans think that there needs to be some kind of— maybe disagreements on amount, how much gun control, but there need to be some limits put on the use of guns and the sale of guns and distribution of guns and access to guns. But these very popular bills are often held up in the Senate by the filibuster.
Or take action on climate change, abortion rights, efforts to raise the minimum wage.
There’s all sorts of very popular policy ideas — they’re supported by majorities of Americans — which are often thwarted by our institutions. And so my sense is that if we had a system in which majorities could actually speak — and this is why, again, we make the case for reform such as eliminating or weakening the filibuster — that this would generate a sense of enthusiasm and possibility that we can control our own democracy.
And I think so many Americans feel that they can’t change their democracy, and so they become disengaged, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you think, “Well, my vote doesn’t make a difference, so I won’t vote.” And that comes true because, in fact, not voting is going to lead to outcomes that you don’t like.
Jeff: One of the things that plays into this, and that we see inherent in our politics today, is this division between policy issues on the one hand and culture-war/emotional issues on the other hand. Talk a little bit about that and the way that is really feeding into this danger.
Daniel: We talked about race already, but there are a whole range of other hot-button cultural issues. And these are issues upon which it’s easy to mobilize voters. And so if you have policy positions, which are not particularly popular and can’t garner majority support, it’s very common for politicians to try to change the topic of conversation to issues that can generate enthusiasm. And so we have this outrage industry both in the media as well as among politicians.
If you’re pushing for complex policy proposals that aren’t very popular, and that are not going to mobilize voters, you’re not going to win elections. And so it’s much easier to talk about really hot-button, simplified issues. I was actually just recently looking at the 1912 Progressive Party platform — which was Theodore Roosevelt, after being president, ran for president a second time, and he lost the Republican nomination and ran as a Progressive Party candidate.
And this long document with detailed policy proposals, including things such as giving women the right to vote, an income tax, these complex policy proposals. What’s so striking today is the Republican Party in the 2020 election didn’t even have a party platform. Didn’t even have a platform because the party wasn’t really running on ideas.
And so I think what very often happens if a party doesn’t have ideas, what you do instead run on is resentments. The thing about running on resentments is it’s like a short-term fix for a party because you can maybe win an election in the short run, but over the long run you’re inflaming your population and it’s a very reckless form of politics.
Jeff: Since the constitutional solutions don’t seem to be effective, as we’ve been talking about, are there extra-constitutional answers to maybe begin to turn this ship around? Even things as controversial as they are, like third and fourth parties that may come along, that change the dynamic, change the landscape in a way that shakes it up enough that something positive could happen.
Daniel: In our book, in our last chapter, we have 15 proposals for reform. And so I encourage your listeners to go look at that. Some of these are really stretches and others are more realistic. And it’s not a random list. There was a real logic to the list. The list is of reforms that other democracies have introduced, number one, so things that have been proven to work well. And in some of them in fact there’s a path to reform.
Some of these things that I think that don’t require constitutional change and are within reach include some institutional reforms, such as getting rid of or weakening the filibuster. The filibuster has been changed often throughout its history; as late as the 1970s, the threshold for getting a bill through was lowered. It could be lowered again. And all this requires is a vote in the Senate.
There’s carve-outs for the filibuster. You could add a carve-out for, let’s say, the protecting of voting rights. So this is one that only needs the Senate to approve, does not require a president to sign. It does not require the House of Representatives to support it, let alone other states. So that’s one thing — the filibuster reform. Something else on our list is to have states pass laws that have automatic voter registration. Pennsylvania just recently did this. A lot of states are doing this to make it easier to vote.
And in most democracies around the world, governments make it easier for voters to vote. Not more difficult. And this is something that can be done at the state level, does not require constitutional change. If you have automatic voter registration, it makes it easier to vote and you will allow majorities to speak more clearly.
And I think this ultimately would have a positive effect. Similarly, voting rights protections at the national level. There was a bill that almost passed two years ago that got held up by the filibuster. So if we eliminated the filibuster, or weakened the filibuster, you could then pass voting rights reform at the national level.
Now, to come to your particular suggestion of multiple parties, I agree entirely with you. I think our democracy would be enriched with multiple parties. Most democracies do in fact have multiple parties. But here’s the catch. In our current system, the rules are set up. We have an electoral system where each congressional district sends one member of Congress. That is a system that really political scientists have demonstrated, lends itself to a two-party system. It’s very hard for a third party to win.
And so, given the rules of the game that we have, I think it’s a mistake to try to support third-party candidates because they will in fact not make it into office. And you may think, well, you’re sending a message to politicians, and I can understand that, but often it backfires because, in fact, you split the vote in a way that’s counterproductive and the guy that you don’t like might end up in office. If you want a multi-party system, one of the proposals we make in our last chapter is to introduce a form of proportional representation, which requires changing the voting rules.
So you have to get the sequence right. If you change the voting rules, and this is something that’s left up to the states, a key term here for people to look up is ranked order voting. It’s up to the states to determine their own voting rules. If you introduce ranked order voting, various forms of proportional representation, then it would be easier for more parties to emerge, and I think ultimately would all work to the benefit of our democracy.
Jeff: Some of these problems that we’re seeing on the national level are filtering down to states and state legislatures, and we see excessive gerrymandering and voting rights issues and things that are determined by the states that are reflecting many of the national problems that we’re talking about.
Daniel: That’s really where the battle is taking place right now. Sometimes people ask us, is the future in the United States going to look like Hungary or Russia? And I think that’s really exaggerated at the national level because you really have two parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, battling it out. And I think the Democratic Party is quite robust in its opposition to Trumpism and so on. But where you see many Hungarys occurring is at the state level. There’s really a lot of states in the US where voting rights are under assault, where efforts are being made to make it more difficult to vote, number one.
Number two, gerrymandering, where the state legislatures, once a party’s in power, redraw the boundaries to make it so it’s harder to vote them out of office. To give you an example of this, the state of Wisconsin is a state where there’s more Democrats than Republicans. So, for statewide offices, where everybody votes and every vote is counted for the governorship, there’s a Democratic governor in Wisconsin. But because of gerrymandering, those same voters produce overwhelming lopsided victories in the state legislature, because the way that the territory is carved up into districts, for Republicans.
Then, once Republicans are in office and control the state legislature, they are responsible for drawing boundaries, and they continue to draw boundaries in a way that makes it harder for them to be voted out of office. And then the final step of this process is to try to shape the court system. And so what’s happened in Wisconsin is really just a remarkable process where there was an election where you had a state Supreme Court justice selected— and they have elections for justices in the state of Wisconsin that the Republican state legislature is in the effort to try to overturn—
So that recently elected justice, [Janet Protasciewicz], when running for her judgeship, said that she wanted to take on gerrymandering. Once she’s come into office, the state legislature is pursuing impeachment against her, before she’s even ruled on a case, because they say she’s biased against them. And so there’s an effort to remove her from office. And all of this is hardball politics to try to entrench a party in power.
And so there’s a lot of states across the US where this is happening, and this is very worrying because, if you look back at American history into the 19th century — the Reconstruction period, which we described in pretty good detail in our book — this is where democracy dies is at the state level.
Jeff: And this is where the issue of there being so many moving parts in the process that it’s hard to imagine any grand bargain or grand solution. It raises the point that Donald Rumsfeld used to make, that if you have an intractable problem maybe the only solution is a bigger problem. Which really raises the question do things have to get worse before they get better? Do we have to bottom out in some way?
Daniel: Yes, I’m not a big believer in that theory of history. I think usually when we bottom out things just get worse. One might say that if we really bottom out, then we can learn. And that is true — I do think at some point democracies after going through a catastrophe learn and realize that there’s a lot at stake. And I think that this helps explain, for instance, the relative robustness of German democracies today. Having gone through the horrors of Nazism, the first couple generations after World War II really realized that democracy is something that needed to be defended.
So one might say, “Maybe we need to go through a process of really where we lose our democracy to appreciate it.” I’m a believer in a very clever line from Otto von Bismarck, the German statesman from the 19th century, who said that only a fool learns from his own mistakes; the wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
One of the reasons we wrote this book, really, is to try to draw lessons from history from other countries to warn Americans and let Americans know that there’s incredible opportunities, and to learn about them from other countries, and there’s also incredible dangers, and to try to avoid that fate ourselves. So I really hope that people look at it and realize that there is a lot at stake and we need to avoid bottoming out if at all possible before trying to reconstruct our democracy.
Jeff: We know how powerful personality and leadership is on the authoritarian side. We’ve seen it over and over again. What about leadership on the other side and how important is that?
Daniel: Yes, really very, very critical. I’m glad you raised that question. There’s two ways in which I think leadership really matters and can make a difference. Number one when faced with authoritarian threats it’s absolutely for—
In our book we lay a basic test of what holds the line against authoritarianism. Number one, if somebody or a party has to accept elections, win or lose. Number two, they have to not use violence to try to gain power. And number three, and this gets to the point of leadership, if you’re a mainstream party or politician or political leader, and your allies engage in any of those first two behaviors, you have to vehemently, vocally condemn, distance yourself from, and hold accountable anybody who engages in that kind of behavior.
Now it’s very tempting if you’re a political leader to look to the next election and think, “I would rather remain silent or justify or excuse bad behavior from my allies.” But looking at the history of democracy— and again, we recount this in the book, this is how democracies get into trouble: it’s when mainstream politicians who appear like democratic small-d, appear committed to democracy, ultimately choose their own career prospects over a commitment to democracy.
And I think that’s the situation we face today. This recent report came out of Mitt Romney describing many members of the Senate, many of his colleagues and party friends who said, “Of course, I know that Trump lost the election, but I’m afraid to go cross him.”
And what political leadership is, is the courage to recognize that some things matter more than party. This is a cliche, but it’s absolutely critical for democracies to survive.
It’s when political leaders don’t do that that democracy has gotten in trouble. So that’s one thing. And then a second point I would make about leadership is that leadership is about being creative and finding coalitions.
When the deck seems to be stacked against you in terms of trying to find a coalition to find partners to push through reforms, leadership is about political creativity and finding new alliances, finding new friends, finding new people you may disagree with about a lot of things, but you can cooperate with to form the coalitions to get reform through. I mean, this is how Franklin Roosevelt got the New Deal through. This is how any constitutional reform comes about. So political leadership is about political creativity and that’s something we should reward as well.
Jeff: I guess the other part of it is charismatic leadership because authoritarian leaders tend to be charismatic inherently — not always, but most of the time. We don’t necessarily see a countervailing amount of charismatic leadership coming from a democratic side, at least not enough.
Daniel: Not at the moment. No, that’s true. I think that people often talk about the power of the bully pulpit of the president who can get up and speak and convince people. Some political scientists have studied this a lot. And I think the bully pulpit matters, but maybe it doesn’t matter as much as we think. Often charisma happens behind closed doors. I think both things are necessary.
Clearly, you need to inspire people, motivate people, articulate a vision of a society that you want to live in. Without that, it’s hard to be a political leader. But on the other hand, it’s also critical to be able to do the hard work behind closed doors, forging coalitions, finding partners; and that stuff is less glamorous, but it’s just as important for democratic politics.
Jeff: And what does history tell us about generational change and the impact of that in this difficult situation for democracy?
Daniel: This is one area where I’m actually relatively hopeful in the United States. There’s two key pillars for multicultural, multi-ethnic, or multi-racial democracy. One is that embrace of diversity, a diverse society. And two is the idea of a political equality for people of all backgrounds. And if you look at public opinion surveys, it’s very clear that younger Americans are much more open to the notion of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracy, and it’s really older generations that have the problem.
And so with demographic change, I think ultimately this is a slow-moving process. I think there’s room for hope. But the problem is that unless we change our institutions to allow those majorities to speak, we’re going to continue to be stymied, frustrated, disaffected.
Look at the groups of students and young people who are pushing for gun control; they speak for majorities. But at this point, they are not able to achieve the legislation that would prevent kids from getting shot in schools. And so generational and demographic change is certainly necessary, but my concern is that it’s not sufficient. We also have to do the work of changing our institutions to empower younger people.
Jeff: The other danger with generational change is that after a while they become frustrated and cynical about what they see.
Daniel: Yes, absolutely. So in our book, we ask the reader to imagine a young woman born in, let’s say, 1990. This person will have lived through the presidential elections between 1990 and 2020, in which the loser of the popular vote has twice won the presidency. In 2000 and in 2016. And if this was your only life experience, don’t you begin to think, “Well, is this political system really worth defending? Is this political system really worth trying to improve upon?”
And there’s great room for disaffection. So, I was born in the 1970s; if your listeners are born even before that, you have an image in your mind of how our political system operates. But again, think of young people growing up today and having witnessed the political system they’ve witnessed, and we have to make sure that we don’t get the disaffection that would understandably emerge out of that life experience.
Jeff: Daniel Ziblatt, the book is Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. Daniel, I thank you so much for spending time with us.
Daniel: Thanks so much. Enjoyed it.
Jeff: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
