Ian Bassin is co-founder and Executive Director of Protect Democracy. He previously served as Associate White House Counsel.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ian Bassin discuss what democracy defenders got right about Trump’s authoritarian tactics, why institutional actors have failed to resist democratic backsliding, and the underlying drivers behind the global rise of illiberalism.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Ian, you and I started talking right around the election in 2016. We were both trying to make sense of what was happening in the world and what the first presidency—what we now know was the first presidency—of Donald Trump would mean for the United States and the world. You were starting an organization called Protect Democracy, which has since grown enormously and plays a really important role in the ecosystem of people trying to defend democratic norms and rules.
Looking at where we are today, what do you think would have surprised us back in 2016 or 2017? What about where we are today do you think we might have expected nearly a decade ago?
Ian Bassin: You’ve teed up an opportunity for maybe both of us to do something that would normally be considered impolite: say we were right. I don’t say that to be self-aggrandizing for either of us. I say it because I actually think it’s important to mark that fact for people to note. Michelle Goldberg has a piece in The New York Times this week that says the resistance libs were right.
What I mean by that is that you and I both—and you in particular—really saw what was building around the world, which you’ve talked about on this podcast a lot: a global move away from democracy toward more illiberal, more authoritarian forms of government. We started talking right after the 2016 election because it was apparent that Trump’s election marked the real landing of that global dynamic here on American shores.
What we built together with your advice—you and I spoke in November 2016 and December 2016, and I spoke with Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Kim Scheppele, Tim Snyder, and Anne Applebaum—was grounded in the fact that all of you had been banging the drum for a while that we needed to be on guard. The idea of democracy was losing altitude, and this more competitive, hybrid form of authoritarianism was rising around the world. We needed to be prepared for it to reach the United States.
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One of the things I asked you and some of your peers in the field was what this looks like when it happens. Is there a pattern you can see play out? You’ve written about this, and you all basically said a version of the same thing: there is a pattern. You’re going to see the politicization of independent institutions like the civil service, law enforcement, and the military; the spreading of disinformation; the aggrandizing of executive power; the quashing of dissent; and the corrupting of elections. There was a playbook you laid out.
Pretty much everything you said has come to pass. The big-picture answer to your question is that I’m not really surprised by anything we are seeing. These are the things that you and others in your field, and we at Protect Democracy, said were going to happen. That includes the detail that after Trump lost in 2020, it was Orbán 2.0 that was more dangerous than Orbán 1.0. During the years Orbán was out of power in Hungary, he built what he called a central political force field to protect himself and his allies when they returned to power, and then executed a much more devastating assault on the Hungarian system.
We said there was a possibility that something like that would happen here. What we initially got wrong was that we thought it would be someone other than Trump who would pick up the mantle and do Trumpism 2.0. It took a while to realize that it was actually going to be Trump himself. During those intervening years, we were saying that this was the real danger.
At the big-picture level, I’m not surprised by what we’re seeing. We’re seeing pretty much exactly what we expected.
Mounk: That’s really interesting. I think I look back at how we saw the world in 2016 and 2017 a little more critically in some ways, but it will be interesting to tease that out over the course of the conversation. One way of thinking about this is to split the question into different component parts.
One component part is whether we correctly predicted the nature of the attack on democratic norms and institutions that Donald Trump and his administration would push forward. Another question is whether we sufficiently understood both what had produced that moment and what the right ways were to resist and oppose those power grabs. On the first question, which is a very important one, I would immodestly give us pretty high marks. On the second question, I would give myself much lower marks, and that is something I have been trying to grapple with.
Bassin: I think you have three questions in there. One of them, which I don’t want to gloss over, is how accurately we predicted the things he would do and the ways he would try to dismantle American democracy. On that question, I think we were quite accurate. The things you’ve written, and the document we put out in 2024 called The Authoritarian Playbook 2025, laid out what Trump would do if he came back into power.
If you look at that document, it’s remarkably accurate: weaponizing law enforcement to go after his opponents, deploying the military to the streets of American cities. It was remarkably accurate. Thankfully, it wasn’t that hard to predict, because he told us, and his allies told us, what they were planning to do. That’s question one.
Question two is about causes. What produced this moment? Why did it happen? What is driving it? That’s the one I’d like to spend some time on. Question three is about responses. What strategies would actually work? That’s where you suggested giving us collectively lower marks, and I think that’s right.
When Trump was re-elected, I had a moment of existential crisis on a number of fronts. One was that we had been working as an organization for eight years to try to prevent the decline of American democracy into something more authoritarian, and now it was happening. There was a sense that we could not keep doing the same thing over and over again and fall into the Einsteinian trap of expecting different results.
During the first Trump term, one of the things we relied on heavily was litigation in the courts as a way of checking autocratic consolidation. After Trump’s re-election, I was much more hesitant to put so much weight on that strategy. I worried that in 2025 we would devote enormous energy to court battles, win early victories in lower courts, and then see those victories erased when cases reached the Supreme Court.
I worried we would reach the end of the Supreme Court term in June with the croupier essentially wiping all our chips off the table because we had put them all in the courts basket. At the beginning of 2025, I thought it was important not to put all our chips on the courts and to recognize that we were facing a political problem more than a legal one.
That led me to think we needed to put more chips on political coalition-building, of the kind you saw in places like Poland and Brazil to confront autocrats there. In practice, the court strategy has actually done better than I expected. The Supreme Court erased many lower-court wins, but those lower-court wins still mattered in slowing Trump down.
The Court recently refused to allow him to deploy the National Guard in Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles. I don’t think we can count on the Supreme Court, but the court strategy has performed better than I anticipated. The political organizing strategy, by contrast, has done worse than I expected. It has been extremely difficult to get institutional actors in this country to really lean in to protecting the system.
I’ve been surprised by how often institutional actors have caved. We were wrong to think they would do better than they did. That brings us back to the second question, which is the one I want to ask you now. If we want to get out of this, we have to understand the drivers. We have to get at the underlying forces.
I’m curious about your current assessment. You’ve been thinking about this for a long time. What is driving this moment of illiberalism and authoritarianism around the world? I don’t think I’ve asked you that question in a while, and I’d like to hear your current thoughts.
Mounk: Why is it that Trump, and so many other politicians who in some ways are dissimilar to him but in many important ways are very similar to him, are riding high in the polls all around the Western world and beyond? We can double down on what strategies are working and what strategies are not working. I think there’s been a great little preview of each of those topics, and we have time to go into depth on each of them.
Let’s start with our rueful victory lap. Let’s start with the thing where we were sadly right. We’re recording this a couple of days after it became public that the Department of Justice is investigating Jerome Powell for supposed perjury in congressional testimony relating to the renovation of the Federal Reserve. It is striking to me the extent to which Donald Trump has used his control over the Department of Justice to go after his political enemies.
In this particular case, it is also striking that he’s doing that in the service of trying to increase his hold. In some of these cases, it was mostly to settle political scores. It was just people like Letitia James, who he has a deep personal gripe against. You cross me, I’m going to make you pay. In this case, it goes beyond that, because the animus really comes from the fact that Donald Trump has a very strong view about what kind of monetary policy he would like the Federal Reserve to pursue. He can’t directly fire the head of the Federal Reserve. This is an attempt to push out the head of the Federal Reserve, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and to expand his power. It is really an attempt to put in place his loyalists into key parts of the state and then set policy that he agrees with.
To me, that is one recent but very important case of how Trump is following this playbook, which is first to use control over the most important levers of the state to intimidate opponents, both the actual political opposition, in this case the Democratic Party, and non-partisan experts and technocrats like Jerome Powell, who’s no person’s idea of a radical Democrat. Second, to put his loyalists into positions of power where they serve his political interests rather than the judgment of what the best economic policy might be, of what interest rate would in the long run be best for the American economy, and so on. That’s one tiny little microcosm from the recent news about that.
To go back to the 2016 question, I think that’s what we all predicted. I think we would have had some trouble really imagining that. In 2016 and 2017, I absolutely would have said this is the kind of thing that could eventually happen. Seeing it actually play out, seeing the extent of the politicization of the judiciary in going after partisan opponents, is striking. None of them have yet actually been put in jail, and the legal system has been relatively good at throwing out some of those lawsuits and so on. The extent to which the Department of Justice now is playing ball is really quite striking, isn’t it?
Bassin: I was a couple of years ago with some allies in the pro-democracy space and coalition and was saying that we at Protect Democracy thought a particular thing was going to happen. I remember one of the people on the call saying, wow, you guys are the most paranoid motherfuckers in American politics. We took it a bit as a badge of honor. I’ve thought about making T-shirts that say that. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.
In this case, I’m going to push back again. I am not surprised even by the brazenness of Trump directing the Department of Justice to indict Letitia James, James Comey, and Jerome Powell. I think it took two terms to get to this point. In the first term, he wanted to do these things. We had reports out of the administration that he was asking, why can’t we indict Andy McCabe and Jim Comey? The problem at the time was that there was still a relatively professionalized Department of Justice and FBI. Even the political appointees Trump himself put in place—Jeff Sessions, again, as you said, like Jerome Powell, nobody’s idea of a liberal Democrat—were unwilling to carry out Trump’s orders. It took part two of Trump’s project, his return to power, for him to understand that in order to do the things he wanted to do, he needed total and complete loyalty from the people in key positions.
Mounk: Ironically, losing in 2020 was probably one of the best things that happened to him, because in 2020, I don’t think he had the staff and the laws. It took him four years in the wilderness to build on the political appointees of the first term, to write Project 2025, to continue to colonize the think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, and then to be able to come in with a completely different team in terms of loyalty and competence than what he had in 2016.
Bassin: I actually don’t think there’s as much of a distinction between the Letitia James prosecution and what’s being now suggested about going after Jerome Powell. I suspect you and I might agree on this—that at the end of the day, you could look at them and say, well, with Powell, he’s trying to impose his will on an independent Federal Reserve, and with Letitia James, he’s just simply trying to seek revenge. But both of them are of a piece with his view that if you use the levers of power you have to coerce loyalty and demonstrate that nobody should cross you so that everyone does what you want.
One of the ways, for example, that he was able to get the prosecution in New York of Eric Adams dropped was he managed to get the Department of Justice to say to the lawyers in the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York who were resisting, we might prosecute you unless you do what we want. We will bludgeon you. And so those lawyers ended up eventually giving up or resigning—to their credit, actually resigning in protest because it was clear that there was nothing that was going to stop Trump and the people he had installed at the senior levels of the Department of Justice from going after them.
So the prosecution of Letitia James and James Comey, in one sense, are revenge, but I think in a greater sense, they are a model of what will happen to you no matter who you are if you cross me. I’ve talked about this before. I grew up in New York City in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was Donald Trump’s era in New York City. And it was also John Gotti’s era in New York City. Trump and Gotti were two of the most dominant characters in the New York City media, in the news, in the tabloids. Trump watched Gotti very closely, and his behavior very much apes the mafia style of behavior—of coercing loyalty, offering protection for those people who paid tribute.
You look at what’s going on now with some of these deals where Nvidia’s allowed to sell its chips to China so long as they cut the government in on a 10 percent share, or US Steel has to give Trump the golden share decision making. As long as the Don is paid tribute, you get protection and you’re allowed to operate. Delcy Rodriguez is learning that right now in Venezuela. And if you cross the Don, well, then cement boots.
Mounk: Nice chips, shame if something should happen to them.
Bassin: There’s a line people remember from Goodfellas where Joe Pesci is being talked about, and the point is that if you come at him with a knife, he’ll come back with a gun. If you come at him with a gun, you’d better kill him, because he’ll keep coming back. That is essentially what Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump: if someone comes after you, come back at them twice as hard. That is how you get your way.
That idea is obviously fundamentally at odds with liberal democracy and constitutionalism. The notion that we simply impose our will because we are strong enough—which Stephen Miller recently articulated in defense of what was happening in Venezuela and the threats against Greenland—is the animating ethos of Trumpism. I think it explains what is happening with Powell just as much as what is happening with Letitia James.
Mounk: How do we think about what truly matters in this moment and what is less important in terms of what the Trump administration is doing? I want to take one example. I think the fact that a sitting president imposes, through legally somewhat dubious means, that one of the most significant cultural institutions in the country should carry his name—renaming the Kennedy Center the Trump Kennedy Center, and making sure that within a day or two the name Trump goes up above the name Kennedy on the actual building—is absolutely astonishing and striking.
We do not have a tradition of sitting presidents naming things after themselves. We tend to name a lot of things after dead presidents, particularly those who were assassinated, like John F. Kennedy. In fact, the Kennedy Center was named in his honor a few months after his death. There is simply no precedent for a sitting president to say, I’m going to name this in my own name. When you add the fact that there was free entry to national parks on Martin Luther King Day, and Donald Trump canceled that free entry and made entry free instead on Donald Trump Day, which is to say his birthday, those things are astonishing.
At the same time, with a slightly cold-blooded look, you might say that this is a distraction. Who cares what the Kennedy Center is called? Who cares when people get free entry to national parks? The things that really matter are prosecutions of political opponents and the building up of various paramilitary forces that have intense personal loyalty to Trump and can exert influence on the streets of American cities.
How do we think about these softer things, which outrage people and do seem to build something like a personality cult, but also in some light appear to be more of a distraction, versus the things that from the perspective of democratic theory have more obvious significance?
You’ve built a formidable organization over the last ten years, but you have limited resources. How do you think about which of these things you respond to? Which of these things should my listeners care about when they read about them in the news? Which of those things should people scream into the void about for a bit, have a beer to calm down, and then forget, focusing instead on something else?
Bassin: Well, first we’re building a pantheon of people that Donald Trump is copying. We named John Gotti, maybe Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas. The one that comes to mind with respect to what you’re saying is Caligula, the Roman emperor who had people cut the heads off statues of formerly revered Roman figures in order to put his own head on those statues.
Your question gets at one of the hardest things we have to wrestle with at an organization dedicated to preventing the United States from declining into a more authoritarian form of government. As you know, we have limited resources. How do we focus them? One of the things we went through over the last couple of months was really putting the screws to ourselves on answering this question.
Steve Bannon and Donald Trump have talked about this idea of flooding the zone, of shock and awe, of doing so many things at once. This is really a strategy that borrows from some of the great military theorists of the past. Sun Tzu talks about this. If you can spread your opponent’s defenses thin enough, it becomes easier to defeat them. There is a very deliberate strategy here on Trump’s part, which is to take constant action on all fronts in order to create the challenge of dividing those of us who want to defend a vision of American democracy and freedom that we would like to hand off to the next generation.
The risk is that we become so split and distracted by everything we are fighting on that we become weaker. At the organization, at Protect Democracy, we do a lot of litigating, as I mentioned, to try to hold the line. We do legislative work, which I can come back to later, including helping states pass laws under state law that allow people to hold federal officials accountable for constitutional violations, such as the horrific shooting of Renée Nicole Good that we saw in Minneapolis. We do legislative advocacy. We do technology work. We build software.
We do a lot of things, and we cannot do everything. If we try to do everything, we will be net weaker for it. That is not to say that the naming of the Kennedy Center as the Trump Kennedy Center is not important. I do think it is important for reasons you and I would both appreciate, which is cultural dominance. The message is that there is nowhere you can look where I am not the center of attention and where I do not control.
There is a reason personalist emperors, dictators, and autocrats do this. It is a way of demonstrating total domination, of bringing opposition to heel. Saddam had his statues everywhere. He was always watching you. He hovered over everything you did. This matters, but we have to order what we are going to focus on.
The thing that we at Protect Democracy are focused on as the highest-order priority is protecting the integrity of American elections: the midterm elections coming up later this year and ultimately the 2028 election. You participated in an event we did in 2017, an initial summit for democracy right after Trump had been elected. We brought people together from across the political spectrum in Washington to preview what we were in for.
You moderated a panel on which the Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza spoke. At the end of the panel, you asked each of the panelists, all of whom had worked in autocratic countries, if they had one piece of advice from their experience for Americans who were about to get a window into what it is like to live in a country that is losing its democracy. I remember Vlad’s answer.
He said that in the United States, you do not yet know who is going to win your next election. In Russia, they do. You are not where we are yet. Hold really tight to the fact that you do not yet know who is going to win the next election.
His insight was that as long as there are regular opportunities for the public to choose whether to continue down a road or pivot to a different one, you have an escape valve. You have the ability to correct. That is the great thing about democracy, the ability to self-correct. That is, at the end of the day, the sine qua non.
There are many other elements that contribute to this. We could talk about the effects of different things on the ability to meaningfully contest an election and protect it. At the end of the day, as long as we do not know who is going to win the next election and there is a meaningful opportunity and a fair process to contest it, and for someone else to win and have that win honored, we have the ability to survive this.
That is our approach at Protect Democracy. Everything flows from the number-one question of how we make sure we maintain the ability to have free and fair elections. That involves more than making sure people can vote on election day or in the weeks leading up to it. It means making sure people can organize, argue, debate, criticize, receive information, and share information, and that the winners actually get seated.
Everything we can do to protect that is the priority. The further something is from that core concern, even when it is horrific, inappropriate, offensive, problematic, and important, the further down the priority ladder it falls in terms of where we can devote our limited resources.
Mounk: I have a thought and a question. The thought is that it has been a very eventful decade for all of us, but especially for Vladimir Kara-Murza, who courageously went back to Russia to fight against Vladimir Putin, was quickly taken prisoner, spent a long time in jail, was finally released somewhat recently, and is now back to fighting for a democratic future in Russia. I saw him speak about the experience and about his hopes for Russia last summer, and he was as impressive as ever.
The question I have is where we are now with election security in the United States and with Donald Trump’s ability to subvert elections. His willingness to do so is quite clear. In 2016, an election he won, he kept claiming that there had been massive voter fraud in California and other places, and that he had won the popular vote despite reports to the contrary in what he called the lying press.
In 2020, he did try to subvert the outcome of the election and to impede a peaceful transfer of power. He managed to impede it from happening peacefully, but he did not manage to impede it from happening at all. Joe Biden was able to take office on January 20, 2021.
We now have midterm elections coming up in which, despite their own unpopularity, the Democrats look relatively likely to win the House of Representatives according to current polls and prediction markets. To what extent do you think Donald Trump is going to be able to subvert those midterm elections? Where are we in this process?
Bassin: Well, let’s start with the good news, which is that our election system in the United States has been remarkably resilient. We had unbelievably successful elections in very difficult circumstances in 2020 during the pandemic. We had a remarkably successful free and fair election. Donald Trump lost that election and, as you noted, tried all manner of efforts to overturn that result. He was effectively thwarted at every turn and failed.
The 2024 election was also remarkably successful. Donald Trump won that election, but the election itself was successful. We then had off-year elections in 2023 and so on. The election system has held up remarkably well. One reason for this is the original Federalist design, which is that it is highly decentralized.
We do not really have one election in this country. We have thousands of small local elections that all ladder up to a national election. That Federalist design has really protected us. If we were to have a situation in which there were a national electoral apparatus running elections, that system would be much easier for Donald Trump to capture and control, in the way that he has, for example, captured and controlled the Department of Justice and other aspects of the federal machinery. I think he realizes this.
Mounk: Yeah, just briefly, one of the times I most disagree with a friend of mine is when he publicly suggested that we should build a good national electoral institution that would have all the best practices and so on. I thought that was lunacy. The fact that American elections are so decentralized certainly allows for shenanigans here or there. It allows for simple technocratic failures like the famous hanging chads in Florida. It can lead to all kinds of problems, but it also makes it incredibly hard to take over the system in a centralized way.
In a place like Hungary, there are nine people or seven people, however many, on the National Electoral Commission. If you manage to get a majority on that committee, you can do all kinds of shenanigans throughout the country driven by the center. Thank God there is not one national electoral committee into which Donald Trump can pack people, either through ordinary means, because every president gets to appoint new people every two years or something like that, or through some kind of extraordinary measures and then run the election centrally from within the control of the White House. Dangerous as the current situation is, that would be much, much more dangerous.
Bassin: Look, we could film many episodes of The Good Fight talking about the ways in which the modern Republican Party has contributed to the mess that we’re in right now. One place where we can at least give Mitch McConnell some credit, and I hope the Republican Party will continue to do so, is that McConnell has been a strong supporter of the decentralized federalist nature of our election system and resistant to efforts to build more national structure into it. At least at this moment, hopefully he and his allies will continue to stand firm on that, because Donald Trump is going to try to bring more of the electoral apparatus under his control.
Let’s talk about where we are and what is going to happen. First, I mentioned that we had a number of successful elections over the last couple of years. Those did not happen accidentally. It was not magic. There was a lot of effort put into protecting the system. Protecting our electoral system, making sure it can function, and defending it against Trump’s attacks is going to require all of those efforts again.
In each of the prior elections, it helped to know what he was going to do. In 2020, for example, we knew he was going to claim that the initial ballots counted—the Election Day ballots—were the only valid ones. Those ballots were expected to show him ahead because of the distribution of who voted on Election Day versus by mail. That phenomenon was called the red mirage.
It was going to look like he was ahead. Over time, as the mail ballots and the urban centers were counted, which tend to take longer, the picture was going to change. We should expect similar efforts again. I expect they are going to come out with reports saying that fraud was seen everywhere. There were some truly bananas conspiracy theories that Sidney Powell floated in 2020, including claims that American voting machines were infected by Venezuela.
Mounk: Perhaps that is why Donald Trump wanted to remove Nicolás Maduro from power in Caracas—to take control of those voting machines.
Bassin: I don’t think that is what drove the decision to invade Venezuela, but I do think they are going to take advantage of it. I think you are going to see Delcy Rodríguez or some other senior person in Venezuela, under pressure from the Trump administration, come forward and say, yes, Venezuela did interfere in the 2020 election.
Trump is going to spend the next couple of months building a predicate case that American elections are rife with fraud, foreign interference, and cannot be trusted, in order to justify a federal attempted takeover and to get other actors to do the things he wants. It is a little bit like the play you are seeing in Minnesota right now, where they say there is rampant fraud, so they have to take away all the money and send forces in. You build a predicate and then you send the forces in. I think you are going to see Trump try to intervene more in the electoral apparatus on the basis of these claims.
Just to be clear, you and I know this, but every real effort, every legitimate effort to look into claims of fraud in American elections finds that it is vanishingly small. The number of fraudulent voters or people who should not be voting is unimaginably small, orders of magnitude less than what it would take to raise questions about the outcome.
The Heritage Foundation, the biggest champion of this, posted something on its website a couple of years ago cataloging all the cases of fraud that have been found around the country. You are talking about numbers in the two digits, like twelve cases. These are absurdly small numbers in a country this size, small enough to have absolutely zero impact on election outcomes. Trump is still going to try to run that play.
Right now, according to Pew surveys, about 77 percent of Americans think elections reflect what actually happened, the will of the voters. When Trump tried to say right after 2020 that the election was stolen, he convinced only about 28 percent.
If those numbers hold, he will not be able to disrupt these elections. If he is able to meaningfully change those numbers, if he uses his grip on the MAGA faithful and the Republican Party to shift things to where you have 50 percent of Americans saying elections can be trusted and 50 percent saying they cannot, then we are in trouble.
At that point, I think he will be able to get apparatchiks around the country, people like Brad Raffensperger, who bravely resisted in 2020, to start saying that maybe something needs to be done. When he begins to say there will be no federal funds for Ohio unless they “clean up” their voter rolls and remove people with names that sound Hispanic, it will be very hard for him to convince the Mike DeWines of the world to do that unless he shifts the public narrative so that DeWine feels political pressure to act.
That is why I think the ballgame initially is preventing him from inventing a phony narrative that elections cannot be trusted. Republicans should know who won the last major national election in 2024: Donald Trump. Mike Johnson became speaker because the elections worked.
Mounk: I want to get back to the outlook for what to expect in the midterms and over the next roughly three years of Donald Trump’s second presidency at the end of our conversation. This feels like a good moment to shift to the second question we said we would try to answer, which is about the causes of this political moment. I know pretty clearly what I thought in 2016 and 2017, because I was working very intensely on The People vs. Democracy at the time. A large part of that book tried to explain the causes. What I said then was that there were three kinds of structural transformations happening in the background that help explain why people are dissatisfied with democracy and why there has been a rise in discontent.
The first was the rise of the internet and social media, which allows people to bypass gatekeepers, makes it easier for new entrants to come into politics, and also makes it easier to polarize the public and to say things that would have been too outrageous to print or broadcast in the past. The second was a set of economic changes, most notably the fact that we no longer live in what, in retrospect, was an extraordinary period of rapid economic growth and rising living standards after World War II.
That period really pacified the United States and other countries. It made many citizens feel that their living standards were improving so much faster than their parents’, and that their children would do even better than they did, that they were willing to give the system the benefit of the doubt. People no longer feel that, even though America has done somewhat well economically over the last thirty years.
The third was a very rapid set of cultural and demographic changes, which has led some sections of the population to experience declines in social status in ways they are rebelling against. I would say two things about this. I would probably give myself something like five out of ten on that analysis.
Some of the structural factors I identified were certainly at play, and much of what I said was roughly correct. I do wonder whether I was insufficiently attuned to some of the legitimate grievances people have with our broader culture and political system.
One example is the way in which America, in particular, is deeply dominated by a professional managerial elite that has become out of touch with the rest of the country and often looks down on it in important ways. These are generally decent people. They are people like you and me, people in our social circles. Many of them are highly competent and did get to their positions through meritocratic competition in which they genuinely excelled.
Still, it strikes me how separate their world is from that of ordinary people. There has also been a broader set of failures of elite institutions over the last twenty years. You could point to 9/11 and the response to it, the financial crisis in 2008, the failure in Europe to grapple with how complicated the migration wave around 2015 would be in real, on-the-ground ways, and then, of course, the pandemic.
Institutions like the CDC promised year after year that they would prevent these kinds of crises or serve as rational guides if they happened, and they did not perform as well as they could have. When I look at all of this, as the first part of our conversation makes clear, I do not have a single positive word to say about Donald Trump, and I think what he is doing to democratic institutions is extremely dangerous.
At the same time, I probably have more sympathy than I did in 2016 or 2017 for voters who say that things are working for people like us. If you have a master’s degree from a good university and a professional job in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, you live a good life. You tell others to respect institutions, and that makes some sense, but those institutions also screwed up badly over the last twenty years. I think I would have dismissed that way of thinking too easily ten years ago. I worry that we may still not fully grapple with that as one of the roots of what is happening now. I’ve been talking for a while, but I’m curious about your reaction and how you think about this.
Bassin: For the sake of a good podcast, I would like to disagree, but I can’t. I pretty much agree with everything you just said. I have in front of me a small set of notes I was taking the other day during a similar conversation, where I was also thinking about what the drivers of this moment are. If we do not understand the drivers, we do not know how to reverse it.
I am literally looking at my notes as you are speaking. The first item on the list was tech, new innovation. That innovation in communications and technology is something we have not yet fully metabolized as a society. I think this is number one. You listed it as number one. I listed it as number one. The reason I listed it first is that if you look at what is happening in the United States, as you have written, it is not just happening here. It is happening across Western Europe. It is happening in parts of South America. It is happening in a way across the world that suggests something beyond unique domestic dynamics has to be at play.
The best answer for what has affected all of human society and civilization in this way is these radical changes in how we share information, understand reality, produce truth, and communicate. On that point, I agree with you. It is number one.
Mounk: One very brief way to think about this from a perspective of comparative politics, and I’ve only hit upon this formulation relatively recently, is that when I teach this material now, I tell my students that any explanation for the rise of populism needs to pass three kinds of tests. The first is the temporal test. Why now? You can’t explain a change from a constant. The second is the geographic test. A lot of the explanations they give, like the economic stagnation one, which I think does help to explain why Michigan voted the way it did in 2016 in certain respects. But it doesn’t work very well for Poland or India or all kinds of other countries where populists have risen a lot in the last 20 years that are vastly more affluent than they were 20 or 30 years ago. So they don’t pass the geographic test.
Then there’s a phenomenological test about whether the energy in our political system is where you would expect it to be given the nature of the explanation. That’s also one problem for the economic explanation, because I think a lot of people would like to think it’s because of inequality and so on. But then why aren’t the left-wing populists winning? Why is it mostly the right-wing populists who are winning? I don’t think social media explains everything, but I do think that it is the one that most obviously passes the temporal, the geographic, and the phenomenological test.
Bassin: That is why we both have it as number one. Number two, as you did, is the economic trends, which notwithstanding what you just said, you did note as the second one. You put it well, which is that it is experiential as much as it is actual economic data. How do people feel about it? There is a lot of interesting psychological research about whether someone feels better about their own wellbeing if they have more in net total than someone else, or whether they feel worse if they are further from their neighbors. You could actually have more in absolute terms but be further from your neighbors and be more upset than someone who has less. I think those dynamics are at play.
You mentioned the cultural one, and you located it, perhaps because we were speaking quickly, in the contest for power coming from groups that have historically been excluded. That is a piece of it, but there is more going on culturally than that. If you look at something Lindsey Graham posted the other day wishing Rand Paul a happy birthday, it was basically a schoolyard taunt. I forget the exact wording, but it was like the way kids try to one-up each other with your-mama jokes. Lindsey Graham was essentially doing a your-mama joke at Rand Paul to signal, look at me, I can do this better than someone else.
Something is happening culturally where that kind of behavior is incentivized in a way it was not before. That is not just about who is contesting for power. There is something else going on. Maybe it is partly the incentives Donald Trump has created, but you see it coming from others as well. Elon Musk does it too. You see versions of it in Europe. Not exactly the same, but did Boris Johnson behave a bit like that? There is a broader coarsening and erosion of culture happening.
That gives us those three factors. There are two more I want to add. One of them partly fails some of your tests, and we have disagreed about this. I think there are structural elements, at least in the United States context, that may not fully explain what is going on because they do not cross geographical boundaries, but they clearly contribute to the incentives.
To give one example, I think the number-one policy issue in the United States that helps explain this moment is immigration. Donald Trump rode immigration to the White House twice. We are in this situation in large part because both George Bush and Barack Obama tried to solve immigration policy challenges and were thwarted. George Bush wrote in his memoir Decision Points that the reason he was unable to pass comprehensive immigration reform was gerrymandering and the fact that many members of Congress only had to worry about primaries and were therefore pulled to their extremist bases and refused compromise.
Barack Obama ran into the same problem. Bush wrote that if any future president wanted to solve the problem of governing in this country, they would have to solve the gerrymandering problem. We are now in a situation where Joe Biden pulled immigration policy wildly to one extreme, which failed, and Donald Trump is now pulling it wildly to the other extreme, which will also fail. There is a new poll, as of the time we are recording this, showing that for the first time more Americans support abolishing ICE than oppose it. That is a remarkable swing of almost thirty points. Trump’s immigration agenda is wildly unpopular.
We have gone from two presidents of different parties who tried to find compromise and failed to two presidents who tried to go to extremes and are also failing. Those are structural dynamics driving this problem. Viktor Orbán, trying to cement control over a Hungarian population that was not overwhelmingly supportive of his agenda, looked at the U.S. gerrymandering system and adopted aspects of it. Structural dynamics like that do not explain everything globally, but they matter a great deal in the U.S. case.
The last piece I would add is leadership. The story of American politics over the last twenty years can largely be told through Barack Obama and Donald Trump. They have dominated American politics. The next era will depend not just on how we respond to the forces we have identified, but on who the leaders are and the force of their personalities.
We need to do work on technology so that new tools empower democracy rather than authoritarianism. Artificial intelligence, in particular, is a better friend to authoritarianism than to democracy unless effort is made. We need work on the economic front. We need work on the cultural front. We need work on the structural front. The leadership problem may solve itself because political markets tend to produce leaders who meet the moment.
One last point you made that I want to return to is your increased appreciation, since writing The People vs. Democracy, of the legitimacy of critiques of the governing class. I agree with you. What is interesting is that this critique runs from left to right. On the left, you see arguments about elite failure. On the right, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed makes a similar critique, with different prescriptions. Even Steve Bannon gestures at it.
Something has gone wrong in how the governing elite in the United States has managed its responsibilities. There will always be elites. The question is how they exercise responsibility toward the rest of the country. One of the earliest books to get this right was Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites, which I think was prescient and underappreciated. Until we figure out how to reset the role elites play in society, we are going to remain unfinished in solving this problem.
Mounk: A few thoughts on this. On the structural issue, I agree with a semi-endorsement of that explanation. Clearly, America’s political system has some quite particular features that create quite particular problems. The mixture of the primary system with gerrymandered constituencies and districts is a fairly unique issue.
That cannot explain everything, because many countries have similar populist figures and similar forms of populism rising without majority political systems, gerrymandering, or primaries. Still, it is clearly a big part of what makes it so hard to overcome polarization in the United States. If you want to lean everything on that explanation, it will fail. If you think of it as one of the deeply contributing factors explaining why it is so difficult to solve issues like immigration policy, and the really terrible downstream consequences of that failure, then I absolutely agree it is a key part of the explanation.
Bassin: Yascha, this is actually one of the points that we have disagreed on over the years. I’m glad we found some middle ground on this. It may not be the be all and end all explanation. I agree with you there. I can’t explain what’s happening globally, but it is clearly a problem in the United States that needs some degree of addressing.
Mounk: It’s a contributing factor for sure. Did I change my mind about that? I would have thought that I had said that in the past, but perhaps I changed my mind about realizing or perhaps we just formulated it right this time.
Bassin: I’m going to take it as a victory because we’ve agreed on so much over the years and even on this show, but this has been one of the points, I think, of tension between our approaches. I think we have found a formulation that works for both of us, and I’m going to say that’s a good victory here.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Ian explore how American culture has changed in the last 20 years, and how to protect the country’s democratic institutions. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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