Why American Democracy is in Danger, with Michael Beschloss
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Hey, it's Evan Osnos, co-host of the Political Scene Podcast at The New Yorker. Today, we've got something a little different for you. Every year, The New Yorker puts on a festival where writers get to sit down with all kinds of people, politicians, artists, authors. This past weekend, my co-hosts, Jane and Susan, and I got to talk to presidential historian Michael Beschloss in front of a live studio audience.

It's a critical moment, just a few days before the presidential election, and we wanted to share that conversation with you here in The Feed. We hope you'll enjoy it as much as we did. Welcome to The Political Scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer. Good morning, Susan, and good morning, Jane. Hey there. Welcome. Hi, Evan.

Well, here we are at the New Yorker Festival. We're up north in the big city, recording on Saturday, October 26th. And we are thrilled to be doing this in front of a live audience at Webster Hall. It's an extraordinary moment for a conversation about the past and the future of American politics. Because let's face it, it genuinely hangs in the balance with just a few days before the 2024 presidential election.

Now, the three of us are constantly taking stock, trying to take the temperature of what's happening in D.C. And in a moment, we're going to talk about the past. But I wonder if you guys can give me a sense of how you're thinking and let's be honest, feeling right now.

Just a few days before the big day. Jane, how are you doing? Sleepless. That's one part of it. Sleepless in New York. No, this is an incredibly nerve-wracking time. We, as anybody who listens to the podcast knows, we go back and forth arguing with each other to go over the cliff or come back above the cliff. There's some hope, maybe. I'm hoping women come through on this particular election. APPLAUSE

But I think, and the other thing that's worrying me as someone who's written a number of books with the word dark in the title is that win or lose, what does it say about this country? Susan? Well, first of all, thank you, Evan. And we're really delighted to see everybody here. I have to say, podcasting is one of those things

super anonymous sports where you sit in a studio with just three people and have no idea where it goes. So it's really amazing to see actual people and we're incredibly grateful for that because I think this is an incredibly scary time. What we all need right now is to a certain extent some community, right?

What were we talking about backstage? Well, we were talking about our memories of election night on 2016. Too soon, Susan. It's too soon.

I'm just saying, you asked where we're at. That is what we were talking about backstage. Where were you that night? What were you doing? I was at Politico's newsroom, and I was the editor of Politico. But we were supposed to be moving to Jerusalem to be foreign correspondents again. And my husband and my son were already there. And I texted Peter, who's here somewhere, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I texted him, and I

In Jerusalem, I said, number one, Trump is going to win. And number two, they're going to want us to come back. So yeah, I was a foreign correspondent for three weeks after the election and then for four years in my hometown of Washington.

Jane, how did you make sense of it? This is a really embarrassing admission, but I remember on my way from Washington to New York on Election Day, I was putting the finishing touches on a New Yorker piece about Trump's loss.

So, clairvoyance may not be my specialty. You know, look, I think everybody on that night was trying to make sense of not just what it meant about the future, but what it meant about the past. There is a moment that somebody told me about recently, that when President Obama, in the days afterwards, was absorbing what had happened, absorbing the result, he said to some of his aides...

What if we were wrong? What if we were wrong, in effect, about the appetite that this country has or the readiness that it has for a multi-ethnic democracy? And Ben Rhodes, who was one of his aides who heard that from him, said to me recently, you know, what's hanging in the balance with this election is that if Kamala Harris wins, then it will be that Donald Trump is, as Ben put it, the strange parenthesis in American history rather than Barack Obama. You know, Evan...

That is, I think it's a really amazing point because I've actually been spending a lot of time thinking not so much about the trauma of election night 2016, but

This very interesting question maybe we can talk about with Michael. What would you have wanted to tell your October 2016 self? History is played in hindsight, in rewind, right? So we know now all the stuff that we didn't know at the time. I'm not sure that foreknowledge would have made it all that better. A question. Just in the last few days, guys, we have seen in extraordinary ways that...

People who have been saying things in private for the last few years, like John Kelly, coming forward and now saying affirmatively, as clearly as possible, Donald Trump is a fascist. We're contending with a moment that history has never really reckoned with in this country. Do you think that it has any impact ultimately on the result? You know, Evan, I've thought a lot about this. You know, we did the reporting in our book that first reported about Kelly's concerns about

hearing Donald Trump say to him in the Oval Office of the United States, you effing generals, meaning America's generals, you should be more like the German generals. What generals? The German generals. Hitler's generals? Hitler's generals. And I...

You know, I find that we've become inured to this. I remember first doing that reporting and thinking, this is the most unbelievable thing I've ever heard, that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinks that the biggest national security threat to this country is the President of the United States. And yet, over time, even that becomes something familiar. And so...

My great fear is that even Trump's fiercest enemies can somehow get used to the unthinkable. I really think a lot of what we're dealing with is the environment in which this information is appearing. Part of the problem is that at least half the country is siloed off from the news about Trump.

Millie saying things like this. I mean, we really are in a different ecosystem with social media, with Twitter, with Fox. It's not the same world that it was when I became a reporter in the beginning, where it used to be it felt like if you had a good story, you could just see it ricocheting across the entire country. It was on the evening news and the entire country heard it. It's just not like that anymore. So I'm not sure that people are so much inured to hearing that Trump is

Hitler as that they're not even hearing it from half the news organizations. And there is the amnesia effect. They somehow seem to be able to repress the reality of what they already know about us, which brings us to the matter of history. And we've got the perfect guest for it. And just a second.

You're going to hear from Michael Beschloss. He is the author of 10 books on presidential history, including the New York Times bestsellers, Presidents of War, Presidential Courage, and The Conquerors. He's written on Lyndon Johnson's secret tapes and on Jacqueline and John Kennedy's life together. He's the NBC News presidential historian and a PBS NewsHour contributor. He's received an Emmy Award and six honorary degrees. Please join me in welcoming Michael Beschloss to this stage. Thank you.

I couldn't hear much of what you were saying, but I think I can probably guess. We should warn you that Michael is the official Uber friend of the pod, and he's our actual friend as well as friend of the pod. These are three of my favorite people on earth, so it's going to be hard for me to keep myself from just being quiet and listening to them. Michael, tomorrow, October 27th, Donald Trump will hold a rally here in New York City at Madison Square Garden.

This is a place of historical significance, but of particular political significance. Shortly after the announcement, you tweeted out a link to a terrific documentary film about an event in Madison Square Garden in 1939. I think we have a clip that we can play now and then we'll discuss it. Can we bring that clip up now? Filmed by Marshall Curry. By Marshall Curry. We, with American ideals...

that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it. If you ask what we're actively fighting for under our charter, first, a social just, white, Gentile-ruled United States. Second, Gentile-controlled labor union, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination.

That is from A Night at the Garden by Marshall Curry, an extraordinary film. You can see the rest of it on YouTube. Michael, what does it make you think? Well, first of all, that is just as you were saying, where Donald Trump is about to speak and have a rally. That one got 22,000 people. It was packed.

and I think he has said that he wants to have upwards of 20,000, so we're talking about the same ballpark. Why was this held in February of 1939? It was obviously two years before Pearl Harbor, a few months before the beginning of World War II, and the organizers said, "We want to have this in Madison Square Garden,

in the capital of the domination of Christian America by non-Gentiles. That's why they were having it there. And you saw the language. You heard him say, we want to return America to the time that it was not dominated by people who were not like those who founded America. A briefer way of saying it nowadays would be just in case someone happens to say, make America great again.

There are people around Donald Trump who know this history. I guarantee you this venue was not chosen by accident. He began his campaign last year in Waco, Texas, with references to David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, a standoff that ended in death after 50 days. And to them, that was a shrine to the dangers of federal domination of America.

Americans beyond the Mississippi. That's why they had it there. In 1980, as Jane has written about, Ronald Reagan on the 3rd of August began his campaign, his fall campaign, where? Neshoba County, Mississippi.

only a little bit more than feet away from where Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman were murdered while trying to bring voting rights to Mississippi in 1964. I don't think that was by accident. So all I'm saying is not a great overwhelming number of Americans know about the rally of 1939, but I do not think it's being held in the new Madison Square Garden by accident. Michael, can I ask you...

This has been a week where arguably we've kind of shattered one of the remaining taboos in American politics by the explicit use of the F word, not that F word, but the label of fascist by one of our two party candidates about the other candidate. We're talking about this rally.

Help us to understand, you know, to what extent you think this is a justifiable comparison. Not surprisingly, what you hear from Republicans is that this is hysterical. Donald Trump was not a Hitler-like dictator in his first term, and therefore we have no right to be saying this. Help us to understand how you approach this as a historian. Well, I think Donald Trump meets most of the parts of the definition of the word fascist.

You go through all of American history. You cannot find another major party nominee who was promised to be dictator for a day, which we all know will not be only for a day if that happens, who has promised to use, suspend the rule of law, possibly terminate the Constitution, get the Justice Department and maybe the US Army in military tribunals and worse against domestic political enemies.

you know, we've had a lot of bad people in American life and some fascists who were not nominated for president in the 1930s, which I'd be glad to mention briefly, but we have never had anything like this. So anyone who tries to normalize this election and say this is like Carter versus Gerald Ford or, you know, anything of the kind, this is an election of a kind we have never seen before in American history. A month from now, we will know which way this went.

But this is as much a turning point, in my view, as the elections of 1860 before the Civil War, 1940. You saw the atmosphere of the 1940 election. This country was deciding not only whether we should fight fascists in Europe, it was deciding whether we should adopt fascism at home.

Father Coughlin, Huey Long, who was assassinated in 1935, these are voices who said, you know, democracy is outmoded. Charles Lindbergh's wife, Anne, wrote a book called The Wave of the Future, and she meant that the wave of the future is fascism. Democracy, she said, does not work anymore. But the point I'm making is that

Neither of those was a major party presidential nominee who 10 days from now might win.

So, Michael, when you talk about these incredibly important hinge elections, 1860, 1940, from, I think, probably the standpoint of all of us in this room, the good guys won. I guess I'm wondering, has something changed, do you think, that might make it possible that democracy won't triumph this time? And...

If so, what is it? What is going on out there? Well, let me just see a show of hands. Is anyone here nervous about election night and beyond? I think for those who are not watching but listening, almost unanimous. I know we should interview them. Who didn't raise their hand? Right. Anyone here? We'd be glad to hear what you have to say. It might be calming.

But democracy works, but you can't do it when you vandalize our political process. Now, I would say it's not by accident that we have not had people running for president as the Canada major party and their campaign promise is elect me because I'll be a dictator.

They didn't do it because it probably wouldn't be very popular. That was true for most of American history. American citizens and children understood how hard we had fought for our freedom from a tyrannical British king, that the essence of America is that we don't have dictators. I mean, the way I put it is, in America, not only do we not have dictators or kings, we should always remember that

We do not work for a president. A president should work for us. And we're on the precipice of a moment where that may no longer be true.

So the question is, like those hinge elections, why are we in such danger now? One is we have disabled civics and history education in the early grades in this country. So, you know, people go to really good schools and very intelligent kids. They don't know what democracy is. They don't know how important this is. They don't know what it means when you lose it. Barack Obama said four years ago...

when you have a democracy and it's gone, people start getting hurt. And that is even more true in 2024. I think a lot of Americans don't understand that. And the other thing is that our political system works as long as it's allowed to be intact. One metaphor for this I often think of is in 1948 after Harry Truman was re-elected, he moved out of the White House because the White House interior was about to fall down.

The floors were caving in. The leg of a piano from upstairs appeared through the ceiling of the downstairs room. Truman sort of joked, if we don't get out of here and renovate this building, there's going to be some violin concert in the east room, and I'm going to be in my bathtub above, and I will fall through the floor, and I'll make a surprise appearance by the president.

And, you know, the White House as it was built was sound. But over the years, you know, a president would come in or a president's family and say, we want to renovate. So they'd do it quickly because they didn't want the first family to be out of the White House for too long. So they'd quickly saw off some trusses or, you know, interfere with some supporting deans. And this happened and this happened so that by the time Truman comes in, the whole place is about to cave in.

And under his direction, for the next four years, the White House was scooped out to the outside four walls. It was gutted. And so if you go into the White House nowadays, it's basically a 1952 building that was built inside the four original walls of the White House. So what I'm saying here is that if the Supreme Court does something called... Anyone heard of something called Citizens United? No.

Or a presidential immunity ruling that says that if you're a president, you can get your White House counsel to bless you

Anything you do, including the killing of your opponents or all sorts of things that earlier in American history a president had to worry about being prosecuted for, at least when he left office, that's no longer true. I'm just saying when you take the system and you keep on vandalizing it and you break off an arm and you break off a leg, we should not be surprised that an aspiring fascist dictator is at the gates of our country.

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You've described with those kinds of legal decisions the systemic change that has opened the door for this. There's something else, a cultural change around the idea of what we call character in politics. And people may say this is... What was that word again? Yeah, I know. It's an old English word.

And in some ways... You used to find it in the White House pretty often. Well, this is the thing. I mean, you were talking about Truman. I mean, you've written about the fact that he got beat up for using some colorful language when he said, and forgive me, folks, he said, Nixon is full of manure.

And for this, it became a great question about whether he had the character to be present. Right, and Truman's aides went to Mrs. Truman and said, can't you get the boss to clean up his language? And she said, you have no idea how long it took for me to get him to use the word manure. That's what she was...

So how do you explain that story of how we went from having, and some people will say it was always an illusion, we never had, but at least we expected the illusion. We wanted people to satisfy what we imagined the office of the presidency required in terms of character. To this, how do you explain that story? Well, that's gone. Many Americans used to think that a large element of one's qualifications to be president were that you tell the truth.

You have a character that would be good to hold up for your children, say you should be like the president. Nowadays, there is someone who may well get elected in 10 days who basically says that's the opposite of these qualifications. The rest of the world are dictators who were mobbed. This is not his language, but his meaning.

The rest of the world has dictators in these countries who are mobsters, so you need a mobster dictator to deal with them and protect the country. That's something we haven't seen before in 248 years. Help us to understand the other ways in which you see what's happening with Trump as an outlier to American history versus where you see the continuities.

What has shocked you in terms of the twists of history here? Or is it just that we've maybe come to the death of American exceptionalism and it turns out that we're as susceptible to a strongman as any other country? Well, whoever would have imagined that a presidential candidate nominee would think it was in his interest to tell everyone, elect me and I'll be a dictator and take your rights away?

for most of American history, that would have been a deal breaker. You know, we were talking about the 1930s, and Franklin Roosevelt privately said to Joseph Kennedy, of all people who was in his administration at the time, he said privately, if a fascist demagogue ever got power in America, there would be more blood running through the streets of New York than there is in Berlin.

This is the late 1930s. Roosevelt always thought that there was a potential for fascism in America. Huey Long, before he died in 1935, was saying, elect me president and I will send government money to every citizen and there will be checks saying, here's your money from Huey Long.

That's an idea that made it into the Trump presidency. I don't know if he has any idea who Huey Long was, but someone may have done so, and it was very helpful to Huey Long in getting elected, every man a king. So FDR in the 30s knew that there was always a danger, especially in the election of 1940, that the Republicans might nominate an aspiring fascist,

Someone who was promising that he would keep us out of war, there won't be another World War I where all these hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly young men, were killed for arms manufacturers, never achieved the democracy that Woodrow Wilson promised.

And so Roosevelt thought that that might be a potent combination and that America in the late 1930s might turn to fascism. It didn't happen because we were lucky enough to have FDR as a leader who understood that and who armed America for the possibility of war, tried to pull us out of the Depression, but at the same time reminded Americans that if there's one thing that should unite us, it is that we don't go for dictatorships.

Had Roosevelt not been nominated in 1932, the Democratic nominee might have been John Nance Garner. I don't think John Nance Garner would have had the talent or the interest in doing what Roosevelt did. So in terms of Trump, we've gone through a horrible time in America in certain respects. 9-11, an election of George W. Bush that many people to this day think was stolen by the Supreme Court.

two misbegotten wars, subprime mortgages were handed out in the 1990s like party favors,

We all paid the price in 2008, one of the worst economic crises, and this horrible inequality of the last 10, 20 years that just mounts and mounts and mounts and shows very little sign of abating. So if you look at the life of the country, that's a lot for a country to go through, and I think in retrospect we might have said that all those factory workers in the Midwest where I come from who were thrown out of work will never get those jobs again.

Others who watched CEOs taking golden parachutes, never paying any price for their mismanagement of corporations. It was bound to turn to a leader who made them angry. And it is the curse of American history that Donald Trump is the leader that they followed in many cases.

When you mentioned Citizens United, I guess I'd love to know a little bit more about how you think that has changed the landscape in American politics and the power of money. Who today is Donald Trump's chief supporter? Are we talking Elon Musk, the richest man in the world? Yeah. So would you draw a causal arrow from Citizens United to Elon Musk?

giving speeches in Pennsylvania and financing Donald Trump. 100%. And I think many people are now looking at the Washington Post's decision not to run an endorsement that the editorial board had written of Paris and looking at it as an indication of what Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, is saying as a big business figure

signal saying big business billionaires are not going to fight back against trump i i mean is is that fair do you are you worried about that and if you look at the history of european dictatorships i'll mention mussolini there were others uh one of the first things that happens is that many elements of a free press cave

That's not just historical, right? I mean, even in recent history, they're going after the press as the first order of business, not the last order of business. Well, and you've got a Republican nominee who was the one who revived the Stalinist slogan that American media reporters are the enemies of the people. Do these look like enemies of the people to you? You know, I want to...

At this point, remind ourselves there is another candidate in this race. We're getting to the joyful part of the podcast. Look, if Kamala Harris wins, she will make history. She will force us to reconsider the history of the last eight years in a way. We will begin to understand ourselves and the country in a different way. I am not being overly optimistic here, but I want to say for the moment...

How do you think about the possibility that if she wins, what does that say about this question that Barack Obama asked all those years ago? Is America ready for a multi-ethnic democracy? Well, people around Barack Obama, I ran into a highly ranking Obama aide. If this person knew what was ahead, that person might have wanted to be high. This is about...

a week or two before the election, and I said, "How do you think this is going?" And they said, "Well, we in the White House follow the President." The President thinks two things. Number one, no country that voted for Barack Obama twice would vote for Donald Trump. Number two, get out the vote will be crucial in swing states. And poignantly, neither of those things did turn out to be true.

If Kamala Harris is elected, I mean, I can tell you already, and I think you all can too, thank you for the honor of asking, but I would ask Evan, and I think we'd probably say the same thing, which is that it shows that the resistance to dictatorship in American history, reports of its death were premature.

and that the DNA of America going all the way back to 1776 and before then was, if there's any purpose we've got, it is resistance to being controlled by authoritarianism. And that not only was proven by Kamala Harris's election, if she has been elected, but furthermore, the symbolism of

black daughter of two immigrants, one from India, one from Jamaica, who worked her way up. You look at her career, she not only did a lot of things, she was elected and chosen for a lot of things over 20 years. This is not someone who was handed anything.

This is about as meritocratic as it gets. So if you're the novelist writing the election of 2024 as a scary novel, which you'd have to, you would say that what more perfect counterpoint than Kamala Harris against Donald Trump, who with the understatement in the morning, I would say, is not exactly the fruit of our meritocracy. But it's very interesting because...

Harris, in a way, is sort of, as you said, drawn up by the scriptwriters to be the perfect opposition to Donald Trump in the sense that she's a woman, she's a daughter of immigrants, she represents the rule of law against this convicted felon. And literally that's what she spent her career doing, most of it. Exactly. And yet at the same time, we've all noticed...

this phenomenon where unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, she has not leaned into campaigning as a historic candidate, as a woman candidate, as a woman of color. And I wonder, is that telling us something about the resistance? Because, you know,

Doesn't it mean something that the United States was prepared to elect a black man president before a woman? If there's one thing that Americans have been resistant to in its history, in addition to dictators, it's having women run the country. Yes.

One thing that we have to remember, this is basically a 100-day event, this campaign. So she had to introduce herself fast, establish herself in a certain way. She didn't have a few years in which her name was on the tip of every tongue. I mean, for a vice president of the United States, it's amazing how few tongues she was on the tip of. And that's something that has to do with the vice presidency. You know about the Martin Van Buren problem?

This is maybe the only political rule that George H.W. Bush ever wrote that I know of, which is he was fighting the trend of Martin Van Buren when he was running as Reagan's vice president in 1988, that there maybe is a reason why incumbent vice presidents have a hard time getting elected.

But not only does she have that problem, and vice presidency is a terrible job, you're required to subordinate yourself to the president to prove that you have no designs on the presidency, and virtually every one of them since 1932 has. It is a measure of how challenging Kamala Harris's task is before her that a political analyst said to me recently, she has to build a coalition that goes from Chomsky to Cheney, which...

which really captures just how difficult this is. You know, as we think about how our politics got to this point, and that contains a lot, I'm talking about polarization, the level of division. Susan asked an interesting question the other night, which if I can borrow it again, what you asked, Susan, was, Michael, if you were thinking about telling the story of the last election,

Of the road to now. Are there moments in our politics. Structural changes. Things that happened. Events that. The two or three moments that actually explain. To that Martian visiting from outer space. How it is that we got here from where we were a hundred years ago. Well one is. Sadly.

George McGovern, whom I got to know and admired very much and liked a lot when I was a kid in 1972 and still admire. He was the head of something called, a few here might remember this, the McGovern Commission on how to choose a president in the nominating process of the Democratic Party.

There was an atrocity in 1968, which was that Lyndon Johnson handpicked basically two-thirds of the delegates to the Democratic Convention. So Robert Kennedy Sr. would have had a very hard time getting nominated in 1968, even had he lived, because the delegates were chosen by Lyndon Johnson in dark rooms. So the McGovern Commission said we should go to primaries, went to the other extreme so that

A candidate like Donald Trump, as he did in 2016, can get the nomination by just winning primaries, even though he may be opposed by, in that case, almost every Republican officeholder and party official. Bad thing because it meant that the voice of the people was not as decisive as it always should be.

Good thing, under the old system, there's no way that Donald Trump would have ever been nominated by the Republican Party, because those people would have said, we may agree with him on certain issues, but this is someone who's obviously unfit and should never be in the White House. After 1972, that screen was gone, and we're seeing the result.

So, Michael, I want to ask you something a little bit different, because I am accused, and often sometimes correctly, by my colleagues of being the voice of doom and gloom here. Not by me, but that may not mean too much. I know, Michael and I are fellow...

livers on the dark side, but let's say that Trump does win. What does history tell us about the role and shape and form that resistance, both collective and individual, should take? Because we started with this amazing clip of the Madison Square Garden rally, and near and dear to my heart is the example of an actual columnist who

Dorothy Thompson at the time, the most famous woman in America, aside from Eleanor Roosevelt. And she shows up at that rally surrounded by a really pretty violent crowd of actual Nazis, American Nazis. She is in the press box and she shouts, bunk, bunk. And they literally drag her out of Madison Square Garden. I'm not sure it was the most effective protest, but she had stared down Hitler a few years earlier.

Trump does get elected. Where does resistance go, both individually and collectively? Okay, here's the problem. What are the shields that we Americans have against a dictator? The Supreme Court. How's that going?

Aileen Cannon, a lot of people like this were named as judges during the Trump presidency, and if he's elected once again, Aileen Cannon will probably be someone we yearn for compared to some of the judges that we will see nominated, and possibly with the acquiescence of a possible Republican Senate.

So not going to get much help there. How about impeachment? The founders thought that impeachment would be a great deterrent to presidents behaving badly. So in recent years, how well has impeachment deterred, for instance, Donald Trump from doing certain things that at least the House felt were serious enough to indict him for? How has that been working?

A free media. You were talking earlier about your worry about a free press no longer being as free as it should be. Do we have courageous owners of newspapers and media organizations who will stand up to power without fear or favor? I'm going to leave that as an open question. If the system were working the way it's supposed to, with a Supreme Court that we could rely on, who we knew was on our side, who was not going to

make rulings about presidential immunity, which I think should be considered an oxymoron, but Supreme Court does not agree with me. And if impeachment were a remedy with teeth,

Impeachment in recent years has proven to be sterile. No president is going to be afraid of being impeached and convicted. It's never happened. Before we all get suicidal, I just want to say, here we are at the New Yorker Festival where our editor wrote a fabulous endorsement of Harris. And we put it out yesterday in the face of the Washington Post. David Remnick is here. There are...

Thank you, David. There absolutely are parts of the free press that are very courageous. And I actually was struck, you might think this is naive, but during the first Trump administration, that civil society in America is not...

what Italy was to Mussolini and is not what Russia is to Putin. We have a history. We have a number of nonprofit NGOs that fought back. We had incredible rallies. But there is this pretty strong civil society. And there's also, as Susan and I were just... This is what we talk about in the green room. We were talking about federalism.

And the states, I mean, the states in this country have individual governments to a sort of startling amount. They seem to conform to some of the lines that we remember of the Civil War. But anyway, I wonder if we don't have a different culture with a strong civil society. That's the happy ending I was talking about. Look how citizens in various states are standing up to the Supreme Court

and the failure of Congress to do what it should have a long time ago in codifying Roe v. Wade, standing up on reproductive freedom with things like referenda and...

If there's anything to clap for, I think that's extremely worthy of clapping for. And yes, the rule of law is in danger, but it's not as in danger now as it might be at a later date if you have four more years of Donald Trump appointments. All I'm saying is that

If a Donald Trump presidency happens, and if he does follow through with his threats of dictatorship, sending the U.S. Army to put down uprisings in blue cities around the country, we still do have, fortunately, a system where the rule of law, public protest, the lack of federal domination of every state capital in the country could be used to make sure that some of these things still live.

We're going to go to questions in just a moment, but before we do, I want to pick up on something you were just talking about. Jane mentioned civil society. You were talking about the ways, Michael, that there are these avenues to exert influence on the system. And I can tell you, I think one of the things that is hanging in the air is this feeling, and we started this conversation with it, with the sense of what can I do? What would we do? What could we do in a moment? Whether or not Donald Trump wins...

on November 5th, we are going to be contending with the underlying forces that created him as a symptom of distress for years to come. And I think a lot of people wonder what is actually worth, uh,

supporting, investing in, time, whatever it is. And you mentioned earlier something, you mentioned the decline of civics education, and that is something that I think people snickered at five or ten years ago. They said, really, is that so significant? And now there's a greater recognition that actually that is a meaningful piece of the process. How do you think about what a person can do? Over the long run, we screwed up, we Americans, founders, our ancestors, when the presidency was allowed to have so much power.

It's one of the fatal compromises we made. Another was on slavery, giving so much power to states, rural places, inordinate power that was likely to be a repressive and conservative constraint on everything that happened in future history, and it has really begun to speed up in recent years. But

There was never a safety latch on the presidency. A president can make war and get almost dictatorial powers. How many times has a president gone to Congress for a war declaration since 1942? The answer, zero.

So all I'm saying is you have a presidency that basically depends on the lucky chance that we happen to elect someone president who does not have dictatorial tendencies. Our luck is running out fast and we've got to, if we make it through this election without a dictatorship, we've got to look at ways to put constraints on a president. The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

Right.

We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out. That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie. Maybe it's a book. Maybe it's just kind of a trend that we see floating in the ether. And we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template.

We talked about the midlife crisis, starting with a new book by Miranda July, but then we kind of ended up talking about Dante's Inferno. You know, we talked about Kate Middleton, her so-called disappearance. And from that, we moved into right-wing conspiracy theories. Alex basically promised to explain to me why everybody likes the Beatles. You know, we've also noticed that advice is everywhere. Advice columns, advice giving. And we kind of want to look at why.

Join us on Critics at Large from The New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. Folks, you've sent in terrific questions, and I want to make sure we get to as many as we can. So let's plunge in. One of the first questions, and Susan and Jane, you guys will have thoughts on this too, perhaps. But Michael, the United States has recovered from periods of extreme polarization before, but this period feels unprecedented.

From your perspective as a historian, can we recover from this polarization? And if so, how? We have before now. And the founders gave us a constitution and a system that had two things in it. Number one, let's have as many fights as possible over policy.

this ain't England, folks. You know, there's not a king secretly making policies and, you know, making proclamations. We want Congress to be full of conflict. We want people to fight about the policies, you know, all over the country because that's the way you get the best laws and the best programs. But the other half of the statement is...

At the end of the day, once those policies are decided, we've got to unify, we've got to negotiate with one another, and we've got this lovely element of our system which is intended to unite the country, and that is a president of the United States who is chief of state.

In almost every case going back to 1789, presidents have taken their unifying chief of state role very seriously. You know, absolutely have divisive programs, but also it's my job as president to try to keep the country as united as possible. Another thing that we saw during the Trump presidency, which is a first,

and I think it will be done with a vengeance if he is reelected, is a president who has contempt for the idea that a president should come and unify the country and be someone that our children should want to be like.

Yeah, I just I think that's so important. Donald Trump during the pandemic. I know we've all written that out of history, but he's the first president, the only president I could imagine who would literally talk about my states, my electorate, you know, that red America was what he was designing for.

his policies for. And I think that makes him obviously a historical outlier. But it's interesting, the premise of the question, because I feel like, you know, we're not one year into this, two years into this. We're nine years into the Trump phenomenon, which is the acceleration of a polarization trend that already existed. And I feel like

We're at the point at which we've got to stop asking, okay, when is it going to snap back to normal? That in some ways, that's the fallacy that we're all kind of still buying into is this idea that we remember what America is supposed to be like and when Trump will just go away or the polarization will just go away. You talked about reproductive rights and that's obviously an important reason. And if Harris wins, that's going to be one of the big reasons why.

But the long-term trend here with our federalization is that we're getting different rights depending on where you live in this country. And that's going to, in my view, unfortunately, accelerate the polarization. If having access to reproductive freedom or making decisions about my own health care is a fundamental human right, as I know that many of you in this audience believe, then why would it depend on whether I live in Austin or Los Angeles? And...

From my perspective, the question we might be asking over the next few years is not when will this polarization end, but how far will it go? You know, there are, when we are beset by moments like this, when it seems irredeemable, I do take some solace in the idea, it was Frederick Douglass who said that when, progress is noisy, progress is loud, progress is rancorous. He said to want progress without conflict

is to want the rain without the lightning and the thunder. And on some level, there is a conspiracy of silence at times when people are not fighting as actively for the passionate things that they believe in. And I think that is by no means to defend what is the indefensible. But I think we're living in a period when America is, and I say this having lived in countries in which you don't have the ability to talk out loud about it.

about what it is that you want and the country you want to shape and the leaders you want to have. And we are in the throes of that, as agonizing as it can be. I mean, I think in many ways, if you step back, we're in a backlash that has never really ended after having elected the first black president, Barack Obama. And a lot of this can be seen in that context.

and that as the population of this country moves further and further towards a non-white majority, what we're going through is a reaction, a backlash by the white population that feels it's threatened and losing power. So I think you have to look at it partly in that context and

eventually they will lose power. You know, I guess I was struck by it when I went to the African American History Museum in Washington, which is fabulous. If you guys have not gone, please go and take a look at it. And you realize as you spiral up from the bottom where this slave trade is described, you just see

it's action, reaction, action, reaction throughout American history. Every time there was progress made, there was an incredible backlash. And I have to say, I see that partly. I don't know if you do. I am not the historian. And no, I agree with you totally. And I get back to

If the system is working, you know, our job as citizens, the highest form of patriotism is denouncing your government, denouncing what a president does. And just think about the possibility that if we have a dictator in the White House who is trying to neutralize his political opponents, we're going to be living in a different country today.

To that point, actually, this is a relevant question from a listener, an attendee today who writes, I'm a moderate Republican who lost a primary for Congress earlier this year. I'm concerned that if Trump wins again, my party will not come back from its current trajectory. Can you talk about instances when a new party has been established and how such a party might be able to gain traction in the current era when money plays such an outsized role in politics? Sure.

Well, theoretically, a third party should be able to do very well. In 1992, Ross Perot managed to get 19% of the vote without a huge effort. In 1968, at his peak, George Wallace was getting 25% of the vote in early October of 1968. He declined the moment he chose the bomb-loving Curtis LeMay as his vice president, and he finally got 13% at the end. But

Especially nowadays, with a lot of money available and people can get known very fast, it's amazing that there is not a third party, so it should be much easier than it was at the time the Republicans began in 1856. I would say to our moderate Republican friend, one thing you need is Republicans with spine. What is Nikki Haley doing these days?

Is she saying the same thing she said during the primaries, which was that Donald Trump brought chaos and should not be elected president again? You know, part of the story of the glory of America is you have strong people who were willing to put, in some cases, their lives on the line.

The abolitionists in the early 19th century, some of them lost their lives. Americans who wanted to fight fascism in the 20th century, it's not going to happen if you have timid politicians who are just waiting around for the Republicans to moderate their party and not do anything to bring it about.

There's a question here which I think is probably lurking in the minds of many of us, which is how do we break through to the almost half of the country that isn't hearing or doesn't believe in the possibility of an American dictatorship? People who either discount it or are in some ways perhaps seduced by the idea. How do you reach those people?

Well, one thing we, I say lucky, I'm saying this in big quotation marks, but between about 1940 and maybe 10 years ago, most Americans did not need to go to read a history book to understand what fascism and dictatorship were. They knew that Hitler was a bad guy and dangerous.

that you should elect people who were unlike Hitler and Mussolini. There were still Americans living who had fought on D-Day, and there still are a few, but had fought in World War II. The idea of electing a fascist in 1952, for instance,

only seven years after World War ended, you know, Americans did not need to be educated about dictatorship and fascism. They do nowadays, and especially with

Some media organizations, won't mention any names, don't have anyone particularly in mind, but who try now to normalize fascism and to normalize dictatorship in order to make it easier for one person to get elected. We've never had that kind of influence in American society for

all two and a half centuries of our existence. I'll go ahead and name the names. Watch the clip from just two days ago on Fox News' morning show in which...

I never thought I would see this, even on propaganda television in America. One of the anchors said he thought that a little dictatorship among friends was not so bad. And specifically said, well, you know, I mean, Germans, maybe Trump was confused, but, you know, it's okay. I mean, you know, I could understand why, because our generals were so mean to Donald Trump. I could understand why he might be wanting Nazi generals. Just terrible.

Yeah, and forgive me for saying this given what my profession is, but little history does sometimes help. And if you know what happened to Germany after January of 1933, you might be a little bit more cautious about opening the door to an aspiring dictator in 2024.

Somebody writes in with a different perspective from what you were just describing, saying, is it all gloom and doom? We survived the first Trump presidency and other dark times in American history, and yet we are still here. Fair point. I would say we survived the first Trump presidency in the way that I think our questioner means, but

because at the beginning of that presidency, he did not know what he was doing. There were people like General Kelly and others who were even Mark Esper at the very end at the Defense Department that was restraining him from doing certain things that he otherwise wouldn't have done. You know, at this point, as I've mentioned earlier, the guardrails are mainly gone.

The protections against presidential malfeasance in our system have been largely removed, especially by presidential immunity. We're living in a different world from 2017, and this is now a movement that is

gathering force and openly talking about fascism and dictatorship in a way that Donald Trump never did in 2016. And isn't it true that even if Trump has not learned that much about how to do it differently, the people

around him really have learned this. I mean, Susan, you've often quoted the Raptor quote. What was the quote about? You tell it. What Jane's referring to was really, I think for me, a chilling moment in reporting our book about the Trump presidency where this was a very senior national security official who'd spent a lot of time directly in the Oval Office with Trump who said to us,

Donald Trump is like the velociraptor in the first Jurassic Park movie. And, you know, the children run into the kitchen and they think they're safe and then click, they hear the handle on the door turn that Donald Trump in this metaphor is the velociraptor who's learned to open the door of government. And I wonder, Michael, you know, what do you think about capacity this time? I mean, we all are agreeing with you on the lack of the guardrails, but...

Does a Trump administration led by someone who we know breeds chaos and disorganization and infighting among his... Chaos is actually more desirable in some scenarios. Right. So how far can he go in just one four-year term? If you don't want a presidential dictatorship, you fight. And you acknowledge the fact that it's going to be much harder than 2017 because of the Supreme Court, because of the failure of impeachment.

because there will probably be a Republican Senate, and because Americans are a little bit more blasé about some of the things that Donald Trump might do that would horrify many of us,

These are thinkable to a lot more Americans in 2024 than they would have been in 2016. Anyone who is unsettled by this, who is worried about the future of our friends and our children and our society, fight, criticize, but know that it's not going to be easy.

To that point, and we're almost out of time, but somebody writes in and says, I'm 25 years old. Oh, to be 25 years old. So I've only voted in elections against Donald Trump. Do you think we will ever get back to a time when it's exciting to vote rather than a necessity out of fear that the bad guy will win?

Could I say something that is a genuinely optimistic way of looking at this? And that is, as dark as this is, as scary as some of the scenarios are, one thing about history, at least American history, is that in certain ways, not all, you have to be an optimist.

How is it that against most odds, this country has stuck together for two and a half centuries against most predictions? For most of that time, we had a functioning system. We did do something like the election of 1940 when Franklin Roosevelt was in a situation that's about as tough as it could be for a presidential candidate. He was saying, I'm going to keep you out of war, but...

We have to rearm in case we have to go to war to defend ourselves, and that's a good deterrent, and we should not give in to fascism. It worked. This country is amazingly resilient. And as I said, I'm worried about the Supreme Court. I'm worried about vandalizing the remedy of impeachment and other remedies. But if you look at the whole of American history...

You have to say with a little luck, the land is bright. Folks, on that note, I'm afraid that is all the time we have for. Thank you, Michael, for joining us, for being here with us at this extraordinary moment. Thank you to my co-hosts, Susan and Jane, for this conversation here, here.

Thank you, Evan. And of course, thanks all of you for your interest in this and for your support for the festival and for the magazine and what it represents. Have a wonderful rest of the weekend. This has been the political scene from The New Yorker. I'm Evan Osnos. Thank you to Amanda Miller, Catherine Sterling and Caitlin Vincent for their help in making this special interview happen.

We had research assistance today from Alex D'Elia. Our producer is Julia Nutter, and our editor is Gianna Palmer. Mixing by Mike Kutchman. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks so much for listening. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I...

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