Democracy Works

This is one of the most pessimistic episodes we’ve done, but it’s worth hearing. Andrew Sullivan, New York magazine contributing editor, Daily Dish founder, and former editor of The New Republic, is a longtime observer of American politics who does not shy away from controversial opinions. In this episode, we discuss the tension between liberalism and democracy, and how that tension manifests itself around the world.

The way Sullivan sees it, the “us vs. them” rhetoric and attitudes in our culture have gone so far that the moderating values and virtues of liberalism will no longer be able to intervene. We also discuss the relationship between dignity and identity politics, and the parallels between the United States and the United Kingdom.

Thank you to our sponsor, Penn State World Campus. Learn more about their Master of Professional Studies in the Psychology of Leadership at worldcampus.psu.edu/leadership.

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More from Andrew Sullivan

New York magazine column

His lecture at Penn State on “American Democracy in the Age of Trump”

Interview Highlights

[6:18] How do you think about democracy in your work?

There are two core types that I think about, liberal democracy and illiberal democracy. Democracy itself I think is a two-edged sword. Pure democracy, Plato would tell you and so would Aristotle, is extremely unstable and the founders certainly believed that as well. They were very cognizant of what happened to the Rome of Republic. Liberal democracy requires certain virtues. It requires the ability to have a deliberative conversation to use reason, as well as emotion, but reason is the core function of it, and openness to other ideas and toleration of radical different world views than you, within the same culture. And that’s hard. It’s really, really hard. It’s harder than we think.

[7:56] Of those things, what concerns you most right now?

I think that it is human nature in fast changing societies and fast changing economies and the world is changing extremely fast, to seek security. Democracy’s promise is not ultimately security, it’s freedom. And there are moments in history where freedom is more popular than non-freedom. And I think the massive migrations across the world and the globalizing of the economy has created the seeds for the need for not having every view represented and not being tolerant of everything. And actually stopping things that might otherwise be associated with liberal democracy.

[10:20] What role does dignity play here?

I think one of the eternal human demands is meaning and youthfulness. And I think large numbers of people in the West, especially those who are unskilled. Who’ve earned their livings in the past by rather honest labor, but aren’t educated or intelligent or in the new media. I think they’re confronting the fact, and it’s not that they’re inventing this or imagining this. The fact that they’re not really needed anymore for the economy, for the society. And that’s a terrible thing to feel. I think that simultaneously, we see a decline in religion and that also helps people keep it together. You see across the West, but especially in the U.S., a huge crisis in opioid addiction in these very communities that feel that meaning has disappeared.

[13:40] Is democracy equipped to respond to our current political moment?

One can certainly hope so. It’s certainly been rather resilient facing other crises, but the last time we had a major, huge global economic crisis, the 30s, it didn’t do too well. And liberal democracy has also been I think held up somewhat by the generations who still remember that and don’t want to return to it. But as generations emerge who don’t remember that at all, liberal democracy will seem like as if, maybe we should do away with this.

That’s why I’m concerned that younger generations seem to have much less support for democracy than older generations. I don’t think they see very clearly, what the alternative actually is, and it tends not to good. I mean, democracies are actually better adapting than authoritarian societies to change. But authoritarian societies can arrest change more successfully. They can seal off a country, they can make it so that, they’re more resilient against it and that changes that are happening also don’t happen there.

[17:54] Can small-scale efforts to reform democracy add up to a greater change?

Yes, they do because liberalism is also about the maintenance of rules and norms and institutions that keep a society free and open. And wha...

Political campaigns in the United States, especially those for the presidency, can be nasty—very nasty. And while we would like to believe that the 2020 election was an aberration, insults, invective, and yes, even violence have characterized U.S. electoral politics since the republic’s early days. By examining the political discourse around nine particularly deplorable elections, Mary E. Stuckey seeks to explain why.

Stuckey is the Sparks Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. She specializes in political and presidential rhetoric, political communication, and American Indian politics.

After the interview, Michael Berkman and Candis Watts Smith discuss how the despicable discourse Stuckey describes trickles down to local politics, particularly school board races in the current election cycle.

Additional Information

Deplorable: The Worst Presidential Campaigns from Jefferson to Trump

Mary Stuckey on Twitter

Related Episodes

Demagogues are more common than you think

This week, we're handing the microphone to Penn State student Joey Picarillo for an interview about the rise and fall of early democracies and what lessons we can learn from them today. Joey is a studying political science at Penn State World Campus and has already read many of the most influential books on democracy by Robert Dahl and others. He brought this book to our attention and did a wonderful job with the interview.

Historical accounts of democracy’s rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy by David Stasavage draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer—democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa. Stasavage makes the case that understanding how and where these democracies flourished—and when and why they declined—can provide crucial information not just about the history of governance, but also about the ways modern democracies work and where they could manifest in the future.

Stasavage is the Dean for the Social Sciences and the Julius Silver Professor in NYU’s Department of Politics and an Affiliated Professor in NYU’s School of Law.

The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today

From Pizzagate to Jeffrey Epstein, conspiracies seem to be more prominent than ever in American political discourse. What was once confined to the pages of supermarket tabloids is now all over our media landscape. Unlike the 9/11 truthers or those who questioned the moon landing, these conspiracies are designed solely to delegitimize a political opponent — rather than in service of finding the truth. As you might imagine, this is problematic for democracy.

Democracy scholars Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum call it “conspiracy without the theory” and unpack the concept in their book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Russell is the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth. Nancy is the Senator Joseph Clark Research Professor of Ethics in Politics at Harvard.

As you’ll hear, the new conspiricism is a symptom of a larger epistemic polarization that’s happening throughout the U.S. When people no longer agree on a shared set of facts, conspiracies run wild and knowledge-producing institutions like the government, universities, and the media are trusted less than ever.

Additional Information

A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

Since 2008, the Tea Party and the Resistance have caused some major shake-ups for the Republican and Democratic parties. The changes fall outside the scope of traditional party politics, and outside the realm of traditional social science research. To better understand what’s going on Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Strategy at Harvard and Director of the Scholars Strategy Network, convened a group of researchers to study the people and organizations and at the heart of these grassroots movements.

Skocpol joins us this week to discuss their findings and the new book Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance. Her work in particular focuses on the Tea Party and includes interviews with Tea Party members across the country. We also discuss the Resistance and whether these oppositional forces to the party in power are likely to continue after November’s election.

Additional Information

Upending American Politics from Oxford University Press

Skocpol on the Scholars Strategy Network

Related Episodes

Grassroots organizing to “reboot” democracy

Salena Zito’s deep dive into Trump’s America

When states sue the federal government

The democracy rebellion happening in states across the U.S.

Episode Credits

This episode was engineered by Democracy Works host Jenna Spinelle, edited by WPSU’s Chris Kugler, and reviewed by WPSU News Director Emily Reddy. A huge thank you to Abby Peck in Theda Skocpol’s office for arranging the interview and providing technical support.

Interview Highlights

[6:45] How did we arrive at our current moment in American politics?

Well, I was surprised in the early Obama presidency by the sudden emergence of the Tea Party and perhaps I wasn’t surprised for exactly the same reason that a lot of other people were. First there were some demonstrations, but then there were hundreds of regularly meeting local groups of tea partiers and that attracted our attention because we realized that since the 1960s a lot of the organizing on the civic side in the United States had taken the form of national advocacy groups and maybe some local things, but usually not very connected into anything national.

Then if you fast forward eight to 10 years later, the same thing happened when Trump was elected and in both cases these were presidents that shocked the other side, elected at the same time as Congress was controlled by their own party. And the grassroots resistance emerged even more quickly after the Trump election, which was an even bigger shock to the people on the other side.

[10:01] What was it about Barack Obama’s election that changed the paradigm?

It’s in Americans’ DNA to organize when something strikes citizens as needing action and both grassroots tea partiers and the grassroots resisters, now they faced a shocking event and that event is probably very important. I think social movement scholars often don’t pay attention to events. But it’s a pretty shocking thing in American democracy when a president who looks like they’re going to carry through radical changes is elected at the same time as a Congress of their own party.

And in the case of Barack Obama, of course it was an African American. He looked like he was coming to power at a moment of economic crisis that was going to lead to sweeping changes led by Democrats, and at that moment, a lot of grassroots conservatives just said to themselves, we can’t depend on the Republican Party to do anything. We don’t trust the Republican Party. Who’s going to do it? We’re going to do it. And so they started organizing face to face.

[12:15] How does today’s organizing relate to older styles of civic engagement and civil society?

In the Tea Party it was more men and women often married couples together, but women were more present than you might think and more present than you would think for conservatives because women tend to do things and these are almost always in both sides people who’ve had experience organizing in their workplaces, their churches, maybe they’ve been part of the local political party or a local civic movement on the left or the right. And so in a way they do remember older fashioned ways of organizing and then...