Or is that a Sears crisis?
Something Anand Giridharadas shares at The Ink is worth noting. He spoke with Daniel Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies about how world democracies respond to antidemocratic movements.
Giridharadas writes, “People speak of this as an existential moment for democracy, but it also feels like a business-as-usual moment in terms of how many citizens invest their time and energy.”
That’s the way it feels to me too, more like a Sears crisis. People want a movement. Few want to start one.
To preseve this republic, Democrats need to step it up a notch. Except here on the ground their idea of stepping it up a notch is typically doing the same thing, the same way, just more of it. Telling ourselves every freakin’ election is the most important of our lifetimes is counter-productive. Because what do we do in the face of an existential crisis? We play it safe. We stick with what we know. We don’t experiment. That’s a mistake.
Giridharadas interviews Ziblatt:
I see an imbalance between the professed level of outrage by very large numbers of people about Trump, about Trumpism, about democratic decay, about lies, and the lack of an actual movement. Can you talk about that imbalance?
There’s a book by Eitan Hersh called Politics is for Power. He makes this case about how to move beyond what he calls political hobbyism: people watching MSNBC and feeling like they’re engaged in politics. This is like the community I live in, a place where when you go take your dog for a walk at night, you see everybody’s TVs are on and they’re watching MSNBC, but voter turnout for local elections is 15 percent. And so that’s really a problem that afflicts both red states and blue states.
Institutional change is something that not everybody cares about. Or it’s like a bank shot to get to what you want; it’s an indirect route. If you’re not happy with your life, the idea that we need to introduce, say, proportional representation is an abstraction. So how do you get people to think in institutional terms?
The way to do that is to link institutional reform to the issues that people really care about in their daily lives. Whether that’s abortion rights or gun control; it could be economic policy.
I also think there’s something to be drawn from looking at America’s own great tradition of institutional reform. Up until about 1970, there was a tradition of reforming the Constitution and making our system more democratic. We’ve stopped doing that, and reimagining what’s possible is really important.
The mistake the left makes, Democrats make, and a Biden administration still working from a 20th-century political paradigm makes is to think what people care about most is kitchen table issues. It’s how they express their everyday anxieties, yes, but that’s because what’s eating them goes much deeper than economics. They don’t know how to put into words what they’re really anxious about, or else they have enough residual shame not to talk about it in public.
It seems like authoritarians perfectly understand the actual emotional landscape of the country and of people. And generally pro-democratic leaders don’t. Can you talk about that?
We say emotion, but what’s that mean? It means fear, it means hope, it means aspiration, anxiety. It’s this fear, fear of loss. This idea that if you have been at the top of the hierarchy, equalization feels like you’re now at the bottom of the hierarchy — that, I think, is a lot of what’s driving our politics, particularly on the Republican side of things.
I would say the hypothesis of the Biden presidency was that if you address people’s material concerns, this will take some of the steam and anger out of the populist movement — this rage that fuels Trump and continues to fuel MAGA. And I think there’s a lot to that. It’s a pretty good bet to make.
But if you look at the persistent low poll numbers and the perception of the economy — I think this is something that people haven’t really dealt with: why are people still not happy? — maybe there’s something else that’s going on. And I think it does have to do with these broader demographic and cultural changes that people are responding to, and not really understanding.
And so I don’t quite know what political leader out there is doing this. I think Biden tries to speak to it to some degree. I think he thinks of himself as being able to do that. He does it better than lots of politicians, but it’s still probably not sufficient.
I think that’s right. The truth lies just below the surface, underneath a scab perhaps, and many are not ready to dig deeper. Meantime, MAGA Republicans are fine with manipulating people’s anxieties about being left out to their advantage. Democrats keep playing to people’s pocketbook “best interests.” Their pitch is, “Democracy is under a threat, imperiled, this could be the last election ever…but I know you’re really concerned about the price of bananas,” as Giridharadas puts it.
Tapping people’s “guts,” as Stephen Colbert famously put it, feels beneath them. We’re forever trying to prove we’re the smartest kids in the room. We rely on political abstractions. Republicans play to raw emotions.
“What we need is to present a vision of what kind of democracy, what kind of society we want — something that can tap into people’s hopes and aspirations,” Ziblatt says.
Paint the beautiful tomorrow. Sell the brownie, not the recipe. Barack Obama did that and went from obscure freshman senator to president.
Ziblatt thinks Biden is on the right track, but to be most effective needs to present a more unifying tableau.
Instead of the campaign speech Biden just gave on Friday [President Biden’s speech in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania on January 5, 2024, which focused on Donald Trump’s threat to democracy], I’d like to have seen a speech given to commemorate January 6th, with Liz Cheney sitting right next to A.O.C., with Dick Cheney in the audience. This shouldn’t be a partisan event. This needs to be a moment of national recognition and consensus, like Spain in 1981.
Giridharadas laments the lack of visibility on TV of any pro-democracy movement. “Where is this movement? I want to be in it. Can you connect me to something?” people write him in emails.
I’m forwarding the emails to you.
First of all, you have to get involved with real organizations, where people are coming together face to face. This can mean volunteering at your local precinct office of the Democratic Party. It turns out it’s a really low bar to get involved. You could very quickly become the leader of the local precinct office. And then you notice that nobody can meet regularly because they all have kids. So you work to set up a thing where people are sharing childcare duties, and next everyone is thinking about who should be the candidate in the next election.
A dose of Hopium
Yeah, it’s actually work. But it’s work that makes a difference and grows the Democratic bench. People like Trump and George W. Bush were born on third base and think they hit a triple. Many progressives want to start on third base or it’s not worth their time. Get over yourselves.
Last question. Is there a case you’d make for hope? Is there anything in the United States that gives you hope that the authoritarian threat will be overcome?
There are overwhelming majorities of Americans who do value these institutions and value liberal principles, and value principles of racial equality. I was looking at some survey data on whether or not you think there should be rules, restrictions on where people can live on the basis of race. In the mid-1970s, very high percentages of Americans agreed that there should be. Today, overwhelming percentages of Americans think the opposite, conservative and liberal alike.
On a whole series of questions like this, there’s been a major transformation in people’s views about race and racial equality. And as much as we have this moment of Nazis in the streets and racists feeling like it’s possible to talk more vocally, if you look at the numbers, most Americans reject this stuff. If you think of Richard Nixon’s effort to inflame the silent majority in the late 60s and early 70s, it was incredibly successful. Donald Trump’s attempt to do that in 2020 just foundered. And I think it’s because there have been profound changes in most Americans’ basic attitudes.
There are serious ailments — guns, violence, etc. — but our society at some level has this vibrancy, this health, and our economy is pretty strong as well, though our institutions just don’t reflect that. And so that’s why I’m obsessed with the institutions. I feel like, if we could get our politics right, then it could reflect that more. That’s where I find hope and optimism.
