The Columnist

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Donald Trump has wasted no time in his second administration.

The moves he has made are familiar to anyone who has seen a democracy give way to autocracy.

Loyalists only, no matter how unqualified, a dubious claim to a mandate, a sycophantic party apparatus that for the moment controls both chambers of Congress, harnessing the power of the military against its own people.

I feel a great sense of urgency today,

and those who want to preserve and strengthen American values and American democracy should feel it too.

But how can we make sure our political system is up to the task?

From the Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America.

I am Gary Kasquar.

My guest is Brett Stevens, a columnist for the New York Times.

He is also the principal author of the manifesto for what would become the Renewed Democracy Initiative, the organization I founded in New York in 2017.

The beginning of that document is an ideal introduction to our conversation.

It reads, The modern world is at risk of losing its way.

The liberal democratic order is under attack from within and without.

The historical arc toward greater global stability, freedom and prosperity in large parts of the world is at risk of being bent back toward political authoritarianism, economic stagnation, ideological extremism and international disorder.

Eight years later, we cannot say say things have changed for the better.

When it comes to fighting authoritarians and would-be dictators, champions of democracy must find common cause with those who share their goal of freedom, even if it means working with people with whom they disagree, as some of our listeners surely will when it comes to Brett's views of politics and global affairs.

On the issue of securing the democracy the founding fathers gave us, Brett is an ally in the fight.

And when we spoke in early June, he shared with me a new sense of how to win and even a bit of optimism.

Hello, Brett.

Thank you very much for joining the show.

Good to see you, Gary.

So when did we meet first time, Brett?

It was a long, long, long time ago, yeah?

Yes, I actually remember the occasion very vividly.

You were a contributing editor

for the Wall Street Journal, and you came in for lunch with Bob Bartley, and someone walked past my cubicle and said, hey, do you want to have lunch with Gary Kasparov?

And I jumped out of my seat.

And so I remember that precisely.

You moved to the Wall Street Journal from Jerusalem Post?

Well, I had been at the Wall Street Journal.

Yes.

And then after 9-11, they hired me for the Jerusalem Post.

I was there for nearly three years during the second Intifada, and then came back to the journal and had a very happy career until

another event.

Exactly.

So I remember this, we talked about the rising star in GOP politics, Donald Trump.

I remember that you were quite worried about Donald Trump after meeting him at this luncheon in the Wall Street Journal.

It was the beginning of 2016 and you were full of emotions.

Well, you know, so I had written a a column in 2015, essentially comparing Donald Trump to Ugo Chavez of Venezuela.

And apparently, Trump was infuriated by the column.

So, what followed was this dance in which at various points he was threatening to sue the Wall Street Journal.

Then he was demanding a meeting.

And finally,

the meeting happened.

And when the meeting occurred, in fact, he was very ingratiating.

You know, he gave me a big handshake.

He said, oh, you're a killer, you're a killer.

And yet, by then, he was already the clear frontrunner for the nomination.

And what, of course, he did understand, perhaps much better than I, was the psychology of the conservative movement as he found it.

And I think the psychology of mass media, mass persuasion, of the reality TV show.

I think if we look at it now, one plausible interpretation of everything Trump does plausible, I don't think it's convincing, but plausible, is that for him it's just a reality TV show.

It could be Love Island, except it involves ICBMs.

Aaron Powell, so you were

one of the staunchest

never Trumpers back in 2016, 2017.

At one point, you softened the edges.

You know, this is the column that you wrote.

I was wrong about Trump voters.

So, just tell us about this journey from 2017 to 2024.

So, is it based on your re-evaluation of the whole political situation and Trump's impact on American democracy?

Well, you know, the first line I wrote about Trump in that 2015 column when he first came on the scene, I think the line went something like: if by now

you don't find Donald Trump appalling, you're appalling.

It was an indictment of the voter himself or herself.

Back in 2015.

In 2015.

And basically, my point was:

if you listen to his bigotry, to the inanity of so much of what he says, and you say, well, he's the guy for me, well, then, you know, ultimately, in a democracy, it's the voter who puts the man

into office.

You know,

my attitude towards Trump at the time, and I think certainly the attitude of most Democrats, was,

you know, if you like this guy, you are a bad person.

And telling voters they are bad people for their likes, political likes or dislikes is not going to win them to your cause.

It's just not.

It's bad.

It's bad politics.

Abraham Lincoln liked to quote this proverb that a drop of honey

kills more flies than a gallon of gall.

And I think now you listen to a lot of Democratic leaders, and the theme that is finally emerging in the Democratic Party is we need to listen to the Trump voter.

We need to meet that Trump voter where he is.

We have to stop condescending.

We have to stop calling them names.

Because if we do, we're simply going to strengthen the very movement that we're seeking to defeat.

So it's politics.

Now, you think that this is the ⁇ we need a new appeal to the Trump voter?

Well, two things.

It's politics as well as policy.

You know, at the end of 2024, after Trump won, I wrote a follow-on column called Done with Never Trump, and it was widely misinterpreted.

You know, I wasn't saying that Trump was going to be

a great president or that I had changed my mind about him.

But what I was done with was a certain style of politics that became kind of

typified by some of my friends'

real friends, personal friends in the Never Trump movement, which was this constant, obsessive

loathing of the man and his movement and everything he represents, and an assumption that if Trump has done it or said it or thought it, it's a lie, it's dangerous,

and so on.

And I just thought that that style of politics was bound to fail.

But I also think, and this is important, you know, those of us who detest the man but also want to oppose him effectively have to acknowledge that now and again he strikes on something that has real validity.

You know, I wish Democrats had taken more seriously the constant Trumpian taunts that Joe Biden was physically unfit for office, which I think now is

beyond dispute.

I think I wish we had more seriously taken the view that the border had become completely unpoliced, and you can have a sensible pro-immigrant view without essentially accepting a de facto open border policy.

And so we have to sort of rethink our our approach to voters to oppose to oppose the MAGA movement or to bring people back from the MAGA movement.

And also on some policy questions,

we can adopt what I call George Costanza politics.

George Costanza, the wonderful figure from Seinfeld, who at some point thinks that the answer to all of his problems is to do the exact opposite.

I don't know if you

recall this episode or if you ever watched Seinfeld back in the 90s.

I have not, yes.

You're missing out on a great

trove of wisdom.

American wisdom.

But I think a lot of people listening to this podcast will get that George Costanza do the opposite reference.

If Trump says there's a problem at the border, the opposite approach

is not necessarily the right one to take.

Agreed.

But

Trump's first term was quite different from what we're seeing now.

So he's just starting with the choice of his vice president, Mike Pence, traditional conservative, and his first cabinet.

And just

most of people who served in his first administration, they were, well, just just belong to the elite, very traditional.

There were few exceptions that were not crucial for the decision-making process.

While Trump's second term is dominated by the 2025 project, and it's

probably

just aims at a fundamental change

in the United States.

I don't know whether

it has a global vision of overthrowing the foundation of the Republic, but anything that Trump has been doing so far and everything he has been saying so far, it's far more radical.

Well, you know, leaving the 2025 project to one side, the most important and most distressing change between the first and the second term is that we have a cabinet staffed by manifestly incompetent people.

I mean, with the arguable exception of the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of State, who is a person I don't recognize anymore, the Marco Rubio

the Marco Rubio.

It's a line from a movie.

The Marco Rubio that we knew is gone, gentlemen.

He's gone.

And in place, there's this kind of ridiculous doppelganger who's trying to find some high-flown way to reconcile

what he knows is true.

Exactly.

What he knows is true with what he's required to say.

But as you're pointing out, it's also an ideologically much more radical and in some ways ambitious project than the kind of traditional conservatism with Trumpian characteristics, you know, to kind of use a Maoist sort of style slogan that the first term was.

And it's exceptionally worrisome.

However, one final point, what worries me most in all of this is J.D.

Vance,

because I think that he is an exceptionally opportunistic and cynical character in American politics and much, much brighter than his boss.

And

I think if the Democrats don't get his act together, get their act together, he's going to be the next president of the United States.

So, Democrats, get your act together.

Okay, let's talk about disagreements.

You write a column with Gail Collins at the time.

I did.

Where you model a way of having arguments.

So, disagreeing about fundamental principles, even

without resorting to hostility or personal attacks.

How did that come about?

Gail Collins, who had been the editorial page editor at the beginning of the century and a longtime liberal columnist at the paper, lovely human being, approached me when I came to the Times and said, you know, I'd like to do this thing where you and I kind of have a conversation about political topics.

And would you do it?

I thought, yeah, sure, you know, why not?

I thought it was kind of a...

a courtesy to an older colleague and not central to what I was doing.

And then it just took off and became this wildly popular feature, weekly feature in the Times.

Our readership was incredible.

There was clearly a real hunger among

the silent majority of Times readers for

political difference and conversation that wasn't based on outrage, where people could like each other despite their political differences.

I think

market in American political media.

Are we talking about the disagreement on fundamental principles?

There's no question that having at least some baseline shared values, belief in.

You do believe that you have the shared values, because it's very important for us to actually find out the common ground.

What are the core values that bring together liberals and conservatives?

Well, you know, it's funny.

It used to be when I was growing up in

Mexico, but then in the United States,

the difference between conservatives and liberals

was

all happened philosophically within the world of liberalism.

I mean, within the model of John Locke and Jefferson.

That kind of framed the disagreements so that

there was no difference between a Reagan and a Carter on respect for free speech or the value value of immigration.

I mean, they disagreed about how many B-1 bombers we needed or, you know, whatever,

or on how to address inflation.

But there were policy differences within the framework of, I think, broadly shared values.

We've moved from a world where the difference is between liberal and conservative to a world where the difference is between liberal and illiberal.

Because I think the Republican Party, to a great extent, has become an illiberal party, not a conservative party.

There's an important distinction between those two.

So I was able to, I think one of the reasons the conversation with Gail succeeded is that we do share basic

values, a basic sense of fairness and decency.

She's not a radical progressive social

democratic socialist, and I'm not

a MAGA Republican.

But is MAGA just

has any ideology?

Because illiberal, for me, it's more about having sheer power.

So it's the,

what is the ideology of MAGA that feeds Trump and Trump and World?

I think an ideology is beginning to cohere around MAGA, and it's

a kind of

a concept of

very old school reactionary European nationalism

that distrusts elites, at least educated elites.

distrusts outsiders.

So, I mean, one of the things, I mean, it's not surprising that a guy like J.D.

Vance doesn't simply dislike the thought of illegal immigration.

He dislikes legal immigration because it's about protecting a concept of nation that emerges from tribe, identity,

common ethnic, linguistic, racial characteristics.

You know, it's what used to be called thrown and altar conservatism.

It's not something that's...

that we haven't seen before in politics.

Religion is a big part of it, and of course with religion comes hypocrisy.

But

I don't think you can dismiss it as just a bunch of jerks having knee-jerk bullying instincts, although there's plenty of that.

There is a thought pattern to it.

Wolbrad back.

Now, it seems to me that the old divide of the 20th century, so

left-right, so center-right, center-left, social labor on one side, you know, center-right, conservative, Christian Democrats on the other side, this politics is dead.

It's no longer relevant.

So, we have different dividing lines.

Correct?

It's dying, yes.

It's dying.

So,

what is this new coalition?

Because

when we got together back in 2017 and started the Renew Renew Democracy Initiative, and you were one of the co-authors of this manifesto.

So we talked about democracy being

surrounded or just attacked from both sides, like siege from far left and far right.

So one side attacking the market economy and other one the liberal democracy.

But it seems to me that the antidote has not yet been worked out.

What are these new dividing lines?

Do we have to consider a new coalition that will drop some of the traditional disagreements and concentrate on preserving these very values that are so far not being shared by our opponents?

So the thing that we don't need is a centrist party.

We don't need it.

No, and I'll tell you why.

Because everyone defines centrism differently.

Every person who'd like to be a part of a centrist movement has

some red line, but it's different from the other centrist red line.

And so

I've seen it in kind of small ways and in large, but it never works.

Everyone wants to be reasonable,

but you end up with mush.

I think what America needs is a liberal party.

And I mean liberal in the Australian sense of the word or the Dutch sense of the word, which is a party that really is dedicated to

the ideals of a free and open society governed by an effective rule of law that believes in the power and the goodness of market capitalism, of free speech, of due process, of other central liberal values,

but rejects

and has like clear

opponents or differences with

the ideals of nationalism or the views of like socialism.

The problem with centrism is it's always trying to bid for the affection of the most dissatisfied so-called centrists.

And so

it doesn't work.

But this Liberal Party,

so

what is the political goal?

I mean, the party

is being formed as to appeal to the voters and win elections.

So

can you imagine this kind of party?

Yeah, look, the problem.

It's not

The problem that you have, it would have to be built over the wreckage

of a defunct party.

We have a system.

Defunct parties or parties?

Party.

Maybe parties, but

we have a system that we're not going to get rid of in any plausible way, the Electoral College, politically plausible way,

that favors a two-party structure.

That's just the system that we have.

It has disadvantages.

It also has advantages.

But it means that the Republican Party could only succeed once the Whig Party had failed, right?

And

so I don't think we're going to be able to get a Liberal Party unless

one of the two parties so implodes that there is a movement to create

something new.

But that will only happen once, say, the Republican Party, and it could happen, implodes.

Of course, I've been hoping for this to happen for

eight years now, and it hasn't worked out.

But I think there's now actually

a space in the Democratic Party to create a party that says, you know, we oppose totalitarianism, we believe in old-fashioned, classic American values,

and we're against this kind of nativist, know-nothing nationalism that the Republicans represent.

That's a coherent political space.

The point is, there are elements that could create a winning

coalition behind these ideas.

What's required is a charismatic, major political figure.

And,

you know, the Republicans, I hate to say this, but they found a hugely charismatic figure.

He's not charismatic to my taste, but Donald Trump embodies a politics of personal charisma.

Is there a Democrat who has that, who has that kind of quality that Obama had and that Clinton had?

And I think before that, you'd have to go back to LBJ.

That's what remains to be seen.

So

do you expect this American politics to

go through this realignment, so to create this new dividing lines and

to make it a part of the campaign?

We have 2026 campaign, 2028 campaign, but right now we have other challenges.

So we just, you know, it's the there's the onslaught by Trump administration on some fundamental principles.

So how do we go through this period of

called instability or turmoil?

How this new political balance

will be created to make sure that America will not simply

collapse?

Well, I hope I'm right.

But I think the basic laws of politics that this country has

operated under for

generations still applies.

I think if Trump continues to screw up, if he drives away people in his coalition through tariffs, through mismanagement, through erratic policy,

if taxes don't go down but instead effectively go up,

the

Democrats are likely to at least take the House.

The Senate is a little more challenging for them in 2026.

You'll get political paralysis.

And if Democrats can actually coalesce a charismatic, winning political figure, they have a reasonable chance of winning in 2028.

That's a long way away.

You know, people are always saying, oh, the Democratic Party is dead.

It has, I don't know, a 37% approval rating.

The Republican Party's approval rating

isn't that much higher.

So, you know, what's the expression?

The only way out is through.

And we'll get through it.

I was on a panel

about a month ago in Brooklyn, and the question that was being asked quite earnestly is like,

you know, is Donald Trump going to be president for life?

No, Donald Trump is not going to be president for life.

He is not going to be president for life.

Well, what if he repeals the 22nd Amendment?

Well, in that case, the Republicans, at a minimum, would have to win the election.

Well, what if all the elections stolen?

All of this kind of nightmarish scenario, I think, is anathema to,

is unlikely to happen for a whole variety of reasons, but not the least of those is that our allegiance as a people to bedrock institutions and to a certain set of ideas is still pretty damn strong.

We're not the Weimar Republic.

We're not Yeltsin's Russia, right?

I mean, 250 years means something

in this country, and I don't think it's all going to be washed away.

So we are going to get a restoration of some kind of

balance.

I think the real question that I worry about is whether the Democratic Party comes to the realization that it has to bid for voters at the center, or whether it thinks that it has to become a kind of perverted mirror image of mega-republicanism.

That is to say, to move to its extreme left.

Again, I remember this is the first time actually, my first visit to America was in 1988.

1988?

1988, yes.

And I remember the elections.

So Dukakis has been crushed by Bush 41.

Again, expected.

So after eight years of Reagan, so the country was on the rise and this mood was so, you know, it's like a positive and it's Dukakis stood no chance.

And then the Democratic Party just, you know, just

did its soul searching and shifted, you know, from this,

you know, Mondel Dukakis leftist

policies into Bill Clinton.

Yeah.

They found Bill Clinton.

So again, it's, it's, all they needed is

the, an attractive, very, you know, the smart candidate, also from the South, so they're from the red state.

So though Arkansas was not a red state yet, yet at the time, a governor.

But it's, I don't feel that today we're going through the same process.

Well, you know, the great question the Democrats have to answer is do they need to go through one election cycle to find their Bill Clinton, or does it have to be three, right?

In the case of the 1980s, it was three.

Carter was destroyed in 1980.

Mondo was destroyed in 84, Dukakis in 88.

Finally, they thought, okay, we're going to have to bite the bullet and get a guy who's a moderate Southerner who believes in the death penalty, among other things, right?

That's what they had to do.

My fear is that the Democrats will be goaded once again by the MAGA right into capitulating to their own worst instincts.

And I'm afraid, but it's a very effective tactic with the Democrats.

Democrats really have to sit down and internalize the lessons of their loss last year against one of the most known and one of the most detested figures in American politics.

How did you lose to this guy?

The reason is...

The second time.

The second time.

How did you lose to this guy?

Because you are worse.

You are worse because you sound, contrary to Tim Waltz, you guys sound like the weird people,

not the Republicans.

And so there's got to be a Democrat who understands that.

So moving to the left or winning.

Yeah.

Or Or improving your chances to win.

So what's more important?

You know,

what is it that Niels Bohr said?

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

So I don't know.

I don't know.

Maybe they're going to have to lose so badly again to J.D.

Vance or Josh Hawley or someone else that they just hate

that they're going to say, okay,

we've got to reclaim the center.

I guess the question you're really asking is, is the head going to beat the heart, right?

The heart wants to beat left in the Democratic Party.

But the head wants to win.

And the head wants an agenda that is going to serve middle America, middle-class America, middle-political America,

and

not a class of radicals who have an idea about

this country that is

Donald Trump.

Okay, now I'd like to end the podcast on a more positive and forward-looking note.

So

let me ask you,

what is the way into the future?

Because both domestically and internationally, so

America's traditional values have been challenged or have been sacrificed for some very short-term political gains.

And just we could see

the political center, you know, the reasonable people basically being bent over by the radicalism for the left or the right.

So what's the way out?

Give us just, you know,

your positive vision.

Will America, you know, become great again?

Sorry for using this.

Yes, America is great and will be greater still.

You know, one of the differences between a dictatorship and a democracy is that a dictatorship advertises its strength and hides its weakness.

Democracies, by contrast, we advertise our weakness and hide our strength.

I mean, the media is a daily digest of everything that's going wrong with this country.

You've never seen a New York Times headline that says, things slightly better today than they were yesterday, although we could have run that headline.

So a newspaper headlines like, you know, the greatest harvest ever.

Exactly.

But in America, we look, we're constantly focused on our weaknesses and we hide our strength.

There's a pessimism paradox, which is that pessimistic people, at least if they're not fatalists, are constantly attending to the things that are going wrong.

And so they're adjusting, they're trimming their sails.

They're trying to find solutions to problems as they encounter them every single day.

And yet there's huge strength in the United States.

If you look at any of the major technologies that are going to be the defining technologies of the next 30 years, almost invariably it's happening somewhere in

the United States.

The innovation is happening here at the copying is happening in China, right?

And this was the same story in the 1970s.

1970s was a period of deep pessimism in the United States.

The Soviet Union was on the march.

We were politically terribly divided and weakened at home.

And yet that's when some guy nobody had ever heard of named Steve Jobs was tinkering with a computer.

And another guy nobody had ever heard of named Bill Gates was tinkering with software.

Think of all the great American companies that have emerged in the last 50 years and continue to emerge and compare that to a list of the major, say, European companies.

The innovation is here, the excitement is here.

Americans eventually get their heads out of their asses.

It just sometimes

takes a while.

There's a spirit of enterprise and irreverence and trying new things and experimentation that exists in this country like nowhere else.

People still want to come to our shore.

And one day we will have the leaders who understand the the still vast untapped potential of this country and they're going to exploit it to its fullest.

So in the long term, I'm an optimist, but I think actually it pays to be a pessimist in the short term because it makes you more attuned to both danger and opportunity.

Just want to clarify, short-term, mid-term, long-term.

What's

the time scales?

Exactly, time scales.

So this is, we're going through the very revolutionary period

in world history.

We have wars, we have global conflicts.

So there's so many challenges that we don't know how to address.

And I think that's our response now,

the outcome of these many battles, will define the future

for the next 50 years.

Here's the question.

Are we making mistakes at a faster or slower rate than our enemies are making mistakes?

Now, who are our enemies?

Are enemies within or enemies outside?

Both.

Both.

So you're still optimistic.

So that's okay.

The only thing is we're having this conversation on a Monday, but tomorrow I might be a pessimist.

Okay, Brut.

Thank you very much.

Pleasure, Gary.

This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Arlene O'Revelo.

Our editor is Dave Shaw.

Original music and mix by Rob Smircia.

Fact-checking by Ina Alvarado.

Special thanks to Paulina Casparo and Mick Gringard.

Claudia Nebay is executive producer of Atlantic Audio.

Andrea Waldis is our managing editor.

If you want to learn more about the work Brett and I have been doing at the Renew Democracy Initiative, I invite you to visit rdi.org and to subscribe to the next move on Substack.

Next time on Autocracy in America.

The fact of the matter is, you want a military that will push back on orders and on positions.

If you create an environment, a culture of fear that speaking up, whether it is against a particular mission or a particular policy,

is going to get you fired, then you're going to find yourself as a military in a very difficult position.

I'm Gary Kaspor.

See you back here next week.