How to Stop A Civil War

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

This week we had a lot of big news here at The Atlantic.

You may have noticed a new logo for the show, and it's part of a complete redesign here, which you'll see on the website and in the magazine.

And we published a special issue around a single theme, how to stop a civil war.

With me in the studio is the person behind that issue, the Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Hi, Jeff.

Hi, Isaac.

So, civil war?

Yes.

Good question.

That's just a rosy topic that came out of nowhere.

Hey, we're the Atlantic, okay?

You know, we're not us, which is nothing wrong with us weekly, but we're not, you know, we go heavy.

But it's actually not just heaviness.

It has a prescriptive quality to the issue.

I hope you see that.

As you know, Isaac, as a loyal Atlanticist, the Atlantic was founded in 1857 to do two things.

One was to argue for abolition of slavery.

The other was to

talk through our journalism about the fracturing of America and the American idea and what is the future of this experiment.

And so we don't think it's the 1850s here in the United States.

Nevertheless, we're in a period of division and fracture and mutual contempt and a loss of common affection and filter bubbles and competing and dueling narratives, even about things that a few years ago might have been understood to be common observable truth.

So

we're in a bit of a bind.

We're a little bit off the rails right now.

Donald Trump, I argue

in one piece in the magazine, is a symptom symptom of some deeper problems.

He's not the cause of this.

Exacerbates some of what we're seeing, but the problems run deep.

And so we thought we would, in one place, just pull together a bunch of really smart thinkers, philosophers, writers, to go at different aspects of this problem.

So when did the idea for this issue begin?

I don't think this issue has a precise beginning because

The Atlantic is the magazine of the American idea.

We are constantly grappling with one aspect of this or another.

But I thought to pull it all together after I had a lunch about a year ago, a little more than a year ago, with Danielle Allen at Harvard, the great philosophers, great government experts.

And we started talking about disenfranchisement, disempowerment, where democracy has gone off the rails, how to bring it back.

She happens to think that the American idea articulated in the set of founding documents is a good good one.

And

when we had lunch, she had this very vividly described idea that eventually became the piece, one of the centerpieces of this issue, the road from serfdom.

And it's talking about revitalizing the idea of citizenship and revitalizing the idea of democracy and how we could take back democracy from malign forces that seem to be working against I would consider to be America's interests.

Aaron Ross Powell, so that's really the question that today's episode is framed around.

Does American democracy depend on Americans getting along, or is civility actually dangerous?

It's interesting that you asked that because

this being the Atlantic, I didn't want us to just go in one direction and have all these writers go in one direction.

So I want to pressure test all of the ideas that we're talking about.

One of the fears about the call for civility, common common discourse and dialogue, one of the fears, it's a justifiable fear, is, and again, we go back to the

actual Civil War period to understand this.

After the Civil War, there was a period of Reconstruction in which African Americans, newly freed African Americans, were empowered.

But whites of different parties, in the 1870s decided that, you know what, national unity

is requiring us to actually put aside some of the needs and the political needs, economic needs of African Americans.

We're going to come together.

We as white Americans of different parties, different regions are coming together

on a set of issues.

And the only way we can do that is to scant the needs of the African American population.

For the greater good.

For the greater good.

And so we asked our Adam Serwer, one of our great writers, to make an argument against reconciliation in a kind of way, to say that, no, before we reconcile, we have to drive right through the hardest issues.

We can't make believe that we get along and that we understand each other and that we have our best interests,

your best interests at heart, and you have my best interests at heart.

We can't do that.

We can't go through that kind of fakery.

We're going to have to actually go right at it and argue our way through that.

And some people...

are going to lose power and some people are going to lose certain privileges in doing that.

And so we have a number of writers in this issue who are arguing for common vision, common purpose.

Let's all come together around X principle or Y principle.

Let's remember who we are and let's behave better to each other.

And Adam is saying, you know, let's slow that down a little bit.

Let's think about the consequences of that, given that we've already been through a period, arguably more dramatic period, but given that we've been through a period in which

comedy was built on the backs of the dispossessed.

So here's what we're going to do today.

You have been, as you mentioned, living with this whole idea in your head for a year.

I have only had a chance recently to page through the issue.

So I'm going to turn the reins of the podcast over to you for this episode to talk with Adam and to talk with Danielle about this division and the possible ways through the division.

And I'm excited to do it.

And thank you for turning over the reins of this podcast to me.

I will try not to mess it up too badly.

Well, if you do, then one way or the other, I'm back here next week.

So thanks, Jen.

Thanks.

So I'm here with Danielle Allen and Adam Serwer.

Adam, as all of our listeners know, is one of the Atlantic stalwarts, our staff writer who has been doing amazing work on the Trump administration for three years.

Adam, thanks for being with us and thanks for contributing to this special issue.

Thank you for having me.

It was an honor to contribute to the issue with so many other big names and wonderful people.

And we also have Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and the director of the Edmund J.

Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.

You have so many titles.

It's unthinkable.

There's a lot of titles.

So many titles.

It means you're very fancy.

Or something.

Or something.

Overbooked.

Or your business card has to be larger than ordinary.

Danielle Allen, just to start, describe your concern about where we're headed, where you think we're going if we don't intervene, what sorts of interventions we need to make in order to restore the people to power, in essence,

and talk about

the conceit,

one of the conceits of the piece.

We called it the road from serfdom.

And maybe you can describe a little bit about Hayek and how you're thinking in opposition to some of the ideas that gained great popularity over the last 30, 40, 50 years.

And if you could do that in 90 seconds,

you will win a free subscription subscription to the Atlantic.

Okay, here we go.

So, the first and most important point of the piece is that the best path to flourishing for human beings is democracy.

This is because democracy gives people control over their own lives personally, but also gives them the chance to be co-creators, co-owners of the public sphere.

The second really important point is that you can't have democracy unless you commit to preserving political institutions and commit to a concept of union, where majorities and minorities in any particular contest stay with the game and it's worth their while to stay with the game.

So you have to prioritize the functioning of democratic institutions over other areas of policy if you want to preserve democracy.

The second real stretch of the piece is to argue about why is it we've become so factionalized, so polarized over time, and how dangerous is this degree of factionalization.

Part of the argument is about changes to our social life and cultural universe.

Part of it's about changes to political institutions.

Part of it's about economic policy, actually, and the idea that the economic positions and paradigms that flowed from writers like Hayek and Milton Friedman led to removing economic decisions from politics, putting them in the hands of technocrats operating separately from politics, and that removal of key political choices from the political realm has disabled Congress, has left our politics without substantial work that it needs to do.

In other words, it's not worth our time to invest in politics, partly because we're no longer permitted to make meaningful political decisions about the the direction of the polity, particularly in relationship to economic questions.

So, then the final part of the piece is really focusing on what we can do about that.

How can we restore the worth and value of our political system so that it makes sense for ordinary citizens to participate?

And how can we restore our commitment to union, to doing this together, despite the magnitude of our disagreements and cultural conflicts?

And there, the focus is on a set of sort of starter reforms that would, I think, rescue our political institutions.

So, among them, increasing the size of the House, using things like ranked choice voting in congressional elections, term limits for Supreme Court justices, and so forth.

So it's really an argument for the value of democracy to individual human beings and the importance of prioritizing democracy itself on our policy agenda.

Okay, you win a subscription.

Hurrah.

Yeah, good.

Let me just, before I turn to Adam, let me just stay with one thing.

You've written a wonderful book about the Declaration of Independence.

You're preoccupied with the founders.

Talk about Washington.

You quote George Washington early, and you're talking

in the context of faction,

which is a word you prefer over tribalism, I think.

Talk about

I thought your argument for faction over tribalism was very strong.

I actually hate the word tribalism.

I think it's really stupid.

Let's get Danielle talking about what is better about faction.

And also, maybe you can just step back for a minute and talk about what the founders feared.

I mean, it it was Madison who was particularly obsessed about faction, although Washington obviously spoke about it again and again.

Absolutely.

They all were worried about faction.

So Washington saw faction as a form of despotism and saw it really as the first step to permanent despotism where self-government is destroyed and power handed over to one person to exercise autocratically.

And what his worry was was that when you have highly factionalized or polarized or for some people tribalized politics, what ends up happening is that a sort of spirit of vengeance really emerges and people care more about winning for their side than preserving the game, so to speak.

And it's that desire to sort of win for your side that leads people to invest all their power in a single charismatic individual who they think can just continue to advance the ball for their side.

That was the danger he was worried about.

Preserving free self-government requires the notion that, again, you prioritize keeping everybody in the game, the people who are against you as well as the people who are for you, and therefore you prioritize compromise and you prioritize sort of shifting balance of who wins and who loses over time.

So they put a lot of effort into thinking about how to ward off factionalism.

In some sense, Madison was the great theorist of that.

His essay, Federalists Number 10, is exactly about this question.

And he really thought that he was able to design a system of representation that would prevent extreme views from finding each other and being able to coordinate and sort of drive politics in dangerous directions.

We've seen that system eroded for a whole lot of reasons in the last 30 years, social media being one of them.

But so the degree to which our systems of representation were supposed to mediate opinion, moderate it, help us find those compromises and syntheses has been really undermined by a lot of changes in the last 20 years.

Adam, what's your beef with the word tribalism?

Aaron Powell, I just think it doesn't really reflect

what is dividing people.

I mean, when you look at the two political parties, only one of them really resembles

a coalition that is homogenous in a racial, religious, and cultural sense.

You know, when you look at the Democratic Party, there's not a whole lot.

I mean, like,

you know, hipsters in Brooklyn who are voting for AOC don't have a tremendous amount in common with

the black church ladies in South Carolina who get on the bus to go to the polls every election day.

These are different people who are in coalition together who have similar interests, but they are not in any sense part part of a tribe.

Aaron Powell, but you do believe that the Republicans have turned themselves into a tribe,

in the common understanding of tribal, meaning not creedal,

but based on color, religion, faith,

and so on, right?

Well, I would say that I think that they have come to see themselves

as threatened by the diversity of the country.

I think that that's clear both in the way that they I mean, if you look at Fox News every night, demographic panic is is a frequent topic of conversation on Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson's shows.

And when you saw in the reaction to Yoni Applebaum's piece discussing sort of demographic changes to the country,

the response was one of anger and panic from conservative readers who are looking at that.

And I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of Trump's brain trust is from California, a state that was once the Nixon and Reagan heartland, and who's, and where the Republicans' harsh approach to immigration basically locked them out of power.

Right.

So, I just want to say that I really enjoyed Danielle's piece.

I was really,

I thought her concept of monopoly, not just in the economic, but also in the social realm, was really important.

I think where I differ from Danielle is that I think,

you know, in some ways, the system is standing in the way of the rebalancing that's necessary.

So, you know, a huge contributor to polarization is income inequality.

But what we have in the system that Madison designed is this sort of weird coincidence where

this very conservative

white portion of the country can wield disproportionate power because they are ideally geographically distributed.

And this has created a sort of artificial politics of scarcity where people who are extremely wealthy use their power and influence to exploit the choke points in the system to prevent redistribution, which in in turn exacerbates the politics of scarcity that already exists and

make our politics more fractitious along

certain particular factional lines

because politicians are there and willing to exploit people's economic suffering and hardship by blaming people who are different.

And when you look at like American history in the past, the pendulum swings.

You had the New Deal and then you had Eisenhower and Nixon sort of accepting that liberal consensus for a few decades.

And then you had Reagan, and you had like Clinton and the DLC types basically accepting

the world

that Friedman built.

But there's been no way for the pendulum to swing back in part because of the sort of weird.

The Electoral College is in the way.

The Electoral College, the Senate, there's like this system that is designed has sort of

weirdly stuck in the snow and there's no clear way to get the chains on the tires to pull the car out.

The response?

So, I think it's a good image to say the system is weirdly stuck in the snow.

I think that's exactly right.

I think that there are.

It's archaic given climate change, but we'll move

that to another conversation.

But I do think that there are ways of getting things started again.

I don't think it's exactly an easy path, and I think the question of the Electoral College and the Senate is really the hardest piece of it.

I've been a defender of the Electoral College in the sense that I think you have to protect minority interests in decision-making, including rural minority interests.

But

it may well be the case that the combination of the Senate and the Electoral College is excessive protection at this point.

And I think that is a conversation that we have to have as a country.

But more importantly, I think there are a lot of votes that are left on the table.

There's a lot of voting power that's left on the table.

And I believe that with ranked choice voting, which sort of drives politics back towards a kind of competition aimed at the center, not the extremes, that will be a mechanism for pulling more votes back into the conversation.

I think that if Congress understands itself as the first branch, which it is, it's not a co-equal branch with the second branch.

It's Article I for a reason.

The legislature is the body responsible for rendering the will of the people.

If Congress worked hard to rebuild its own power, including degrees of power over things that have been set up as sort of independent functions like the Federal Reserve and so forth, I think that there are avenues for economic policymaking that could drive the country in an egalitarian direction.

So I do think it's possible to pull more voting power into the electoral system in ways that would drive egalitarian focus in policy.

And then also if Congress thinks about its own functioning and so forth and wants to reclaim its own power, there are ways of reshaping economic decision making for the sake of the well-being of the country.

Aaron Powell, Adam, let me frame, given what Daniel just talked about, let me frame for you a question that relates to your piece.

There would be people, let's just say we move toward a conversation in the coming years about redistributing power in a way that finally acknowledges that Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota have fewer people than queens,

and that we're going to have to rebalance the country and rebalance the distribution of power in a way that makes this country more representative.

There are people who are going to say, that's going to cause a civil war because the whites in these rural areas are going to rebel against what they would see as their disenfranchisement.

So, what we have to do is paper over the differences, and we have to prevent civil war at all costs.

And therefore, we have to be civil with each other, and we have to compromise with each other, and we have to accede to their...

feelings.

I asked this question, obviously, in the context of your piece,

in which you argue that we overvalue comedy, compromise, and civility.

You're not, you're personally a very civil person,

but you also believe that we can make a fetish of this.

Well, I think like, you know, democracy is a system for managing conflict, right?

And so I think, you know, you have to allow people to fight with each other.

You have to allow people to argue and have disputes and not shut them down.

And I think particularly what bothers me is when people who are, you know, saying, well, my rights are being violated and

they are told by people in authority that they're being uncivil and they need to shut up.

And the thing about that is that we tend to romanticize certain periods in history, such as Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, but they were also considered annoying and uncivil.

White people did not like it.

No.

And then you...

You go back to abolitionism and you hear Frederick Douglass saying things that you would never hear a prominent liberal pundit say today, which is, you know, the way to nullify the fugitive slave law is to make a few dead kidnappers,

which is, you know, really tough, but the thing is, is that sometimes that happened.

That, I mean, that did happen before the Civil War.

So, I mean,

my concern basically is this, that because

the system seems to incentivize this kind of racial nationalism that Trump has embraced, it makes it basically impossible for one side to recognize that the other side is also part of the same country.

And it incentivizes Republican politicians to treat Democratic constituencies as though they are not legitimately American.

And you can look at, like, and I don't think it's just about the Senate, but I do think it is about democracy in a sense.

And I think that

the only way that this has a happy ending is if this dispute is resolved in favor of multiracial democracy.

And my fear

with the emphasis on reconciliation is that in the past, those kinds of really deep deep conflicts have been resolved in favor of simply excluding non-whites from the polity.

And you can see attempts by the Trump administration to do that now, whether it's with

the most prominent example is the attempt to use the census case to institute essentially a nationwide racial gerrymander in order to make it easier for Republicans to win elections without majorities.

And I think that sort of thing is a much bigger risk than whether or not people are sort of nasty to each other in political conversation.

I also think that that nastiness is at root a symptom of the larger problem, which is that our

experiment with multiracial democracy is very young and some people have not entirely accepted it.

We're going to take a break for a moment, but we'll be back shortly with Danielle Allen and Adam Server.

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Danielle, you're obviously an expert on the founders, preoccupied with the founders, and you embraced their complications,

which is to say, the people whose ideas you admire so much were also slaveholders and also parked to the side.

Not all of them.

Not all of them, many.

The people I admire most were not.

Most were not.

The ones I admire were not.

Okay.

But you admire.

I admire Washington.

You admire Washington.

All right.

We've settled that another time.

You

nevertheless

believe that to some degree, early in the founding of America,

the founders parked to the side some very, very difficult questions in order to achieve the kind of unity that was necessary in order to become a free nation, free in quotes for certain people who were marginalized.

Talk about what Adam said in that context.

The largest question for both of you is obviously, and this is, you mentioned Yoni Applebaum's piece in the same issue.

We are now participating in an experiment about whether we can build, for the first time ever in the planet's history, a true multiracial, multicultural democracy.

Are you confident that this can be done?

I am confident that it can be done, though the confidence comes from a sense of necessity.

That is to say, it needs to be done.

That's the nature of the confidence.

And then what needs to be done will be done because we have the resources of human spirit and intelligence to achieve it.

So that's the sense of

a collective horror of the idea of committing violence against each other.

Yes, I certainly hope we do.

I think we do.

I mean, I think that's the other thing about the Civil War stuff is that, you know, we're really, Americans are like really annoyed with each other.

We're like fed up.

But I actually don't think, I mean, like, when you think about the period before the Civil War, you have a vast

area of contiguous territory whose entire economy and culture is built around an industry that the other half of the country wants to abolish.

We're not in that situation.

There's more in common between like,

there's more in common,

you know, metro areas have more in common with each other.

Like Atlanta has a lot more in common with Washington, D.C.

than it does with rural Georgia.

And just like New York City has more in common with Chicago and upstate New York has more in common with rural Illinois.

It's not a, you know, the divides are within states, not between them.

So I'm not afraid that we're going to field large armies and start shooting at each other.

My concern is that when you look at American history, there are a lot of lesser outcomes

that are not

shooting wars between large numbers of people that end up denying democratic rights to large numbers of people.

And my fear is that we're headed towards that sort of outcome one way or the other.

So I want to respond to that.

And I want to take up the concept of multiracial democracy because I think this is incredibly important.

And I want to be very clear that the argument that I'm making for union is not an argument for civility.

I mean, you know that already, but I want to just say that explicitly, and I want to explain what that means.

It is an argument for committing to each other, and it is an argument for understanding compromise is an important part of politics.

But that's not to say that politics isn't about contestation, including uncivil contestation.

And so I think we need a few distinctions to make sense of what we're talking about.

So, yes, the only way that we can resolve this positively from my point of view is, as you said, Adam, with a multiracial democracy.

There are two parts to that phrase, multiracial and democracy.

So my argument is really about the democracy piece of it.

I presume the multiracial piece in the sense that there is no such thing as union that does not include everybody.

So the moments that you describe as moments where civility fails us are moments where exactly civility is used to push some people out of the union.

So the precondition for my argument is inclusion, that the full population of this country is all included in the project of union, and that we have to redesign our political institutions to make that a meaningful reality.

So currently our political institutions don't function so as to incentivize participation broadly across the whole population.

To come back to ranked choice voting again, it has the problem of our current system has the problem of incentivizing politicians to campaign towards their most extreme voters and sort of to shape the conversation in that way.

Ranked choice voting, people want to, be people's second choice and their third choice as well as being their first choice.

Just describe very quickly how it might work for people who are not familiar with the concept.

So ranked choice voting is when you get to vote for a list of your favorite candidates, your first choice, your second choice, your third choice.

And if your first choice doesn't make it over

any office.

It could be for any office.

It can be used at any level.

We could use it for the presidency.

We could use it for Congress.

We could use it for city elections.

And basically, if you happen to vote for a first choice person who doesn't do terribly well, then your vote can roll over to your second choice person.

So the people who voted for Jill Stein, for example, might have had a second-choice vote that would have rolled over to another candidate

in the presidential election.

So, at the end of the day, what that means is that people don't win with a mere plurality.

I mean, they really have to win with a majority, and that majority is composed out of first- and second-choice points of view.

So, you get a much more kind of moderated and aggregated view.

Also, if you combine ranked choice voting with multi-member districts, so for example, if we had bigger and more heterogeneous congressional districts, it would mean that you would have districts that were represented simultaneously by, say, a Democrat and a Republican.

So the point is that that's a kind of institutional redesign.

that would do more to structure our institutions on the basis of a fully inclusive conception of voice.

A fully inclusive conception of voice means that all kinds of voices should be part of the public sphere as well.

So it does mean that there's space for uncivil voices as well as for civil voices.

And so what I like to say is, as I argue for compromise, it's important to see that there's a distinction between good compromises and bad compromises.

And I take the compromises around religion at the founding to have been good compromises and compromises around enslavement to have been bad compromises.

The first included all the full range of religious perspective in the colonies, the second did not include the full range of perspective on enslavement.

So, from my point of view, inclusion is the first principle.

You build functioning democratic institutions on top of that, and that's what makes multiracial democracy possible.

Yeah, so I am not as well versed as Danielle is in the sort of systemic solutions to this problem.

The only thing I'm saying is that, you know, our civility problem is really a polarization problem, and our polarization problem is actually the result of our unresolved race problem.

And when you have parties that are polarized along racial lines, where one party is mostly, you know, made up of white Christians and the other party is multiracial, you end up in this kind of

existential battle over the nature of American democracy.

I mean, I'm not, you know, my point point is not to say, you know, I think some people weirdly interpreted my argument as like the Democratic Party has to win.

But what I'm actually saying is that multiracial democracy has to win.

And ultimately...

Oh, you're arguing that the Republican Party has to change.

What I'm arguing actually, and I'll say this explicitly, is that I want the Republican Party to integrate because that's the only way I fundamentally see multiracial democracy surviving in the long term, is if the parties do not conceive, are not racially polarized along these lines in a way that historically has been extremely destabilizing for American democracy.

Let me ask you one final question on that, and I'll ask Danielle for a final response.

The question, Adam, for you is how do you convince Trump's constituency, mostly white, mostly angry,

resentful on race issues, among other issues.

How do you convince them that this is where America is going, that nobody is dispossessing you,

that we're just looking to sort of equalize things a bit more.

Do you think that convincing can be done in a civil or even uncivil but still verbal way?

And am I even asking the right question?

I know there are a lot of people who get angry with that kind of question because

it sounds to some people like you're saying, how do I give more rights to racists so they become a little less angry about the condition of the country?

So

I think that the question, so

I'm going to, I hope you don't mind, I'm going to reject the framing of the question.

I think it's not

that they have to.

But you're going to do it anyway.

I think they're entitled to

their perspective.

What I want to change is the institutional incentives for the Republican Party in terms of only appealing to that constituency.

They were heading in that way, by the way.

They were heading in that way briefly in 2012, and then Trump was like, you know, actually, we can win by just appealing to these people and it'll be fine.

But that creates, you know, then you have to deliver for that constituency.

And Trump has not really delivered economically for that constituency, but he has, you know, reflected their fear and anger in a way that has been extremely harmful to a lot of people.

So given the dispossession that's caused by the technocratic elite, and given the impact of social media and these unfiltered and untrue ways that people are getting information, how do you do the constructive thing of helping people who vote for Trump understand from your perspective that they're voting for a, to use a loaded term, false god.

So, I mean, I think there are a few parts of your, both of your questions that I would also sort of contest slightly.

So I agree with Adam's point that the Republican Party has become a demographically constricted party and that that's an important part of how it's currently functioning.

I think that's a different thing from saying that everybody who voted for Trump is a racist, which I think is not the case.

And I think it's really important that we not presume that up front.

Well, can I just interrupt and say, if you voted for Trump, you are either racist or you made a decision that his racism and xenophobia and misogyny and all the rest were not going to stop you from voting for Trump.

I mean, I don't want to

make a choice.

Sure, I think that's fair, but I think that second category is an important category to see as distinct from the first category.

And so I think that the second category is a group of people for whom the concept of fairness matters a lot, and they have been very focused on what they feel has been fair or unfair to them.

And they have been willing to put their own, what they think of as fair to them, sort of above fairness to other people.

And that's sort of what you're pointing to.

That's a very different thing from proactively seeking to subject other people.

So I just think that's an important distinction.

But then I think that that concept of fairness is a relevant one.

And the question is always, how can you maximize the number of people who want to be committed to the idea that democracy as a set of fair institutions is what we're trying to build here together?

Can you pull people away from a sort of limited conception of fairness that really is just tied to their own interests and bring them back to a bigger conception of fairness that's about democratic institutions generally?

No, I don't think you're going to get all Trump voters.

The question is, can you make the number of people who remain committed to Trump as small as possible by giving people another vision for how they can actually find a solution to their own experience of unfairness while also supporting other people's efforts to solve their problems of unfairness?

That, I think, is the way to formulate the challenge.

Right.

This goes, and Adam has spoken spoken about this among other people.

This goes to the idea that there is, when we talk about the working class, people automatically are talking almost about white people.

And there is, of course, a very large African-American, Hispanic working class.

And they have more commonality, more interest with white working class people than a lot of white working class people understand.

Exactly.

And the additional point that I'm making is it's not just the sort of commonality with regard to economic interest.

It's that across whole swaths of our population, people experience a lack of control over their own fates and futures.

And that is across races, it's across classes and so forth.

And that's where re-empowering people with regard to our political institutions, rebuilding our institutions so that they actually genuinely function for the people rather than being steered exclusively by a technocratic elite, is a gift for everybody.

That ought to shrink the number of people who see the solution to the lack of control and lack of fairness they experience as sort of achieved through a persona like Trump.

I think

the major fear for me is that, you know, liberal democracy is basically an agreement on what the rules are for managing conflicts.

And my concern is that people

is that a certain segment of the country has

been manipulated into thinking they are imminently going to be dispossessed of everything they know and love by this alien majority that is emerging.

And so as a result, they're losing faith in the the rules that we have all agreed to to manage our conflicts.

And I think those rules are extraordinarily important and they must be preserved.

But one of those rules is, you know, being able to get mad at each other and express that.

Aaron Powell, one final short question for both of you.

And our job, certainly our job as journalists, is not to make people feel good when there's no reason to feel good.

What gives you, though, hope that we can maintain national unity and cohesion within a framework that allows for disagreement, sometimes uncivil, sometimes angry.

Well, I have the good fortune of having the chance to visit with people all over the country giving talks, usually about the Declaration of Independence or else about the future of democracy.

And I've been able to do that in a sort of diversity of context with people from different political opinions, points of view, and so forth.

And what I do find consistently across contexts is people's ability to say that they love this country, actually,

despite disadvantage, despite forms of challenge, even despite discrimination and things like that.

And so I think we have a very hard time saying out loud that we love this country and saying that to each other and being able to articulate the reasons we do and accepting that we all love this country for different reasons and that's okay.

But I have been just truly encouraged by the degree to which I hear people express love of this country.

Adam, you use history as a guide.

This isn't actually the worst it's been.

No, it's really not the worst it's been.

And in some ways,

there are lots of things to be optimistic about.

I mean, I think that

at the end of Reconstruction, there was a white majority that was really not all that interested in the rights of black people.

And I think that when you look at America today,

there's a lot more people who care about the rights of not just black people, but other ethnic and religious minorities.

And they think that's important, and they think that is a fundamental aspect of what America is.

But I also think, you know, as someone who lives in Texas, I live in San Antonio, and I, you know, I do not spend a lot of my time around extremely online people.

I think that social media can sometimes fool people into thinking everybody is way angrier than they are.

Look, a lot of people who,

people who are extremely involved in politics are angry.

That's true.

But like the vast majority of people are really just trying to like...

figure out their lives and

pay their bills and

have fun and see their friends and take care of their families.

And I think that that really really hasn't changed.

And sometimes the sort of conversation online can make people feel as though we're all a lot angrier and crazier

and closer to each other, being at each other's throats than we really are.

Adam Serwer, thank you very much for joining us.

Danielle Allen, very special thanks to you for contributing to this special issue and to this special edition of Radio Atlantic.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

Thank you to both.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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