Is Democracy Dying?

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Democracy around the world faces a set of unique threats.

Authoritarianism is spreading, corruption is festering, and the worst could be yet to come.

Today, we've gathered some preeminent thinkers to discuss one important question:

Is democracy dying?

This is Radio Atlantic.

So, welcome, everybody.

This is Jeff Goldberg.

I'm the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and I'm here with my colleague Alex Wagner.

Oh, it's so good to be in the same room with you, Jeff.

Good that we're doing this.

We're doing this in the same room for once.

Not in different cities.

Highly unusual.

It's unusual.

And then we have people in other cities that I'm going to introduce.

It's very exciting.

We have multiple cities.

Very globalists.

We'll get to that.

We have Jeffrey Rosen, the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center.

Womp, womp.

Yeah,

that was very good.

That's the theme music to his podcast, We the People, by the way.

That usually has an airborne intro.

There's an airborne intro.

Wait,

we're going to have singing today.

And in London, we have Ann Applebaum,

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, columnist of the Washington Post.

Ann, can you hear us?

I can hear you.

That's wonderful.

It's amazing.

I can.

It's amazing how this technology works.

The reason we have Ann and Jeff with us today for a very special episode of Radio Atlantic is that we're just launching our October issue of The Atlantic.

It's an issue, a special issue organized around a single theme asking the question: is democracy dying?

And Jeff has written one of the anchor pieces, and Ann has written an equivalent anchor piece, both taking on this issue from different perspectives.

Our goal, and I could say this, and Jeff will correct me if I'm wrong,

when I say our goal, I mean my goal with Jeff.

This whole issue emerged out of a series of conversations I've had with Jeff Rosen over the past

year or more,

starting with a,

I would say, narrow question.

It's actually not narrow, as you'll see in Jeff's piece.

And the narrow question was what would James Madison make of today's America and make of today's political processes and make of the presidency itself?

Our goal in pulling together this issue, and we have amazing pieces from Ibram Kendi and Yoni Applebaum and Justice Stephen Breyer and Yuval Harari and David Frum.

We have

an amazing set of pieces, and I hope you read the whole issue.

Our goal was not merely to talk about Donald Trump, because part of the theory of the case is that Trump is as much a symptom of a problem as the cause of a problem in democracy.

So, why don't we just start with Jeff for a minute and then Ann for a minute and talk about,

I want you both to talk about

what's at the core of your pieces.

And Jeff, maybe you could start by giving us an overview from your perch there at the National Constitution Center, where you are probably literally overlooking Independence Hall right now.

Talk about what the founders and specifically James Madison would make of the state of our democracy at this moment.

Well, thank you so much, Jeff, for this great collaboration and for your homework assignment, which was to ask me to think about what Madison would make of American democracy today.

It prompted a lot of reading and thought, and the piece that resulted argues that Madison would be appalled by the rise of passion over reason.

It turns out that as a man of the Enlightenment, Madison and his fellow founders were centrally concerned about designing political systems that promoted reason rather than passion.

And the big way that they hoped to do that was to slow down deliberation so that passionate mobs could not mobilize quickly.

They're centrally concerned about mob rule because they've read about the histories of failed democracies, of Greece and Rome.

And Madison, after spending a year reading about the fall of Athens, is convinced that in large assemblies, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason.

Even if every Athenian had been Socrates, Athens would still have been a mob.

He's consumed by the notion of silver-tongued demagogues who seduce the people with appeals to emotion and passion rather than reason.

And he thinks that only by slowing down deliberation can you prevent demagogues from rising up.

And that is why the Constitution is so determined to separate and divide power, to prevent mobs from mobilizing quickly.

Because we the people have the sovereign power, power, but our power is divided among the three branches of the federal government and then between the government and the states,

Madison felt that majorities, when they formed, would have to be reasonable.

And he was especially focusing on the large size of America, the geographic extent, which would make it hard for information to travel and for mobs to discover each other.

And then, of course, the point of the piece is that all of the cooling mechanisms that Madison was relying on to slow down impetuous mobs have atrophied.

And the piece goes through the political polarization driven by geographic self-sorting and by media filter bubbles and echo chambers that's made Madisonian deliberation impossible, the rise of an imperial tweeting presidency, which has the kind of direct communication between the presidents.

Imperial tweeting.

That's imperial tweet.

Or tweeting,

yeah.

Or tweeting imperialism.

Darth Vader.

Absolutely.

But you know, it's important.

Remember, Obama was the first tweeting president.

And this is...

So he used the mechanism slightly differently than this president.

He did.

It was a little bit of a problem.

Oh, you and Obama apologize.

Sorry.

Highbrow.

But the final point is just of the tremendous importance of social media and all this, because

it turns out that, as Anne and I found with the runaway success of our pieces online, arguments, actually we're a counterexample.

Generally, arguments based on passion travel faster and further than arguments based on reason.

I guess the Atlantic is the Madisonian exception.

But given the fact that you can make decisions at warp speed, all of the

barriers to mob rule have atrophied, and as a result, we have a lot to do to resurrect Madisonian reason today.

I want to go to Anne in a minute, but Alex just wants to jump in with a quick question for you, Jeff.

Jeff, I found the piece enlightening and fascinating and depressing all at the same time.

One of the things you point out, though, in addition to sort of the miscalculation, which is maybe laying more fault at the feet of Madison than is fair, but one of the things that you talk about beyond

the fact that he couldn't account for social media and the direct communication of presidents, sort of the emotional weight of the presidency that it now has in the 21st century, you make this note, you say that

the representatives who are willing to support the party line at all costs, and you point that out as sort of a byproduct of political and geographical self-sorting.

But

was it just that the founding fathers couldn't envision partisanship in the way that it is now?

I mean, that seems less a function of the 21st century.

I don't know.

Maybe you can expand on this a little bit.

Did that sort of fervor just not exist when they were creating the foundations of our democracy?

It's a great question.

And no, partisanship completely existed.

I mean, the election of 1800 looks a lot like the one today, to the degree that the outgoing Federalists reduced the size of the Supreme Court in order to deny the incoming Republicans the ability to make any appointments, and people are fighting duels over the invective in the

newspapers.

So, what's the difference?

They didn't anticipate the rise of parties, but parties for most of American history were a good thing, they were a moderating force, they were organized around constitutional principles, states' rights versus national power, and so forth.

I think it's the decline of party authority combined with the increasing

responsiveness of representatives to the most ideologically extreme base of both parties that's created the polarization.

So without lionizing the

golden age of the Senate, which John McCain's mourners properly lamented, in an age when the Senate was less directly responsive to the people, then you could have senators and representatives going across party lines and making decisions in the public interest.

Now that you have to tweet out your purity to the base in real time, the kind of deliberation behind closed doors that made the Constitution itself possible isn't possible.

So, without understating the partisanship at the time of the founding or the polarization that led to the Civil War, which is as great as it is today, it's the direct communication between the people and the representatives that's so important.

And that's why Madison was so determined not to make this a direct democracy, but instead a representative republic.

And

I want to jump onto a couple of things that Jeff said, but I want you first, if you can, to describe a little bit about the European experience of democracy.

Your piece is a totally fascinating piece, and I really recommend it to people.

It's part memoir, part analysis.

And one of the things that comes through in your writing here and elsewhere is that Europeans don't make the same assumptions about the durability and stability of democracy that we in America have made, at least until this last couple of years.

Could you talk about that theory of circularity,

of history's circular quality,

in the context of what you learned by doing this article?

Sure.

Well, as you know, this article started with a slightly different question, which is me trying to figure out why so many people who I was friends with 20 years ago, I would no longer speak to, and they would no longer speak to me.

And that's, I suppose, the personal element in the piece.

And really, it's a story about how polarization happened in Poland, which is a country I'm affiliated with.

I lived there in the late 80s.

I lived there and then also in the 90s.

I'm married to a Polish politician.

I'm a kind of figure in Polish politics.

I explained that in the piece.

Many people who were my friends at one point have attacked me in the media in some quite nasty ways, and so on.

So the question is how that happened.

And what I wound up pointing to and underlining was this, was exactly what you've just said.

We made an assumption, we being me and quite a lot of people in what was,

I don't know, the ruling class or the leading group of Polish politicians in the 90s and the first part of the 2000s.

We made the assumption that the transition to democracy that Poland made in the 1990s was a kind of permanent thing.

We were now on a path.

We were part of NATO.

We were part of the European Union.

We were aligned with the United States.

And that the decisions that people had made, the Constitution that was adopted,

the norms that were beginning to be taught in school, the independent judiciary that was set up, that that was now, that couldn't be changed.

And you know,

this was the era when

Frank Fukuyama's complicated essay about the end of history was interpreted to mean now we will all have liberal democracy forever and ever.

And partly that misinterpretation was because that's kind of what people wanted and what people thought had really happened, that we'd made this leap and that it was over.

And as I began

kind of picking apart the last couple of decades and

reading history not just of Poland but of other countries, you know, you really see that this kind of transition had happened before and the kinds of arguments that were happening in Poland and that are happening now have also happened before.

And I found some odd

some odd echoes.

So I was looking, you know, I was trying to avoid avoid the obvious comparisons, you know, the Nazis, the 1930s, because those are particularly extreme examples.

But if you look, for example, at the Dreyfus trial, you know, this was a moment that split France, when France became incredibly polarized.

People who thought they were on the same side, that they'd agreed about everything, that they had a similar idea of what France was and what their position in society was, suddenly found that they couldn't even be at the same dinner party at one another and

they had terrible arguments, they never spoke to one another again.

And the fight was over two different definitions of the nation.

On the one hand, the nation as this

kind of almost holy religious institution to which I am devoted and we are all devoted and can do no wrong.

And these were the anti-Dreyfussards who believed that it was impossible that the French army could have lied and framed Alfred Dreyfus, who was a Jewish officer who was accused of treason, falsely accused of treason.

And then there was the other side who had a different definition of the nation.

No, the nation is a set of laws and rules that apply to everybody and treat everybody equally.

And it was a kind of one idea of the nation versus a more universal idea about justice and so on.

And this, of course, is exactly the echo of the political division that you have in Poland today.

It's the echo of a division you have in other European countries.

And these two ideas of the nation compete.

And the people who believe one and the people who believe the other,

each side thinks that they should rule and they should be in charge of the country and they should decide who wins the elections and who runs,

you know, also who runs the economy and

who should have the lead in education and culture and so on.

And our assumption that one particular group and one set of ideas had won, and this was an idea about rule of law and being part of a Western community, and essentially an idea of small L liberalism,

you know, liberal democracy, we had assumed that had won and actually there was another group inside Poland who were unhappy with that vision as

the anti-Dreyfusards had been unhappy with a particular vision of France.

And they were trying to replace us.

And in fact, replacing the liberals in their case meant you have to change the rules and you have to,

if democracy favors

one particular elite and another elite wants to take over, then they have to end democracy in order to get it.

So, in other words, I've found a lot of historical echoes in France, in Greece, and in other places that show that there is this constant fight to decide who's in charge, who rules, according to which rules, according to which idea of the nation, whose definition of the nation wins.

You know, this fight is not ever over.

And our idea in the 1990s that we had solved this problem and we'd fixed it forever was simply wrong.

And I'm writing most of the piece is about Poland, some of it's about Hungary, a little bit is about some other European countries, but obviously it's true of any democracy.

In Americans, we have this idea that our democracy is a kind of progression upwards with this little blip of the Civil War,

and it can never go backwards.

But actually,

this kind of cycle, you know, this competition for which elite gets to rule, whose set of ideas wins, which culture dominates, you know, why should that ever be over?

And I have a question on sort of like a parallel question to what you're talking about now.

The argument about who gets to rule is never over is something you write about in the piece.

But you also talk about this dynamic, and it's so brilliantly encapsulated in the story about your New Year's Eve party on December 31st of 1999, where this huge group, 100-plus friends, gather together and have a merry evening.

And then, you know, two decades later, nearly half of these people aren't speaking to the other half.

And it sort of begs this question: what happened here?

I think a lot of Americans can sympathize with that because we look out at our country and we say, oh, but 20 years ago, we thought we were in a different place.

We really thought of this as these United States, though we had our partisan differences with one another.

This chasm that has opened up, where did it come from?

Did these people always have these sort of latent ideas about authoritarianism and race and all the rest?

What's your sort of theory on the origin of all of that?

Yeah, so

obviously, you know, I was writing about Poland, which I have this particularly weird, strong experience of having been involved in it as as kind of an outsider and kind of an insider for two decades.

But of course, this is the same story in the United States.

There's even a parallel story in Britain where

the divide over Brexit has split my friends here as well.

I have friends who are on both sides of that argument, and some of them will no longer speak to one another either.

So

it's not uncommon.

I think what's happened is that

the stakes of the arguments changed.

The dividing lines moved.

And whereas, I mean, this is a little bit different in each country, but whereas the, you know, if the big arguments for two decades were about this, basically we were all arguing about the size of the state, right?

There was a left-right divide that was about economics.

Now we're arguing about different, now we're arguing about immigration, national identity,

you know, culture.

And suddenly, and within those arguments, suddenly people find themselves on different sides.

You know, People who were on the same side of the argument when we were talking about the size of the state and taxation suddenly realize they're on completely different sides of the argument when we're talking about

race and immigration.

Because some of these issues...

They simply didn't come up before in the same form that they're taking now.

And so people didn't have that.

But once the argument shifts, once the paradigm shifts, which is what happened in France during the Dreyfus trial, which is what happened in Europe during the 1930s as well, suddenly people find themselves on much different sides.

That's how I would explain it.

I mean, again, you have to be specific about each country.

I mean, I think

in Poland, in my piece, I try and talk about particular people even and how somebody's...

the course of somebody's life makes them choose one side or the other.

And

you often have to look in a quite a detailed way, which I wasn't even able to do in that article about particular people and why they make one choice or the other.

But I think essentially we're talking about the argument shifting.

Well, Jeff,

where do you I mean you you isolate a number of factors that have led to these sort of inflamed passions.

Do you place the blame more squarely in one area than the other?

I guess the blame would be the fact that they are now easier to express and enact into law and constitutional change.

So

Brexit couldn't happen in America now because we don't make fundamental constitutional decisions by one-off referenda.

But we just did elect a president who's pandering or playing to the same populist impulses in a way that he couldn't have been elected in the 1930s because party leaders would have filtered out the demagogue and instead chosen

a politician like Franklin Roosevelt who could respond to economic populist needs and frustration with corporate power, but also accommodate the interests of white southerners and of poor people in a way that wasn't as directly responsive to the mob.

So the hypothesis, and I wonder if Anne thinks it's right, because she'll have a her historical perspective is unraveled and the comparative perspective, is that America is now giving voice to the populist passions that have long bubbled up in the country and which transformed Europe in the 30s and earlier because the constitutional cooling mechanisms have been undermined.

So we're becoming more like Europe in that sense.

And yet still,

I wonder if it would be harder for American populism to completely redefine the country as long as the constitutional structures hold and easier in Europe because they don't separate power with written constitutions the way we do.

Is that right or wrong, Anne?

I wonder.

Well, I mean,

in theory, what's happened into the Polish Constitution shouldn't have happened.

I mean,

they've broken the con in essence, essence, the Constitution has been broken in order to change the composition of the judiciary.

So, what happened in Poland is the equivalent of Donald Trump saying, right, I don't want just to appoint

one new Supreme Court justice.

I want to sack all of the justices and reappoint nine new ones.

That's, in effect, what's happened.

And at the moment, that seems kind of inconceivable in the United States.

How could that happen?

Maybe because our Constitution is older, maybe because we're used to these things happening, maybe because people would object.

object, but in effect, that's what's happened.

The Constitution existed, and it had separation of powers, and it had many of the checks and balances.

I mean, it's different from the United States, but it does have checks and balances, and it did have,

you were meant to have an independent judiciary, and without a constitutional majority, and without, you know, without any formal form of constitutional change, and simply by a regular parliamentary vote, they changed it.

And so the question is, could something like that happen in the United States?

And as I said, right now it seems inconceivable to me, but on the other hand, the election of Donald Trump also would have seemed inconceivable to me three years ago.

So I don't know.

I mean, you know, you're

you know, what if a U.S.

President, say with the backing of a majority party in Congress, decided he could change the Constitution and fire the Supreme Court?

What would happen?

Aaron Powell, Trevor Barrett, you know, I don't uh there's enough of a culture of an independent judiciary in America that if Trump tried to fire the judiciary,

the Supreme Court would check him, I think.

But it's not inconceivable that if the Democrats take both houses of Congress and the White House, they will expand the size of the Supreme Court to 13, the same way that the Jeffersonian Republicans

did in response to the Federalists.

And that could set us down the path of a

challenge to the culture of judicial independence that looks more like Poland than we might have thought.

Yeah, I mean, maybe it it would happen differently in the United States, but it's that kind of, you know, this fundamental challenge of the system.

It clearly can happen because it just did happen in both Poland and Hungary.

The question is: could it happen in the United States?

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This is Radio Atlantic.

Alex Wagner and I are talking with Jeff Rosen and Ann Applebaum about the future of democracy.

Can I ask you both a question on Alex too?

In another piece in this issue of The Atlantic, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld from Yale Law School quote Abraham Lincoln, who made the obviously astute observation that

America as a multi-ethnic democracy

is not organized around blood or religion or ethnicity,

that

we have a political religion which is based on reverence for the Constitution and the rule of law.

Obviously, we've been imperfect in revering these two things, but my question to all of you is: are we in a wholly new period in American history in the sense that we have a president now who does not even pay lip service to the idea that reverence for the Constitution and for the rule of law is paramount and is the glue that binds this country together.

Not yet.

The president is not a good idea.

I don't like the yet.

Yeah, wait, wait, wait.

Yes.

Let's say yet about the pressure.

Well,

I'll withdraw it and say not yet.

And I believe that the Constitution will save us because we have a norms-breaking president who is challenging constitutional ideas.

But so far, the institutions are fighting back.

The judiciary, especially the lower courts, are checking presidential excesses.

If the president were to try to fire the judges or throw journalists in jail, the U.S.

Supreme Court would unanimously say no to him.

The Republican opposition, led by Senator Ben Sasse, makes their appeals in constitutional terms.

Plus, the limits of the president's power are evident daily by his inability to put his opponents in jail or delay their prosecutions and the outrage that follows attempts to manipulate the rule of law.

So I think the Constitution has saved us so far, and I will venture to predict that it will in the future.

Jeff, let me ask you something else.

So

the other thing that's happening in Poland and several other countries is that the ruling party is essentially a minority party.

It doesn't have a majority of support.

It's a long story how they won and so on and why they control the parliament, but they don't have

51% support of the public that's more like 30-something, which is very similar to Trump's level of support.

And well, a lot of what they're trying to do is rig the system so that next time they can't lose.

And what worries me about the United States is one sees in North Carolina,

to some degree even at the national level, what I'm beginning to be afraid of is that if the Republicans begin to fear that they are permanently the minority party, you know, because they've become identified with racism, because they lose black and Latino support for whatever reason,

that

they will choose fixing the Constitution or fixing the vote over democracy.

Because that is essentially what's just happening.

And how deep a worry is that for you?

I'm very worried about it, partly because, I mean, I've literally just seen it happen.

Again, it's in a much weaker democracy and one that's not so old and doesn't have this constitutional religion in the same way.

But

when I read about the

North Carolina Carolina state House and state Senate changing the rules to restrict the ability of a Democratic governor to

the Republicans to restrict the Democratic governor from

having the rights of a governor, then I worry that these are the same kinds of impulses.

And I would say they're kind of human imp I mean you know, if you can't win democratically, then you try to win undemocratically.

It's not that illogical.

Aaron Powell, Jr.:

To further Ann's point, I mean, that's what voter fraud efforts are.

I mean, I think if we're being honest about the sort of

root of that, it is to disenfranchise a large number of voters who would otherwise vote Democrat.

And

you see inclinations by the part of the Republican Party that are disturbing in terms of

being a sort of tyrannical minority.

The thing that worries me, and this is something that both Ann and Jeff talk about, is information.

Ann points out that sort of conspiracy theory can be the sort of root cause of, or a litmus test for the rise of authoritarianism in a society.

And Jeff talks about the media was supposed to be one of those coolants, but the media now, you know, what is the media?

What is real news?

We're in a time where a serious subset of the American electorate has given up on settled fact.

And my question, I guess, for all of us is in the wake of Donald Trump, Trump, because in theory he's not going to be president forever, is there a reset?

Or

has some part of society embarked on a different trajectory entirely?

And can we put the pieces back together?

Well, first, we do have to say that the fact that Anna and my pieces are doing so well is a total vindication of Madison's hope.

That a group of journalists that Madison called the literati would allow the slow voice of reason to travel quickly across the

board.

Clearly, my expectation is that this special issue of the Atlantic will

help the White House change course.

Rebuild our democracy.

Madison would be proud.

But

the problem of fake news of disinformation and of filter bubbles is really troubling.

There was a very distressing survey published just last week since our pieces came out that shows that exposing people to differing points of view on Twitter hardens polarization rather than counteracting it.

People dig into their heels and become more attached to their pre-existing views.

And then the sort of modest efforts at combating fake news that Facebook is trying, like prioritizing on the news feed, articles that people actually read rather than stuff that they share quickly without reading are modest indeed.

And the First Amendment is and should be a serious barrier to any government efforts to try to tell Facebook and Twitter how to regulate speech.

But I guess I would want more empirical

polarization seems like a greater problem than fake news.

And the polarization problem is caused mostly by geographic and virtual self-sorting, and that does not have an easy solution.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Let me ask the three of you, if I may,

the simple question, is democracy dying?

And if you don't want to grapple with that question.

Well, you mean like yes or no?

Lightning round.

Not that.

True, false.

Yeah.

And if that's not a question that you want to grapple with, then let me rephrase it as, what would keep democracy from dying here and in Western European democracies?

Alex, go first.

Alex, Alex.

I'm going to take the first

of the...

Yeah, I want the true.

No, I want the true, false, is democracy dying.

I just, I read Anne's story, and I just, that fundamental sort of truism, the argument about who gets to rule is never over, right?

That's, it's obvious, right?

And yet, as an American, as someone who has sort of like believed in the idea of the moral arc of the universe is long but bends towards justice, it's really hard for me to embrace the idea that that argument isn't over, right?

That in fact, there might be a, you know, a door in the floor where it all, the ground falls out from underneath it.

I guess, so my answer to the question, Jeff, is, while cerebrally I know that, you know, maybe democracy is dying, and there are a lot of indications that suggest

some sort of metastasizing cancer,

I believe, and maybe it's articles and magazines like this one, that make me believe that we are still invested in trying to make it work and keep it alive.

So I'm an optimist.

I do not think it's dying.

There you go.

There's my answer.

That was a good answer.

Ann, Jeff?

I mean,

dying is tough because, you know,

well, at some point it will end.

All civilizations end.

You know, the question is, again, don't say that, Anne.

That was a thousand years.

Oh, my God, Anne.

I guess

that wins the vote for cheeriest observation of the last half hour.

Sorry, guys.

Wait, next you're going to tell us that we're all going to die, right?

That's the next lie.

No, no, that's definitely never going to happen.

No, no, no, but

you know, maybe one should

be more philosophical about it.

I mean, yes, there are these challenges, and it might falter for a while.

I mean, if you look at,

you know, you look at the history,

leave alone ancient Greece, look at the history of modern Greece.

You know, you have a country that is, you know, over the last hundred years has been alternately a democracy, a dictatorship, occupied by foreign countries, a democracy again,

you know, then there's a populace, then there's a liberal.

So

it's been through all kinds of different governments and

some of them have been more successful than others.

I mean, it may just be that the United States has had this unusually long run as a liberal democracy and there will be a period of something else at some point and then maybe we can revive liberal democracy.

I mean the idea that it's an upward trajectory and that there's no,

you know, that there's, you know, and by the way, we've forgotten really how extreme the Civil War was and how dead democracy must have seemed to people who were alive at that time as well.

But that's, you know, that's kind of, we've kind of buried that in our collective consciousness.

But, you know, but I think it's very possible that there will be a period when it's not working and people will try the things.

I mean, why wouldn't there be?

You know,

there are always people

who aren't succeeding within the system.

Whether it's because they're the minority or because they've lost out or whatever, you know, they don't like the system because it's not working for them.

And whether they're the Bolsheviks in 1919 or they're the

far right of 10 years ago who thought they were on the fringes.

I mean, there's always somebody who feels the system isn't working and will therefore want to change the system.

And it's true in every country, and of course it's true in the United States.

Alex used the word metastasizing, which is a great word.

And I think

I was going to say Madison would have said the same thing, that democracy is not dying.

It is metastasizing.

We have too much democracy, not too little.

The cooling mechanisms are gone.

The idea of Republican government, which filters passion, is undermined.

And then the question is, can you put the genie back in the bottle?

And it's really tough in a democratic age with democratic technologies, which is properly suspicious of elitism and properly much more inclusive than the 18th century.

It's hard to create new cooling mechanisms to slow things down.

So that would lead

us to ask, you know, are the old ones going to save us?

And they might.

You know, if we have a normalized president the next time around, not another celebrity, but a Republican or a Democrat who looks more like predecessors and federalism allows California and New York to

flourish and say Roe v.

Wade were overturned, which

many think it won't be, but if it were, if things went back to the states,

most states would protect abortion rights and the Republican Party would suffer and so forth.

So,

yeah, these challenges are tough, but it's still very difficult to make fundamental constitutional change without convincing lots of branches of government over a long period of time.

And so, therefore, maybe the system will work.

Jeff, can I say something?

It often seems to me, I worry that the American Constitution is too rigid, you know, that in with changing technology and with

changing geopolitics on, that it isn't, you know, that it's not up.

I mean, just for example, the gun laws, you know, the,

which are so outdated and so belong to an 18th-century idea about militias and so on, and have not caught up with the idea that

I don't think the founding fathers ever thought that 18-year-olds would be able to buy automatic weapons, or people who are mentally ill would be able to

have huge arsenals of rifles at home.

And I worry that the U.S.

Constitution is so hard to change that we risk,

you know, it risks becoming broken because it's just simply insufficient to keep up with the times that's a powerful you mean in other words in other words since you can't throw out the bathwater you have to throw out the baby too like that that's the attitude of the attitude actually i mean in that amy chuo jed rubenfeld piece they they notice a a lack of reverence um on the part of their students for the constitution in a way and maybe it's that rigidity jeff that that that is causing a distaste

and i know you're in the business of defending the constitution so here's your big chance

Here's your big chance.

No,

well,

it's true that young people are more likely to support

alternatives to democracy and prefer authoritarianism and so forth.

So is it the Constitution's fault?

If it is, it's based on a misunderstanding of the Constitution and the Supreme Court.

The fact that we don't have serious gun control in the United States is not the fault of the Supreme Court's decision in the Heller case, which said that reasonable regulations, including regulations of guns and schools and so forth, are perfectly reasonable.

It's the fact that

the gun lobby has so polarized the debate that Congress and the states won't pass the regulations that most Americans are demanding.

So we may well have a political pathology in America that's stemming from polarization, but it's not because the Supreme Court is constraining reasonable policy choices.

I guess you could say, and some do, that some uh the the weaponization of the First Amendment, as Justice Kagan uh put it recently in cases like Citizens United is making meaningful campaign campaign regulation

difficult, and because the Constitution is so hard to amend, overturning Citizens United will be difficult.

But

that's the,

I don't think anyone would claim that that's the major source of our vexation.

So although Anne's concern is

serious and venerable, and for a long time, liberals and progressives, especially in the 70s and 80s, worried about

an anti-democratic constitution that was too hard to amend.

I think suddenly liberals as well as conservatives are rediscovering the virtues of constraints and of these structural limitations that slow things down and want to shore them up.

And as a result, I don't think it's the Constitution's fault.

Although, you know, another source of popular frustration with democracy in a lot of countries is precisely the fact that it's slow.

You know, that nowadays you can do so many things so quickly.

You know, you press a button online and, you know, package arrives the next day, and everything happens really rapidly.

And yet, and in a lot of European countries, you have this process of forming coalitions to create governments, and that can take weeks and weeks.

And, you know, the processes by which

you need to go through to make democracy work are very tedious and cumbersome, and some to a lot of people seem to belong to another era.

You know, and that's you know, Anne, it's interesting that the analogue here is the way certain people in the West talk about China's ability to build new airports and new railroads and new everything so quickly.

And it's well, the reason they can do that is

the state is absolute power.

And there's jealousy.

The envy of the globe.

Or envy that people have for Putin.

Look, Putin can just decide to invade Ukraine.

You know, he doesn't have to consult.

I mean, who among us cares, though, Ann?

I mean, really.

I got to say, Jeff,

I'm not trying to do your job for you, but at the National Constitution Center, if you had t-shirts that said, don't blame the Constitution,

I think they'd sell.

Thank the Constitution.

Thank you, thank the Constitution.

It ain't the Constitution's fault.

Absolutely.

The Constitution's fault.

Just a suggestion.

Alex Wagner is also a branding expert.

If you have anything to buttress Polish democracy on a t-shirt, please let us know.

Something about Smolensk.

That's all I know.

Actually, no, you'd find it very amusing.

You know what people do wear on their t-shirts, and they do put on their car bumper stickers right now, is the word constitution.

Constituzia.

Oh, wow.

That's like the slogan of the resistance.

I knew that somehow this conversation would merge around branding.

Somehow.

Somehow.

Swag.

I mean, we could do this all day, but unfortunately we can't.

And I don't think we've solved anything here, but at least we've illuminated some of the issues.

It's great to have two of the world's leading experts on this set of subjects with us.

They're great, great, great stories.

They're great stories.

Please read The Atlantic.

Please read everything Jeff Rosen and Ann Applebaum have to say about everything.

Ann and Jeff, thank you for joining us today.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That's it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend.

Catherine Wells is the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Special thanks to Kim Lau for additional production support and to John Batiste for our immortal theme music.

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