The state of American democracy

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Good afternoon, good evening, for those of you here in Europe. Good afternoon for those in America. It’s terrific to have such a wonderful turnout. I don’t know if it’s for a good reason or for a bad reason. We’re talking today about The State of Democracy in the United States. We’re just a little bit more than one year out from the attacks on the US Capitol. We are heading into a midterm election year and I know that, for those of us who reside in the UK and in Europe, we look back at America sometimes a little bit more than puzzled I think, as we enter this year.

I’m Leslie. I direct the US and Americas Programme here at Chatham House. I recognise many of your names. It’s wonderful to see you, Happy New Year, I hope that it is a happy new year. We have a tremendous panel today and I should say, before introducing them, that we are on the record for this conversation, so it will be recorded. We will share it.

Amy Walter is the only one of the four of us who has not been formally affiliated with Chatham House, but Amy has been a tremendous participant with many of our events at Cheltenham, here at Chatham House, she is well known to all of you who follow US politics. She is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Cook Political Report, which is a tremendous resource. She is a regular on the news media and PBS NewsHour and I personally find her to be just tremendously compelling as a Political Analyst and as a person. So, I’m very grateful to you Amy for joining us. You have many offers and it’s great that you’ve taken the time to do this.

We then have Peter Trubowitz who’s Professor at the LSE. He is Director of the Phelan US Centre. He is an Associate Fellow on the US and Americas Programme here at Chatham House. He is a friend and a colleague, and a well-known author of “Politics and Strategy: Partisan Ambition and US Statecraft”, one of his recent books. He has another one forthcoming.

And Megan Greene is at the Harvard Kennedy School where she’s a Senior Fellow. She writes regularly in the Financial Times. She is an Economist. She was previously and will again be renewing her Dame DeAnne Julius Senior Fellow on International Economics at the Academy here at Chatham House, so again, is very much part of the Institute.

We have this conversation at a moment when President Biden and Vice President Harris are pushing very hard to enact legislation, that they see as being foundational to saving democracy and voting and elections in the United States. We saw the speech yesterday in Texas and we know the concerns about polarisation. I’ll just cite one number before I turn it over to Amy, and when Anar, who’s really made this event possible, along with Tom, and put together some slides for me. We saw a slide that said that more than 80% of Republicans and more than 80% of Democrats view the other party as a threat to America’s values and that is up more than 40% as compared to what it was in 2016 before Donald Trump entered office. That’s quite – to me, that’s one of the most extraordinary figures. We know that America is divided, we know that it’s polarised but the change, in just those handful of years, is really, truly remarkable.

So, Amy, let me turn it over to you. There’s democracy, there’s polarisation, there’s partisanship, there are elections, there’s COVID, there are so many things and it’s very hard to disentangle them, but perhaps you can help us make sense of the current moment.

Amy Walter

Sure, and thank you again for the invitation. I always love being on these panels. I’ve learnt so much. Someday soon, we’ll be able to do these again in-person, though being able to do this remotely means I am coming to you from Alaska, so my – one of the few states I have never been to before. Hello from a place that is actually warmer than Washington D.C. at this moment, interestingly enough.

Alright, so where are we – where do voters think we are and where do we go from here? And it is a very challenging question, and it’s one that folks in my circle, certainly the American media has been spending a great deal of time on. That slide that Leslie highlighted is one I talk about a lot, this idea that each side, Democrat and Republican believes the other is an existential threat; believes that if the other side gets in power, they will destroy what it means to be an American. And while this number did jump up pretty dramatically between the 2016 and 2020 elections, this is a pattern that has its beginnings long before Donald Trump came into office.

We’ve been watching this trend of polarisation and the ways in which Americans have bubbled themselves over the last 25 years and it’s obviously not just happening in the US, it’s happening all throughout the rest of the world where you have primarily, and just in most simplistic terms, those who live in more densely populated, urban suburban areas, taking a worldview decidedly different from those who live in small town and rural America. The kinds of people who live in those places look different, where they’re getting their sources of information are very different, and so, between the way we can polarise ourselves literally physically from each other and then we incorporate sources of information that only focus on our own worldview keeps us even more separate from one another. That is a challenge that I don’t think any one leader can solve. This is not just one President, if you just get the right person in, they’re going to be able to unify the country. This is – it goes deeper than that, and it’s a bigger challenge than that.

At the same time as Leslie pointed out, we have an equal number of Americans who are very worried about just the state of America, right, not just what is the state of democracy, but what’s happening in this country? Between COVID, the economy, the sense of and again, we’re seeing this all over the world, but the sense that people have kind of gone crazy, right? People are punching Flight Attendants; we have road rage incidents in the US that are going up. We know that the toll, mentally and physically, psychologically on our kids from being isolated from each other has been significant. In this country, we had a record number of Americans last year die of overdose deaths, so there is a sense that we’re [inaudible – 07:58] and that this area that we’re in feels very unstable, and how people respond to that is going to be the question going forward.

I think when this President came into office, and if you listen again to his inaugural address, over and over again he used the term ‘unity’. “We’re going to unify, we’re going to unify, we’re going to unify.” That was probably a bigger word or a more frequently used word than anything else. And at the same time, if you look at polling, before he even stepped foot in the Oval Office, 90% of Republicans already thought unfavourably of him. So, we have that sort of baked into the cake, no matter what he would do. But, he had, you know, in a sense, an opportunity. Coming in at a time where people felt very scared, divided, still in the middle of this crisis of COVID, but yet, he had in front of him a couple of things that could help to mitigate it.

One, just the fact that he wanted to lower the temperature, which he did. There’s not going to be tweeting, there’s not going to be incessant, minute-by-minute attacks on individuals or institutions. And the second one is, he had these vaccines that were developed and it seemed as if the plan was a pretty simple one, which is, get the vaccines, get them delivered, “Right, I’m going to put around me a really competent group of people who’ve been in government before. We’re going to focus on one thing and one thing only and that’s getting COVID under control, which will get the economy under control, which will get our country, sort of, back on track and unify us around a common purpose.” And it looked really great, for a few months: January, February, March, April, May, you could see opinions of folks about the state of the economy going up, consumer confidence was rising, opinions about how long COVID was going to be around, that – people feeling like, okay, we’ve turned the corner.

The President, on the 4th of July announcing that we’re now close to our Independence Day. There was a tremendous amount of optimism in the country, but then, to quote a great American Philosopher, the boxer Mike Tyson, you know, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” And the administration got punched in the face, and that was the delta wave that hit over the summer, combined with the Afghanistan pull-out, which, across the board, Americans believe was disastrous and then the rise in inflation really hitting people’s pocket books. All of those things combined really took a toll on opinions of the President.

As someone who casually thought he was, you know, he was competent, he was going to bring folks – we were going to get this all worked out, and now, we don’t have independence any more now. We’re back to lockdowns and we’re back turning on each other, Governors deciding they’re going to take things into their own hands, the rise of the, “we’re not taking a vaccine” movement and the – you could see right at the end of August that the numbers started to decline. Opinions of the President, consumer confidence, worries about COVID, all of those things, at the same time, made the same movement, which is down here.

And that’s where the President sits right now, is somewhere around 43% job approval rating, which by the way, is where Donald Trump was going into his first term, midterm election. It’s about where – it’s a little bit lower, but about where President Obama was going into his first midterm election, but it is – again, it’s driven as much by the frustration that this administration, which sold itself as being one of competence, of one of being able to bring people together, has kind of – that the shine has come off of that. Put on top of the fact that we’ve never had a 79-year-old President before and the President’s ability then to be the messenger, to be seen as, you know, going out of there consistently as a cheerleader for the country, you know, I don’t know that he is doing as much of that as different Presidents have. And it all gives for Democrats thinking about this upcoming election, it puts them in a very precarious position, but I do want to note two things before we move on.

The first is, the results of a midterm election have rarely been predicted of said next Presidential election. In fact, go all the way back in our history – I’m not going to go all the way back to the 1860s, but even just in post-World War Two America there’ve only been two times where the President’s party didn’t lose seats in the midterm election. If we want to go even more recent history, Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, had – Ronald Reagan had terrible first midterm elections and then went on to easily win re-election two years later. So, we do have to be very, very cautious in predict – in assuming what this midterm will be. But the odds are very strong that Democrats lose one, if not both houses, which would mean that President Biden will spend two years coming into his next election with very little legislative ability, right? A lot of what he’s going to have to do is through Executive Actions and we will, you know, have to watch and see what is on his plate then.

The final thing that the country – that I will say while – but majority of Americans believe that our democracy is at risk, but we don’t agree with what the meaning of democracy is, what – or we don’t agree to what is at risk. So, Republicans believe the biggest threat to democracy right now is the threat of elections that are not properly – are not safely guarded, right? That there’s voter fraud, things like that. That is the number one belief. Democrats believe that, right, Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy and this belief continues to drive that, and that January 6th was indeed an example of the threat to democracy. Republicans do not see that at all. So, it’s not – we do agree as Americans that democracy’s at threat, we don’t agree to what’s at stake.

But I also will say that, as a country we’re in – the US is an incredibly resilient place, and for as much as the danger that these last two years have presented, whether it’s January 6th, whether it’s lies about fraud, whether it is a President who was pushing to undermine the very structures, and the structures did hold. It’s fair to ask, will they continue to hold? I agree with that, but I do think that they have been pretty solid. We’re an incredibly dynamic place, and two years from now, the conversation and the issues may look very different. They simply are, who may or may not be running for President. So, I will leave it that and look forward to the questions and comments.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Thank you, Amy, that was a great place to start. I find myself wanting to ask you – I’ll say it and come back to you later, you know, if all those things that you, kind of – that you helped – that you laid out to help us understand where things are in the US: inflation, lockdowns, frustration, anger, hadn’t been – you know if things had looked much better, would Joe Manchin still have blocked Build Back Better agenda? I mean, how much of this is just simply something that’s happening, you know, with this particular individual or maybe, you know, two, in the Senate? I’m very curious about that. We can come back to it and Peter might even touch on it, but Peter Trubowitz, over to you.

Peter Trubowitz

Right, so it’s great – thank you, Leslie, it’s great to be here on the Chatham House platform with you and Amy and Megan.

So, let me begin by answering what I take to be the summative question here. “How’s democracy doing in America?” Not so well. As Amy pointed out, country’s deeply divided. It’s politics swirling with lies and half-truths, and I would add, with both sides questioning, and this – yeah, I think Amy hit this point at the end, both sides questioning the legitimacy of the political system, albeit for different reasons. And when I look at this, to me there seems to be like three different intersecting debates that are going on in the United States about what kind of democracy America is and should be. And so, I want to just kind of unpack these pretty quickly in my remaining four and a half minutes.

So, one of these debates, I think, and I think probably in a sense, the most important debate, has to do with the social contract. Both sides seem to agree that it is broken, but they offer, in my view, different explanations for why and as a result, different prescriptions for fixing it. For the many Republicans who are under Trump’s spell, it’s about a political system that is no longer delivering for Americans the way it did in the 1950s when White Americans made up 89% of the population and immigration policy strongly favoured the entry of Europeans.

I think, for Biden and Democrats more broadly, it’s about a political system that is no longer delivering for working families the way it did when there was more regulation, greater social protection, and less inequality. And that debate is playing itself out over Biden’s Build Back Better Plan to create non-tradeable jobs, expand and reform the social safety net and increase educational opportunities, just as it played itself out, I think, over Trump’s efforts to reimpose national control over trade and restrict the flow of immigrants.

The debate over the social contract, I think, is mirrored in a second great debate that has to do with the rules of the game and that is most immediately about whose vote counts, and it’s being played out in state legislatures, it’s being played out in the US Senate, it’s being played out in the Supreme Court. I mean, Joe Biden’s speech yesterday that Leslie referenced, where he called for a carveout in the Senate filibuster to pass pending federal voting rights legislation falls into this category. But sort of of the many state level Republican efforts to, kind of ,curb voting access and to, I would say, chip away at the, kind of, impartial, electoral management system that exists, you know, or has existed for a long time, yet at the state level. But it’s not only I think, a debate about whose vote counts. It’s also, I think a debate over the rules, a debate about which problem in America needs fixing.

The one that Trump and Republicans stress or the one that Biden and Democrats talk about? For those who think the core problem is holding on to some semblance of that older rural and whiter America, you’ll favour rules to prevent a tyranny of the majority. For those who think it’s about meeting the needs of urban and suburban America, which makes up the bulk of American population, America’s population and its GDP, you’re going to favour national voting standards to prevent a tyranny of the minority. In short, I think – my own view is, is that the debate over the rules that’s playing itself out is really a debate over who will rule America going forward, whether it’s the majority or the minority, and this is one of the reason it is so intense and bitter.

There’s a third debate, and it’s in no small part, I think, an extension of the first two debates. It has to do with foreign policy and it’s about whether or not the United States will continue to uphold the liberal world order. Now, for Trump, the answer was largely a no, because, I think, in his view, that order and the liberal, democratic values that are, you know, in principle, enshrined in it, changed America in ways that eroded its sovereignty, that deluded its identity and it stopped its will.

Now, I’m not convinced that most Republicans truly share this view. I think it’s unclear to me, frankly, I think there’s a mixed picture out there. For Biden and most Democrats, there’s a clear rhetorical commitment to strengthening the liberal order, but I think the question here is, how credible that is to America’s allies, let alone to its adversaries. I think that’s very uncertain and I also think that a lot is going to depend on whether Biden and the Democrats actually can make meaningful progress on their vision of renewing the social contract and democracy at home. And we’re not approaching the one-year mark and Biden’s Presidency and I would say, you know, where I come down on this, I think the jury is still very much out. So I think, I’m probably at about five minutes, Leslie, so why don’t I just leave it there?

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Thank you. You’ve certainly put a lot on the table. I do – I don’t know, I sort of was watching the four of us and I think we all sit up a little bit straight when the identity issue, of the demography question and the inequality question are suddenly right there on the table, because we know not exactly how this matters, but we know that identity politics, you know, it’s a terrible term, but that’s the one that we use, and the question of inequality intersect om complicated ways, and as soon as you turn to that conversation, it is a very important one, not least because I think a lot of people look back at America, they notice the demographic change. I mean, 89% White in the 1950s is quite extraordinary and that’s something that’s certainly changed, as have many economic questions. I think there’s a lot to unpack there and I hope we can come back to it. Thank you for those remarks. Megan Greene.

Megan Greene

Yeah, thanks. I’m going to give you guys an optimism sandwich. So, I’m going to start by talking about the strength of our institutions, then talk about inequality, and finish up by talking up about inflation.

So, I’m going to highlight that according to a survey a colleague of mine at Harvard recently did, according to a bunch of surveys actually, overwhelmingly, Americans think that democracy is the best form of government, but there’s about 20% who are open to or support authoritarianism. So, if democracy ends up failing, it’s not because the majority gave up on it. It’s because the minority managed to mobilise and seize chances to overthrow democracy.

I’m going to just highlight the strength of our institutions because, you know, January 6th was terrifying. A lot of developments have been terrifying, particularly under President Trump, but a lot of our institutions did actually manage to hold that Congress clearly has no – had no problem fighting Trump. They impeached him twice, so that’s a good sign, and states repeatedly push back against Trump, so we saw it with the COVID response in the spring of 2020 as the pre-election campaign was really getting underway. Trump put a ton of pressure on state and local authorities to open up the economy. A lot of them pushed back against that, despite huge amounts of pressure.

The Republican Secretary of State in Georgia went ahead and certified the election results, despite personal threatening calls from the President, so, that institution, state and local government, seems to have some health left in it. There are concerns about our Judiciary, particularly as Trump has managed to stack it or had managed to stack it, but there also signs that the Judiciary stood up to the President, so, after the last elections, Trump brought 62 lawsuits. Only one actually was awarded to Trump, so he only won one out of 62 suits, so that suggests that the Judiciary has stood up to the President as well, and the media, on the whole, has been unafraid to criticise President Trump and now President Biden, so that shows that there’s a healthy amount of pushback there. Although I do think that President Trump certainly weakened our trust in the media.

And then, importantly, if you want to get really dramatic and look at the military, our history of civil control over the military has held really strong. So, there are a lot of terrifying polls, certainly suggesting that the state of American democracy is regrettable, and I would agree with that, but there is also some evidence that a lot of our institutions have actually held up, even in the face of some significant threats. So, that’s the first part of my optimism sandwich.

The second part is, what I think is underpinning a lot of this degradation in democracy, and that’s inequality. Incoming wealth, inequality in particular. It’s not a new issue, actually. Inequality in the US has been increasing significantly since 1979, so this is a multi-decade trend, but it’s really come to the forefront, particularly off the back of the pandemic when it was those low wage, hourly service workers who were holding our economy together and we weren’t remunerating them appropriately. It then became obvious to lots of people that inequality might be a problem in this country and it’s uniquely – it’s a problem in lots of developed and some emerging economies, but it’s really turbo-charged in the US, and I would say on that front, the pandemic has increased a lot of the factors that are driving inequality.

So, I’ll give you a couple of examples. One is market concentration. In the US, 75% of our industries have become more concentrated over the past 15 years and if you think about it, if you’ve got high market concentration, you get superstar companies rising to the top. Look at tech, look at healthcare pharma, they’ve certainly done well in this pandemic. They singlehandedly drove the S&P 500 market rally, starting in March 2020. So, market concentration has just gotten worse. It’s the mom-and-pop shops who went out of business while the big, multinationals with access to deep liquid, capital markets managed to weather this pandemic. And market concentration is related to inequality because if you’re a worker in one of these industries and there are few superstar firms that buy up all the smaller start-ups that could turn into competition for them, then you don’t have that many options for employers. And if you get a job offer from one of those superstar firms, you’re not in a great position to negotiate for better terms, and what’s more, those superstar firms talk to one another and know what the others offer as well. So, it really reduces worker power and that’s the second point that I want to make.

Worker power still remains incredibly low. Trawl the headlines about ‘Striketober’ where we had a bunch of strikes last October. If you chart out the number of strikes in October on a historical basis, it doesn’t even show up on the chart, it’s such a small increase, relative to the 1950s and 1960s, you have to zoom in significantly for it to even appear on a chart and so, it’s one metric of worker power. Unionisation is another metric; it’s fallen significantly since the 1950s at its peak. Biden has paid a lot of lip service to supporting unionisation and to cracking down on companies that legally or illegally thwart unionisation, but not a whole lot has fundamentally happened there, and so – and then technological innovation is a third factor that we know, as companies were locked down, they went ahead and automated. We know that from survey data. Capital’s cheap. It’s been a great opportunity for them, but that does undermine wage increases and therefore, exacerbates the inequality problem. So, a lot of the big drivers, over the past couple of decades, of inequality have just been turbocharged by this pandemic.

And Biden’s aware of this. The first few Economists he hired were all Labour Economists. That was a great sign, you know, that a huge social package was put together to try to support those who’ve been left behind. Most of it is on the cutting room floor. Most of it will probably remain there, unfortunately, so, I think that there’s great frustration among a lot of Americans that that legislation that might have supported the bottom deciles of society isn’t coming through. So, I’m not particularly optimistic that we’re actually dealing with this inequality issue and while that’s the case, Americans are going to perceive that the ‘American Dream’ is dead and actually, if you look at the data it effectively is. So, we’re not doing much to revive it, unfortunately.

I’m going to finish up on one optimistic note. Anyone who lives in the US can’t help but notice there’s a lot of inflation. The US is incredibly expensive. My whole life, Europe has been expensive for Americans. All of a sudden, Europe is really cheap for us, which is incredibly weird and it’s certainly been increased by the recent bout in inflation. I’m not actually worried about higher inflation on a sustained basis, in part because of these longer-term structural trends that I mentioned underpinning inequality. They all keep upper pressure off of wages, which keeps upper pressure off of prices and once we manage to contain the virus, once it becomes endemic, and once we manage to iron out some of our supply chain disruptions, I think these bigger structural factors will probably reassert themselves and overwhelm the factors that had been driving inflation up. And so, I know inflation, that the print came out recently, it’s the highest we’ve seen in decades, but I’m – I think by the second half of this year, actually, inflation will be abating, not only because of these structural drivers, but also because I think some of the main drivers of growth in the US will disappear this year. So, we’re facing a huge fiscal drag.

The environment for investment will be less attractive because rates are going up. A lot of consumers have – are burning through their financial cushion, so that jump in demand that we’ve seen, pushing prices higher will probably evaporate and foreign demand probably won’t look great either, with China slowing down significantly. So all of this together, I think, will take the heat off of inflation, which is positive because we’ve had significant wage gains. It’s much harder to claw that back for employers. You can’t really give your workers a pay cut. That doesn’t happen a lot and so, we’ve had wage gains, but inflation has been growing faster than wages and that’s just eating into people’s living standards. If inflation can abate, but those wage gains remain aren’t repeated, so we don’t have, kind of, cycles of wage gains, but we at least have had one bout of wage gains, and that should improve people’s standards of living and should remove some of the frustration for Americans regarding, you know, the ‘American Dream’, the state of our politics, the state of our polity. I’ll finish there.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Megan, that’s tremendous. I appreciate it. You know, there’s a lot of optimism in there, but it’s not an entirely comfortable optimism. The debate about inflation is interesting. Your analysis is especially interesting, but I think also, the fact that, you know, we know that people see the infla – the question of inflation very much through a narrative that is very polarised. But even within your own, you know – even within the Democratic Party, even within your own institute at Harvard, you’ve got Larry Summers and Jason Furman and yourself, I can imagine what the conversation’s like, so even within the Democratic Party there seems to be, you know, not entirely a consensus on the question of inflation. Correct?

Megan Greene

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, Larry came out a year ago, roughly, with his hair on fire saying, “Look, you know, the amount of stimulus – the amount of government stimulus that we’re providing massively overwhelms the output gap.” So, normally, in a recession, you figure out the size of the hole that you fell down, you figure out policies to fill that hole exactly, and what we’ve been doing is filling that hole four times over. And not with productive investment. So, stimulus checks, probably I would agree with him there, probably not the most productive use of government funds. Investment in infrastructure and green infrastructure or education, that’s a great use of funds.

What we’ve seen, if you look at the Brookings Institution’s Fiscal Impact Monitor though, Larry was right, we did throw a lot of money at the pandemic last year and the previous year, but actually, by the second quarter of last year, the impact of fiscal measure. So, all of our stimulus plans and taxes taken together was negative, so, actually, the government was dragging on growth and that will continue through until about 2023, based on all of the legislation on the table. You know, Biden may manage to get parts of the Build Back Better package through as standalone legislation this year, but that won’t really change the outlook. Most of that is meant to be spent over ten years. A lot of it is backward and so, in terms of spending this year, it probably won’t make a difference.

If you look at the OMB’s estimates, the size of the fiscal retrenchment that we’ll be undergoing this year relative to last year is the second largest in our country’s history, second only to 1946. So, that’s a pretty huge fiscal drag and so, while Larry and to some degree, Jason have argued, well, we’ve got this huge fiscal stimulus that’s overheating the economy and driving inflation higher, that actually has reversed already, as of the second quarter of last year, and so that should be less of a factor.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Thank you, and of course, all of this is read, you know, through the lens of a very divided politics. I want to ask you all a question and if you give me just a very brief answer and then we’ll turn to – there are many questions here in the audience. It’s an unfair question, but I’m going to ask it anyway, and I’ll start with you, Amy. What is your hope, what is the hope for a moderate, political leadership to win, not in 2022, but in 2024? What is the hope for a moderate President to emerge victorious through a stable electoral – through the election, through a stable election?

Amy Walter

So, the term ‘moderate’ is again the key question, right? But, in 2016, Donald Trump was seen as the more moderate candidate. Remember, he was running as a pop – a populist, but one who was – he was going to keep social security and he wasn’t going to touch Medicare, he was not running as, sort of, a plutocratic, traditional Republican. And, you know, while of course the wall and, you know, immigration were key – his values, just overall, he was seen as more moderate than, say, his predecessors who were running on the Republican side.

Obviously, Joe Biden’s seen as more moderate in this coming election, so I think the success that Presidents have, right, you can rile up your base, you can get as many people on your side to come out, but you can’t win if you are seen as going too far one way or too far the other. And I think this has been, again, just a little bit of optimism in all of this. And it’s both a challenge, but it’s also the reason why I agree with Megan about our systems holding, is that whenever one party gets in power, has all control, right, House, Senate, President, they tend to move too far one way.

They see it is as a mandate, despite the fact that, maybe they won by a very narrow margin like, for example, the 2020 elections or 2016 elections, despite that they see a mandate, they end up going and speaking mostly to their base. The next election, they’re rebuked, they lose that power, they only have, in most cases, just the Presidency, they lose control of Congress, so that – whatever we want to call the middle independent voters, non-affiliated, non-partisan, people who are less partisan-identified, continued to be an important factor in keeping the system from overheating one way or the other, and it’s a very narrow margin, right?

It is – it was 40,000 votes that determined, in the Electoral College, Biden’s Presidency. It was about 80,000 that determined Trump’s Presidency, so this is a small number and it’s not quite as sexy as talking about the base and who’s going to turn out and who they’re going to nominate. But I think that we have seen that when a party goes too far, there is pay – there’s payment that they have to make.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Super-interesting, not least because of course, a lot of the people who might run on the Republican side would have a hard time walking back the fact that they’re – they haven’t played, you know, to the moderate middle and their – the cards, in that sense, have been revealed in a way that perhaps Donald Trump’s hadn’t been in 2016, but I guess time will tell. Peter, prospects for a moderate outcome – a moderate candidate to emerge in the next election?

Peter Trubowitz

It’s harder for me to see on the Republican side, but I – it’s also difficult on the Democratic side. On the Republican side, I think – I mean, the first point I would make is, I don’t think the median voter is dead in the United States, but shouldn’t have the kind of influence and power that it once had. The centre’s pretty hollowed out in the United States, so there’s still, you know, you do have to pick up votes in the centre to be able to, in quotes, ‘the centre’, independent voters to be able to take the bronze. But the base, that, you know, each party’s median voter if you will is far off – much further to the left and much further to the right than it was, let’s say, 25/30 years ago in the United States and frankly, this is not only true of the US. This is a kind of OECD wide problem or phenomena. So, I think if Donald Trump is out of the picture, let’s just, you know, if you want to go with your kind of scenario here, I think there will be a lot of movement in the Republican Party not to the centre.

Maybe somebody will give it a try. What Chris Christie’s trying right now, trying to occupy that lane, but I think most of the movement would be, you know, pointing to the left here, and to the right, and to the far-right. And I think on the Democratic Party side, it’s very hard for me, you know, I think – I mean, look, Amy – I think it’s Amy who mentioned this, or maybe it’s you? Joe Biden’s very old. If he stands again, I mean, he’s going to be very, very old, I think the party’s got an issue. He’s old. Harris does not have the draw that I think a lot of people thought. Maybe that changes, I don’t know. Gavin Newsom, anybody? I mean, you know, I think the question is, kind of, you know, in the Democratic Party, I think the push – there’ll be a lot, the progressive wing will really pull candidates to the left and maybe one will be able to tack back, but it’s a kind of longwinded answer. I’m not particularly optimistic that there’s going to be some kind of unity ticket, like Tom Friedman is calling for today in The New York Times that will involve Joe Biden and Liz Cheney, you know, it seems, kind of, remote.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Thank you. It’s, you know, it’s a hard question to answer, so I’ve given you not an easy one to be succinct on, but I’m going to ask you to be succinct nonetheless. Megan, your views on this one? And then we’ll come straight to the audience.

Megan Greene

Yeah, I guess I would say that the lesson that I took away from the last Presidential election was that we wanted a safe pair of hands in the White House, but we weren’t actually ready for real change and that was reflected in the incredibly slim majority that we put in the Senate. So, you know, that was always going to tie the Democrats hands, to some degree, more so than I had realised, even at the time.

But I guess on that basis, if that’s the case, that we’re not actually ready for change, then a progressive candidate from the Democrats certainly can’t succeed in that environment. The Republican side is a lot harder to imagine, just because I don’t think Trump was actually running on effective change. There was no actual plan to implement change, there was just a lot of mobilisation of frustration and anger, and that could work this time around, but I don’t think any plan for real change, which would be on a more extreme side, of either side of the political spectrum can succeed.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Great, okay, we did avoid the question of whether it would be a stable transition, but I’m sure that, as the time approaches, that question is going to loom large. Let me come to Gordon Dee Smith and Rodrigo Mora. If you unmute, we’ll come to you first, Gordon, and then to you, Rodrigo. If you can be succinct, just because we’ve packed a lot into this hour already, but it’s really great to hear from you. Gordon.

Gordon Dee Smith

So, yeah, thank you so much. Dee Smith. So, I was – this is a fascinating conversation and appreciate it very much. Peter and Amy both touched on things that I’m – that I would like to expand on and one of them, I guess the best way to state this is, the thing that’s fascinating for me about this, is that it’s a global phenomenon, as Amy mentioned, and that has it has to do, I think, with the question that Peter brought up of social contract, and I would call it broken promises. And I think that there’s a fundamental level at which people feel that – at least an implied promise, that life was going to get better, is now being broken, left and right and in many countries. And I wonder if you think that’s a valid explanation and if not, what is the explanation for the ubiquity of this, because I think we tend to focus on the US and come up with political explanations that are certainly, you know, necessary, but maybe not sufficient and we discount the really interesting fact that this is so global?

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Thank you very much, and Rodrigo.

Rodrigo Mora

Hi, thank you. So, a very simple question, whether the panel thinks that the travails that American democracy is going through now, reduced the appeal of the Liberal Democratic model, you know, before other countries, developing countries, but also, to some extent, developed ones?

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

I’m going to take one more question also before coming back to the three of you. Trisha.

Trisha de Borchgrave

Sorry, can you hear me?

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

We can hear you, yes.

Trisha de Borchgrave

Yes, no, you’ve all basically touched on it, which is, you know, what – where do we go – where do we find that moderate space? And I was just – someone I – and I am paraphrasing this, but somebody said, you know, “Nothing exposes a hollow consensus faster than the exercise of Presidential Executive Orders,” and I’m wondering whether this is really going on within the Democratic Party as well? All that cultural, progressive change that I particularly don’t find threatening and I actually welcome, I think is happening very, very fast and I think if you have millennial children as I do, I really have – I don’t mean this as a sort of fuddy-duddy, but I find it difficult to keep up with the definitions that are almost happening on a daily basis and those definitions, whether it’s through gender or sexual preference or you know, BLM, subtlety, nuance, what you can say, what you can’t, I am open to all that, but it is happening extremely fast and if you don’t have a millennial in the room, you can put your foot in it. And I don’t take it as a personal kind of, affront to me, or insult or whatever, but I’m just wondering whether within, you know, a party that has a lot of moderate Democrats, this is happening too fast and this is imploding on them? Thank you.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Excellent question. Why don’t we come to you first, Amy? And don’t feel like you have to answer each of them, perhaps the global question or that final question, actually, might be a good one for you.

Amy Walter

Yeah, those were all fascinating questions. I think I’ll focus on the final question. I don’t have a millennial. I have a Gen-Z, which is even more confusing because life to them is in 30 second TikTok bursts and so, it’s not just that things are changing constantly, but their ability to concentrate on something for more than ten minutes is exhausting. Like, they can’t physically do it, so that is also changing the pace in which our culture is moving at the same time. Look, I think, fundamentally, this is happening all over the world, but in the US if you look at where the vote for Democrats or Republicans comes from, back in – whether not long ago, back in 1992, back in 1996, Bill Clinton was winning about little under half of all of the counties in America. There are 3,000-something counties; he won about 49% of those.

Fast-forward to Joe Biden. Joe Biden wins with a bigger percent of the popular vote than Bill Clinton did, wins with 51% of the popular vote by carrying just 17% of all the counties in America. He’s doing that by running up the score in big populous counties or winning in places that Democrats used to not win, like outside of – in the areas of Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, which used to be more Republican. But fundamentally, if you look at the people who are living in those areas that Joe Biden is winning and those areas that Donald Trump or Republicans are winning, it’s not simply a cultural disconnect, but their – everything about their way of life impacts the choices that they’re making politically. The issue of immigration, if you live in a urban environment is a very different conversation or if you’re trying to hire people for the knowledge economy, that’s a very different conversation than if you live out here in rural Alaska and you’re drilling for oil, right? So, that, in terms of who’s coming and who’s going and your interaction with those folks.

A knowledge economy has been very good for the people who live in those fast-growing areas. It’s not been very good for the people who live in small-town, rural America. We’re seeing the GDP numbers by Congressional district, even since 2008, they used to be equal, a blue and a red district, basically, even, in terms of per capita income and GDP and those numbers now are growing. Brookings has done some really good work on this, the divide is growing, with blue areas becoming much wealthier, red areas not as much. The GDP growth just in the areas that – in the counties that Biden won, much more significant than in those that Donald Trump won. So, at the end of the day, I think what you’re – what we have isn’t – is – when we say, “Well, what is it, why can’t we find this median place?” It’s – or, “Why do we have this divide?” or “Why are people feeling like change is coming so quickly?”

In many ways, it is that we have a country that is desperate. One part of the country cannot fundamentally understand why we wouldn’t want to do things this way, right? Everything about what they do, and how they do it, suggests this is the direction the country should go. “I don’t understand why you would want these things.” And so, when that happens, it becomes more threatening, right? Your way of life is literally under threat if the other side gets in. Everything you know could be undermined by people who don’t appreciate and understand that. And the reason this has happened, there are a whole bunch of other things we have – we don’t have time for, but just look at the makeup of Congress. There is not – there are very few members of Congress, Republicans who represent those densely populated areas, Democrats who represent rural areas. So, it makes legislating almost impossible because you’re never going to get those two sides. So one side gets in power, they put the issues and agenda of their America first; the other side comes in, and it’s their America that gets their issues addressed. Finding a way to bridge both of those things is beyond just political. It’s also economic.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Thank you. Peter and then Megan.

Peter Trubowitz

Yeah, so just, first of all, let me get the questions in the Q&A, there’s a terrific set of questions, we should shut up and listen. So, I’m going to respond to, first to Trisha’s excellent question and just to make one observation before turning to whose – what was the first question? I forget his name right now, but it was a terrific question, I’m going to respond to it.

Trisha, you pointed to the Presidential powers and the use of Executive Discretion by Democrats as well as Republicans. This is a problem. It’s happened on both sides. This is not new, this is a long, secular trend and it is symptomatic of the political problem in the United States, which is that neither party can legislate in a programmatic way. The country is too divided, and if you’ve got like a filibuster in the Senate, it is just too easy to send legislation to the graveyard and – so this is a problem and it’s a symptom of the political problem deeper down.

The question that was asked about the US in, kind of a, broken contract or, I forget the phrasing, so this is music to my ears, like, kind of, putting the US in comparative perspective. I have a book coming out in – with Oxford University Press, an opportunity to plug it with Brian Burgoon at the University of Amsterdam that is called “The Retreat of the West” and it looks at this phenomena across the OECD. And just very briefly, what we show is that from about the 1990s through the present, there’s been a growing gap between governments pushing trade liberalisation, institutionalized co-operation and multilateral governments and declining supports among voters. It is not only true of the United States. It’s true of most EU countries. You can see it in Japan. So, this is a problem that has deep roots that we argue that there’s two things going on. One is what you’ve just put your finger on, which is a broken contract, which we call, kind of, withdrawing or slowing down the growth of social protectioning. Basically, the levelling off of the Welfare State. There’s a second issue that people don’t talk about or don’t think about enough.

The end of the Cold War opened up the political space in Western democracies in a big way. It made it possible for parties pushing nationalist, isolationist agendas to come back in. Now, I’m not saying Donald Trump could have never gotten elected during the Cold War, but it would have been a heavier lift, much heavier.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Or at least for his age. Megan Greene, your turn.

Megan Greene

Yeah, I’ll keep my comments short and I’ll address Rodrigo’s question about the challenges in American democracy affecting US soft power, and I’ll highlight that the Chinese Government, President Xi has come out with three main priorities for the Chinese economy. The first one is financial stability, and that’s specific to China’s real estate market or they’d like to remove moral hazard and that’s a smart move economically.

The second one is common prosperity. I teach a course at Tsinghua University and common prosperity comes out several times in every single class. So, it is drilled into my students’ heads that common prosperity is central to the Communist Party right now.

And the third one is the green transition. So, hitting carbon emissions targets. It’s no coincidence that President Xi is pushing two areas in which the US is completely failing. I think China does – is trying to show that, actually, their form of government can be more effective than ours and they may well succeed in doing that.

I’ll also highlight that I was in Europe around COP26 when we were, you know, back at the table finally as the US and I spoke to a lot of European policymakers and I have to say, one of the first things that they highlighted was how unreliable the US is as a partner in any of this, kind of, stuff, because while there’s a government in place right now, that’s interested in the green transition and inequality, who knows who will be in place in two years’ time, and they’re not wrong to think the US is a pretty unreliable partner and maybe they should just circumvent us. It would be nice to have us onboard, but we’re no longer super crucial because we’re so incredibly unreliable. So, I think our challenges in American democracy certainly are undermining our soft power, and I think other forms of government, particularly in China, are trying to show that they can be more effective, and it’s possible they might be.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Thank you, Megan. I’m going to ask – I’m just going to read very quickly two last questions, turn it over to each of you for a final word ‘cause we are at time, but Sir David Manning who is – I couldn’t pass up the question, it’s a brilliant question and David, as many of you know, is the Chair of our North America Advisory Council, is tremendously important to all of us at Chatham House. He writes, “There is fevered talk of the United States risking civil war. Should this be dismissed as hyperbolic rhetoric or can you envisage widescale civil violence leading to the US breaking up?” Great question, we really do want to hear the answer and there I would just say, there are two questions here that really ask the bipartisan question, one from John Holmes about, “Is there any real possibility for bipartisan, electoral reform?” And another one asking the question about whether Joe Manchin, “Is there anything to his claims that he’s interested in bipartisanship?”

So, maybe I’ll go –I’ll start with you, Peter, come to you, Megan, Amy give you the last word ‘cause you’re further away than anybody else is and it might be harder for us to get you back so, Peter.

Peter Trubowitz

And my answer to David’s very, very good question, he always asks a good question and a tough question, is the fact that you can ask this question is a problem. It underscores that there’s a problem, and I’m going to leave it at that. So, that’s a bit ambiguous, but we wouldn’t be having this conversation, as you well know, 25 years ago, 15 years ago, ten years ago. Things have really accelerated on this front and it’s a problem. I think, I wouldn’t put high probability on it, but the mere fact that we – it’s even part of the feasible set, in a discussion among reasonable people, that’s a problem.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

And reasonable people including our former Ambassador to the United States of America, Megan Greene.

Megan Greene

Yeah, I actually looked up the definition of a civil war in preparation for this panel, in part because a colleague of mine at Harvard had just written about this and a civil war involves two groups within a country that control their own armies, fighting violently and over 1,000 people being killed. The actual incidents of civil war is pretty rare. It’s basically unheard of among wealthy, developed economies, so history is on our side, in terms of not actually facing a potential civil war. That being said, even if there isn’t a civil war, there is a lot to be worried about. So, I agree that, you know, it doesn’t – almost doesn’t matter if we’re facing a civil war or not, we already have a problem. And in terms of actually finding bipartisan support for an effective, independent electoral body, there’s no chance, I think, given what is trying to be pushed through, in a number of states, by Republicans at the local level, and is there anything to Joe Manchin’s bipartisanship? No, I think he’s mostly out for himself and is protecting his own seat in West Virginia, which has its own interests that are, unfortunately, against what a lot of the measures are in the Build Back Better plan.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Amy, prospects if not for civil war and Megan’s right that the bar is high, but for electoral, serious electoral related violence?

Amy Walter

Right, I would point back to 50 – a little over 50 years ago, in 1968 there was a great deal of violence, in fact, much more violence than we’re seeing right now. If there is any point when it looked as if America was literally going to violently separate it would have been at that point. The other is, in terms of electoral reform, go back to the 2000 election, not exactly an uncontroversial election. A great number of Democrats believed that President Bush was put into place in a not – in a way that was flawed, to say the least, that the way that the Supreme Court invested itself in that outcome and yet, two years later, by overwhelming margins, the House and the Senate passed electoral reform. So, we are – we have done it, but we aren’t in that same place today.

I think the most likely thing we’re going to see, on electoral reform, is fixing the so-called Electoral Active, the 1860s, where it made it very clear that the Vice President cannot stand up and decide that he’s not going to declare the electoral votes from one state to be valid or that members of Congress can no longer do that, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the states themselves. They obviously are the ones that dictate what the electoral votes are that get sent to the Congress.

As for Joe Manchin, I think it’s important to appreciate that this is a guy who comes from a state that is literally the most Republican in the nation. There is no other state that is more Republican than West Virginia. No other state gave Donald Trump a bigger percentage of the vote than West Virginia. The fact that they also elected Joe Manchin is quite remarkable and I – I’ve been, you know, really, really, really, you know, quite stunned that people are surprised to see Manchin pushing back and how far he’s come, actually. He may still end up voting for some version of Build Back Better, but how far that they’ve been able to bring him, think back to how difficult it was for the Obama administration when they had a 60-vote margin to get enough of their members onboard for billions of dollars in spending. They’ve been able to get Joe Manchin to spend $1.9 trillion on COVID relief. So, I think we have to also put it into some of that perspective.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Thank you, and that’s tremendous, actually ‘cause it sort of brings us around – back to some of, I think, Megan’s earlier comments as well of, you know, the bar is – you know, there are some quite transformative things to note, as well as there’s a lot of resilience in the system, but my God the fact that, as Peter said, that we even ask the question about civil war and electoral violence, there’s a good reason why we ask it, but it is very disturbing.

I thank you, to the three of you, thank you to everybody who’s joined us this evening, this afternoon. It’s a really important conversation, we’re at the beginning. If you have topics, questions that you’d really like to see us look at more carefully, in our roundtables, please email me. I’m very curious to hear. Anar and Tom and I are working quite hard on this right now, conceiving of what are the conversations that are most important to have, so we look forward to your feedback.

Peter, thank you so much. Peter, I know that you’re going to be doing this in-depth at the Phelan US Centre at the London School of Economics, Megan at Harvard and here, and Amy, across the news media, as well as the political part. Thank you so much and we will carry on the conversation very soon.

Peter Trubowitz

It’ll be with you.

Megan Greene

Thanks.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Bye. Good to see you. Thanks.