The Three Faces Of Trumpism

Summary

Podcast Summary: Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick — "The Three Faces Of Trumpism"

Date: November 29, 2025
Host: Dahlia Lithwick
Guests: Jedediah Britton-Purdy (Duke Law), David Pozen (Columbia Law)
Theme:
An exploration of three competing frameworks for understanding Trump-era American politics: authoritarian crisis, enduring dysfunction, and constitutional regime change.

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Overview

This “thinky” episode dives deeply into big themes on the state of American democracy under Trump’s leadership. Drawing from their recent Boston Review piece, law professors Jed Purdy and David Pozen join host Dahlia Lithwick to interrogate three narrative “scripts” about Trumpism and today’s constitutional reality:

1. Authoritarian rupture
2. Deep-seated dysfunction
3. Constitutional regime change

They analyze what these perspectives capture or miss, their historical roots, and their implications for action in a fractured political and epistemic landscape.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Origin of the Three-Frames Project

• Genesis: The guests’ collaboration stemmed from their own and others’ bewilderment at current events and the constantly shifting sense of crisis.
  • David Pozen: “In the course of a single day, I think Jed and I found ourselves toggling across wildly different diagnoses of where the country is at.” ([04:01])
  • Jed Purdy: Many colleagues “found themselves skidding uncontrollably across the various three positions over the course of a day.” ([04:51])

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2. The Three Explanatory Frameworks:

a. Authoritarian Crisis (Frame 1)

• The dominant liberal/centrist interpretation, seeing Trump’s era as a rapid, foreign-influenced slide to autocracy:
  • Jed Purdy: “Consolidation of unaccountable power in the executive... using the power of federal law enforcement to target enemies... deliberate erosion of the stability and credibility of the electoral system... a shift in the tone of politics... to an explicit friend-enemy kind of logic." ([06:17])
  • External comparison: Playbooks from Orbán’s Hungary, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Modi’s India.

b. More of the Same / Deep Dysfunction (Frame 2)

• A perspective from the political left: Trump as a symptom and intensifier, not a fundamental rupture.
  • David Pozen: “[Trump] is best seen as a symptom of rather than a cause of democratic decline and constitutional rot… Many of the things Trump is accused of breaking were already broken.” ([09:09], [11:32])
  • Example: Americans’ policy preferences not reflected in government; due process rights long denied to minorities and immigrants.

c. Constitutional Regime Change (Frame 3)

• The "White House narrative": This is routine constitutional transformation—a new majority shifting the system from within, as it did under FDR or during the Civil Rights Era.
  • Jed Purdy: “The way we change constitutional regimes… is by transformation from within… usually under pressure from democratic political movements. So the New Deal changed the American order, the civil rights era changed the American order.” ([12:53])
  • He notes Trump supporters’ claims that “we have a mandate… we are just doing what FDR did.” ([12:25])
  • Distinction: This is normal American politics, not a loss of democracy, say defenders of this view. ([15:35])

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3. Historical Roots & Diagnosing the Present

• Each script pulls from how one interprets pre-Trump America:
  • Those who see an abrupt crisis likely believed in a previously healthy democracy.
  • The "more of the same" camp saw US democracy as fundamentally and chronically flawed far earlier.
  • Regime change theorists see prior liberal hegemony and now its overturn.
• Pozen: “[Deep] constitutional change… does generally require sustained, strong majority support… and that is… conspicuously lacking here.” ([23:58])

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4. All Three Lenses Have Value, But Where To From Here?

• Lithwick: The challenge: “Trump is gobbling up what's left of those [institutions]… at a really accelerated rate... he has broken with alacrity and in ways that might not come back.” ([25:42])
• Defensive bipartisan “anti-authoritarian” minimalism (e.g., Harris + Cheney coalitions) risks leaving root dysfunctions untouched.
• Pozen: “If you're right that Trump has both exposed, you know, deep rot in Congress… then the more of the same diagnosis suggests we need much more fundamental reforms.” ([26:57])
• Ambitious reforms—court reform, ending the filibuster, fighting plutocracy—may be needed to prevent future Trumpism, but are made difficult by polarization.

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5. Hybridization and Mutual Learning

• The three camps are less mutually exclusive than in Trump’s first term; more are integrating elements from multiple views.
  • Purdy: “There is a kind of convergence that's incipient now… that's some real learning about the points that the competing sides have.” ([28:58])
  • For example, even leftists now better appreciate the value of due process.

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6. Epistemic Crisis – Are We Living in Three Americas?

• Lithwick: Are these frames reinforcing epistemic silos—are we living not just in disagreement, but in different realities?
  • Purdy: “It is not at all evident that we can get ourselves out of our epistemic fragmentation... the political community basically learns how to imagine itself… through a series of fragmented for profit platforms whose motive… is not to get you civically useful, actionable information, but to hold your attention…” ([44:31])
  • However, online platforms could also build new forms of democratic overlap if harnessed well.

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7. On “Butter Knife to a Gunfight”—Norms, Hardball, and Democratic Resilience

• Can liberal or institutional norms hold against illiberal onslaughts? Is tit-for-tat hardball the only answer?
  • Pozen: “There is a structural disadvantage that parties who want to rebuild institutions have against a wrecking ball like Trump... I generally think that the best case for Democrats playing hardball themselves is when it's in the service of what I've called anti-hardball.” ([36:40])
  • Use hardball to achieve reforms (e.g., anti-gerrymandering) that reduce incentives for further “dirty play.”

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8. Reflections and Takeaways

• Purdy: “I came to a fuller appreciation in the process of writing of the depth and incorrigibility of the differences and that we really were talking about both views of history and views about constitutional legitimacy that are hard to get onto the same page.” ([50:25])
• Pozen: “I think for my own sanity, it was important to try to charitably reconstruct the Trump advisor's own account of what they're up to… There's always space for the next generation… to push in a new direction.” ([52:25])
• Both see hope in coalitions between anti-authoritarian liberals and leftist reformers, but stress these are generational projects, not quick fixes.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “We all change our minds about everything… we are all toggling between split screens.”

  • Dahlia Lithwick ([05:40])

• “Trump is best seen as a symptom of rather than a cause of democratic decline and constitutional rot.”

  • David Pozen ([09:09])

• “The way we change constitutional regimes in this country… is by transformation from within the same constitutional text…”

  • Jed Purdy ([12:53])

• “There's a kind of convergence that's incipient now... that if nothing else represents some real learning about the points that the competing sides have.”

  • Jed Purdy ([28:58])

• “We say [epistemic polarization] has gone beyond… disagreeing on policies or parties or candidates, but goes to the level of our basic understanding of the kind of country we're living in…”

  • David Pozen ([48:31])

• “Politics really is about living within a space of ongoing, deep, deep disagreement… disagreement is rooted just in our being different people who are trying to find a way to live together.”

  • Jed Purdy ([50:25])

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Key Timestamps

• [04:01–05:40] — Origins of the collaboration and the challenge of finding common diagnosis
• [06:17–12:25] — Dissection of the three explanatory frames: authoritarianism, deep dysfunction, regime change
• [20:35–24:33] — Historical roots and how prior assumptions affect current interpretations
• [25:42–28:57] — Institutional collapse accelerated by Trumpism; incomplete fit of available frameworks
• [28:58–31:49] — Institutional learning; increasing hybridization of the crisis and dysfunction lenses
• [36:40–40:08] — The “hardball” dilemma and institutional fragility
• [44:31–48:31] — Epistemic siloing and the future of democratic discourse
• [50:25–55:28] — Guests’ reflections on what they learned and where action/hope may lie

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Conclusion

“The Three Faces of Trumpism” invites listeners to critically engage with the assumptions guiding their political analysis, not merely to choose one script, but to see the value—and limitations—of each. The episode closes with a double call: for analytic humility in the face of deep-rooted, unresolvable pluralism, and for bold thinking about new coalitions and reforms that could shore up both democracy’s structure and its spirit.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

I'm Dahlia Lithwick. This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts, the law and the Supreme Court.

[C]

We need to think somehow bifocally about the Supreme Court, both as a rule of law bulwark in potential still at the moment, and also as a long running structural problem in American democracy.

[B]

Although some of the destruction of state capacity will be very hard to reverse some of the attacks on basic norms that Trump has engaged in. Actually those norms might be more resilient.

[A]

In the tryptophan haze of the long weekend after Thanksgiving, I thought we might do one of what we sometimes call our thinky shows. That is a show about big themes and big questions, an attempt to locate ourselves within the swirling, to anchor ourselves with a little bit of analysis, with the horizon broader than a news alert or a TikTok take. If you've been listening to the show for the last 10 months, or maybe longer, you are well aware that our view is that we are sitting square in the middle of an authoritarian takeover, mostly copy pasted from the Viktor Orban playbook, and that it's proceeding swiftly and alarmingly despite the fact that it comes in the shape of a clown car. This week's guests, both of whom I admire immensely, asked in a recent piece in the Boston Review, what are we living through in a written attempt to make meaning of competing narratives about this present moment in US history so we might better understand as between authoritarian rupture, just the latest expression of deep seated dysfunction, or the flip to some new constitutional order? Which of these is in fact the true story of America? And in 2025, I'm just delighted to introduce two great thinkers. Jed Britton Purdy is a law professor at Duke University and author, most recently of Two Cheers for Politics, why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening, and our Best hope. David Posen is a law professor at Columbia University and author, most recently of the Constitution of the War on Drugs. So, Jed and David, I just am so happy that you're here, and I'm happy you're here this week when my brain sort of hurts from breaking.

[C]

Thanks, Dalia. Good to be here with you.

[B]

Thanks.

[A]

Before we really dive into the piece, the substance of it, I would love to talk about what it was that brought the two of you together to try and name and understand this present moment. I think most of us, for all the wrong reasons, tend to start from the proposition that we know exactly what we are living through and everyone who doesn't agree with us is a moron. And you have not started from that place. And David, maybe you can just tell me a little bit of the genesis of what led the two of you to try to pan back a little.

[B]

Sure. The piece grew out of conversations Jed and I were having in which we tried to make sense of what was happening all around us, from some colleagues and relatives urging us to flee the country, Yale's top scholars of fascism actually fleeing the country, to other colleagues and friends suggesting that was hysterical and comical, a reaction to an ordinary regime change. And in the course of a single day, I think Jed and I found ourselves toggling across wildly different diagnoses of where the country is at. And so the piece really started as an earnest effort to get our bearings in a time that we have experienced as more destabilizing and confusing than I think, any other in our adult lives.

[C]

Golly, I might just add, that we also found, as we began to try to hash out the themes together, that more and more people we spoke with, who would seem to have very strong sort of official public positions about what's happening, in fact, seemed sort of relieved and delighted to be able to tell us that they found themselves skidding uncontrollably across the various three positions over the course of a day, depending on the latest headline they'd read or which historical analog they were thinking about, or whether their children had to go to urgent care that day. So we did begin to develop a sense that we weren't just trying to think out of our own heads, but that the sense of bewilderment we were dealing with might be more widely shared.

[A]

I do love the proposition of naming the fact that we are all toggling between split screens and we all change our minds about everything. Certainly on this show multiple times and so I think it's incredibly useful to be vulnerable to that. I wonder if we can walk through the three frames that you're describing. We'll just go one by one. And maybe you can start, Jed, because as I suggested, the first one is very much, I think, the animating zeitgeist of this show, and that is the idea that we are simply in some kind of authoritarian crisis.

[C]

Sure. So although the authoritarian crisis frame needs no introduction, I'll try to give it an efficient one. So this is the view, as you said, that we are caught in a timeline that's defined by an authoritarian playbook. The playbook is in some ways copied from Orban's Hungary, Bolsonaro's Brazil, Modi's India, maybe a variety of regimes that have become increasingly illiberal in the last decade or so. We're part of that pattern on this take. What does it mean that we're part of that pattern? It means that there is a consolidation of unaccountable power in the executive. It means that the president is using the power of federal law enforcement to target enemies such as Jim Comey and Jim Comey's family and to reward friends such as Eric Adams. It means that independent institutions like the legacy media and the universities that have thought of themselves as really secured by the First Amendment to do their own thing in their own way now find themselves the targets of pretty explicitly partisan strong arming. And it means the deliberate erosion of the stability and credibility of the electoral system under partisan, partisan pressure from the administration and maybe even a higher level of abstraction. It means a shift in the tone of politics from a sense that even though it's bad, we're all in it together, to an explicit friend, enemy kind of logic, where if you're on the other side, you need to be crushed, and all the tools of power are going to be brought to bear to try to do that. So all of those specific symptoms kind of add up to and are drawn up into that broader sense that we're in a politics that's not working normally and where all of the structures people have taken for granted before are gonna come under pressure or there'll be an attempt to shatter them. And so you could say, where are we? We're on the brink of moving into a different kind of regime and one that will be less free and thus democratic.

[A]

We had Kim Lane Shepley on the show very early on, and she ess read us. You know, here's the Orban playbook. You go after the courts, you go after the academies you go after the pre. So I live comfortably in that water. But, David, I'd love for you to expound on door number two here because we dip into that an awful lot in the discourse and don't always name it. And door number two is essentially same old, same old, more of the same it has ever been thus. Right.

[B]

Right. Or taken further. So if the first position on where we are now, the authoritarian crisis view is the province of mainstream liberal and centrist publications and voices like this podcast and the New York Times and the Atlantic and Kim Lane Shepley in the academy, the second is more associated with the political left. And we call this the more of the same perspective. And it sees Trump and Trumpism as illuminating and intensifying long running trends and pathologies. Rather than fundamentally breaking the mold, some of what Trump has done in this term takes further standard Republican priorities and policies, like hostility to affirmative action or abortion or tax cuts for corporations, environmental deregulation. We know this from Republican politics for several decades now. Other things that Trump is doing have a bipartisan pedigree. Harsh immigration enforcement, expansion of the national security state, the consolidation of power in the executive branch, and particularly in the presidency. These are long running trends that again, Trump has taken further. And of course, his rhetoric is more vulgar and heated than prior presidents. But on this account, basically, Trump is best seen as a symptom of rather than a cause of democratic decline and constitutional rot. And so if we're going to figure out how to move beyond Trumpism, we need to address these deep forces that have brought us to the brink, rather than see Trump as a unique force in American politics that is more or less an external shock to the system.

[A]

And David, maybe the way I always think of that is, you know, when Dobbs came down, the guests who would come on this show and say there was never a right to abortion in America. Right. You know, it's the people who say there was never actually a right to vote. There was never actually anything other than an incredibly racist carceral state. And to blame things on, you know, this Robert's court decision or that Roberts court decision is to elide systemic inequality that Trump happens to be channeling and tapping into. But if Trump went away tomorrow, we would still be that country. That's the gist.

[B]

Yeah, basically that a lot of the things Trump is accused of breaking were already broken. Trump seems to trample on due process rights of noncitizens and other groups. Well, immigrants in this country and racialized minority communities have not had their due process Rights respected for many years. In fact, most Americans policy preferences aren't reflected in government policies. And that's been true for many years. There's a whole literature on racial authoritarianism. And on this account, basically, Trump has deepened and broadened the experience of that life under an authoritarian regime rather than innovated and introduced authoritarianism for the first time on our shores. So yes, this is the basic proposition that America has never had a really well functioning democracy. And Trump has revealed that rather than created that harsh reality.

[A]

And Jed, number three is the one we keep hearing out of the White House when people squawk and we hear, you know, this is what presidents do. This is just constitutional regime change. This is Stephen Miller saying, we have a mandate. You all voted for this. We are just doing what FDR did and what presidents have historically done when they usher in a new constitutional worldview. So like, everybody take a breath.

[C]

Well, you put it pretty well there, Dalia. I think you said about as well as I can what the view is from the administration and many of its most thoughtful supporters. As you said, it starts with the observation that the way we change constitutional regimes in this country, unlike in some other republics like France, is not by writing a new constitution. It's by transformation from within the same constitutional text and institutions that we have, usually under pressure from democratic political movements. So the New Deal changed the American order, the civil rights era changed the American order, changed the relationship between the courts and the executive. They changed the relationship between the federal government and the states. They changed the status of enroll of independent institutions like the media and the universities in a variety of ways. And when things change, it is alienating and even frightening to the people who are socialized into the prior regime and committed to its values. People called FDR a fascist. The southern white resisters to the civil rights era claimed that the Constitution was being fundamentally betrayed. And they were right that it was being once again fundamentally transformed in the civil rights era and really key ways. And so we should ask ourselves whether that's what's happening after a campaign in which the President won both a decisive electoral college and a clear popular victory, if only with a plurality, and ran as a transformative candidate. Extremely clear that his campaign was about attacking the institutions and rejecting the arrangements of a multi decade, semi bipartisan previous regime and trying to take things in a very new direction.

[A]

One important element of this, tell me if I'm wrong, is that in a country where you cannot amend the Constitution.

[C]

Absolutely.

[A]

You know, we like to talk from the political left about popular constitutionalism Right. We like to talk about living constitutionalism. This is it. This is the same thing. It just happens to be coming from the Heritage Heritage Foundation. Right. I mean, that would be the argument is that nothing was bad that is happening here. This is how we get constitutional change. And Americans wanted, as David said, immigration policies to change and they wanted a strong executive and they want to be tough on crime. So there you go. Right? There's nothing nefarious here.

[C]

Maybe one point is worth making about what follows. It wouldn't mean that anyone on the left or any liberal should say, okay, great, I guess I have to like Trump's immigration policy now. What it means is that there's a critical distinction between serious heartfelt disagreements about the direction of politics, which have to be fought out electorally, and the loss of the constitutional system. And this framing says this is still the same constitutional system. So if you oppose it, fight it. Absolutely fight it. But don't say that we're losing the constitution or ceasing to be a democratic constitutional republic. This is how. This is the ordinary extraordinary politics of this republic. And we should fight in those terms. So when take a deep breath means take a deep breath in the constitutional crisis, register and see this as a more familiar kind of landscape.

[A]

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[B]

With regard to Trump specifically, the narratives go back to his first term, where some identified him as an authoritarian threat right from the outset, and the resistance movement at the time reflected that view. I think a lot of people also saw him as just standard Republicanism taken to the hilt, you know, and his signature achievement of his first term was the Tax Cut and Jobs act that really was recognizable as an intensified version of familiar partisan politics. And then the regime change view was more aspirational in the first term, I don't think, although he transformed the judiciary, I don't think he otherwise articulated a clear constitutional vision in the first term. But all three positions began to coalesce in the first term, but have really come into the fore in the second term when the stakes seem so much higher and Trump seems up to something more transformative. Though no one can agree on exactly what it is on the larger historical perspective. One thing we suggest in the piece is that where you land in diagnosing the present is inseparable from your view on what American politics looked like prior to Trump. So those who think we've fallen off the cliff into Orban or Erdogan style authoritarianism generally had a pretty optimistic view of how we were doing before Trump, where for all of the flaws of our system, we had a full democracy and we had liberal safeguards against various abuses of power that Trump has engaged in. So that there is something jarring and discontinuous about what we're seeing now. Those in the more of the same camp, as already mentioned, had a much more pessimistic take on where we were throughout the 20th century. And you could point to indicia of this, like when Trump first won the presidency, the Economist Democracy Index downgraded the US From a full democracy to a flawed democracy. And of course, on some accounts, we were flawed democracy much before that. So this narrative stresses continuity. Basically, Trump has exposed the authoritarian tendencies that were always latent within capitalist liberal democracy. And then finally, on the regime change view that we were just discussing, the emphasis tends to be on liberal capture liberal hegemony. Christopher Ruffo, one of the theorists of the Trump administration, likes to invoke a Gramsian term about hegemony. And on this view, liberals basically captured the constitutional order for several generations. The turning point was really the New Deal. The civil rights revolution was a second transformation. And these are contingent developments. They're not timeless constitutional truths. And so if we think in terms of generational renewals or ruptures, now it's the right's turn. And as Jed said, they're pursuing their version of constitutional regime change. On that, I just, I can't help but note, Dalia, this is a bit of a digression that even separating out what you think on the substance of what Trump is doing and how vile you may find some of his policies just on the process through which he's pursuing them, I do think it's important to emphasize that this is not the New Deal in terms of the kind of democratic mandate Trump can claim. He's never even enjoyed majority support, much less super majority support in the public and in Congress the way FDR did. So really, the weakest procedural strut of the regime change view for Trump is that generally, while it's true under our system, constitutional change happens without formal amendments often, deep constitutional change does generally require sustained, strong majority support for whatever direction we're moving in. And that is just conspicuously lacking here and makes this much more problematic historically and democratically.

[C]

May I jump on that point just for a moment? Because I think it's extremely important and I think a related difficulty is that the lack of majority support for Trump's program is not unique to Trump's program, but seems to be symptomatic of a multi decade pattern in American politics in which we have collapsing trust in public institutions, collapsing trust in fellow citizens, and intensified partisan animosity of a form that essentially means that in any circumstance we have two minority parties. There's a real sense in which all governance has been minority governance for a while now, maybe since the early years of the first Obama administration, in the sense that it's been hard to rally sustained popular support, even though our system still produces majorities, because that's what it's built to do. So in those circumstances, either we're a country incapable of having basic change, or we're a country that finds a modality of basic change that doesn't rely on the kinds of sweeping and sustained majorities that we had in the past. And neither one is a heartening conclusion.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I found myself as I was reading the piece, struggling between these two positions of, you know, they're right, they're right. This is why we can't have nice things. You know, Congress doesn't function. The courts are not necessarily the bulwark of democracy. We believe them to be. You know, we can talk about the flaws of the media and of plutocracy, blah, blah, blah. But what's interesting about the pieces, of course, Trump is gobbling up what's left of those. David, you made this point at a really accelerated rate. So it's a little bit tricky to locate yourself in this conversation. If you are starting from the proposition that there is no functioning Congress, it's not clear there is a functioning media, certainly not one that people trust. And so a lot of the stuff that is stipulated, broken and came broken, he has broken with alacrity and in ways that might not come back. And so I think that's where it feels like the sort of like, oh, this is just regime change by another name. Feels like it elide some of the sort of Ms. Pac man quality of just destroying what's left of democratic institutions.

[B]

Yeah, I'll just say I think this points to attention and where we go from here. If we were assuming that we are able to dig out at all. The authoritarian crisis view tends to be paired with a pretty defensive and minimalist set of recommendations for how we resist Trumpism and then restore something like normalcy. We need to have bipartisan coalitions that are focused on some thin areas of consensus, like support for the rule of law and basic, you know, some of the institutions you named, and this is like Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney, a grand coalition defensive crouch posture. And the imperative is just to get rid of Trump and find basic common ground. But if you're right that Trump has both exposed, you know, deep rot in Congress, in congressional capacity and in the media and other institutions, then the more of the same diagnosis suggests we need much more fundamental reforms or we're just going to be vulnerable anew to the next authoritarian. We're not really going to solve the democratic discontent that Trump exploits. And so what do we need to do? We might need court reform or other structural constitutional reforms. We might need to get rid of the filibuster to enable more legislation in the future, even though that's very scary right now. And we need to address inequality and plutocracy and gerrymandering, you know, so a much more ambitious agenda paired with a much bleaker reading of how we got here. But as Jed says, given the state of polarization and distrust in the country, it's very hard to see at the moment how we can get there. Although I think the more of the same camp has a powerful point in putting its finger on just how much needs to change to really prevent Trumpism from being an ever present menace in the country.

[A]

Chip.

[C]

So without imagining that, I know how to solve it. Something we observe in the later part of the piece, which I think we can sort of expand on now, is that the three frames, which in the first Trump administration, I think were pretty mutually exclusive, people were really sort of in one or the other, and there were a lot of potshots taken sidelong. Think of the sort of, if I can use names, the Zibla and Levitsky how democracies die kind of school of thought versus Sam Moines potshots, which were really the kind of exemplary, more of the same in the New York Times kind of space in the first Trump administration. I think in this administration, there seems to be a lot of hybridization and adaptation going on between the first two camps. I think we both perceive that it's much more ordinary now to find people whose basic frame is authoritarian crisis to say yes. And it's also true that oligarchy isn't new and is a deep problem. It's also true that we need to think somehow bifocally about the Supreme Court, both as a rule of law bulwark and potential still at the moment, and also as a long running structural problem in American democracy. And even if we're not sure how to put those two together, trying to hold the two thoughts at the same time is progress against trying to deflate or shoot down the other one. Conversely, I think a lot of people on the left who thought you could throw the liberal baby out with the oligarchic bathwater of pre2016America and not really lose anything, have an intensely renewed appreciation that things like due process and the basic terms of the First Amendment are actually pretty important and that there is a whole world after you lose those. That is much worse than the hypocrisy and imperfection of pre2016America. I think there's a kind of convergence that's incipient now that if nothing else represents some real learning about the points that the competing sides have. People think lots of things in this country and you could make lots of maps of memes. The piece is not meant to be a map of memes. It's meant to be a map of reasons. Like these are things people say that we think have to be taken seriously, even if you don't come down in the same place. And the fact that there's some learning happening seems right because these are things as to which there ought to be some learning possible. These are not just like crazy things someone thinks.

[A]

I love the notion that this piece is a map of reasons because it explains what the project was, which I think felt really meta until I read the piece a couple of times. David, you want to add something?

[B]

I guess the piece performs a kind of liberal commitment to pluralism or reason giving that is under siege. I was just going to offer another cut on the where do we go from here conversation and why it's vexed. So you noted the authoritarian playbook is what Trump seems to be deploying when it goes after civil society institutions and weaponizes the Justice Department and so on. And that's the standard take of the authoritarian crisis camp. There is an anti authoritarian playbook that some people refer to for what you do when you're faced with authoritarianism. And it sounds in a kind of liberalism of fear this is the defense of minimalism, of the Liz Cheney, Kamala Harris partnership. And so executive power is scary, so you want to minimize that. Courts are your best bulwarks against authoritarian predations, so defend them at all costs. Checks and balances and veto points in the political process are great. The more the better. And so all of this is designed to stop the worst abuses of authoritarianism, but by the same token, it minimizes the government's capacity to do good and pursue progressive reforms that might be needed to resist inequality and get people reinvested in democracy again in a way that will, in the long term, resist authoritarianism. So Jed and I have thought a lot about how the kind of anti authoritarian playbook or praxis differs from standard progressive responses to our crises. And finding areas of overlap, I think is an important project for people who are appalled by what's happening now. I can think of two where the standard anti authoritarian playbook meets standard liberal progressive aspirations for good government. And that would be rebuilding congressional capacity. I think both sides can agree we need a functioning Congress or we're going to be vulnerable to presidential imperialism in the future, just as we are now. And both parties are to blame for letting congressional capacity wither. And that needs to be a priority. And a second area of overlap is something about the importance of collective action. American civil society institutions have in general done a very poor job, it seems to me, of collectivizing their response to Trump threats. Think of the universities, think of law firms, think of media organizations. Even though we have this famously wealthy and diverse civil society, it's actually very poorly organized to do collective action at scale. And so I think figuring out how to make collective action less costly and more realistic for those civil society groups has also gotta be a priority that both camps more of the same and authoritarian crisis can agree on.

[A]

And I wanna really point out, cause I know there's gonna be some grumpy listeners who say, oh my God, is the prescription here really, like, talk to each other better? But I think what you just said, David, is, you know, it is beyond sort of piercing the all or nothing and the absolutism of these three different camps. It' functional bridges. But what you just said raises, I think, another sort of thorny problem for me, which is, and you cite to it in the piece, and I just want you to unpack it, is the butter knife to a gunfight problem, right? Where, you know, what we call the Merrick Garland problem of simply acting civilly and with norms and saying we are going to reinstantiate an independent Justice Department by doing things the old way clearly was not, I think, the answer. And so now, and I think the example you have used is we're in the gerrymandering wars, right? We're watching mutually assured destruction, which, if it goes as it's going, is going to either mean somebody disarms unilaterally and gives up, you know, free and fair voting, or that we just gerrymander ourselves into oblivion. And I would just love your reflections on this question because it makes, does, I think, undergird so much of the peace. If we have crossed the threshold into there's no going back because there is no longer an agreement on what the rule of law means. There is no longer a commitment to one person, one vote. There is no longer a commitment to, you know, the basic norms of dignity or, you know, to an independent Justice Department that's not coming back. So the worst thing we could do is seed ground. And I know you've really grappled with this, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on both. Am I descriptively wrong that that's a problem? And also, and this is just, you know, my own anxiety, but, like, how will we know that we have unilaterally disarmed and there's no coming back?

[B]

I'll say a few things. One, I'm not sure that the American public has given up on some of the basic rule of law or democratic norms that you note in the piece. We comment on how some of Trump's most flagrantly authoritarian tactics, like threatening to deport people without hearing some of what ICE is doing, masked and unbadged and threatening to defy judicial rulings, are very unpopular, actually, if public polling is to be believed. So that may be a hopeful sign that, in fact, although some of the destruction of state capacity will be very hard to reverse, some of the attacks on basic norms that Trump has engaged in, actually, those norms might be more resilient. But on the big question, what do you do when the other side is playing dirty and trampling on established legal and moral principles? I've written about this in the past under the rubric of asymmetric constitutional hardball. I think this is a wicked problem for the Democratic Party and for liberals in general. It's not satisfying. But I'll just say I do think that there's a structural disadvantage that parties who want to rebuild institutions have against a wrecking ball like Trump. And it's dangerous to play tit for tat games that could easily lead to escalation So I generally think that the best case for Democrats playing hardball themselves is when it's in the service of what I've called anti hardball. That is, you play hardball at time one to get to a place at time two where both sides are gonna be less incentivized to play dirty. And so with gerrymandering, that looks like maybe if Democrats control Congress and the presidency in 2029, you do away with the filibuster in part to push through anti gerrymandering reforms like bipartisan redistricting commissions that are broadly popular. But it seems like there's no way to get there within the structure of our political duopoly. So you're playing hardball, you're getting rid of the filibuster. That's a bold move, but you're doing it to get the country to a place where less hardball will be necessary. So I think, just in general terms, that's probably how I would think about it if I were a Democratic politician, though I know that that's not fully satisfying. And then finally, I'll just say, going back to FDR and the New Deal, this is why it's important to keep in mind the legitimacy of constitutional change in the absence of a formal amendment and the need sometimes to do very disruptive and to political opponents, very upsetting things to move the country forward, as we saw in the New Deal there. I think ideally you would have deep majority support for whatever change is happening and you would be transparent in the way you pursue it, and you would do it with, you know, with respect for the other side. But there's no escaping the reality that both sides want to pursue transformative reforms that might involve some norm breaking to get there. So just to point out that Trump has shattered expectations doesn't really answer the question. It's striking that Mondani, the new mayor elect of New York City, also cites FDR as his favorite president, as do various people in the Trump coalition. So there's an appetite on both sides for playing hardball. I think it's important that it be done with an eye to getting beyond hardball and in a way that respects majority Democratic preferences.

[A]

We are going to take a short break. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. For all the financial advisors out there, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value in fixed income is not always easy, but Vanguard bonds are institutional quality, which means top grade products across the board. Vanguard sets the standard for, for what dependable investing should look like. Vanguard's Lineup includes over 80 bond funds that are actively managed by a 200 person global team of sector specialists, analysts and traders. Their long standing establishment and scale allows them to invest across all kinds of sectors, maturities and geographies. Which means they can spot and act on opportunities that others might miss. So if you're looking to to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for [e-mail] audio that's vanguard.com audio all investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor Courage is the new currency in this country I'm Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, where our team of lawyers is fighting in court every day for you, for your rights and for our democracy. The Trump Vance administration wants us to be exhausted and divided, but when people come together and speak out, courage becomes contagious. And that is how change happens. We've already won cases to defend people and communities, all free of charge. But ahead of 2026, we need you beside us. Join the [e-mail] when you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure the actual impact on people's lives? GiveWell has spent 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation and only directs funding to the highest impact opportunities they've found. Over 150,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to direct more than $2.5 billion. Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 300,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more. You can find all of their research and recommendations on their site for free and thanks to the donors who chose to sponsor their research. GiveWell doesn't take a cut from your tax deduction deductible donation to their recommended funds. If this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter Amicus at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from Amicus to get your donation matched again. That's givewell.org code amicus to donate or find out more. And we are back with David Posen and Jed Purdy. We've had so many people on this show doing versions of popular constitutionalism, right? Kate Shaw telling us, look, when people hold up signs that say no Kings, they are embodying the Federalist Papers. They may not, you know, have the scholarship necessarily, but people understand what parts of the Constitution they want to fight for. We had Rob Bonta, California attorney General, essentially saying the same thing, like the crowds will fight for constitutional ideas that they value. And this is not unthinkable that they are doing that and organizing around that. Your conclusion really is it's not that we disagree on facts, but that we disagree on scripts. And I'm not sure this is not a media criticism piece. And I don't think you're trying to solve for that. But I did find myself wondering from the get go whether part of this project was to sort of name the three different scripts, the three different lenses, or to point out in a much more meta way that we live in such closed epistemic systems that. But we are living in three separate realities. And put aside the prescription, David, that we're gonna have to talk through those. I wonder how sanguine you are about the possibility that we can claw our way back not from the constitutional or democratic crisis you're describing, but from the epistemic crisis that embodies the whole piece.

[C]

I'll just say that although the Internet changed everything is such a cliche now, that people feel that to show that they have interesting thoughts, they need to talk it down and get away from it rather than run to it. It is true, actually. And the thing we need to understand, but in a sense won't entirely understand until we live through it, is in what respects that's true and what constraints and affordances it imposes on us. Which is all to say, Dalia, that I do have this worry. I think it is not at all evident that we can get ourselves out of our epistemic fragmentation. And I think it's not at all clear that when a political community basically learns how to imagine itself, how to see itself through a series of fragmented for profit platforms, platforms whose motive structurally, is not to get you civically useful, actionable information, but to hold your attention and to trigger the kinds of emotional responses that hold your attention, that it can expect to generate the kind of overlapping commonality that in a lot of the 20th century was assumed to be a given feature of modern democratic life and in fact, may have just been a side effect of a certain set of technological affordances. One way of thinking about it that's slightly more hopeful is we're not going to have any form of democratic accountability, like it or not, that doesn't run through ongoing, activated substantially online kind of feedback that's just happening now. I'm not temperamentally, especially at home with it. I used to be on the Internet a lot. Now I'm not at all because it was driving me crazy, but that's what it looks like. So I don't think that situation per se precludes the possibility of some sort of merger between people who think that basic forms of political liberty and orderliness and the rule of law are important, and people who think that egalitarianism, affordability, responsiveness to the crises of ordinary life, this sort of anti oligarchy version of politics is what needs to be front and center. I don't think it's true in principle that a fragmented media ecosystem can't be a vehicle for people to converge around a majority program that's both anti oligarchic and constitutional liberty protecting. And actually under any last thing I'll say I think under any media regime there would be an opportunity in principle right now for political entrepreneurs to take advantage of the gap between our fiercely polarized political elite and the persistence of a reasonable convergence around a bunch of questions by majorities, or at least very healthy pluralities of the public who are kind of economically populist, kind of culturally moderate, and don't like facial abuses of basic features of due process. The formal political structure is now constituted through the primary system. Makes it hard for that kind of entrepreneurship to break through. But someone who figures out how to do it will have a great opportunity for a restorative politics. That's the most hopeful thought I have on all of that right now, as.

[A]

Is sometimes the case. Jed, you just took me on an emotional rollercoaster that is so complicated, but I think I understand what you're saying, which is it could be really bad and get worse, or it could be really good, but that the way we talk to each other is not preclusive of talking to each other in ways that break through these silos. David, did you want to add anything in terms of the possible epistemic one way ratchet here?

[B]

It's true the piece doesn't really address media structure, and that's a big ingredient and a very hard one to solve. The piece is also a kind of map of epistemic polarization that we say has gone beyond, at this point, disagreeing on policies or parties or candidates, but goes to the level of our basic understanding of the kind of country we're living in. If there's anything hopeful, I'll just echo Jed's point that there is widespread appreciation, I think, that things are not going well, that one set of grievances propelled Trump into office, and liberals and centrists and those on the left now, of course are converging on a set of grievances about where we are under Trump. And if there's anything hopeful, I think it's that that creates possibilities for, as Jed puts it, political entrepreneurship and maybe also new forms of political organizing.

[A]

I want to land at the following place, if I may, and I'd love to hear from the both of you. I started this show describing this need we have to anchor ourselves in analysis and, you know, use critical thinking skills and name the thing and make meaning of the thing. It's why I love this piece so much. But there is the slightly silly feeling of, you know, chin stroking while masked secret police are disappearing people from the streets. You know, to paraphrase the president himself at his meeting with Mamdani, maybe just call it fascism if it's easier. And that also is glitch. That is me ending where I started. But I think what I am asking is, having done this work of sorting and naming and analyzing, what did you learn and how does it inform how you're going to go forward? What did you learn from this project? We can start with you, Jed.

[C]

I think there was a point in the project where I had a little bit of a naive, fact checking kind of idea. Set them up, evaluate them, knock down the ones that don't stand the fact checking test. I think I came to a fuller appreciation in the process of writing of the depth and incorrigibility of the differences and that we really were talking about both views of history and views about constitutional legitimacy that are hard to get onto the same page. But I also, I came to, by the same process, a kind of fuller appreciation that these positions all have versions that are in the space of reasons. And so they're not going away. And whatever politics we have is going to have to involve some kind of, of an ongoing mediation or way of living together with them. Which doesn't mean we all agree. It doesn't mean we all sing the same tune, all of those kind of the cliched Kumbaya kind of metaphors. But it does mean that thinking like this is part of appreciating, that politics really is about living within a space of ongoing, deep, deep disagreement. And that's not just a cognitive mistake. And it's not just people getting tricked. And even if it always has elements of that on every side, and even if none of this means that moral equivalency or neutralism is kind of the right position, it does mean that you don't know what you're living through if you don't understand how what you're living through is actually in part made and powered by disagreement, because disagreement is rooted just in our being different people who are trying to find a way to live together.

[A]

David, do you have a closing glass?

[B]

I'll say maybe. Two things I felt I learned in doing the piece. One, I think for my own sanity, it was important to try to charitably reconstruct the Trump advisor's own account of what they're up to. And when one does that, and we read more deeply than we might have otherwise into that body of writing and speaking, it's not a crazy account. And there is a deep point there about how constitutional change works in this country and about how the New Deal settlement, if you will, the constitutional order that we've been living with for a while now is not the same thing as the American constitutional or constitutionalism writ large. And so there's always space for the next generation of citizens and their elected officials to push in a new direction. So. So I guess I felt I learned something about the internal point of view of the Trump project, even if I'm fundamentally on the outside and in opposition and then on where I am. I think Jed and I both, I don't want to speak for you, Jed, but are somewhere in between camps one and two, seeing this as being authoritarian crisis, but also more of the same. And there, I think over the course of writing the piece, we saw real dynamism and hybridity between the two positions where, as Jed already said, liberal anti authoritarians recognize that there are deeper structural problems in American democracy that if we don't solve, aren't going to dispel Trumpism, except fleetingly. And I think more of the same progressives realize that there's something really important about basic liberal rule of law commitments. And so I guess I think that's where the action will be in the coming months and years. The possibility for the first and second groups to find ways to form coalitions. Jed and I are both at universities, and as Trump attacked universities, including Columbia, one response immediately from some of my colleagues was the lesson here is universities need to cut themselves off from federal funding. We're too vulnerable to a crackdown from an authoritarian like Trump. And so the right response is to become fully independent. My own view is that that would be a kind of disaster. Government funding for basic research, I think is a crucial pillar of a well functioning system of higher education. And so I think the challenge is not to retreat into a liberalism of fear or libertarianism where we just ask less of the government and then I think are going to continue to have deep, deep popular discontent, but instead to find a way to have effective government that delivers what people want, reduces inequality, and has new guardrails against authoritarianism because the ones we had turn out to be insufficient. So I think that's a kind of generational project that the piece just names. Obviously doesn't make much headway on that. Over the course of writing, the piece became clear to me that the framing of the challenge, if not the road to get there.

[A]

Jed Britton Purdy is a law professor at Duke University and author, most recently of Two Cheers for Politics, why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening, and Our Best Hope. David Posen is a law professor at Columbia University and author, most recently of the Constitution of the War on Drugs. Their piece in the Boston Review is called what Are We Living Through? And if you have a little time and the turkey isn't making you too, too, too dysfunctional, I strongly, strongly commend it to you as one of those big control alt deletes that we like to do on this show. To help think through where we go next, I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us this week and to wish you and your families a really happy holiday weekend. Thank you.

[B]

Thank you, Dalia.

[C]

Thank you, Dalia. Happy Thanksgiving. Foreign.

[A]

That's all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening and thank you so much for your letters and questions. Keep them coming. We are reachable by [e-mail] you can find [e-mail] Amicus Podcast. You can also leave a comment if you're listening on Spotify or on YouTube or rate us and review us on on Apple Podcasts. On today's Amicus plus bonus episode, the court that Leonard Built, the Roberts Majority and the Federalist Society's apparent fall from favor with Donald Trump Judicial Dark Money forensic analyst Lisa Graves makes her debut in the Amicus plus VIP room. You do not want to miss her explanation of what the what is going on in the conservative leadership legal movement right now and how it is smooshing all over American democracy. You can subscribe to Slate plus directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or visit slate.comamicusplus to get access wherever you listen. That episode is available for you to listen to right now. We'll see you there. Sara Burningham is Amicus's senior producer. Our producer is Patrick Hilary Fry is Slate's editor in chief, Susan Matthews is executive editor, Mia Lobel is executive producer of Slate Podcasts and Ben Richmond is our senior director of operations. We'll be back with another episode of Amicus next week. Until then, take good care.

[B]

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