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- [00:00]
Susan C. Stokes
Hello everybody.
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Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Rachel Beatty Riedel
Welcome to Democratic Dialogues, a podcast from Cornell University's Brooks School of Public Policy center on Global Democracy. This show is about bringing cutting edge research on democracy to you, our listeners, policymakers, practitioners, journalists, students, some scholars and citizens who care about the future of democratic government. Each episode we'll dig into new books and research and ask what they mean for the challenges democracies currently face and the potential and opportunity for democracy to deepen, evolve and contribute to citizens thriving. I'm Rachel Beatty Riedel, one of your hosts, and I'm joined by my co host, Issam Bore. Hi, Issam.
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Issam Bore
Hi, Rachel. For today's episode, we are joined by Susan C. Stocks, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Also, she's the director of the Chicago center on Democracy. She's the author of numerous agenda setting books and articles, including that newly released Princeton University bris book, Black why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies. In this important, important book, sue explores why democratically elected leaders sometimes deliberately weaken the very democratic institutions that brought them to power. She examines the incentives, fears and calculations that drive leaders to undermine their own democracies and the ways citizens and institutions can resist. Today, we'll ask what motivates backsliding leaders? What patterns connect cases around the world from Latin America to Eastern Europe to here, United States. And what lessons should Democratic actors everywhere draw from her work?
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So let's dive in. Welcome to the podcast, Sue.
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Susan C. Stokes
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
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Rachel Beatty Riedel
So, Sue, I wanted to jump in with our first question and I'm so grateful to you for writing this book, the Backsliders. And in it, I think one of your main arguments arguments is around the way in which democratic erosion often begins with leaders themselves who undermine the system. So could you walk our listeners through why leaders, even ones that are popular and have electoral mandates, why they choose to weaken the very institutions, electorally and otherwise, that brought them to power?
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Susan C. Stokes
Yeah. Thank you so much, Rachel. I really appreciate that. So I think that question can be kind of divided between why do leaders have an opportunity to sort of aggrandize executives of power and then why do they have an inclination to do it? And I think both things have to come together for us to have instances of democratic backsliding. So if you'll indulge me, I'll just say a few things about sort of the background of the sort of structural conditions that allow for presidents and prime ministers to aggrandize executive power. And I'm going to focus initially on sort of countries more in the global north, older democracies. So thinking about countries like the United States are a number of structural changes and some of them go back to the post war decades of the 20th century. Some of them are more recent and some are sort of political, some are more economic and they encourage the rise of what I'm calling right wing ethno nationalist parties or factions of parties. And so these are parties that either sort of grow out of the more traditional legacy conservative parties or are factions of those parties that might take them over. So what are these kind of structural factors? Well, they include include if you sort of think back or think your history back to sort of the post war years and even earlier in most advanced today's advanced democracies, there were two major sort of types of political parties. They were center left parties, Social Democrats, Democrats in the United States, Labour Party in the UK those kinds of political parties. And and then there were conservative parties. The social democratic type parties tended to, you know, mobilize and organize themselves around a working class constituency. And the conservative parties appealed more to more affluent voters and to business communities.
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There were changes that took place in many of these countries in the latter decades of the 20th century that kind of gave incentives for the left of center parties to not abandon working class constituents, but to sort of stretch their appeal to more highly educated, affluent city dwellers.
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And that had a kind of longer term effect of blurring a bit their identity or their brand, if you will, as parties of the working class.
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That was one set of political changes. And then in the sort of toward the end of the 20th century we had the rise of economic globalization. So countries reducing tariff barriers.
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Encouraged the international flow of capital and investment.
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Not so much people, but globalization nonetheless. Globalization had a very stark effect of increasing income inequality in many countries around the world and certainly in the advanced democracies. Those two changes, if you think about the shift in the party system and then the rise of income inequality, and I should mention that globalization was a political decisions, set of political decisions that tended to be supported by left of center political parties. All of those things came together to leave segments of the electorate, the more economically needy and the, and working class segments of the, of the electorate somewhat orphaned or kind of at sea in terms of their political representation and in terms of their sense of belonging and sharing in the prosperity that many other kinds of groups were participating. So that's all a backdrop to the rise of right wing ethno nationalist parties who are responding to the incentive that's opened up where they're able to occupy a position that is a little bit sort of in between legacy conservative parties and social democratic parties in terms of support for welfare states and is much more economically nationalist. So in favor of higher tariffs and more controls on capital flows. And also that really emphasizes a kind of either ethnic or racial or religious other. And also the other being often migrants to sort of blame the loss of opportunities that the working classes were suffering to blame those groups. And so that was the sort of classic position of the right wing ethno nationalist parties. And those parties were more at risk, not all. They didn't always, they didn't always gain access to power and they didn't even when they did, they didn't always undermine the democracies. But when democracy was undermined in countries, in countries in the global north, it tended to be at the hands of right wing ethno nationalist leaders. Now so that's all about opportunity. And then I mentioned there's also has to be inclination. So part of the story really does have to do with the sort of political profile and instincts and preferences, values of the leaders. So if you think about the United States, the structural conditions that I have been, that I was talking about certainly held already in the Obama years. But Barack Obama is a leader who, you know, venerates the democratic traditions of the United States and the history of the US Donald Trump is a leader who doesn't see the value of those institutions and in fact, is quite skeptical of institutions. So it was that kind of combination of in the United States, and you see this in various ways in other countries as well, of opportunities and inclinations of the leader. Sorry, that was a little long.
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Issam Bore
That was wonderful. Thank you so much, Sue. So I think my question now is, I understand your book draws on the cases from Latin America, Eastern Europe and beyond. So what common patterns do you see across these diverse examples of backsliding, and what does that tell us about the global nature of democratic decline today?
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Susan C. Stokes
Yeah, well, the answer that I just gave was really focusing on what's happened in the United States and to some degree in other parts of Europe, but in the global south, it's been a mixed story, but but not infrequently, democratic backsliding or democratic erosion has been undertaken by not right wing ethnonationalists, but left populist leaders. And so that in ideological terms, there's quite a different flavor to their orientation. But one thing that is in common among countries that have experienced democratic backsliding is that they tend to have higher levels of income inequality. So Latin America and sub Saharan Africa are very unequal, are areas of the world in which countries tend to have very unequal distributions of income and wealth.
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To some degree, that situation improved in Latin America, actually income inequality. In the early years, during the sort of commodities boom, China commodities boom of the early 21st century, there was some improvement in income inequality, but still the levels of inequality are quite high. And that's true in sub Saharan Africa as well. So that's in common. And the other thing that's in common is the kind of strategies and actions of leaders, be they prime ministers or presidents, who want to undermine their democracy. So they undertake what we refer to as a playbook. They use a playbook which is sort of depressingly standard across cases, even though the governments may be very different in various ways. So they typically.
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Go after the, the independent press, both rhetorically and in terms of censorship and denying resources and encouraging the purchase of independent media organizations by friendly economic groups and so forth. They go after the courts, especially when the courts get in the way of efforts to, to aggrandize executive power. So judges become, you know, are depicted as being entirely corrupt and the institutions are hollow. They go after opposition political parties, sometimes legislatures. They go after civil society organizations. So there's a common set of targets and a common set of strategies that are deployed against these targets, sometimes with more intensity and more brutality, if I might use that word, and sometimes a bit more in more moderate ways, depending on the country and what is deemed what they can get away with. But nevertheless, the set of strategies are very much the same. And in terms of the second part of your question, what does this mean for sort of the future of democracy in general?
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We gotta be honest, it's a scary moment in the world. It's often the moment right now, the sort of early 21st century is often compared to the 1930s when a series of of democratic systems fell and fascism arose as well as communism and we ended up with.
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Global conflict and long lasting autocratic regimes or totalitarian regimes. So it's definitely a moment to be concerned about autocratizing or the sort of fraying of democracy in all kinds of different countries around the world World the.
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Marshall Po
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- [15:22]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
So Sue, I think that's such an important and starkly put reminder and a real lucid assessment of what's happening around the world and the kind of scary moment that we're living in as well as the structural underpinnings of where we are and why that's the case. And so one of the many things I really appreciated about this book is the way in which you note that despite these structural conditions and the potential for different leaders to have that kind of inclination to undergo backsliding. You suggest that backsliding is not inevitable, that citizens and opposition actors sometimes succeed in pushing back institutional arenas, are sometimes successful in serving as a check. So can you tell us a little bit more about what kinds of resistance strategies you found to be most effective in slowing down or even reversing democratic erosion?
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Susan C. Stokes
Yeah, well, this is such a this is the key question that I think we really need. You know, I certainly tried to answer some of those questions in my book. And we need more work on this. We also need more data just to put on my nerdy social science cap. You know, we don't really have many it's sort of early in this, in this drama, I think, in many instances. And so we don't have a lot of information to go on. But we have, you know, we have area experts and country experts who are producing really interesting sort of case studies and observations about what seems to work to slow things down. So I guess I would make a distinction between or divide my answer between sort of what elite political actors or institutions can do and seem to be effective, and then what the rest of us, the sort of common citizens can do. And so starting with the more elite actors. And elite is the wrong word. I mean, sort of more organized, sometimes politicians and sometimes leaders of other kinds of institutions. One thing that seems to be helpful is a kind of slowing things down through bureaucratic slowness and kind of slow mowing kind of responses.
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And legislatures, sometimes oppositions and legislatures have been adept at using parliamentary procedures to slow things down. So on the latter, there's a wonderful book by Laura Gamboa at the University of Notre Dame which talks about she has a terrific description of how the the Colombian opposition, the legislature, was able to just use their intricate knowledge of parliamentary procedures to slow mo the efforts of President Uribe in the early years of the 21st century when he was trying to aggrandize executive powers and make some changes in institutions. And the effect of just slowing things down was to kind of give civil society organizations and courts a chance to kind of catch up, catch their breath, understand what was happening and counter mobilize against them. So that's one thing. I was at an event here at Northern Arizona University last night where the secretary of state of Arizona was talking about how they just answer. They get missives from the federal government asking them for information or for changes. And sometimes they just say, yeah, we'll get back to you in a couple weeks. And that again, that's just kind of slowing things down. And a kind of, you know, almost a kind of subterranean sort of not resistance exactly, because often they can't absolutely resist, but just not a kind of snapping to order and certainly not anticipating and complying in an anticipatory way to demands that are, you know, questionably legal or constitutional. Coming from. Coming from backsliding leaders.
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I think we've seen in the United States that in the last several months in particular, but earlier as well, that legal challenges are really important.
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Shakespeare's line was, first kill all the lawyers. I think that we should be saying, first run to all the lawyers for help.
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All kinds of executive orders have been challenged in court, all kinds of actions vis a vis universities and law firms and various aspects of the immigration policies that have been challenged in terms of due process rules. Sometimes those are successful, sometimes they're not. But that has been, I think, a strategy that we really are relying on very heavily. Those are some of the kinds of things also with reference to institutions, professional associations, I think, can play a role in rewarding their members when they act in professionally ethical ways when called upon to help enable the process of democratic erosion. And they can also sanction their members when they have aided in the process or have been enablers in the process of democratic erosion. Again, to use a U.S. example.
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When, when Donald Trump falsely claimed in early 2021 to have been to have lost the election through electoral fraud.
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There were some very prominent lawyers who were encouraging those kinds of claims and making arguments about.
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Why those claims and why the transition to power might not take place in the sort of normal order of things. And those, those attorneys were sometimes sanctioned by.
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Their bar associations. And those kinds of actions, I think, are important for creating counter incentives for future professionals who might be tempted to enable democratic backsliding. So then turning to the common citizens like folks like us.
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I actually end up in my book saying that one of the key differences between cases of democratic backsliding and sort of near miss cases is the resistance of the public to.
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Backsliding. So we know that there are certainly there are citizens of voters who have a taste for authoritarian government. I think that's a small minority. There are a lot of voters in many countries who, when faced with a choice between, you know, or faced with a choice of a government that they think may not be very protective of democracy, but they, they hope can achieve other ends like security or economic improvement. They will choose to support those kinds of governments. But, and, and then there are many voters and citizens who really take seriously and are, are very uncomfortable with, with the erosion of their democracies.
- [22:48]
And so under some circumstances there just are plain old electoral majorities who say we don't want this government in power. So voters voted out of office the PIs party government in Poland a couple years ago. Donald Trump, of course, lost in 2020. And there were all kinds of, kinds of complex reasons for that and complex reasons why he was voted back into office in 2024. Jair Bolsonaro lost elections in Brazil in 2023. So sometimes electorates sort of put the brake on things. In the uk, I argue in my book, under the administration, the government of Boris Johnson, that was an instance of a kind of a near miss where democratic backsliding was a possibility. Johnson prorogued or closed down the parliament in a way that was later deemed by the court to have been unlawful. And he challenged the free press in some ways and tried to stem protests. So there were kind of lurches toward democratic backsliding. But Johnson didn't retain strong support among the electorate. And even among the conservative voters in the electorate.
- [24:10]
He ended up losing a lot of support. And so because voters turned against him, his party turned against him, and for simple electoral reasons, he was going to lead them into electoral defeats. And he already was leading them into electoral defeats and by elections. And the party said enough, you know, you're out. So that's, that's a party acting, but it's acting because the electorate is saying this isn't the leader we want in office. So voters are not a guarantee. And there are all kinds of strategies which I talk about a good deal in the book and provide a lot of evidence about for how backsliding leaders can retain supportive voters even when they're attacking their democracies. But they are sometimes challenged just simply by voters. And we common citizens can do other things as well. I think social movements are, protest movements are incredibly important in shifting a narrative that away from this is inevitable whether you like it or not, or everybody approves of what I'm doing. And the sort of contesting of that narrative by people taking the trouble to take out time on the weekend and go out and hopefully very peacefully express their disapproval of what's happening to our democracy.
- [25:29]
Issam Bore
That's very insightful. So, so one of the most interesting challenges of our current moment of democratic decline that your book takes up is whether the pro democracy opposition should be concerned about following democratic norms and practices when it constrained them in the fight against the backslide leaders. Right. So can you dig into this more for our listeners? Just those who are fighting for democracy always hold themselves to the highest bar of democratic practices because, you know, it increases trust legitimacy of the process itself. Or should they push for victories when and how they can because they have to defeat the autocratic threat in order to protect democratic practices?
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Susan C. Stokes
Yeah, it's such a good question and it's so urgent. Thank you for that question. I think my so I'm going to make a distinction between what sometimes is called hardball tactics and non hardball. I don't want to call it softball because softball is a different game altogether. But you know, hardball tactics are usually thought of or sort of defined as ones that either skirt.
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The edge of illegal or unconstitutional or actually even go over that edge and backsliding. Leaders engage in hardball tactics all the time. That's their modus operandi. And then the question is how does the opposition respond? If the opposition responds in kind.
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There can be benefits to that, but there also are obviously some costs to it. And so I'll give you some examples. But I'll just say that my sort of bottom line on this is I don't think there's a a single right answer to the question of whether hardball should be used or not used by pro democracy forces. I think there really are trade offs involved and it's important to consider to weigh those costs and benefits against each other in each case.
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So you know, you can think about, there are lots of examples that come to mind. So we have the situation in the United States where the Trump administration or Donald Trump has been asking red states to.
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Engage in redistricting of sort of mid decade redistricting effort quite explicitly in order to carve out more safe Republican seats in anticipation of the midterm elections next year. And so.
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A non hardball response would be to say, you know, we gerrymandering redistricting, especially, excuse me, especially in an off year or a mid decade, not after a census, is, you know, breaking a very strong norm. And one shouldn't engage in that. It's undemocratic. And it is on the other hand to not I think that the cliche is that we've been using in this case is meeting fire with fire. To not do so in this case would be to leave the pro democracy forces at a very serious disadvantage.
- [29:01]
And to deny the electorate that wants to express, that might come to polls wanting to express its unhappiness with government performance, with the federal government's performance unable to do so or limited in its ability to do so. That's a case where I think many people came around to the idea that, that the blue state should be doing the same thing, at least in response as a sort of tit for tat response to what the red states are doing. On the other hand, there are situations where people are much less comfortable.
- [29:41]
With that kind of approach. And I'll give you an example from another country, but one with very strong parallels to things that are happening in the United States as well. So Poland, during the government of the PIs, they created a, or there was in place a media regulatory body very much like, excuse me, very much like the FCC in the United States. And it was very, very strongly politicized by the PIs government. So that according to international media groups, it really had, it turned the public media, which was the major media in pol, into a kind of propaganda mouthpiece for the government. Then the PIs lost the elections and the opposition under a coalition of parties under the leadership of Donald Tusk came into office and they were faced with a problem. What do you do about media that is a public media that people are exposed to, that is trying to subvert the ability of the government to actually.
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Make clear what it's trying to do in terms of policy changes and, and sort of improving democratic performance in Poland. And that government actually decided to act in a pretty heavy handed way to, to shift that, that regulatory body much more strongly in favor of the government. And then there was a sense of, well, they went too far and they're actually doing the same kinds of things that the, that the peace democratic backsliding government had done. And so the, the, the back, the, the real cost of, of that kind of move is that the backsliding leaders try very hard to make the public skeptical and cynical about democratic institutions. They try very hard to convince us that there is no such thing as fair and independent bodies, that it's all politics down to the ground.
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And that the opposition comes in, they're just going to do the exact same things in reverse. And so, so this sort of heavy handed response on this media regulatory body fed into that kind of narrative. So it's a tricky one. I'll just throw one more example out there that people probably are somewhat familiar with, which is the recent prosecution and conviction of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who was a backsliding leader who was in office until, until 2023 and he was prosecuted pretty aggressively by the High court in Brazil and was found guilty of.
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Trying to instigate a military coup to keep himself in power after losing elections, actually was found guilty of being part of a plot to poison his opponent in those elections and, and now has been convicted with a really long prison term. So he's unlikely to ever run for office again in Brazil. Now, the opposition claimed, and actually some international friends of Bolsonaro, including our president, claimed, that this was a kind of weaponization of criminal justice against a former president. But in fact, I think that this really in a sense wasn't an instance of hardball because it was really following the law. And it. If redemocratization doesn't mean the return to the rule of law, then what does it mean? I'll say one more thing. I know this is a long answer, but I will also say that even so, sometimes it's difficult to pursue the rule of law in these ways. So in Germany, for historical reasons, there's a concept of militant democracy which says, a legal construct as well, which says if you are a political party that supports certain kinds of hate and that seems to be in danger, if you come to power of undermining democracy itself, then you can be ruled in a legal institution, in a legal party. And that's a, you know, a much more aggressive kind of legal kind of status than we have in the US and it goes back to the Second World War and Hitler and the Holocaust and so forth. But.
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The far right ethno nationalist party In Germany, the AfD, was in danger of being proscribed for those kinds of reasons. But it's also either the first or the second most popular party in the country. And so it's very difficult to tell a population to even explain that. Look, there are good legal reasons, there are good rule based reasons for deeming this party beyond the pale when it's so tremendously popular. And the last time I checked on this, I think that the German government was on the side of what we need to do is persuade voters that this is not a good political party to pursue their interests and the interests of the country rather than closing them down. So all kinds of dilemmas.
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Rachel Beatty Riedel
So it's such an important set of examples and a set of procedures. And it's interesting because it also helps us pinpoint where decisions are made and through what mechanisms. Right. Because as you were suggesting, the control over the bureaucracy in Poland allowed for a shift in electoral turnover to try to reform the bureaucracy in Brazil, the courts were at least sufficiently able to undertake. They were not so captured by the prior backsliding that they were able to be used as a tool even after electoral turnover. So that, you know, this different timing of how quickly these institutional arenas can be captured.
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And who makes the set of decisions about referring to that step, as you know, Germany, these political parties are for right now trying to make the decision not to take that step, but rather to court the electorate to have representative options. So I think it's such an important question. It's so interesting, I think.
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Your perspective to not draw too stark a line to say hardball tactics as responses to try to pursue, defend, maintain democracy are always off the table. I think that's really so important for us to keep in mind about how best to consider the options. So given kind of this global analysis and the book itself and your comments here all suggest that we have so much to learn from this research for how we are thinking about the United States today. So as we narrow into thinking about the U.S. what kind of practical advice can you give to civic leaders, policymakers, social organizations, citizens in general, those kind of, you know, that, that second tier that you were talking about who are worried about the state of democracy in the US and we're headed into 20, 26 midterms, as you mentioned. What, what would you suggest?
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Susan C. Stokes
I think they're right to be worried. I think we should be worried. I don't think it's a mistake. I don't think that's excessive alarmism. On the other hand, I think it's important not to give in to a sense of the inevitability that we're going to lose our democracy. Or even a common question that people, I think are asking each other and I certainly get asked is, will future elections even happen? Will the results of future elections be respected?
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Will there be massive kind of disenfranchisement, effective disenfranchisement of people in the upcoming midterm elections? Will the 22nd Amendment go out the window and will there be an attempt at a third Trump administration? All those kinds of questions are reasonable questions to ask. I think that the right way to proceed is to proceed on the assumption that we are going to have a regular electoral schedule and that for the most part, people are going to be able to vote and their votes are going to be consequential. It's not to say that there won't be some mischief and some efforts to keep people from voting and some, you know, maybe after the fact, claims of Fraud and so on and so forth. But, but in a funny way, I think that the whole experience of 2020 and the aftermath of the 2020 elections has obviously caused some real damage at the state level and county and local levels in terms of voting administration. But it also has trained a lot of people to sort of understand what they might be up against. Again I mentioned that I'm here in Arizona visiting and learned about desktop sort of simulations that they've undertaken to kind of deal with every kind of circumst that can come up. And they, they actually had a really pretty good experience in 2024. You know, there was some skepticism on the Democratic side. There were some few people who said well, you know, did, did Harris really lose in Arizona? Was there not some mischief in the elections? And, and, and that's, you know, something that election. The people who were responsible for organizing and overseeing elections were able to counter with, you know, know, facts. And, and so their sense is that the confidence in election administration has actually increased. I think that one of the tactics of would be autocrats is to undermine our optimism about elections. So if you can make people think that they might be able to not be able to vote by mail, they might not have their votes counted, they might encounter some, you know, kind of violence at the polls and so forth that they, that demobilizes them and makes it harder for them to get to the polls. And so I, I think the, the right attitude is we have, you know, very long tradition of, of elections that mostly go really well and we have election officials who know what can go wrong and are pretty ready for it. And, and so we're just going to proceed. And, and you know, and there are great lawyers, there are gazillion really great ready to go to court to protect our right to vote before and after the fact. So that's something that I think it's sort of, it's kind of a trust but verify kind of position or sort of, you know, be alarmed but don't be demobilized kind of advice. I also think it's important to keep in mind that autocratic or autocratizing government, governments don't get everything right. In fact, there are sort of structural reasons why they tend to screw up, which I talk about in my book. So you know, Rachel, as well that authoritarian governments often have problematic decision making procedures because the leadership can be insulated. Very personalist governments run the risk of having one guy who sort of decides what's going to happen and is surrounded by yes men and yes women and not doesn't expose himself or herself to counselors who say, hey, that's not a very good idea, you shouldn't do that, that's going to backfire or that's illegal, don't do it. And so I think we see signs of that in the United States today. I think we see, I mean, my favorite example is, is it's a, it's a minor example in a sense, but why didn't somebody not persuade our President not to go back to his threat of turning Canada in the 51st state on election day in Canada? You know.
- [42:06]
Carney, the, the successful candidate must have been so grateful to Trump for reminding Canadians that they, that they wanted to vote first. The sort of more nationalistic or, you know, real nationalist, real patriot, I guess, Canadian candidate. You know, that's just a small symptom of someone who's not getting enough, you know, not getting enough good, strong. I think the real loyalists are the ones who are willing to say that's not a good idea. Why don't you try this instead? And so what you see is a lot of mistakes and some of them are minor mistakes and some of them are pretty major mistakes.
- [42:44]
And that's not just the United States. I mean, that was true. I mentioned Jair Bolsonaro. You know, our Brazilian colleagues can write long articles about all the really silly things they did and all the self defeating things they did because they were such a low quality, high loyalty, low quality kind of set of cabinet members and advisors and lawyers and so on. Now that said, it's also the case that if you compare Trump 1 and Trump 2, there were many more, in my sense, loyal counselors in Trump 1. I think we used to talk about them as grownups in the room who would come in and say, don't do that, that's not a good idea. On the other hand, there was, as we all know, there was a group of policy experts, highly conservative policy experts and, and intellectuals who came together around the Project 2025 and made a roadmap to achieve ends that they had been pursuing for a very long time, consistent with a theory of the unitary executive and.
- [43:55]
A need in their view to sort of win back power for the presidency over the courts and over Congress and to engage in all kinds of.
- [44:07]
Policy changes.
- [44:11]
And actions, many of which I think are legally questionable and have been found by the courts to be illegal or unconstitutional in some cases. And so that gave a real momentum and a kind of seriousness of purpose in a way to, to the second Trump administration. And I think that's where we are coming away with this sense of just a fire hose of stuff coming at us that they were very well prepared for. And my soapbox at the moment is the pro democracy forces in the United States. And that's not just the Democratic Party. It's not even all of the Democratic Party, but it is largely institutionally the Democratic Party. It's also constitutionally loyal members of the Republican Party and independents and so on.
- [44:59]
They obviously a main focus now is the kind of slowing or stopping of the process of democratic erosion, the kinds of things I was talking about earlier. Another obvious high priority is winning elections, winning midterm elections, winning presidential elections. But I think there also has to be a kind of blueprint. I think we need a blueprint for redemocratization is the slightly stark term that I'm beginning to use in this regard. And I think there are ideas of that kind that are floating around. You know, how do we, you know, day after, how do we, you know, reinvigorate, repair and make more resilient, really critical norms and institutions that, you know, we'll need to support our democracy going forward? So I think that needs to happen. And some of the, some of the answers to those questions are going to be tough. One of the questions that I like to pose to people is how do we get back to a country where politicians lying is a career killer.
- [46:06]
If a politician is found to be telling a lie on an important matter, that can be the end of their career. That doesn't happen anymore. I'm old enough to remember when Joe Biden ran for the presidency in 1988 and was found to have plagiarized. He was in the primaries. He was found to have plagiarized part of a Neil Kinnock speech, Labor leader in the UK and that was the end of his campaign. That was it.
- [46:32]
And now.
- [46:35]
Dissimulation, dishonesty, lying is an everyday affair. And it doesn't seem to have that same kind of cost. I don't know how you get back to that, but. But it's worth thinking of that. And then there are more concrete things. How do we reformulate the informal rules, or maybe they should be formalized for appointing and confirming Supreme Justices, because the rule that we have now is basically, you only can do that if you have a president can only have a Supreme Court justice confirmed if the, if his party can or her party controls the Senate. And that's not sustainable. It actually is not sustainable over the long run as a way of composing the Supreme Court. And it's also not fair and it's not democratic. So maybe that's a little more, that's gonna be tough, but that's maybe a little more tractable than how do we get back to honesty in public office? But there are, you know, several really important questions of that kind that need to, that really need serious attention now. And, and you know, I sometimes I say this to folks and they say, well that's very optimistic. You know, is there going to be a, you know, a day, a next day, a day after when you have a pro democracy president in the, in the White House? Well.
- [47:58]
And so we should be focusing our efforts on electoral things and, and the people don't care that much about, you know, we've, we saw in 2024 presumably that people, people don't care as much about the threats to democracy as they care about inflation and things like that. And I think there's some truth to that, but I think there's a big segment of the electorate that wants to know.
- [48:19]
What is your plan for repairing our political system. It's not everyone and it's certainly not the most disengaged people in our electorate. And those people need to have good reasons to go to the polls and make good choices. But I think we need to have blueprint in place to persuade the pro democracy parts of the electorate that we have a plan for this.
- [48:40]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
So I think that's so well said and important and you know, it connects back to the start of our conversation about the structural conditions under which backsliding happens. Because that blueprint of repairing democracy, yes, must attend to the norms in the institution so that democracy can function to represent the citizens interests and therefore attend to the redistributive or thriving demands that people have that we can call pocketbook issues, or we can call economic and social issues, but that are stymied when democracy isn't working fully right, when there are these constraints to the norms and institutions. So I think in that way it just ties us back to repairing democracy, to reconstruct the structural landscape, the economic conditions that might encourage people to sometimes vote for that middle section that you suggested around how do I improve my day to day life and have security and potentially economic well being. So I think it's such an important component of the electoral strategy to have a forward looking vision of how democracy, democracy can function better.
- [49:54]
Susan C. Stokes
I agree, I agree and you put it very well. Yeah.
- [49:58]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
So thank you so much for writing this book, for sharing it with us for our listeners and for continuing to be so such a leader in this space and in such a critical time. Thank you so much, Sue.
- [50:12]
Susan C. Stokes
Well, thank you so much, Rachel. And thank you, esam. This has been a pleasure and great questions and yeah, we're all working together on this.
- [50:19]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
Absolutely. Be well.
- [50:21]
Susan C. Stokes
Thank you so much.
- [50:23]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
That's all for today's episode of Democratic Dialogues from Cornell University's Brooks School center on Global Democracy. We hope you enjoyed the conversation and continue to join us in thinking about the challenges and possibilities for democracy today. You can find our episodes on our YouTube channel, the New Books Network website, social media, or wherever you listen to your podcast. And please leave a comment for your suggestions for guests and topics because we welcome your thoughts. Thanks again to our guest today, Susan Stokes, and thanks to all of you for listening. I'm Rachel Beatty Riedel with my co host Issam Bouret, and we'll be back soon with another dialogue on democracy. Until then, stay engaged, stay informed, and stay committed to democratic dialogue.