The end of world order as we know it

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Episode Title: The end of world order as we know it
Date: March 13, 2026
Host: Sean Illing (A)
Guest: Zack Beauchamp (B), Senior Correspondent at Vox

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Main Theme

This episode investigates whether the U.S.-led world order, established after World War II, is unraveling in the wake of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. Through a nuanced philosophical and political lens, Sean Illing and guest Zack Beauchamp discuss the real-time ramifications for global democracy, alliances, and stability. They scrutinize the fragility of international norms, the cracks in American reliability, and the question of whether the world can—or should—expect a return to the old status quo.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Why Study the Crisis of Democracy and Political Ideology?

• Zack’s reporting focuses on the global crisis of democracy and the rise of right-wing ideology. He became interested after witnessing the reaction to the 2015 European refugee crisis and the seismic political shifts following Brexit and Trump’s first election.
• Beauchamp: "The world transformed between 2015 and 2016, the contours of what was politically possible were broken wide open... we had to reevaluate our picture of the world." (03:09)

Trump and the End of U.S.-Led World Order

• The first Trump term was considered possibly survivable within the alliance system, but a second term signals to allies that this era of American leadership may truly be over.
• Beauchamp: "A second Trump term... would indicate that this is what America was... a faction that was hostile to the global order and hostile to the foundations of the US-led alliance system." (07:07)
• European and Japanese politicians, and especially Canadian leaders, were desperate for a “return to normal” that now seems impossible. The realization is that Trump’s approach isn’t a fluke; it’s now embedded in the Republican Party. (07:07–09:58)
• The system was always full of hypocrisies and uneven enforcement, but as Beauchamp paraphrases Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney: “It wasn’t perfect, but it was, on balance, beneficial for people like him. And countries like his [Canada].” (10:30)

Notable Quote:

• Beauchamp: “Now that’s no longer the case anymore... If you listen to Carney's speech, they're no longer valuable, they're no longer meaningful, because Trump has broken the rules.” (11:41)

The Failure of "Democratic Peace" (Interdependence As Cudgel)

• Traditional democratic peace theory argued democracies don’t go to war with each other, especially if they're economically intertwined. Beauchamp notes the popular “Golden Arches” theory fails, but the core observation—no modern wars between established democracies—holds. Why that is, however, is up for debate, especially when Trumpian unpredictability enters the equation. (12:13–14:32)

Notable Quote:

• Beauchamp: “We don't really know why Trump didn't go to war in Greenland, right?...The fact that he threatened to do it is itself a momentous shift.” (18:52)

The Value of the U.S.-Led Postwar Order

• Illing presses Beauchamp to summarize the counterfactual: What if Americans don’t care if the old order dies?
• Beauchamp: "It actually is [the worst thing in the world], genuinely... All of that [global progress] was made possible by a world of relative peace... US Military leadership... played a major role in preventing the worst possible outcome for world politics, which is an unintentional escalation to war.” (27:18–30:23)

Notable Quotes:

• Beauchamp: “You know what the worst times in human history have been? The two world wars that we had. And you know what has deterred world wars from breaking out?...A really big one has been that there was this, this gigantic military alliance that spanned the Atlantic and Pacific oceans...” (27:28–30:23)

Is this Really the End or Just a Phase?

• Could the world just “wait out” Trump? Beauchamp’s view is stark: Category error. America is no longer a predictable ally; even after Trump, the damage is deep.
• Beauchamp: “If I'm just purely a rational leader of a European country... Should I be planning around America having my back? The answer to that question has been yes for decades now. It's not, it's not right. It's just not.” (22:41–23:20)

The Risks of Decadence and Complacency

• Illing wonders if this is simply “liberal decadence”—the complacency that occurs after generations of comfort.
• Beauchamp: “That was the word that I used when we were talking about this episode before—I had decadence... When I think of American history... the time most commonly being described as decadent... is the 1920s. Now, the end of that was pretty bad. The Great Depression and World War II. Not great. But what happened after each of those things?... The thing that really scares me... does it have to get that bad before people start feeling like they need to do something radical to fix things?” (31:00–32:24)

Notable Exchange:

• Illing (to clarify): “Are you for or against another Great Depression?”
• Beauchamp: “It's bad. We shouldn't have that.” (33:00)

Historical Warning and Hope for Democratic Action

• Both acknowledge people often “never do anything the easy way,” only acting after crises. But there’s hope: When threats become visible, democracies can and do mobilize.
• Beauchamp: "When it happens visibly... people get activated. They actually do care about living in a democracy. And... when these would-be authoritarians screw up... it generates this kind of response." (35:59)
• If Trumpist efforts to undermine democracy remain clumsy and obvious, that very overtness could be the movement’s undoing; covert “Orban-style” change is more dangerous.
• Beauchamp: “I've been developing this line of reasoning... the best hope of the American republic is that its enemies are not very good at their jobs.” (38:44–38:59)

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

On the world’s new uncertainty:

• “Now... policymakers in Tokyo and Seoul and Berlin and Tallinn... they have to hedge, at the very least against the possible outcome that the future of the United States is trumpism.”
  — Beauchamp (24:35)

On why the world order matters:

• “If it does go away or get weakened to the point that it’s no longer a reliable firewall against chaos or disorder or war… do you think we’ll miss it when it’s gone?”
  — Illing (19:02)
• “Yeah, I mean, look, there’s a lot of empirical evidence, quantitative social science, suggesting that strong alliance systems make war less likely...”
  — Beauchamp (19:44)

On democratic collapse:

• “So much of the failure or success of an effort to take down a democracy depends on how obvious you are that that’s what you’re doing...”
  — Beauchamp (35:59)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Sean introduces Zack and his ideological focus: [01:22–02:54]
• Why 2015–2016 changed everything: [03:09]
• Trump’s impact on world order: [07:07–09:58]
• Mark Carney’s speech and global disillusionment: [10:30–12:13]
• The fate of “democratic peace” as interdependence falters: [12:13–14:32]
• The problem of American reliability: [22:11–24:35]
• Why the world order matters for Americans too: [27:18–30:23]
• Are we witnessing liberal “decadence” and complacency?: [30:57–32:53]
• The threat—and hope—of visible authoritarianism: [35:59–38:59]

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Tone and Takeaways

The conversation is deeply reflective, alternating between sober analysis and occasional philosophical wit. Both host and guest openly worry about the underlying forces threatening the liberal order, but they also see hope in citizen mobilization and the limits of authoritarian competence. The episode ends on a cautious—but real—note of optimism: perhaps our best hope is that the enemies of democracy just aren’t very good at their jobs.

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Final Thoughts

• Illing: “I gotta tell you, I've been observing our species here for more than four decades, and we fucking never do anything the easy way.”
• Beauchamp: “The best hope of the American republic is that its enemies are not very good at their jobs.” (38:59)

This episode is a must-listen for anyone concerned about the future of global democracy, American influence, and whether the ties that have bound “the free world” can survive the populist tide.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

My guest today is my friend and and Vox colleague Zach Beam. Zach covers a lot of things. He covers ideology, particularly the political right, both here and abroad, and just sort of reports on the state of democracy around the world. And he's also one of the most reliable guests in the history of this show. He's the only person I think who I can count on to not forget to turn on his recorder and to not slap his microphone right off the mount mid sentence, disrupting the recording. Zach, how would you describe what you do?

[B]

Well, I will neither confirm nor deny that any of those things have happened during recordings that we've done, Sean. And I certainly have never forgotten to bring a water glass with me. But yeah, look, I describe my job in sort of two parts. One, I cover the crisis of democracy around the world. And I mean, that one used to be like, what are you talking about? And now everyone's like, oh yeah, I get it. And the second aspect is that I cover political ideology. So I study the right primarily, is what I'm interested in. But I've also been and for a long time had a long interest in liberal political philosophy. I think that's become more and more urgent, not less, as the sort of conditions of life for liberalism have started to decay, clearly and clearly, or more clearly and clearly, I should say more precisely over the course of time.

[A]

So that's an interesting and pretty capacious beat. How did you land at that? Why? Why, why study? Why write about the right wing and. And democracy and ideologies more generally? Is that just a long standing interest of yours or you just sort of accidentally fell into it?

[B]

I mean, yes, I would say longstanding, but it's kind of a circuitous route. I've always been interested in the global fate of democracy and sort of the pro political philosophy. I think, like a lot of people, things really started to change for me around 2015. You know, it was a confluence of things, right? It was the extremely negative reaction to the European refugee crisis, I think was one of the really early things that set me on this path because it set alarm bells ringing that people weren't willing to tolerate the kind of liberal multiculturalism that seemed dominant at that point in time, that it would create frictions in political systems. And he combined that with the Brexit vote at first, and then Trump, of course. And it was just sort of, I mean, the world transformed between 20 in 2015 and 2016, that the contours of what was politically possible were broken wide open. And I think all of us who had to work on politics or worked in politically related areas, I mean, we had to reevaluate our picture of the world.

[A]

Do you feel like you've been right more often than wrong? Like, do you feel like you've had a pretty good sense the last decade or so of where things were heading? Has it gone the way you thought it would? Or have we taken several detours that you really didn't see coming?

[B]

So this year, your predictions, and we can test those, right. I think that if you're a professional

[A]

gambler and you win 55% of the time, is that good? You're good.

[B]

That's good.

[A]

But also not even are you right? Have you been right?

[B]

I'm not 95% of the time, right.

[A]

More. More than.

[B]

More than that, I think. I think the. The thing I feel most proud of recently is a piece I wrote. This was also early last year, very early in the first Trump administration or in the second Trump administration, when I made the case that they were failing, that they were not achieving their political goals. And that was very controversial at the time. A lot of people were very mad at me. They thought I was whitewashing the scope of what the Trump administration was doing, failing to appreciate how much they changed American government. But the benchmark that I used was not, are they changing things or are they getting away with breaking laws? But rather, were they successfully implementing changes that could durably affect the political competitiveness of the American system, the opposition's ability to compete fairly and compromising the rule of law, making it difficult for there to be opposition activity in between elections, because those were the things I'd been trained to look at in other countries where democracy had started to decline. The archetypal case that everyone cites is Hungary, which was one of the first American reporters to write a long piece on how authoritarianism in Hungary works. Yeah, that one does hold up pretty well.

[A]

Yeah, well.

[B]

And so, like, looking at countries like that had helped, had given me a sense of what to look for when you want to see effective control being exercised by a leader over a democratic system. And I just didn't see the Trump administration doing that. Right. They were not doing a very good job following the playbook, especially in the wake of the massive public backlash against the shootings in Minneapolis. Many more people have come around to my view than were when I wrote the piece last year. But that, to me was a really clear example of when what I'm doing is working.

[A]

I'm not going to say it's the biggest story in international politics at the moment because there's so much happening at the moment, but certainly one of the biggest stories in international politics at the moment is the state of the U.S. led world order and whether or not it is going to continue to survive under Trump. How the hell did we get here?

[B]

Go back to the first Trump term, I think to understand some of the stuff at the time. Right. I wrote, and some other people wrote that what Trump was doing, the way that he was trying to weaponize America's trade relations and alliances to try to extract benefits from American allies, most notably at that point by like treating defense spending by NATO allies as a kind of tribute payment to the United States, like they weren't paying their fair share. It's like a misunderstanding of how NATO works. But a thing that you heard primarily behind closed doors was that one term of this is something that Europe and other American allies could manage because it would be like, well, the United States, they did a thing, it wasn't great, but it's still the United States, they're the leader of the free world. They can make mistakes sometimes and we can recover from that, it's fine. But a second Trump term, this is what people said during the first, would indicate that this is what America was at this point, that at least one of its major parties was captured by a faction that was hostile to the global order and hostile to the foundations of the US Led alliance system. And that other countries would need to recalibrate their approaches if Trump were to win again. Well, Trump won again. I mean, not immediately, but a few years later. And now what we're seeing is not, I don't want to quite say it's the inevitable outgrowth of what he'd done. If you look at the way that European politicians behave. I'm focusing on Europe. This also applies to Japan, South Korea, Canada, where I now live especially. And the Canadian case is fascinating. They're, like, desperate for things to go back to the way that they were. They really, really wanted Trump to come in and have Marco Rubio, who is a known quantity, as Secretary of State and things just be normal or as close to as normal as they could expect. You know, maybe Trump would say some weird stuff, but his actual deployment of forces and his foreign policies would be pretty consistent with the broad spectrum of different things that have happened under different US Presidents. I mean, during the first term, there was a tweet where Trump said, I promise not to do this. And it was a Greenlandic. It was a Trump Tower photoshopped on a Greenland. That was the first term. That was this one. This is not a made up thing. It's been percolating in there for a long time. And there are reasons why different parts of the right want to go along with this that are sort of deep in its own ideology, that are separate from just like wanting to backfill whatever Trump is doing. But, but really, this is. This never would have come up had Donald Trump not been President of the United States. It is not organic to the American political right. It's. It really isn't. It's just about him.

[A]

Can you say more about the. The consequences of this whole saga, for lack of a better word? Like what is the rest of the world, particularly our allies, both in Europe and everywhere else, how have they reacted to this whole thing? I mean, I know there was a particularly strong speech from the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney. Is this really a rupture? Is this really like a significant moment where things might be different after.

[B]

Absolutely. And I think that Carney's speech is indicative of where global public opinion is at. It's really fascinating. Right now I'm going to focus on this text because I think it is a stand in for what a lot of people are thinking but didn't feel like they could say. And basically his diagnosis is that we've all been talking about this liberal international order and it's always been hypocritical. Right. There's no Doubt about that. He argues the rules weren't the same for different countries, and there were discrepancies in how systems favored certain privileged nations and hurt others. So it's not that, like, this system was perfect beforehand. His argument is it wasn't perfect, but it was, on balance, beneficial for people like him. And countries like his, like Canada, they got the world was more predictable. Disputes were harder to resolve with violence. Trade remained under control. The sea lanes, right, vital for international trade, were patrolled and by the US Navy primarily, and ensure that there was like very limited piracy or interstate warfare that affected shipping.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It was just like broadly good for a lot of countries, even though it was hypocritical. So they kept pretending that, you know, those hypocrisies weren't there, overlooking them and so on. But now that's no longer the case anymore. There's no longer a point in using the slogans again, which were always a little bit overplayed, right. A little bit overstated, a lot overstated. If you listen to Carney's speech, they're no longer valuable, they're no longer meaningful because Trump has broken the rules.

[A]

Let me ask you this, right? Like, we've had this idea, you know, that the democratic peace theory, which I guess goes back to Emmanuel can't, right? And the idea was that, all right, as more countries around the world became democratic and economically interdependent, there would be less conflict, certainly between those countries. Right. Because all the incentives militated against conflict. It would just be. It made no sense for any of the countries involved because everybody would lose. Is that over? Is the illusion of that over? Because that seemed to be what Carney was saying in that speech, right? That now that interdependence is being weaponized and used as a cudgel to punish countries that don't bend the knee to the hegemon at the top.

[B]

The thing is, I mean, this is. You're really getting on my goats here. Democratic peace theories was like one of my obsessions in grad school. So it's. It's really, really, really fun to back to it now. There are lots of different varieties of dpt. We're just going to call it dpt. That's what political scientists call it. And I don't really feel like saying democratic peace theory over and over again.

[C]

And there's.

[A]

Yeah, if you know, you know, and there's.

[B]

There's different versions of it. The question is, today, have two democracies gone to war with each other in the modern era? And I think the answer is no, right? They haven't. There are variants of it that are associated that are laughable. Like Thomas Friedman had this version in the 90s called golden arches Theory, which is the two countries, the McDonald's never went to war with each other. That was like a sort of weird pop version of the interdependence makes war less likely. It's been disproven. Countries with McDonald's have gone to war with each other, but the democracy one hasn't. And so the interesting question is why, right? Is it a coincidence? Is it that Trump really was about to go to war with another democracy, that's to say Denmark, and then didn't? And why didn't he? Is it just because he personally didn't want to? Or are there any of the different mechanisms that political scientists believe might underlie democratic peace theory that actually restrained him?

[A]

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[C]

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[B]

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[B]

We don't really know why Trump didn't go to war in Greenland, right?

[A]

But but things Often start out very bizarre.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

And like the fact that he threatened to do it is itself like. Like a momentous shift. Right. It sort of undercuts the foundations of the whole project. Right. And so this post World War II U.S led world order, whatever you want to call it. Right. That has mostly benefited us. If it does erode, it's not going to fall apart overnight. Right. It doesn't work like that. But if it does go away or get weakened to the point that it's no longer a reliable firewall against chaos or disorder or war, whatever. If that does happen, do you think we'll miss it when it's gone?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, look, there's a lot of empirical evidence, quantitative social science, suggesting that strong alliance systems make war less likely. And it's pretty obvious what the mechanism is. Right. There's at least two. One is that when you have a bunch of strong countries that are working together, other countries are less likely to attack all of them. And then internally, countries that are in an alliance are not likely to want to fight each other because they're in an alliance and they reap benefits of not getting attacked by states outside of that alliance. Trump is attacking both of those things, both of those foundations. He's opening up with his approach to Russia and his endorsement of territorial aggrandizement. The idea that maybe he wouldn't really care very much if Russia or another country like that decided to go after, you know, a little bitty dado ally that he thinks hasn't been paying its fair share or whatever. Oh, you know, who cares about Estonia? Those countries actually do tend to spend more on defense. But Trump, I don't think recognizing it, recognizes it very much. And that changes because alliances are based on trust. Right. You can't know that another country is going to defend you in the event that you're going. You're attacked in the future. You don't. You really can't. You just have to have faith. And that faith that underpinned the NATO alliance has been built up Since World War II iteratively by country after country, relationship after relationship, working together, deepening presidents and prime ministers, declaring tight connections, training their militaries together. I mean, we are talking decades of order built.

[A]

Zach, is it possible that the problem really is just Trump? Right. That he's a blip and if we just wait it out a few years, things will get back to the status quo ante? Right. And all the rest of the world needs to do is just kind of wait this out and it'll be okay on the other side? Do you have any confidence in that? Do you think, do you think other leaders around the world have any faith in that? Or is the fact that this is possible at all mean that moving forward America is just not a reliable partner? And therefore you can't, you can't depend on that partnership.

[B]

That was their, their assessment the first time around, right? Like, wait and see. Hopefully things will go back to normal. America isn't like this. But now we have a Trumpified Republican Party. And the. I mean, I don't think this is by any means inevitable. But currently the anointed Arab parrot is J.D. vance, who is, as far as we can tell, ideologically very opposed to American internationalism and the current structure of our alliance with Europe.

[A]

He's been super clear about that.

[B]

And so if I'm just purely a rational leader of a European country and I'm thinking, do I count on the United States as the bedrock of my country's security in the future, can I be confident under high levels of uncertainty about the future? Future is very hard to predict. Should I be planning around America having my back? The answer to that question has been yes for decades now. It's not, it's not right. It's just not like what you're saying could be true. It could be that this is all just a blip and things go back to normal. But how do you hinge the entire future of a country on that?

[A]

Right.

[B]

If you're Germany, let alone Estonia or Latvia, like right on the border of Poland, right on the border with Russia, you can't be confident that things are going to work that way. Or if you're Japan concerned about Chinese adventurism, you can't be confident things are going to work that way. If you're South Korea and you've got the north on your boundary with nuclear weapons, and do you think the United States is going to continue extending its nuclear umbrella to Seoul in perpetuity, do you think that, that they'll be willing to defend you in the event of a nuclear attack? Given the North Korea, North Korean missiles can, at least at their theoretical maximum range, hit American cities? Do you really think that given the kinds of people who run the Republican Party, and I think any honest answer has to be, we don't know. Right? We just don't know. No. And if that's the case, then policymakers in Tokyo and Seoul and Berlin and Tallinn, they have to change. They have to hedge, at the very least against the possible outcome that the future of the United States is trumpism.

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[A]

What about from the American perspective? If you're an American and you're thinking to yourself, all right, you know the the post World War II international order was was good and fine and and served its purpose, it was certainly flawed. It's not the worst thing in the world, if it goes away, I don't need it.

[B]

It actually is. It is the worst thing.

[A]

What is your response?

[B]

It like, genuinely is the worst thing in the world.

[A]

Why is it the worst? Why is it the objectively worst thing in the world?

[B]

Zach, if you look at the history of the late 20th and early 21st century, it is an unbroken process of human improvement, right? If you any metric you want to use. Global wealth, declines in poverty, life expectancy, battle deaths, innovation, access to technologies that make our lives infinitely better. I mean, simple things that we take for granted, like washing machines, right? That saved labor, that used to consume mostly women's lives for generations around the world thousands of years, right? Simple things that transformed humanity. All of that was made possible by a world of relative peace. It means people, many, many more people. Millions, hundreds of millions people around the world living lives that they wouldn't have have been able to live otherwise. It's diseases that used to kill infants being eradicated around the world. Now you're going to say, well, all of that was the product of forces beyond just American liberal leadership, right? It was technology, technology, technological advancement. It was economic growth, it was energy innovation, it was agricultural innovation. And all of that's true. But do you know what makes it hard to do technological innovation and to implement those things at scale in societies? World wars. You know what the worst times in human history have been? The two world wars that we had. And you know what has deterred world wars from breaking out, right? A few things, right? It's not monoclosal, but a really big one has been that there was this, this gigantic military alliance that spanned the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, centering on Washington, that ensured that by far the greatest military power in human history was aligned against large and great power, aggression. And US Military power, for all of the ways in which it was deployed for evil, and I will grant every single one of those, from our more subtle horrific diplomatic stuff to mass bombings of civilians during the Vietnam War, to the flawed and disastrous enterprise of the Iraq War from the beginning, we did a lot of terrible things during this period of time. US Military leadership was not an unalloyed good. What it did do is prevent the worst possible outcome or play a major role in preventing the worst possible outcome for world politics, which is an unintentional escalation to war, especially war between nuclear armed powers and a war between the United States and China and the United States and Russia, which becomes more likely in a world where the alliance system is destabilized and China or Russia thinks that they have an opportunity to attack a place that maybe the US actually will come to their defense. Maybe there is going to be a war there. Deterrence starts to break down. The rational expectations of different powers start to change. And the best case scenario in such a world where this breaks down entirely is one in which big countries eat small countries and that means millions of people suffer.

[A]

Then why do you think so many people don't really give a shit? Why do you think there's so much indifference? Is it just human nature? People get acclimated to privilege and comfort and over time you just sort of lose contact with the. The values and the commitments that made all that comfort and privilege possible in the first place. And this is sort of just what happens. I mean, is this, Is this decadence? Is this an era of liberal decadence, which really is to say, is this sort of like the beginning of the end?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, that was.

[A]

That sounded more dramatic.

[B]

That was. That was the word that I used when we were talking about this episode before I had decadence. And I've been thinking about it a

[A]

lot since I wanted to feel, but I came up with it and then

[B]

you introduced it in the episode. Come on, come on, come on.

[A]

All right. It was your idea.

[B]

Idea thief. Yeah. But since we started talking about it, I've been thinking about it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I think it's probably right, but I don't think it's as despairing as you make it out to be. I mean, when I think of American history, the time that I think of most commonly being described as decadent prior to this One is the 1920s. Now, the end of that one was pretty bad. Right? The Great Depression and World War II. Not great, but what happened after each of those things? Well, the Great Depression gave rise to the New Deal, which transformed the American state and lifted millions of Americans out of poverty, ended the Great Depression, built our welfare state, really modernized the United States and put it in a position to be global power. World War II or the outcomes of World War II, this global system we've talked about that has enabled wide scale human progress? The thing that really scares me when I think about those analogies, it's like, does it have to get that bad before people start feeling like they need to do something radical to fix things?

[A]

I kind of think that's awful. I hate to say it.

[B]

That's the case. I kind of think it does. I mean, do we need the greatest global economic catastrophe and the greatest subsequent war, the greatest loss of life in human history in a Single war to shake us out of the way of doing things that we had previously. No one thinks those things were worth it. That it's like, if we could rerun it. Yes, I'd love to have World War II again so we can then get this great period that came afterwards. Right.

[A]

Hold on. Let me. Let me. Let me just. It wasn't clear to me. Are you for or against another Great Depression?

[B]

It's bad. It's bad. We shouldn't have that.

[A]

Okay. I just. I felt like that needed to be.

[B]

But that's what I just said a second ago, right? It's like, I hope that we don't end up getting to this pit before there's a possibility for things to get better. Because, you know, again, I mentioned nuclear weapons a second ago. Maybe the pit this time isn't one we can really come back from.

[A]

Zach, I gotta tell you, I've been observing our species here for more than four decades, and we fucking never do anything the easy way. It's always gotta be the hard way. And. And that's why I worry that it's just. I don't know what the threshold is, but it feels like things really have to break down before people snap out of their stupors collectively. And I. But I. Look, I. But what the hell do I know? It just. It seems that way. It really does. Especially when you. You. When you have, relatively speaking, historically speaking, experience, such a privileged existence, right? Like we have, all of us, everyone listening to this with 100% certainty, and maybe a few exceptions, have lived the best and most comfortable lives of any person in human history that came before, right? Like, that is what it is to be alive right now. And yet it seems like so many people are willing to just play dice with the whole fucking thing in the hope that it'll work out. Because maybe deep, deep, deep down, they believe that it will, because it always does. But eventually the record stops, right? And there's nowhere to sit. And you don't know when that's going to happen, but it will happen at some point. Now I'm sounding depressed. See what you did?

[B]

Look, all right, let me inject a note of optimism here, which is that, again, it's not necessarily the case that things have to be the way that they have in the past or even in some similar version of it. It could be the case that things get better without there being significant mass loss of life or a total, obviously

[A]

legible catastrophe with all the doom and gloom being spewed from both sides, really here it's Also true that there's a lot of good and a lot of evidence that things can improve. I mean, people on the streets saying no and standing up to aggression and state tyranny in solidarity with each other as citizens. That's fucking awesome. And that's the stuff that's like, the best stuff of democracy, and that's a reason to hope, and that's a reason to think people do give a shit. And there is a line or people, if you cross it, people will stand up and affirm what is good about the world. So I just, I just wanted to say that, right, like, it's not all bad and people are not just sitting in a, in a, In a slumber like, indifferent to, like, all the bad things and all the suffering going on in the world. There's, There's a lot of.

[B]

Like I said earlier, the project of the Trump administration is failing. And I think I've really come to believe this, and it's something I'm trying to write for us at one point, but that so much of the failure or success of an effort to take down a democracy depends on how obvious you are, that that's what you're doing. All right? At the, the really savvy operators, someone like a Viktor Orban in Hungary, what they did was very clever. It was invisible to most people. He's boring. Bureaucratic changes that don't affect their life at all until all of a sudden it takes this absolutely massive effort to try to force them out of office. But when it happens visibly, and this goes to your point directly, this is not tangent, right. It's people get activated. They actually do care about living in a democracy. And yes, they care about other things. But there's this, like, sort of pop view based on, I think, a dumb reading of polls in the 2024 U.S. election, that voters can't be activated based on democracy. It's too abstract for them to care about. Well, that is true when the threat to democracy seems abstract, but in Minneapolis, that's not abstract. That's thugs on the street who are taking your neighbors. Everyone knows that that's a threat to the sort of shared everyone who lives there. Everyone is an exaggeration, but it is very legible to people who live in Minneapolis that that's a threat to the democratic foundation of their society. That's something fundamentally against the values of the society they want to live in are happening, and it prompted them to act. And I think that's actually true more often than not. When these would be authoritarians screw up Right. When they make it clear what they're doing that it generates this kind of response. I'm very interested in exploring more how what the consequences of. Of the events in Minneapolis are for the way the Trump administration approaches its efforts to consolidate power. Because I don't think they're going to say, okay, he had a good run. Let's just concede defeat in the midterms and hope that we do okay like this. This isn't over. The question is, do they acknowledge the limits and do they adopt one of these more subtle approaches to authoritarianism, or do they continue just making it blatantly obvious what they're doing? I don't know. In a certain sense, the blatant obviousness would be good for American democracy, though the damage that they could wreak in the short term would be significant. Then people would know what's happening. Maybe they'll keep being dumb. I think there's a real possibility of that. I mean, we certainly have a year's track record of this point of them approaching this, the poor strategy, Zach, it

[A]

seems like the safest bet.

[B]

And so that's the real hopeful note. But I hope, again, I've been developing this line of reasoning for quite some time now, but I think it really is that they're bad at this. They're bad at this. And the best hope of the American republic is that its enemies are not very good at their jobs.

[A]

All right, let's stop right there before we end up saying more sad shit.

[B]

All right?

[A]

Zach Beecham, I love you, buddy. It's always great to talk to you. You are one of the best, and

[B]

really happy to be on Whiskey Fridays with Sean Elling.

[A]

Stick around. I have a few things I got to say. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey and Thor Neueter. Edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala. Theme song by Emma Munger. Big thanks to Sam Newton and Devon Howard. This show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up, and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know. And if you liked what Zach Beecham had to say, and you did, you can get a whole lot more of that on his excellent newsletter on the right.