How Did Our Democracy Get so Fragile?
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. As we lurch painfully into another election season, we can't seem to avoid the phrase democracy hangs in the balance yet again. We've been saying that since 2016. And sadly, alarmingly, it's even more the case today.

Donald Trump is ahead of Joe Biden in many polls, and he certainly isn't chastened by his efforts to overturn the last election. And he certainly isn't chastened by his legal troubles. Instead, he's called to suspend parts of the Constitution and recently called his political enemies vermin, a word out of Hitler and Mussolini. And this year's chaos in Congress, the like of which we hadn't seen in our history, certainly doesn't give you much comfort.

So how did we get here? And can we ever get from here to safer ground where we can argue about things like tax rates? That's a question that some of the New Yorker's best thinkers on politics gathered to discuss recently. Jelani Cobb, Jill Lepore, and Evan Osnos are all staff writers and collectively the authors of a huge pile of excellent books on American history and cultural life.

They came together at the New Yorker Festival for a conversation moderated by Michael Luo, the editor of NewYorker.com. Here's Michael. Jill, Jelani, Evan, thank you all for being here. Thank you, Mike. So I wanted to start in a very New Yorker note with a reading of E.B. White's famous essay, The Meaning of Democracy, which originally appeared in the notes and comments section of the July 3rd, 1943 issue of the New Yorker.

E.B. White, of course, was maybe the greatest magazine essayist of the 20th century. The occasion for the piece was a letter from the Writers' War Board, a group of authors who were meant to help shape public opinion on the Allied effort in World War II. So here it is. "We received a letter from the Writers' War Board the other day asking for a statement on the meaning of democracy.

It presumably is our duty to comply with such a request and it's certainly our pleasure. Surely the board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don't and don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles. It is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad.

It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a war board in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is. Got it.

I almost choked up there. FDR loved this essay. He read it all the time. What do you sort of take away from that essay about why we are here today, the meaning of democracy? I don't know, Jelani, put you on the spot if you want to start. You know, I think a democracy in terms of, you know, that saying about experience, you know, say experience is what you get when you come in second place.

And so democracy is what you get when you lose and still hold faith in the idea that you could win. It's the always wait till next year idea of it. Obviously, that's something that we have taken for granted for a long time and then thought maybe we really shouldn't take that for granted. Jill?

There's a part of me that wants to, well, the large part of me wants to embrace, I think, a lot of the sentimentality around the UB White's perception of democracy. I think about the free library card, bringing your kid to kindergarten at a public school for the first time and belonging to that world.

But in this moment in time, I think democracy really is only as strong as your willingness to lose. And so I guess I really kind of come to that very same place. I think our willingness to lose is quite a fragile thing right now.

I think my dominant reaction when I hear that is, oh, my God, the standards of the New Yorkers are so high. It's so hard. Our predecessors were so good. There's a line in there that really rings true to me, which is that, you know, the idea that more than half of the people can be right more than half of the time. That fraction, which is a big idea and it's sort of embedded in that is the idea of the consent of the loser. That fraction is only true today.

As long as many people are participating in democracy, are we in fact doing the work of

preventing voter suppression, of getting people into the opportunity to participate in politics? Is our system catching up with the reality of life on the ground? Can I weigh in? So there's a thing, going on that same line, about more than half of the people being right more than half of the time. It doesn't mean that more than half of the people are never wrong. And it's important to keep that in mind because we have an amazing liability in the United States

And that is our conception of ourselves as exceptional. Being exceptional is like being rich or being good looking is better for other people to say that about you than for you to say it about yourself. And so because we don't easily engage ourselves,

With the areas in which we fall short. Or when you bring up the areas in which we have fallen short, you're accused of, quote unquote, wanting to tear the country down, which is something I hear all the time. It was like, no, we're actually trying to immunize ourselves against our worst instincts. Jill, you said something about sentimentality of the piece. It's kind of out of fashion a little bit to feel that way, maybe about sentimentality.

about our democracy? Like, what were you reacting to when you were talking about that? Yeah, so I actually read that E.B. White piece when I was working on a piece for the magazine. I was kind of surprised to see how ubiquitous were panel discussions like this in the 1930s. By the time it gets to 1943 and he gets the letter from the war board, he's kind of exhausted by it,

it, right? Like it's become a trite thing. Like we have all probably been on the democracy talk circuit lately because it's all anybody, you know, we should be talking about. One of the things that really struck me comparing maybe my experience of being on in panels like this with the tenor of some of those conversations in the 30s was the

The extraordinary affection for ordinary people that was part of that 1930s vibe, the documentary populism of a Dorothea Lange, the Federal Writers Project, people going around collecting stories of ordinary people, the celebration of the everyday, the folk music, that that...

meant that when people talked about democracy, they talked about their affection for ordinary people for daily life. You know, like if we were to sit here and be like, you know,

Democracy is skateboards and FIFA on my video player. It's just things that are like regular. Democracy is my YouTube algorithm. But we don't, you know, so when people were making projects whose aim was to cultivate democracy, they were full of affection. But I also know that I am of this world and I, you know,

I'm not going to wax poetic about the ninth inning right now. I don't know, that FIFA thing got me a little teared up. I mean, Jelani, you wrote a book about the Obama presidency. It was published in 2010, and then you had to...

I guess they republished it in 2020 and you wrote a new introduction. And you wrote, Obama's emergence was tied to his ability to articulate a transcendent vision of American identity, one in which the traditional divides of partisanship and race would be of less consequence than the overarching bond of citizenship. So what was it about America that enabled us to elect a man named Obama?

Barack Hussein Obama as president United States and then eight years later elect Donald John Trump. So, I mean, I think there's not that it's not that complicated. Actually, I think it's the same thing that allowed us to revoke the 15th Amendment and the 19th Amendment and lynch people for voting.

same society where people from all geographic lines and racial backgrounds participated in the civil rights movement. I mean, if we went all the way back to the fundamental dichotomy of the people who founded this country and the way that they subsidized their mission of liberty with the lives of slaves. And so we've always been engaged in that dialectic. Hmm. Jill, do you have a perspective on that kind of dialectic?

what's a little bit odd about our contemporary moment is that, um, people seem to wish that they could choose one or the other of those accounts of, of the American past, the one that sort of maps onto their political preferences. And I think that's incredibly dangerous. So I remember at the time, um,

Trump was elected. I was like a bit more than halfway through writing this thousand page history of the United States. And then he was elected and I was going to end with Barack Obama's inauguration. That was going to be like my final chapter. I was like, this is great. People are so excited. And then Trump was elected and I had to like quickly add like 10 pages. And then when I went to talk to people and the book came out in 2018, people kept saying to me, how did you write this history of the country so fast? The whole book explains Trump.

And I was like, no, the whole book explained Obama. I just added Trump. Like the whole book explains both of them because it's the both sides of the coin. Like it's just the cleaving of of the story into two. You know, people on one side want to believe the history of the country is a history of, you know, the march of freedom and a triumph of capitalism. And on the other side, want to believe that this history of the country is a litany of atrocity and exploitation.

And both are true, but also that means neither is true. I think it really impoverishes our political conversation to deploy these really polarized histories in this way, which is why we have these doofus waste of energy history wars in the classroom right now. If I can just add something to that. I think that the interesting thing about the deployment of history in ways that are used to

to rationalize contemporary politics. And so when I was talking with my students about W.E.B. Du Bois and the book that he published in 1935, Black Reconstruction, which was meant to

to turn the entire understanding of Reconstruction on its head, to say that it had actually been an experiment in democracy and that the emancipation of slaves had been a good thing and that the enfranchisement of black people had been a good thing and that these governments did useful, worthwhile things for the time that they existed.

The prevailing narrative prior to that had been that all of these things were an unmitigated disaster. And that argument was being used to justify Jim Crow. And so now I think it's kind of brazen and really shocking to see the extent to which we're seeing history just photoshopped.

in order to provide a narrative that aligns itself so directly and with such kind of a one-to-one ratio to the political project that's also being undertaken right now. Evan, you went to the Capitol on January 6th. I think I might have called you. Yeah, you sent me there, Mike. I didn't just go. I didn't just go.

Evan, you got to get there. Yeah. Now. Well, you're like, one of us has to get there now. What really struck me about it and gets to the sort of deeper problem that we're contending with, it was not actually the guys and they were guys with the flags that they were spearing the police officers with. In some ways, that was a phenomenon that I understand. What struck me was when I was talking to people on the edges of it,

grandmothers who had joined in this delusion, the idea that they believed that they were doing something noble when they were engaged in this wretched act of insurrection, we're really just beginning to understand how the

the sort of collapsing compact between those people and their sense of government would affect our lives. Just one fact that's notable. Of the people I talked to there, I was struck how many of them told me that it was their first trip to Washington. They came for the first time to sack the Capitol. That's Evan Osnos. He's speaking with fellow staff writers Jelani Cobb, Jill Lepore, and Mike Luau. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And we're hearing today from three great thinkers who met to talk about the state of democracy, all of them staff writers at The New Yorker. Michael Luo moderated our conversation with Jill Lepore, Jelani Cobb, and Evan Osnos. Here's Mike Luo. Jelani, one of your specialties as a historian is the post-Civil War era. What about this moment?

resembles that time in our history and what is different? You know, there are people in this country who are believers in democracy. And then there are people whose primary faith is in power.

And if democracy will yield power for them, then fine. And if they can't get power through democracy, then their allegiances to whatever mechanism will keep them empowered. You have to cook the history books in order to get to that version that we talk about, the kind of gleaming perfect. We start out as great and have only gotten better, you know, idea of American identity and American history. And by subscribing to that idea, it makes it difficult for you

to really look at Reconstruction and what happened. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, there was a tantamount to restarting, you know, rebooting the country because you abolished slavery, you created equal protection under the laws and birthright citizenship, and then you gave limited enfranchisement to black people, black men specifically. And the reason that I've been such an evangelist

for understanding black history is that it is a phenomenally convenient barometer of America's tolerance of anti-democracy. The 5,000 or so people who were lynched, that was done in order to prevent democracy. We say it was like, oh, it was done in order to terrorize black people and so on and so forth. In Mississippi, the population of Mississippi was half black.

50% of the population could not vote. So those actions were meant to forestall democracy. And so we have to actually grapple with that if we want to have a clear gauge of what's happening around us right at this moment. - Jill, you're in these truths. One of the themes that comes through is the fragility of the American experiment that the outcome is not assured.

I mean, what are you thinking about the outcome these days? I was reading this kind of wacky book by this Yale Law School scholar, Jack Balkin, recently called Constitutional Time. And he has this crazy cosmological pattern that he's proposing. And I'm going to get this wrong, but it's sort of, if you imagine there's the, you know, the Earth's own rotation on its axis, and then the Earth's orbit around the sun, and then the moon's orbit around the Earth. And so imagine those are three different patterns. So one of them is...

constitutional time, like the patterns of amendment and revision. One of them is polarization. Let's say the other one's income inequality, right? This is not what Balkan uses because he's not interested in that. But I would say that's the third thing that's most important. And he's like, okay, so we're in a perfect eclipse right now because the

The Constitution has become unamendable. Our polarization is at a peak. And he's not talking about pretend he's talking about income inequality. Right. So we're like the sky is completely dark because the sun is blocking. The moon is blocking where we are standing on the planet. I was very drawn to this notion that we're in a perfect storm, that all of these forces at the moment have lined up.

But where I was completely unpersuaded is they're not separate systems, right? Income inequality drives polarization. Polarization drives income inequality. If you're trying to make an X, Y axis, like everything starts falling apart in 1968, just when the country really becomes a multiracial democracy. It's difficult to imagine how such a well-aligned set of crises, like which one do you tackle first? Like for me,

I just decided as a historian, I'm going to start thinking hard about the Constitution. And the other things are just kind of harder to think through. But if everybody would just kind of concentrate on income inequality, and we would talk more about the have yachts and the not have yachts. Please use the technical term. It's the haves and the have yachts. Right. We need to talk more about the haves and the have yachts. And kind of less about like, what is the good thing you can do today as a citizen to

disenfranchise the rich? I don't know. Bill, I think you raise a really essential idea, which is this ties into the January 6th discussion of a moment ago, which is that one of the pieces of data that's come out of an analysis of January 6th, Robert Pape at the University of Chicago looked and said, well, what is it that ties these people together, these insurrectionists? It tends to be that they come from counties that are overwhelmingly white that have had a measurable uptick in diversity.

Theda Skocpol, who has thought more about the sort of origins of the very far right right now than almost anybody else, particularly the Tea Party, will tell you that, you know, government dysfunction, that sort of that the expression that the government is the problem or ultimately when you dig far enough, you get to this core root, this reality that the white majority is in every conceivable political way.

rebelling against the reality of a more diverse country. And that is the enduring fact. And we're seeing it sort of come out in all of these permutations, violent and political and elsewhere. So, Evan, you know, here's the thing. We're talking about these counties that were overwhelmingly white, that experienced a significant uptick in diversity. Do you know the fundamental county we're talking about is Queens? Yes.

It is not a coincidence that the most xenophobic political figure in modern American life is a product of the most statistically the most diverse county in the United States. And I know this growing up in Queens. Trump's version, Trump is a generation older than me. His version of Queens was the second whitest borough of New York City. My version of Queens was the most diverse county in the United States.

That was why in 2016, no one spoke that language as fluently as Trump did, because it was the language of the Archie Bunker era resentments of white working class and elite residents of Queens. He'd heard that language his whole life. It's important to also keep in mind.

That when we look at the history of populism in the United States, particularly right-wing populism, they have always had a certain ratio of completely batshit crazy. Is that a technical term? That is a technical term. Political scientists use that term.

That obscures an actual valid critique somewhere. Like when you sift through enough, you find like, oh, wait, this actual thing was true. And they found this thing that was true. And then they ran off in the most nutty, like completely insane direction possible. But they actually did have a sense that something was taking advantage of them in a way that they couldn't really articulate.

One of the unusual aspects of our democracy is its kind of uniquely counter-majoritarianism sort of nature. And the founders were really afraid of factions and democratic majorities, and they built in all these kind of protections. The Electoral College, the Supreme Court, the Senate. What were they so afraid of?

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's really important to recognize is how truly innovative what they were setting up was. I mean, what they were trying to do with the House of Representatives was have a system of true representation.

It was completely destroyed by the compromise over slavery and the three-fifths clause. But the idea of representation by numerical representation, that element of democracy, which was an artifact of the emerging science of demography, that you could actually reliably count people and then have people be represented in the proportion to how many people there are, that's actually like a hugely big idea. But then they really freaked out about doing that.

And so they're like, OK, well, we'll do the Senate and that will be basically ruled by property. But they were rejecting literally ruling by they were literally going to do the Senate by wealth, by the wealth of the state. You'd have you'd have proportionate representation by wealth. So all of these aristocratic measures that were put in the U.S. Constitution and were then copied by the most influential written constitution in the world, they were copied by other constitutions.

all the other countries in the world that adopted those things in their written constitution in imitation of ours, amended them out of their constitutions. We are the only nation in the world that doesn't elect our own president by numbers. But our amendment provision was also a compromise with the slave states, with the deep south slave states. And so the reason we can't amend the constitution really is because of slavery. And the things that would really repair slavery

We need to abolish the Electoral College. We need to get rid of unequal suffrage in the Senate. And we need to have term like you can't do those things unless you can amend the Constitution, which we can't do. I would often talk with my students about the New York City subway.

All of the cities that adopted, you know, metros or rail subways after New York City benefited from seeing what didn't work in New York City. Same thing with LaGuardia Airport, which was one of the earlier airports. We've made some progress with LaGuardia. But if you were two or three years ago going to LaGuardia going, look how early we built an airport. And so the same thing, you know, applies to our constitution in some ways.

The New Yorker's Jelani Cobb. His books include The Substance of Hope, Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. Jill Lepore is the author of These Truths and many other books. And Evan Osnos' Wildland came out in 2021. They spoke with editor Michael Luo at the New Yorker Festival in October. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbess of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell.

with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Mike Kutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Decca. This week's episode was produced with assistance from Catherine Sterling, Amanda Miller, Nico Brown, Michael Etherington, and others from the New Yorker Festival. And we had additional help this week from Jared Paul. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I...

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