Really enjoyed this discussion but I think it’s worth pointing out that the history of the 1968 era Democratic Party is not as Mr. deBoer tells it. First, he refers to the 1968 Dem nominee as George McGovern when it was Hubert Humphrey; McGovern would be the nominee in 1972. More crucially, 1968 was not the pivot point where the party suddenly would become more disciplined and exert more power over choosing a nominee, it was the exact opposite. Humphrey was the party’s pick in 1968 and in fact won 0 primaries. The party then implemented reforms, initially presided over by McGovern, to become MORE democratic, creating a more robust primary system where voters would exert more sway on who the nominee would be. In 1972 McGovern won the most delegates in the new primary system with an explicitly anti-war multi-ethnic coalition. He was opposed by the Dem establishment, to the point where there was a “stop McGovern” movement. It seems like Mr. deBoer worked backwards from negative feelings about the 2016 primary to finesse the actual history.
Really good podcast. I was just wondering about Freddie's critique of the Democratic Primary system is that my impression was always that the primary system in both parties only had a tangential relationship to democracy until relatively recently. Kennedy did win a 'brokered' convention but this was only because of a deal he made with the party elite ditto with Stevenson and Humphrey. It's only post 68 where McCarthy lost to Humphrey despite winning more votes in the primaries when super tuesday and 'democracy' in the primaries became more of a thing. Albeit this led to the chaos of 72 and Mcgovern with his three 'A's' (Amnesty, Abortion, and Acid) which the Republicans targeted him with...
I'm also unconvinced primaries are a great way of selecting candidates. Despite always promoting greater citizen input on here, so I may be at risk of contradicting myself, primaries aren't really designed for this. They're voted on generally by partisans who have a more extreme vision of politics than the average voter. Thus, their judgement as to what constitutes the 'best' candidate is likely to be limited. In the Uk, we saw the Conservative membership elect Liz Truss to become PM (shortest PM in history who barely made it past 100 days in office) and Labour in 2015 and again in 2016 elected Jeremy Corbyn who produced the worst electoral results in almost a century.
It strikes me that parties don't have to be or even internally they shouldn't be 'democratic'. I'm not sure this necessarily impacts broader democracy on a bigger level. Of course the fact politics is so far away from so many is a problem but primaries don't strike me as the best way to facilitate public engagement.
Good points. What would your alternative to primaries look like? But more to the point, why shouldn't mass party organizations be at least somewhat internally democratic, particularly for a party like the Democratic Party that prides itself on being, well, democratic?
I think i would rather allow the representatives who have been elected to choose. I'd have a mass ballot of them and allow the representatives of the Democrat Party to do their jobs. I tend to think that is likely better than the primary system the US has adopted as representatives would be held accountable for whomever they choose.
I'm also not sure how democratic the primary system really is given they have a tendency, as with Trump, to enable an extreme plurality in the party to have an outsized section of the vote. This is generally because primaries attract people who are more heavily partisan and 'committed' to their politics. In the UK when parties haven't really whittled down candidates the members may be more represented but the traditional voters of those parties are left behind. I would therefore argue while primaries appear more democratic on the face of it ultimately they are likely to misrepresent how the traditional voters of said party really feel and what kind of candidate they would want.
What do you think of the system in Louisiana state elections? In the first round, everyone running from every party is on the ballot. Everyone can vote, regardless of party registration. If a candidate gets a majority of the votes, they win outright. Otherwise, the top two candidates proceed to round 2. There, whoever gets more votes wins.
I get what people mean when the say Trump is not or would not be an existential threat. Many people who plan to vote against him would fare just fine under a second Trump term. But I worry greatly about the possibility of Trump and those under him using their power to target political opponents in a massive way. And even if Democrats exaggerate how close America actually came to a coup on January 6, the mere fact that it happened makes it dangerous for Trump to win. A Trump victory would validate his actions on January 6, and make it more likely future presidents or would-be presidents would encourage coup attempts like that.
All true, and I'm totally fine with making that more narrow and specific argument. But I feel we should only use "existential threat" for threats that are truly existential. Otherwise, we run the risk of desensitizing people and getting into a boy who cried wolf sort of problem.
Good conversation, although I feel like Freddie didn't adequately address Damir's (and at points Shadi's) argument that there has been something irreducibly popular or 'democratic' at play in Harris's anointment, even if not quite in the procedural sense of being directly elected by grassroots activists. Maybe one way to put it would be that even if as Freddie says, Harris's election was very much elite-led in terms of which actors made the key decisions, nevertheless certain aspects of public/popular sentiment were much more decisive in determining the decisions or constructing the preferences of those elites relative to what one would expect from the 'smoke-filled room' archetype.
I do feel like there's a deeper problem here, in that our vocabulary is too impoverished to adequately capture/describe a lot of social and political phenomena; we find it difficult to describe forms of political influence that fall short of formal institutional mechanisms but nevertheless play a decisive role in determining preferences and outcomes.
Yes, I think there's something to the argument that even elite-driven processes can be "democratic" insofar as they reflect popular sentiment and demands and preferences of the base. Even I can't deny that there seems to be genuine (if somewhat manufactured) enthusiasm for Kamala Harris.
The democratic process is a set of activities that need to be checked off one by one if a given decision or appointment is to end up in the “well, that was democracy” column.
To use a term that we’ve all come to love, it’s binary.
Great conversation. deBoer's complaint that Democratic party is not democratic enough stems from his belief that more democracy will help elect more-left candidates in primaries. But, the elites exerting influence in making sure that moderates are selected in primaries should be seen as a balancing force against partisans who dominate primaries.
I don’t know for sure how seriously people take Trump as an existential threat, but I know that people facing death or other fateful circumstances often don’t behave every moment like that’s the case. I can’t personally say much about how much of this is people being in denial and how much is some sort of fatalism or whatever. Speaking purely for myself as a person who thinks that reelecting Trump will be the end of the US as we know it, I just can’t spend all my time freaking out and also I don’t think it would help if I could. I’m no political scientist so my lack of imagination on the topic isn’t very instructive, but it usually seems to me that the best response to Trump’s loony, existential threat politics is basically normal politics, except with much greater penalties for losing. Biden’s, “well, at least I did my best” is pretty tone deaf, but to some extent that’s where I am, too. I mean, it may wreck my livelihood or even my life, but all I can do is my best and then adjust as best I can as the disaster descends.
But I'm curious about the line of reasoning here. How exactly would reelecting Trump be "the end of the US as we know it"? I hear people saying this but I never understand what they actually mean by this claim or what the (plausible) scenario would be where this outcome would come to pass.
They believe that this time round he and those around him are entering the presidency with a clear plan, a desire for retribution and a strategy to put their vision (whether that’s the much-discussed Project 2025 or something else) into action.
They would do that by restructuring institutions to pave the way for the US to head in their chosen direction.
And since this is a matter of ideology and is framed/perceived as existential, they would enact those changes in such a way as to ensure they couldn’t just be discontinued or overturned should their plans fail and the democrats be voted in in 4 years time.
It remains to be seen whether the institutions that stood up to a disorganised first term would be able to resist a coordinated effort this time around.
I think it’s fundamentally hard to predict, but my general thought is escalating withdrawal from shared institutions and understandings. I don’t know if this needs a more detailed example scenario to demonstrate what I mean, but my thought is that if the Trump administration takes actions that “blue state” administrations see as invalid/illegal, then they’re likely to try to find ways to defy or countermand these actions, which then drives Trump to further turn the screws, at which point the blue states likely take yet more dramatic actions, and so on. This also plays out inside various federal agencies, amongst court systems, and so on.
There’s many different paths this can go down, all of which are highly chaotic, and they would have to overcome shared history and interests, not to mention more explicit guardrails in the form of norms and rules, so even if we start down the road there are off-ramps. I don’t think anything is a given, and I think we can be pretty sure that the nation as a whole isn’t going to become fascist or really any single radically different thing, because we’ll come apart before we get there. Yet at the same time, I think if we go more than a short distance down any of these paths, whatever that comes out the other side will have undergone some fairly massive changes. Not only that, the world’s understanding of the US and its geopolitical position will also have changed quite a bit.
I’ll be wrong about this if the Trump administration turns out to have less will to break the “deep state” which is really just the contiguous nature of the nation as shared rules and practice over time and amongst participating individual contributors. But I don’t think the people who stopped Trump et al. in 2017-2021 will be there in 2025-2029, so it seems more likely than not that the cycle of action and reaction this time will have much more energy and fewer buffers.
Obviously I could say more given how long winded my comments have been already, but are you asking because there’s something you’re wondering about or think needs elaboration?
I just don't understand a how a 2nd Trump term will bring the nation to its knees. This time. I'm not a Trump supporter, but I suppose I might need to be since it's the 'other guys' who are changing who/what we are, etc. It seems an odd stance to take that NOT dismantling institutions like the 'deep state' is 'fortifying democracy' and the like. I dunno... I might just be too dumb to make sense out of this current bizarro world we are trying to navigate.
This may not be the best venue to communicate about this, but I’ll try clarifying a couple of items and see if it helps.
First, the “deep state” can have many meanings, but insofar as it has a meaning that refers to something big and powerful, it refers to all the people implementing government policy who are not replaced with each election, and the processes they have built up to do that. Amongst other things, it is where our laws and norms take concrete shape in the world, and in so doing establish their practical meaning. If we don’t like something or want the government to do something else, the particular things the deep state is doing now is the point of reference and provides some kind of stable meaning to the critique. Amongst other things, tearing this down wholesale leads to complete chaos and confusion. But Trump et al. don’t really want to tear it down wholesale so much as break the parts of it that resist the deep state becoming a tool wielded by the specific political group in power. Most of the folks involved want to break this because it prevents the executive from implementing whatever policies and actions it prefers, but of course if you have a very vindictive person at the top then the interest is in using the deep state against that person’s rivals.
A lot of rules about what US intelligence is and is not allowed to do with US persons arose after Watergate, and folks have had good reason to worry about the potential for abuse targeting rivals in the wake of the Patriot Act and so on. Happily, the “deep state” intelligence community of today has grown up in the post-Watergate, post-COINTELPRO era. While the potential for abuse has grown, there’s still a lot of institutional resistance to naked abuse. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been abused, but the scale and nature of that abuse has been limited by laws and norms that have been generally respected by senior figures, which in turn has limited what political appointees can get away with asking the intelligence services to do on behalf of anyone’s political interests.
I mention this because I spent a fair bit of time in the intelligence community and so experienced it directly, but the same dynamic is true across the full breadth of domains where the government is active. Basically, the “deep state” is what gives teeth to Constitutional limits on power. Which isn’t to say that the deep state always follows the Constitution or anything; we have a whole process for determining in what ways it’s not following the Constitution and ordering changes, and that too is a deep state element.
So when we’re talking about making much more of the leadership of the various agencies political appointees or at least subject to replacement at the whim of the president, we’re talking about removing much of what makes the government an entity that respects laws and shared understandings as opposed to the tool of a specific person. That is, it’s what makes the nation a republic rather than a monarchy (elective or not).
Finally, the critical other element is that it wouldn’t be a matter of Trump and allies acting in a norm-breaking way and everyone else trying to hold on to the old norms. That’s largely what 2017-2021 looked like, but there was some reciprocal norm breaking on display as well. If the norm breaking goes much deeper this time, reaching down much further into the federal government, then the reciprocal norm breaking from the left and perhaps even the center will also escalate. Frustration with the limits of constitutional pluralist democracy is common everywhere and left populists would also like to break the deep state where it blocks their policy priorities. I’m not particularly worried about a single “fascist” group taking over the country because I think it would fly apart into different camps long before we got there. But I still think that would be a disaster.
Really enjoyed this discussion but I think it’s worth pointing out that the history of the 1968 era Democratic Party is not as Mr. deBoer tells it. First, he refers to the 1968 Dem nominee as George McGovern when it was Hubert Humphrey; McGovern would be the nominee in 1972. More crucially, 1968 was not the pivot point where the party suddenly would become more disciplined and exert more power over choosing a nominee, it was the exact opposite. Humphrey was the party’s pick in 1968 and in fact won 0 primaries. The party then implemented reforms, initially presided over by McGovern, to become MORE democratic, creating a more robust primary system where voters would exert more sway on who the nominee would be. In 1972 McGovern won the most delegates in the new primary system with an explicitly anti-war multi-ethnic coalition. He was opposed by the Dem establishment, to the point where there was a “stop McGovern” movement. It seems like Mr. deBoer worked backwards from negative feelings about the 2016 primary to finesse the actual history.
Really good podcast. I was just wondering about Freddie's critique of the Democratic Primary system is that my impression was always that the primary system in both parties only had a tangential relationship to democracy until relatively recently. Kennedy did win a 'brokered' convention but this was only because of a deal he made with the party elite ditto with Stevenson and Humphrey. It's only post 68 where McCarthy lost to Humphrey despite winning more votes in the primaries when super tuesday and 'democracy' in the primaries became more of a thing. Albeit this led to the chaos of 72 and Mcgovern with his three 'A's' (Amnesty, Abortion, and Acid) which the Republicans targeted him with...
I'm also unconvinced primaries are a great way of selecting candidates. Despite always promoting greater citizen input on here, so I may be at risk of contradicting myself, primaries aren't really designed for this. They're voted on generally by partisans who have a more extreme vision of politics than the average voter. Thus, their judgement as to what constitutes the 'best' candidate is likely to be limited. In the Uk, we saw the Conservative membership elect Liz Truss to become PM (shortest PM in history who barely made it past 100 days in office) and Labour in 2015 and again in 2016 elected Jeremy Corbyn who produced the worst electoral results in almost a century.
It strikes me that parties don't have to be or even internally they shouldn't be 'democratic'. I'm not sure this necessarily impacts broader democracy on a bigger level. Of course the fact politics is so far away from so many is a problem but primaries don't strike me as the best way to facilitate public engagement.
Good points. What would your alternative to primaries look like? But more to the point, why shouldn't mass party organizations be at least somewhat internally democratic, particularly for a party like the Democratic Party that prides itself on being, well, democratic?
I think i would rather allow the representatives who have been elected to choose. I'd have a mass ballot of them and allow the representatives of the Democrat Party to do their jobs. I tend to think that is likely better than the primary system the US has adopted as representatives would be held accountable for whomever they choose.
I'm also not sure how democratic the primary system really is given they have a tendency, as with Trump, to enable an extreme plurality in the party to have an outsized section of the vote. This is generally because primaries attract people who are more heavily partisan and 'committed' to their politics. In the UK when parties haven't really whittled down candidates the members may be more represented but the traditional voters of those parties are left behind. I would therefore argue while primaries appear more democratic on the face of it ultimately they are likely to misrepresent how the traditional voters of said party really feel and what kind of candidate they would want.
What do you think of the system in Louisiana state elections? In the first round, everyone running from every party is on the ballot. Everyone can vote, regardless of party registration. If a candidate gets a majority of the votes, they win outright. Otherwise, the top two candidates proceed to round 2. There, whoever gets more votes wins.
I get what people mean when the say Trump is not or would not be an existential threat. Many people who plan to vote against him would fare just fine under a second Trump term. But I worry greatly about the possibility of Trump and those under him using their power to target political opponents in a massive way. And even if Democrats exaggerate how close America actually came to a coup on January 6, the mere fact that it happened makes it dangerous for Trump to win. A Trump victory would validate his actions on January 6, and make it more likely future presidents or would-be presidents would encourage coup attempts like that.
All true, and I'm totally fine with making that more narrow and specific argument. But I feel we should only use "existential threat" for threats that are truly existential. Otherwise, we run the risk of desensitizing people and getting into a boy who cried wolf sort of problem.
Good conversation, although I feel like Freddie didn't adequately address Damir's (and at points Shadi's) argument that there has been something irreducibly popular or 'democratic' at play in Harris's anointment, even if not quite in the procedural sense of being directly elected by grassroots activists. Maybe one way to put it would be that even if as Freddie says, Harris's election was very much elite-led in terms of which actors made the key decisions, nevertheless certain aspects of public/popular sentiment were much more decisive in determining the decisions or constructing the preferences of those elites relative to what one would expect from the 'smoke-filled room' archetype.
I do feel like there's a deeper problem here, in that our vocabulary is too impoverished to adequately capture/describe a lot of social and political phenomena; we find it difficult to describe forms of political influence that fall short of formal institutional mechanisms but nevertheless play a decisive role in determining preferences and outcomes.
Yes, I think there's something to the argument that even elite-driven processes can be "democratic" insofar as they reflect popular sentiment and demands and preferences of the base. Even I can't deny that there seems to be genuine (if somewhat manufactured) enthusiasm for Kamala Harris.
Except “democratic” isn’t a feeling or a vibe.
The democratic process is a set of activities that need to be checked off one by one if a given decision or appointment is to end up in the “well, that was democracy” column.
To use a term that we’ve all come to love, it’s binary.
Great conversation. deBoer's complaint that Democratic party is not democratic enough stems from his belief that more democracy will help elect more-left candidates in primaries. But, the elites exerting influence in making sure that moderates are selected in primaries should be seen as a balancing force against partisans who dominate primaries.
I don’t know for sure how seriously people take Trump as an existential threat, but I know that people facing death or other fateful circumstances often don’t behave every moment like that’s the case. I can’t personally say much about how much of this is people being in denial and how much is some sort of fatalism or whatever. Speaking purely for myself as a person who thinks that reelecting Trump will be the end of the US as we know it, I just can’t spend all my time freaking out and also I don’t think it would help if I could. I’m no political scientist so my lack of imagination on the topic isn’t very instructive, but it usually seems to me that the best response to Trump’s loony, existential threat politics is basically normal politics, except with much greater penalties for losing. Biden’s, “well, at least I did my best” is pretty tone deaf, but to some extent that’s where I am, too. I mean, it may wreck my livelihood or even my life, but all I can do is my best and then adjust as best I can as the disaster descends.
But I'm curious about the line of reasoning here. How exactly would reelecting Trump be "the end of the US as we know it"? I hear people saying this but I never understand what they actually mean by this claim or what the (plausible) scenario would be where this outcome would come to pass.
I think it’s quite clear what’s meant by it.
They believe that this time round he and those around him are entering the presidency with a clear plan, a desire for retribution and a strategy to put their vision (whether that’s the much-discussed Project 2025 or something else) into action.
They would do that by restructuring institutions to pave the way for the US to head in their chosen direction.
And since this is a matter of ideology and is framed/perceived as existential, they would enact those changes in such a way as to ensure they couldn’t just be discontinued or overturned should their plans fail and the democrats be voted in in 4 years time.
It remains to be seen whether the institutions that stood up to a disorganised first term would be able to resist a coordinated effort this time around.
I think it’s fundamentally hard to predict, but my general thought is escalating withdrawal from shared institutions and understandings. I don’t know if this needs a more detailed example scenario to demonstrate what I mean, but my thought is that if the Trump administration takes actions that “blue state” administrations see as invalid/illegal, then they’re likely to try to find ways to defy or countermand these actions, which then drives Trump to further turn the screws, at which point the blue states likely take yet more dramatic actions, and so on. This also plays out inside various federal agencies, amongst court systems, and so on.
There’s many different paths this can go down, all of which are highly chaotic, and they would have to overcome shared history and interests, not to mention more explicit guardrails in the form of norms and rules, so even if we start down the road there are off-ramps. I don’t think anything is a given, and I think we can be pretty sure that the nation as a whole isn’t going to become fascist or really any single radically different thing, because we’ll come apart before we get there. Yet at the same time, I think if we go more than a short distance down any of these paths, whatever that comes out the other side will have undergone some fairly massive changes. Not only that, the world’s understanding of the US and its geopolitical position will also have changed quite a bit.
I’ll be wrong about this if the Trump administration turns out to have less will to break the “deep state” which is really just the contiguous nature of the nation as shared rules and practice over time and amongst participating individual contributors. But I don’t think the people who stopped Trump et al. in 2017-2021 will be there in 2025-2029, so it seems more likely than not that the cycle of action and reaction this time will have much more energy and fewer buffers.
This seems to be quite a bit of hand wringing. Can you say more?
Obviously I could say more given how long winded my comments have been already, but are you asking because there’s something you’re wondering about or think needs elaboration?
I just don't understand a how a 2nd Trump term will bring the nation to its knees. This time. I'm not a Trump supporter, but I suppose I might need to be since it's the 'other guys' who are changing who/what we are, etc. It seems an odd stance to take that NOT dismantling institutions like the 'deep state' is 'fortifying democracy' and the like. I dunno... I might just be too dumb to make sense out of this current bizarro world we are trying to navigate.
This may not be the best venue to communicate about this, but I’ll try clarifying a couple of items and see if it helps.
First, the “deep state” can have many meanings, but insofar as it has a meaning that refers to something big and powerful, it refers to all the people implementing government policy who are not replaced with each election, and the processes they have built up to do that. Amongst other things, it is where our laws and norms take concrete shape in the world, and in so doing establish their practical meaning. If we don’t like something or want the government to do something else, the particular things the deep state is doing now is the point of reference and provides some kind of stable meaning to the critique. Amongst other things, tearing this down wholesale leads to complete chaos and confusion. But Trump et al. don’t really want to tear it down wholesale so much as break the parts of it that resist the deep state becoming a tool wielded by the specific political group in power. Most of the folks involved want to break this because it prevents the executive from implementing whatever policies and actions it prefers, but of course if you have a very vindictive person at the top then the interest is in using the deep state against that person’s rivals.
A lot of rules about what US intelligence is and is not allowed to do with US persons arose after Watergate, and folks have had good reason to worry about the potential for abuse targeting rivals in the wake of the Patriot Act and so on. Happily, the “deep state” intelligence community of today has grown up in the post-Watergate, post-COINTELPRO era. While the potential for abuse has grown, there’s still a lot of institutional resistance to naked abuse. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been abused, but the scale and nature of that abuse has been limited by laws and norms that have been generally respected by senior figures, which in turn has limited what political appointees can get away with asking the intelligence services to do on behalf of anyone’s political interests.
I mention this because I spent a fair bit of time in the intelligence community and so experienced it directly, but the same dynamic is true across the full breadth of domains where the government is active. Basically, the “deep state” is what gives teeth to Constitutional limits on power. Which isn’t to say that the deep state always follows the Constitution or anything; we have a whole process for determining in what ways it’s not following the Constitution and ordering changes, and that too is a deep state element.
So when we’re talking about making much more of the leadership of the various agencies political appointees or at least subject to replacement at the whim of the president, we’re talking about removing much of what makes the government an entity that respects laws and shared understandings as opposed to the tool of a specific person. That is, it’s what makes the nation a republic rather than a monarchy (elective or not).
Finally, the critical other element is that it wouldn’t be a matter of Trump and allies acting in a norm-breaking way and everyone else trying to hold on to the old norms. That’s largely what 2017-2021 looked like, but there was some reciprocal norm breaking on display as well. If the norm breaking goes much deeper this time, reaching down much further into the federal government, then the reciprocal norm breaking from the left and perhaps even the center will also escalate. Frustration with the limits of constitutional pluralist democracy is common everywhere and left populists would also like to break the deep state where it blocks their policy priorities. I’m not particularly worried about a single “fascist” group taking over the country because I think it would fly apart into different camps long before we got there. But I still think that would be a disaster.
We need to build new high trust systems and migrate to them. Ones that run on collective intelligence and the Wisdom of Crowds. Like so
https://open.substack.com/pub/joshketry/p/dont-trust-verify-we-must-build-a?r=7oa9d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web