We have made it to the other side of election day after quite a fraught campaign. This is our second forum looking at the US elections but, of course, the only one that follows the 2024 elections. So today, we are talking about what is next. And we are joined by three eminent scholars who will look at the implications of the results for democracy here and abroad, and what's at stake in foreign policy.
KRISTIN: I now turn the event over to Professor Melani Cammett, director of the Weatherhead Center.
MELANI CAMMETT: Thank you so much, Kristin, and thanks to our distinguished panelists and to the audience. Welcome again to the Weatherhead Forum, which is the Weatherhead Center's platform for addressing pressing topics of the day. I think it's fair to say that this is a pressing topic of the day.
And we have now made it to the other side of election day after quite a fraught campaign. This is our second forum looking at the US elections but, of course, the only one that follows the 2024 elections. And I hope you were able to join us at the earlier one which focused on geopolitical implications. It is available up on the Weatherhead Center's website. And so you can watch it on our YouTube channel if you'd like to see it.
So today, we are talking about what is next. And we are joined by three eminent scholars who will look at the implications of the results for democracy here and abroad, and what's at stake in foreign policy. So for today's format, each speaker will present for about 10 or 15 minutes. And then I'm going to pose a couple of questions to the group. And then I will take your questions from the Q&A. I'll try to get as many questions in as possible from the audience. And I may end up combining some of them together so we can maximize feedback to our audience.
So let me briefly introduce our excellent panelists, and I'll introduce them in the order in which they will present. Our first speaker is Daniel Ziblatt, who is the director of Harvard's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, where he is-- and he is also the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard. He also leads a research group based in Germany at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. And his research focuses on European politics and the comparative study of democracy.
He's the author of four books, including How Democracies Die, which was published in 2018, co-authored with our colleague Steven Levitsky at Harvard. As I'm sure many of you know, this has become a New York Times bestseller and was described by The Economist magazine as the most important book of the Trump era. We are now in a second Trump era soon, so probably sales of the book will once again surge.
The book has been translated into 30 languages. And in 2023, Daniel and Steve Levitsky published something of a sequel to that book entitled Tyranny of the Minority, also a New York Times bestseller. And that analyzes American democracy in comparative perspective. Prior to this, Daniel wrote Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, published in 2017, which is an account of the historical rise of democracy in Europe, as well as a book on European State Building entitled Structuring the State. In 2023, Daniel was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Thank you for joining us, Daniel.
Our second speaker is Josh Kertzer, who is the Johns Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Government, and director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Government at Harvard. His research specializes in the intersection of international security, political psychology, foreign policy, and public opinion. He is the author of Resolve in International Politics, published in 2016, and Abstraction in Experimental Design, Testing the Tradeoffs, which was published in 2022, along with numerous articles appearing in a range of journals, including all the top publications of political science and other social sciences. His work has been recognized with numerous awards and at various institutions. And in 2023, he received Harvard's Joseph R. Levenson Memorial teaching prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching. So thank you, Josh, for joining us.
And last but not least is Pippa Norris, who is a comparative political scientist. She's been teaching at Harvard for three decades and is the Paul F. McGuire lecturer in comparative politics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She's the founding director of the Electoral Integrity Project, director of the Global Party Survey, co-director of the TrustGov project, co-principal investigator for trust in European democracies, and vice president of the World Values Survey.
Her research compares public opinion and elections, political communications in many countries worldwide. I also have to mention that she is ranked the second most cited political scientist in the world, according to Google Scholar. And she has many career honors, including, among others, the Skytteprize, the Karl Deutsch Award, Fellowship of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And the list goes on and on.
Her latest book is forthcoming with Oxford University Press early next spring and is entitled The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding. So as you can see, we are in excellent hands here. We have an all-star team. And I will turn it over to Daniel with-- to kick us off. Thank you.
DANIEL ZIBLATT: Yeah, thank you, Melani, for the invitation to do this. You sent this invitation, I think, back in June, at which point I agreed without thinking too much about it. And I'm reminded here of an apocryphal story perhaps in the early '70s when Henry Kissinger was supposed to have asked Premier Zhou Enlai what he thought of the French Revolution. And he supposedly said-- who knows if this is true-- "It's too early to tell."
And so whether that story is true or not, I had a little bit of that feeling this morning waking up. What can I possibly say? Because I think "insta-analyses" tend to always be wrong. So I say that as a caveat before everything I'm about to say. So nonetheless, offer a couple of observations.
First, just a word on the state of play as I understand it. Trump, unlike in 2020 or 2016, has won a popular majority. And the Senate, it's looking as if he has a very big majority. And in the House, it's still undecided. I mean, it's uncertain. They're still counting votes in California and so on.
This is all against a backdrop of three other factors that make this very different from 2016. First of all, Trump has come to power without much aid of the Republican establishment because it doesn't really exist any longer, which despised him back in 2016. And so in many ways, I think he has a much freer hand. So that's one important backdrop. I mean, just to give you an example, his daughter-in-law is the head of the party rather than somebody who he has to negotiate with.
The second kind of difference from 2016 is that the Supreme Court is now even much more heavily Republican leaning. In his first term, he nominated-- got three judges approved at the Supreme Court, so the Court is very much more on his side. And then third, the Court this summer in its decision, Trump versus the United States, ruled-- in effect, carved out and created a broad swath of criminal immunity for Donald Trump that allows for him to evade any criminal accountability for his actions while carrying out his official functions of the presidency.
So you add all of this together, and it does give one a very frightening picture. He has a much freer hand, and his presidency has a much freer hand to do what authoritarians have done throughout time. That is harassing and prosecuting opponents, the things that he's also promised that he would do mass-- disruptive deportation of migrants, the hollowing out of the federal bureaucracy, replacing scientists and experts with loyalists, the use of the military and the Insurrection Act against protesters, rampant political corruption.
And just one thing I'll add here given our audience-- an attack on universities. So this is a very kind of common discourse that one hears of the universities' endowments ought to be taxed. Certification of universities should be questioned. Attack on federal funding. So all of these things, I think, are in play.
And so this is really the stuff of nightmares, certainly. I mean, I have to think back-- December 2016, when Steven Levitsky and I began thinking about our book, How Democracies Die, this was the kind of nightmare scenario that we imagined might happen. So what happened? I don't have access to the data. I mean, people maybe will give us some more concrete answers to that question.
I mean, just one thing I would note is that in 14 of the last 15 presidential elections in South America, Steve Levitsky tells me incumbents have lost. In 2024 alone, the German coalition is, of course, deeply popular. France's Macron has had a rebellion against him in the parliamentary elections. Just this year, incumbents have lost in Britain, Japan, South Africa, and Botswana. After 50 years in power, even the ruling party was ejected.
So there's a real anti-incumbent wave. What's driving that? I don't have a specific answer to that or a novel answer, but it's hit America. Now, one might say, well, this is normal Democratic politics. And to a certain degree, I think that's right, that democracy-- the genius of democracies is it's self-correcting nature.
When citizens are dissatisfied with the status quo, they throw the incumbents out. And that, in effect, is what has happened. And that's a kind of happy, self-correcting logic of democracy. But the problem, of course, is that if the person being elected into office is the kind of threat that it seems and that I just described, then this does disrupt this happy, self-correcting logic of democracy.
And so we are really find ourselves now in a bind. And Steve and I had an op-ed a couple of weeks ago where we laid out other strategies that may have been possible to supplement elections that we didn't pursue. I won't go into all of that, but this, in a way, is sort of a vulnerability of democracy that we have now confronted.
So what I want to do, though, is very just briefly go through three points. And I imagine there's a lot of academics on the line, so I'm happy to put it in these terms. I'm going to talk about coalitions, institutions, and international context very briefly. So first in terms of-- and the point here is that I'm not really-- maybe you guys are coming here to look for some data. What were the exit polls look like, and why did people vote the way they do? I don't have access to that data.
And I think in some ways, my expertise is much more thinking about historical analogies and trying to use those historical analogies to think about the nature of the problem that we confront and how that might inform responses to it. And so that's of my forte, so I'm going to go with that. So I'm going to talk about both historical analogies-- the power of some analogies and also the limits of some analogies.
So first of all, what's very clear is that this is not 1930s fascism. Now, don't be too reassured by that statement, because in some ways, there's actually some bad news in that, as well as some good news. What I mean in particular is that the way fascists came to power in the 1930s and 1920s is never with a majority of the vote.
In Germany, the Nazi party at its max had 37% of the vote. Fascists in Italy even less. So they always came into power in coalition with the conservatives and establishment. And so this experience is very different-- in many ways, very novel-- in which you have a-- within an established democracy, at least, where you have a majority party come to power with a majority coalition.
And so that's a point worth making. So that's kind of worrying, I think, in some sense. But there's also a kind of lesson in that, I would say, for how to think about how to respond to this. Because in many ways, this is a populist coalition-- a multi-ethnic populist coalition that we'll hear a lot about. But I think in many ways, the silver lining may be that this coalition might be pretty ephemeral.
It is a populist coalition, which means it's anti-establishment. It's not rooted in deep economic or material concerns, I would say. I mean, that's my assessment anyway. It's a coalition that's intended to really give a big middle finger to the establishment.
That's a powerful and dangerous coalition, but it's also one in which it has a vulnerability. And that I think that a Trump presidency in which you have massive tax cuts for the wealthy, mass deportation, massive protectionism will wreck the economy. And that means the Trump presidency can't deliver for its citizens. This will be tragic for all of us, but this also suggests a response, which is to focus on that economic agenda of a Trump presidency.
So that's the first point. Second point is about institutions. In terms of analogies, the United States is not Viktor Orban's Hungary. That's my second point. And really what I mean by that-- of course, Hungary is a unitary state. I mean, I've always been reassuring people over the years that Hungary's Constitution is very easy to change-- only require 2/3 majority in a single chamber, unitary state.
Hungary came to power and was-- very easily could sneak these incredibly anti-democratic reforms into legislation, get it passed overnight, and so on. Now, I've always said the US, there's great-- the US is a highly decentralized political system-- its famous system of checks and balances, which I've always thought makes the US more resilient. And I still think that, although this election, I have to say, erodes my faith in that because if especially the Republicans win the House of Representatives, the United States will look much more like Hungary than I could have ever imagined with control of the Presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the House of Representatives.
That said, institutional levers still do exist-- and so this is my institutional point-- that didn't exist in Hungary. So we still have powerful and popular governors, federalism, a kind of highly decentralized court system, as well as civil society institutions, including universities and other civil society institutions. The point I would make here is that we need to think about sources of alternative power, sources of leverage, where people can engage in politics in a way-- people talk about resistance and so on. I think it's much more about thinking about where are the institutional points of leverage in the political system and focusing on those as a way of combating any move towards authoritarianism.
Final point is about international context. So I first said this is not like 1930s fascism. I've said this is not like Hungary. I think in many ways-- also another way-- I mean, to put it in a very silly way, perhaps-- the US is not like El Salvador. And what I mean by that it's a much bigger country. So El Salvador has experienced a tragic erosion of democracy with a populist president who's come to power and exerted great tragedy on the population.
But when democracies get into trouble or die in small countries, it's certainly tragic for citizens and maybe for neighbors, but it doesn't really have global reverberations. Elites often escape. They send their kids to college in the United States. They have bank accounts in London, et cetera, et cetera.
What's much rarer and what's unique about the current moment is the degree to which the United States is a global power. And we don't have many examples of any in the modern era of democracy so significantly eroding in a global power. And so I think the global reverberations of this are something that we probably are not-- we woke up this morning as Americans maybe not thinking about this.
I know my inbox is flooded with Europeans who send me emails. It sounds like as if I've lost a relative. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for your election and so on. But people are worried. And I think there's many Europeans at least who feel like they ought to have been able to vote in this election because this affects their lives as well. And so the global foreign policy reverberations of this are really significant as well. And I think my colleague Josh Kertzer, in a moment, will talk about that.
So just as a general point, I think-- I'm at a little bit of a loss for words. But I do think that we have to focus on the kind of existing levers of power that exists within the United States that are not captured by authoritarians. In many ways, I think our civil society institutions failed in the response. Church leaders-- Catholic Church was too quiet. Business leaders were too quiet. Other civil society institutions were too quiet. But these are sources of power, just as some of our local governments and governors are. And in the days ahead, I think action in these areas are going to be absolutely critical. So I'll stop there. Thank you.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Thanks so much, Daniel. Josh, I'm going to turn it over to you.
JOSH KERTZER: Perfect. Thanks so much, Melani, for having me. And Thanks Daniel and Pippa for your esteemed company here. So as Daniel and Melani mentioned, I'm going to focus my comments primarily-- or exclusively, I guess, on the foreign policy implications of the election.
I think in lots of the discussion, we tend to focus, I think, normally on the domestic implications. But obviously the consequences of American elections are hugely important around the world. I think it looks like this election was more decisive than the one eight years ago, say.
But certainly, it's the case-- eight years ago, I remember I teach an American foreign policy undergrad class here at Harvard. And I remember that American-- I had these students in the class who were complaining about how, because of the electoral college, it's 80,000 people in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania who determined who the president was.
But obviously, there are 7 billion people on the planet who are affected by American foreign policy, and 6.7 billion of them don't get a vote. And I think the extent to which the election was being so closely watched in Taipei, and Tel Aviv, and Kyiv, and Krakow simply because who controls the White House has profound importance not just for American foreign policy, but then for the globe as a whole. So I want to make three or four sets of comments depending on how we're doing on time.
First off, I would urge us to be cautious of what sometimes gets referred to as the pundits fallacy. I think we're going to hear a lot of extremely, supremely confident explanations for why the election results turned out the way they did over the next few days. Usually, these explanations will take the form of, if only the candidate had done something that I wish they had done-- they had been agreed more with me on a given issue, or they had used the messaging that I wanted them to use.
Harris shouldn't have pivoted to the center. She should have pivoted more to the center. She talked too much about the fight for democracy. She should have talked more about pocketbook issues. She should have picked Shapiro. Disinformation, war in Gaza, all sorts of other things.
But usually, this ends up being people who are projecting their own views onto the electorate as a whole. And I want us to be wary of theory getting too far ahead of the empirics because I think, A, we won't know we won't have good answers for a while. B, nothing in social sciences are monocausal. But like Daniel said, I do want to note that 2024 has been an unusually bad year for incumbents more generally.
He mentioned Sunak, and Macron, and the liberal Democrats, and the ANC. Looks also like the Liberal Party will probably lose in Canada. The Morning Consult had polling data in all G7 countries about a month ago. And at that point in time, Macron's popularity was 18%. Schulz in Germany was 20%. Kishida hadn't resigned yet in Japan, but it was 21%. Trudeau in Canada was 25%. Starmer was 31%.
Biden was actually the second most popular G7 leader at 38%. But this is to say, as we think more broadly, I do think we should be skeptical about explanations for the election outcomes that hinge on what Harris did or didn't do in spending too much or too little time in a given state, say. Because I think given the broader international and transnational dimensions here, there's clearly more that's going on.
So point number two, and more substantively, it's worth pointing out that how candidates talk on the campaign trail in regards to foreign policy doesn't necessarily translate to how they behave when they're in office. So eight years ago, Trump campaigned as a firm believer in congressional checks on executive power. Obviously, he ended up exercising many of the same tools as his predecessor.
He ran against the war in Afghanistan, but then initially he escalated it. And it's actually Biden who ended up formally withdrawing. He said NATO was obsolete, but then ended up sort of endorsing it at some point. He ran on tearing up NAFTA, but the USMCA wasn't quite the overhaul that he had promised. So this is to say that there's a difference between how people talk when they're on the campaign trail and how they govern when they're in office.
And I think this is for two reasons. The first reason is that it's often the case in foreign policy that presidents end up being judged by new issues that appear on their agenda that weren't things that they planned for. George W. Bush obviously campaigned as a staunch critic of nation building, then 9/11 happened and changed his mind.
I think probably the two defining foreign policy issues of the Biden presidency, apart from the Afghan withdrawal, are the two wars right in Ukraine and Gaza, neither of which are wars that the US initiated. And so in this sense, the idea of these kind of exogenous shocks or maybe shocks that aren't really exogenous but are endogenous to some sort of complex interactive process that aren't directly within leaders control are going to set a lot of the agenda. But the other reason I think why it's usually the case that there's a difference between how candidates talk versus how they govern has to do with the idea of domestic constraints.
So in theory, the idea behind Democratic foreign policies is that democracies are supposed to conduct better foreign policies than non-democratic states precisely because of these Democratic constraints-- constraints from Congress, from bureaucracy, from interest groups, and so on. The challenge here-- and political scientists like Rachel Myrick have done some excellent work on this-- is that in an era of partisan polarization, a lot of these domestic constraints break down.
So it looks like Republicans are going to control both the Senate and the House. And so in this area of unified government, Congress is going to be extremely unlikely to check the President. And conversely, in a couple of years, should the midterm elections do what midterm elections often do and produce a kind of thermostatic reaction, what you're going to see is that all of a sudden, we end up with deadlock, where-- and this is going to simply incentivize presidents to use executive orders, because this way, you can skip Congress rather than trying to deal with those constraints.
So this is to say that one prediction you might make is that Trump is going to be less constrained this time around given what's happening with the Senate and the House. Although, as Daniel mentioned, maybe it's too soon to tell with the house. But the other reason I think why Trump is less likely to be constrained this time around-- many of you might be familiar with that trump had this executive order from October 2020, which was revoked by the Biden administration upon taking office, establishing Schedule F as a new employment category for federal workers.
Basically, the idea being to make it easier to fire high level bureaucrats who are seen as obstructing the president's foreign policy agenda. So this is to say that if we're not seeing constraints from Congress or we're not seeing as many constraints from the bureaucracy, there's-- some of you have probably seen the TV show The West Wing. There's a famous episode called "Let Bartlett Be Bartlett." It's this kind of liberal fantasy of how American politics works. But in this context, my guess is what we're going to see is folks are going to let Trump be Trump.
So this leads to the third and perhaps most important point. So I think Americans sometimes complain that both parties are exactly the same and there's not a real choice between them. But my sense is that the reason why the US election is the front page story everywhere on the planet today is precisely because the two parties and the two candidates aren't the same.
So what I want to do is I want to talk about four key foreign policy issues on the American foreign policy agenda, and how Harris and Trump differ on them, and what this might tell us about the effect of a Trump presidency on foreign policy. So the first issue has to do with NATO and the Western Alliance. I think Biden was very much an Atlanticist by disposition. We might think of him as perhaps the last Atlanticist in the Oval Office we'll have for a while.
My sense is that Harris was expected to maintain Biden's policies with respect to NATO, strengthening the collaborative framework, advocating shared responsibility within NATO without threatening its core principle of collective defense. Harris supported continued US military presence in Europe to deter Russian aggression, and generally was an advocate for a predictable and United NATO, valuing cooperation rather than financial contributions alone. Trump, obviously in foreign policy, emphasizes a much more transactional approach. He's demanding that NATO allies significantly increase their defense spending or risk reduced US involvement.
The idea is turning NATO into pay-for-play arrangement, in which American support is contingent on each member's financial contribution. The obvious concern here is that this undermines collective defense, it destabilizes European security, particularly with regard to Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. And I'll talk about that in a couple of minutes. And so my guess is what you're going end up seeing is increased security burdens being shifted onto Europe itself and the attendant domestic political issues that will arise as a result.
The second key issue, I think, where the two candidates' foreign policy issues differ is trade. So Trump is famously a protectionist. I think it was a couple of weeks ago he had that line about how the most beautiful word in the English language is "tariffs." And so in this sense, I think it's probably safe to say that he's likely to continue trade wars in office.
This is going to have huge implications for American relationships with countries in Europe, both Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Americas in particular. With each of these actors, Trump is likely to reintroduce tariffs on European goods, as he did during the first term. As folks might recall, this led to strain in US-EU relations and retaliatory measures from Europe.
And so in general, if we think about Trump's-- what makes Trump distinctive in foreign policy, there's a sense that number one, he's interested in these bilateral trade negotiations rather than multilateral ones. And so in this sense, we're seeing this kind of fragmentation. The other is that there's a real transactional element to this, much as it is with alliance politics.
There's a real sense that whereas Harris would have conducted trade disputes multilaterally, maybe potential collaboration on digital environmental standards, we're less likely to see that sort of thing with respect to Trump. [INAUDIBLE] has huge implications for Canada, which is hugely dependent on trade with the United States, questions about stability of international supply chains and integrated supply chains.
The huge implications for Japan and South Korea, particularly the auto and technology sectors in both economies. Southeast Asia as well. Think about supply chains with regard to Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and so on. So this is to say I think trade is another key issue where we are likely to see Trump behaving distinctively.
I want to maybe conclude this point by talking about the two wars, because those are obviously-- there are obviously more than two wars happening on the planet at any given point in time. But there have been two wars in particular that have been particularly polarizing in Washington, and one is war in Ukraine, and the other is the war in Gaza. So with regard to Ukraine, Trump favors what's referred to as a frozen conflict settlement in Ukraine. The idea here is to induce a negotiated settlement that would allow Russia to retain parts of Ukrainian territory as part of this negotiated settlement.
And the rationale, I think, proposed by Trump for this and Trump's allies is that this reduces American involvement in the conflict. But the downside, obviously, is that it signals a weakening of NATO's resolve, sets a precedent for Russia's actions in Europe that increases Russian confidence in advancing westward and so on. Harris obviously had a very different view-- has a very different view with respect to war in Ukraine and has opposed settlements that compromise Ukrainian territorial integrity or could be seen as rewarding Russian advances.
For the war in Gaza, Harris has sort of tried to thread the needle a little bit, advocating for a two-state solution that supports Israel's security while also addressing Palestinian rights, calling for diplomatic solutions to de-escalate violence. Trump has more clearly sided with the Israelis, signaled an openness to Israeli settlement expansions in the West Bank. There are s plenty of voices in the United States, maybe even hypothetically on college campuses, who would like the two candidates to be further apart on this issue.
But it's worth pointing out that in the region, it's not clear that the two candidates are actually seen as the same. I saw a poll last night as I was watching election results, figuring out what I was going to say today, from channel 12 in Israel, showing that 90% of Jewish-Israelis aged 18 to 34 think that Trump would better serve Israel's interests. Only 2% said Harris would. Obviously, there's a huge generational gap that's occurring in Israeli politics right now, with younger voters typically being more conservative than older voters are.
But this is to say that folks in the region don't necessarily see, at least on the Israeli side, the two as the same. And one reason has to do with their broader policies in the region more generally. So my guess, if I were to make predictions, is both Harris and Trump are likely to push for further normalization agreements between Israel and neighbors in the Arab neighbors in the region.
My guess is that Trump would try to continue the unilateral approach adopted by the Abraham Accords, in which normalization isn't conditioned on Israeli concessions with regard to the Palestinians, whereas Harris would have been more likely to try to link normalization to support for tangible process on the ground with regard to Palestinian statehood. Similarly, the two actors, I think-- two candidates have very different approaches with respect to Iran. Harris seeking to contain Iran-- Iranian nuclear ambitions through diplomatic engagement, whereas Trump is more likely to adopt a maximum pressure approach.
If you were to ask yourself, Which of these two candidates is more likely to greenlight an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities? for example, much more likely to be Trump than Harris. There are lots of other issues where the two candidates diverge-- climate, immigration. Lots of other key regional differences as well with respect to Africa, Latin America, and so on.
But the final point I want to make here in the two minutes that I have left-- so usually, if we think about electoral outcomes, we can think about there being winners and losers. There are folks who are gaining from a policy, and there are folks who are going to be harmed by it. If you're thinking about where in the world folks are celebrating today and where in the world folks are mourning today or more and easy today, my guess is there's a couple of things you would look for.
So number one is ideological distance. It's usually the case, for example, that transatlantic relations sour when you have a right-wing president in the United States and left-wing governments in Europe. But also more generally, I think Harris administration would have gotten along with the traditional allies of the United States-- Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, Canada. It's emphasis on multilateralism, cooperating with allies, stability in multilateral trade agreements.
On the other hand, Trump foreign policy is quite personalized. He tends to get along very well with other strong men. And you see this too in polling data in Israel, in Hungary. Also too, Poland is this interesting case where, on the one hand, the Poles want American security [? port, ?] but there's also some skepticism about the European Union.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, I think there's no pretense of a human rights agenda under the Trump administration. Big question marks, I think-- and I'll stop here-- include China. It's not clear-- I think there's a lot of ambivalence on China's end about which candidate would have been better for the PRC.
And one thing that we are seeing in an era of polarization in foreign policy is China seems to be the one issue in foreign policy in Washington that Democrats and Republicans do seem to agree on broad principles about, even if they disagree on particular policy instruments. So I think that's my 15 minutes, so I'll stop there. But I'm happy to chat more in the Q&A.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Thank you so much, Josh. And Pippa?
PIPPA NORRIS: Thank you so much. And I'm going to be talking about many of the issues. I think that set it up really nicely to think about some of the questions and the big picture. We've all been deluged last night with every single county in America and what the results are.
And we've looked at lots of demographics and things like that, but I'd like us to think about the big implications and to build in particular on what has already been said. And was democracy on the ballot? And is this the big threat, which is being faced?
And I'm going to think about four different types of topics. One is, how do we actually interpret whether it's rhetoric or reality? And that's the point which Joshua already made when he remarked about the difference between the words of the campaign-- how far that's a performance or how far that really is going to be put into practice? And we all need to think about project 2025 as the reality of what's going to be implemented.
And then the second question related, did MAGA-- those who supported Trump-- vote for strongman rule? In other words, when people ask, what does the result mean for America? What does it mean for who we are, for our identities, and for our beliefs, and our values? And so I'll look a bit evidence of that from the exit poll.
And then to think about the actual risks of democracy-- we obviously don't know. We're speculating, but we can certainly look at comparable figures-- strongman rulers, authoritarians-- populists as I call them. And I pick four cases. And what we can do is we can say, we don't know what's going to happen in the next four years, but we do know when leaders come to power a little bit about how the institutions change. And I'm just going to give a brief bit of evidence for that. And then the conclusions to think about the risks at home and abroad.
So how do we interpret the rhetoric? And the front page of the New York Times today gives a very dire picture. And this is one where the liberals have their hair on fire. What would he do? "He would use military force against his political opponents. He would fire on thousands of career public servants." That's part of the promise of project 2025.
"He would deport millions of immigrants. He would crush the independence of the Department of Justice, use government to push public health conspiracies," and so on and so forth. We're familiar with this broad set of threats. He'd be a dictator from day one. But when he makes claims like this in the rhetoric, is it essentially something that should be taken literally?
And the classic claim in the 19-- when he first came to power and came down the Golden staircase-- when he makes claims like this, do we take him literally but not seriously? And the press certainly does. Or do his supporters take him seriously, but not literally?
Is it simply a performance? He is very much a fan of the wrestling performance, and that's theatrics at the highest level. And this can be something that can rev up his base, that can stir up the Proud Boys, and many other extremist groups to support him. Or is it something which is actually a real risk for everybody along the lines that some of our previous discussions has summarized? Is it time to move to Canada?
Well, let's look at a little bit of evidence first. Did MAGA vote for strongman rule? And we can look at this by the two different sources that we have available right now. One is the poll that was done by Edison, the exit poll. And one is the vote cast that was done for AP.
So this is the evidence, if we look at how far people feel that there are real threats to democracy, broken down by their vote. So the fact that we find that those who voted for Harris think that there are tremendous threats to democracy is hardly surprising. And half basically feel that American democracy is under threat. Half felt that it was secure.
But look at those who voted for Trump. And what you immediately see is they also, in very similar patterns, feel that there were threats to US democracy. So if there are threats, how do we interpret that? Clearly, partisans and those who back both camps have very different views about where the threats arise.
Classically, for example, in elections and electoral integrity. For Harris, it's about voter suppression. And therefore, for the supporters, it's about acts by various Republican states to limit access to the ballot, or who could be registered, or to clean the registers, and so on. But for Trump supporters, I think they were also motivated by a genuine commitment to their vision of democracy and their vision of electoral integrity.
For them, it was-- they believed it-- a threat, for example, to people who weren't actually citizens qualified to vote, migrants to get on the ballot, and for a variety of other threats. So it's not the case that Trump supporters gave up on democracy per se. In their views, certainly, they believed there was a threat, just like Harris voters thought there was a threat, although the sources of that threat come from different places.
Well, what about other aspects? What about the ways in which we can think about the importance of this for people's vote? Was democracy something they just paid lip service to, or was it something which actually affected how they voted? Well, again, we haven't got the complete analysis, obviously, but we can certainly ask people, what's the single most important factor influencing your vote?
And according to the Associated Press VoteCast polls, which is the largest poll we have available-- it was done a few days before the polling day-- and it has over 100,000 respondents. The future of democracy was nominated as the single most important factor influencing their vote, higher than those who said the same about inflation, or immigration, or abortion, or free speech. And clearly, it was again here the Harris voters who gave it as the most important factor. That's the purple-- the single most important factor. But if you add the two together-- single most important or unimportant-- you can see that Trump voters were also concerned about the quality of democracy. And the future of democracy, they say, affected their vote.
Now, clearly, there are many other things happening as well. We obviously have issues of abortion that was highlighted for the Democratic side. And that's seen as important by many Democrats.
We also have the issue of inflation that was highlighted in particular as the economic explanation for those who voted for Trump. And that's seen as important, as we can see, for example, amongst conservative Republicans and moderate Republicans.
And we also have other issues. But the point is that democracy, I think, when you ask people, was seen as the single most important issue overall. And it really is one which is a matter of interpretation about where the threat arises. I don't think necessarily, in other words, to conclude that point, that Trump supporters were necessarily giving up on the importance of democracy, but how they saw it partly because of misinformation, disinformation. Partly because of leadership rhetoric, partly because of the ways that the Republicans have given up on certain aspects is an important aspect.
Well, what are the real risks in terms of institutions? And here, Daniel emphasized that we can think about this in terms of the past record. We don't know what's going to happen in future. We do know how previous comparable figures have come to power, have governed, and therefore what the record is.
So let's look at a few. Let's look at Bolsonaro in Brazil. Let's look at Modi in India. Let's look at Orbán in Hungary, and then the Trump record from his first term.
What do we see? Well, these are all selected cases, but the great thing about this is we've got time series data for how liberal democracy and a number of other institutions have been affected by these leaders in their first terms and in their subsequent terms other than Trump. And we can look at the before and after for Brazil, for Hungary, for India, and for the United States.
Now, as Daniel emphasized-- of course, these are very different cases. Most of the countries which have had backsliding have, in fact, had much weaker checks and balances on the executive and much less commitment to democracy. But they do provide some historical evidence where we get some data.
First, are these leaders similar in how they treat and have certain ideas towards liberal democracy? And I have a survey here, which is the one I conducted from my global party survey, which says, yes. Basically, on the vertical axis, we have, do the leaders and the parties support pluralist or populist rhetoric? And on the horizontal one, do they respect or undermine liberal Democratic principles?
And as you can see, all four leaders, according to our expert survey, are basically placed in the most authoritarian quadrant. They don't support liberal democracy principles, and they do use populist rhetoric. And that's when we compare across all these different countries where the parties are being placed. The Republicans are very similar to, for example, Fidesz in Hungary in that regard.
So let's take some indicators. And here, I'm very much using Levitsky and Ziblatt's How Democracies Die. The familiar indicators are from the V-Dem pattern. And we can look at it over the two decades. And we can look at four indicators. What's the actual decline in liberal democracy? What's patterns in terms of civil liberties and growing restrictions on freedom of expression by the media and others?
What's the patterns in terms of electoral integrity? And what's the patterns in terms of violence? Four basic indicators. And I think we'd all agree that if those are clearly going down when a strongman leader comes to power, that's a good indicator of backsliding, and erosion, and serious risks.
What do we find? Well, here's the pattern in trends in liberal democracy, from the turn of the 21st century through to the most recent data. And it's from the Variety of Democracy Project, one of the best sources we have to try to look at multidimensional concepts of democracy, and some systematic expert data.
The liberal democracy index is widely used. What do we see? Brazil-- but there were problems before Bolsonaro came to power. And then there was a subsequent period where clearly Brazil goes further down. Why were there problems? There was problems of corruption, remember, and challenges to Lula da Silva.
There were challenges in terms of protests on the streets and dissatisfaction with the way the Brazilian government was working. So Bolsonaro, you can argue, reinforced those issues. But since then, he voluntarily, of course, left office after he was defeated. Lula da Silva came to power. And there have been something of a recovery, but from a low point.
Hungary is a worst case scenario. Of course, Viktor Orban was elected to power with Fidesz in 2010. And you can see that since then, in the first term, there was a small decline, particularly the change in the electoral system, which reinforced his power in subsequent elections. But then in the second term, the third term, and now the fourth term, democracy has gone down further, faster than you might expect.
In India, we can also see some slight decline before Modi came to power. But afterwards, it goes down, and down, and down. And in America, when Trump from 2016 to 2020, we can see the plummet in terms of the liberal democracy index. And we're very familiar with the patterns and the challenges that occurred during that period. And then a stabilization without a recovery.
So the first term looks similar in some ways to the first term of some of the other leaders. But the second, third, and fourth subsequent terms are when the real subsequent risks arise. Why? Because these strongman leaders learn how to govern. They learn how to use the levers of power.
They can bring in more of their own supporters who are very much aligned with their own vision. And that's where the real risks arise. Are there checks and balances in all these countries? There were, but whether they hold up-- maybe it'll be Hungary, or India. Maybe it'll be Brazil.
What about trends in the media? One of the classic cases of backsliding-- one of the weakest areas. And we can see a similar pattern to the one I just showed you in terms of liberal democracy in Brazil. Media freedom goes down under Bolsonaro. In Hungary, it goes down even further. In India, we know there are many major restrictions on the press. Used to have one of the most strong, independent presses in the world. And now, as we can see, threats to journalists and reporters, imprisonments. Inability to be able to show critical coverage of the leader and the party, the BJP, has had real negative effects.
So far, we can see that's gone down a lot. In the United States, Daniel emphasizes, of course, the media is one of the areas of real checks and balances-- that it has pushed back. And that's certainly true of some of the major media. But clearly, the rise of other alternative sources through social media, and other avenues, and the role of Fox News-- we can see the decline before a recovery. But in the second term, it could again be the serious risks that we see with these other strongman leaders.
And lastly, what about the issue of electoral integrity and violence? Electoral integrity recovers in Brazil according to the V-Dem evidence. It goes down in Hungary. It goes down further in India, of course, with tremendous violence against some of the opponents of the BJP. And in America, it goes down a lot as confidence declines and as there are more threats.
But of course, we know 2018 was actually given a good bill of health. And 2020 was seen as one that ultimately clearly won, other clearly with the caveat of January the 6. But nevertheless, the quality of the election has-- as we've seen in yesterday's election, there weren't actually that many problems at the ballots. There weren't that many problems in polling stations. There were the routine problems of people lining up in queues in some areas, and a small technical hitch-- administrative hitch here and there, but not violence, nor intimidation, nor many of the major problems of electoral integrity, which are so evident elsewhere. And the election, by most standards, I think, could be seen to be run fairly well.
So violence is a more mixed picture. And again, this is V-Dem data. Doesn't occur under Bolsonaro necessarily in Brazil. It goes up before then. It doesn't increase. In Hungary, it does not increase because there are other mechanisms which Viktor Orban has taken in order to consolidate his power even against a united opposition. In India, it does go up. And in the US, it does go up before going down under the Biden period.
So what are we saying? What are the dangers for democracy at home and abroad? Culturally, did the MAGA vote for strongman I think there, we need a lot more evidence. And by the way, at the end of the week, we're going into the field with the US World Values Survey, which I'm doing with colleagues in Michigan and with NORC, conducting the fieldwork.
And we've got some really good questions about support for autocratic principles as well as different types of regimes, where we have a time series from the 1980s and the 1990s. So we need more evidence. But the evidence I showed you from the exit polls said that MAGA seemed to be voting for democracy as they saw it. The risks to democracy are very real from comparable leaders, but we can also think of cases where there have been cases of strongman or authoritarian populist parties come to power. And when they leave power, we see cases of resilience.
Poland remains a question mark, but that certainly is the case there. And we can think of some other examples around the world as well. And maybe I'm selecting based on biased examples of worst case scenarios, but what that evidence shows from the institutional evidence is that the second term is where the risks arise, not necessarily the first term, where the leaders are still learning how to run the government and implement their policies. And they face many stronger checks and balances on executive aggrandizement.
So the conclusions are there are clearly risks, but this is the global picture. And I'll finish here. Essentially, this is Democratic backsliding over the net change in the liberal democracy index from the beginning of the 21st century to the more recent period-- two decades of change. What was the pattern in 2000? What was the pattern in 2021? And how have countries changed?
And you can immediately see that some of the cases I've shown you are the ones which have the worst backsliding during this period. Trump, by the way, is clearly-- that green blob is for the United States. It's not for the Belarus label below. But Brazil, India, and of course, Hungary, Poland, Nicaragua, Turkey.
We're familiar with that-- Ireland with a military coup, Greece with challenges, the Czech Republic, and many others around the world as well, including Israel. And we can see, therefore, those are the threats. But the net change also sees, on a last note, some positive gains.
So not every country worldwide has necessarily had a net decline. And therefore, there is some room for at least a more optimistic scenario. Many of the countries which have seen a better performance in these periods are small cases, small populations, or area sizes. Some of them have had ups and downs. But cases like South Korea, or Estonia, Albania, Malawi-- cases are not necessarily negative in every case. Not all cases are going in lock step.
There's checks and balances, which can be effective. So that's my conclusions. And I really look forward to learning more about the alternative interpretations and broad-- so many questions about the US election. Thanks very much.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Thank you to all of our panelists. I want to pose one or two questions to all of you, and give you a couple of minutes to respond each, and then turn to a couple of questions from the audience. And I will also try to incorporate some of the points from the audience members in these initial questions as well.
So the first thing I'm curious about, and this may be a sort meta question, is we often hear this phrase the "diffusion of democracy," although scholars in the social sciences have also talked about authoritarian diffusion. And so I'm wondering, how do you see the impact of this election on the diffusion of political regimes around the world? What are the mechanisms there?
I mean, we've heard about some concrete mechanisms of the possibility of pulling out of global or multilateral commitments. Is such a thing as a diffusion of norms that might matter here as well? And then secondly, on the democracy theme again, I'm curious to know-- and some of, I think, Pippa's public opinion data is really interesting here, highlighting the concern for democracy among diverse voters in this country.
That raises the question, what does democracy mean to them? Does everyone feel that-- define democracy in the same way? And also are there concerns that MAGA voters have about democracy in the Democratic Party?
One of our audience members has raised a couple of points about the manner in which Harris was selected to be the candidate. And from this participants' perspective, it seems to be undemocratic. How can we think about what democracy means? I mean, this same participant in the audience has highlighted his perspective, or her perspective, on how the Democrats and liberal elites were not delivering for working Americans.
So is there a different understanding of democracy here? And also irrespective of objective indicators, is what really matters your perceptions here, and where do those come from? So let me go in the order of the speakers, and then I've got some more questions to throw at you drawing on the audience.
DANIEL ZIBLATT: So yeah, thank you, Melani. These are good questions. In terms of the norms of diffusion, one area-- I mean, there's lots of ways in which this will have consequences-- in many ways, probably unknown consequences at this point. But one thing that I can point to immediately is that part of the thing-- thinking about Europe, the region of the world that I know best, that there are radical right parties, anti-immigrant parties of various flavors and stripes, some more authoritarian, some just very conservative on immigration questions.
One important one is Meloni, the prime minister of Italy. And I'll just use this as an example. I mean, she's often held up as somebody who actually has played along pretty well with the Western coalition and with Ukraine's war with Russia. I wonder to what degree-- that's partly because there was a Biden administration in the White House.
Because I think she sort of thinks of herself as a potential partner with a new Trump administration. And so you could imagine very well both Orban, who has also visited with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere, that there may be a kind of competition among these kinds of leaders for a connection with Trump. And I think this having this change in the United States empowers and legitimates a particular orientation towards the international order as well as domestic politics.
And so I could very well imagine that some of these parties that have kind of kept things under wraps, given the international setting in which the US is so important, that now with domestic change in the United States, this now will empower, embolden, legitimize these kinds of actors to speak out more vocally, and to compete in effect to be Biden's partner-- rather Trump's partner in Europe. So whereas when Biden came to Europe, he'd go visit with Macron and Olaf Schulz in Germany, these leaders are now going to compete for attention for Biden. So depending on what you think of those actors, this is potentially-- that's a mechanism through which this transfer could take-- a transformation and could take place.
In terms of understandings of democracy, I think this is very fascinating issue. Actually, you mentioned that I work in Berlin. I mean, one of the research projects that we've taken up is trying to ask people in surveys what they think "democracy" means. And what we've come to the-- finding that people mean very different things by "democracy."
And one of the things that's actually been a little difficult in studying this empirically is, often, people ask in surveys-- give respondents a kind of range of responses that accord to how political scientists think about what democracy means. And so what we've done in our surveys is more open-ended surveys, and then try to do analysis of the open-ended surveys. And we see very stark partisan difference.
So I've done this work in Germany. We see very stark partisan differences, where political actors all claim to be speaking on behalf of democracy, emphasizing different dimensions of democracy. So one classic one that comes up-- in some ways replicates what we've seen in closed-ended surveys-- is this sense of to what degree are checks and constraints on power part of democracy, or to what degree is democracy the will of the people?
And there does seem to really be this kind of populist sense that the will of the people is what democracy is. And so why that matters is that when somebody comes into power democratically, as Trump just has-- Trump has been democratically elected-- free and fair elections-- what having that definition of democracy then allows-- this sense that's just about the will of the people allows one to turn a blind eye to potential abuses of power because they are not-- if one is much more attuned to constraints on power as being an essential part of democracy, which a lot of people think, then you would be willing to call out these things as abuses. So in that sense, I think that the conception that voters have of what democracy is really does matter a lot.
MELANI CAMMETT: Josh?
JOSH KERTZER: Great. So as a humble IR scholar, I will defer to my sage comparativist colleagues for more incisive answers. But I do want to say two super quick things. Number one, I want to put a plug in. There's a great piece that just came out in Science by the political scientists Jonathan Chu, Scott Williamson, and Eddy Yeung, where basically what they did is they fielded conjoint experiments in, I think, Egypt, in Thailand, in the US, in India, Italy-- Japan, I think, as well.
And basically, they were interested in how people think of democracy, and how do people know democracy when they see it? And basically, what they found is institutional answers about what democracy is-- so respecting the will of the people, that sort of thing-- that ranks very low in folks' responses. And instead, it has to do with whether elections are free and fair, so electoral conceptions. And it has to do with protection of civil liberties, so liberal conception of democracy. And so they found this in all of these cases.
The second thing that I want to say is the-- so as we think about the diffusion of democracy, from an IR perspective, I think it's worth contextualizing this in the context of the liberal international order. And so basically, for folks who aren't IR junkies-- although it seems, from the chat, like some folks here are-- the idea here is after there are these sort of-- and this is a standard John Ikenberry story.
So there are these world historic moments. Think 1815, think 1919, think 1945, and so on, where great powers-- so basically, when you win these major wars, you get a major say in what happens. And there three different things that the victorious powers can do. Number one, they can choose to dominate. Think of Stalin in Eastern Europe after the Second World War.
They can choose to abandon, to pack up their things and go home. Think of the US after World War I. Or they can choose to institutionalize. And this IR argument is what the US did in 1945-- the United Nations system, Bretton Woods, this global, rule-based economic order.
And the intuition behind this argument, especially in Washington for folks who tend to make this argument, is that the liberal international order has its liberal character from the architects who created it. So in other words, if a non-liberal democracy had won the second World War instead, the order that would have been produced would have looked very, very different.
And so in a sense, the question that political scientists in IR oftentimes ask is-- so we think about China as this rising power and China as the next global hegemon, or maybe I turn to a kind of multipolar order. Presumably, the order that China would construct would be based on the domestic principles in Chinese politics rather than the domestic principles in American politics.
And so in this context here, as we think about the effect of Trump, but also other kinds of-- sometimes referred to as sovereigntist leaders or populist leaders-- the folks that Pippa mentioned-- I think there's a sense that these are folks who are self-described nationalists rather than internationalists. It's about America first. It's the idea that you would constrain yourself in order to produce cooperation abroad is a an argument that these folks tend to disagree with. And so I think as we think about things like Democratic backsliding, we need to think about it in the context of these broader questions about the international order. Because the international orders that can either facilitate the spread of democracy and support democratic norms, or there can be orders where these things don't matter as much.
PIPPA NORRIS: So to come back to your first point, Melani, about the issue about diffusion of democracy, I think one of the main red flags for me is that the Trump administration could easily cut USAID, the Democracy, Human Rights and Governance section, which does incredibly good work. I know this because I've worked at UNDP, and we were always partnering with them.
And so part of it is the more informal aspect of norms. Part of it is also how people see the value of democracy around the world. So there is an emulation effect, a contagion effect. But I think it's also the actual technical assistance that are provided for things like elections, and for rule of law, and for training judges, and getting more women into office, which is always behind the scenes, but is really important work. And that could easily be cut as too much-- as one of the areas where they're going to reform the State Department.
The other question about democracy-- I always say that it's not about-- when we think about populism, we know that really it makes those two claims. It makes the claim to be anti-establishment, and it makes the claim to be pro-people-- the vox pop. The people should be the legitimate source.
And whenever I get my class, one of the first things I try to do when we talk about populism is say, well, who's in favor of those? Who's against it? And I love that because they normally say, well, actually, a lot of the elites in many parts of the world are corrupt. A lot of the power is in the hands of the few and not actually expanded. It's just a veneer.
And people, therefore, feel that maybe the public should have the better, stronger say. So populism, per se, isn't a threat to democracy. That's instead, as Margaret Canovan argued years ago, a form of democracy. But it's direct democracy. It's a belief in the people.
The problem for me has always been whenever it's coupled with-- that's a form of rhetoric, but whenever it's coupled with authoritarian practices. And here, I think we need to know actually less about how people understand democracy and much more about how people understand authoritarian practices. So we've asked for years about, do you like democracy very much, a great deal, not much, et cetera. And we ask people about their values and their satisfaction.
But it's all got a "D" word in it, and that conditions people to answer in a particular way often. I think what we need to do is ask about basic practices that people turn a blind eye to which are about the executive aggrandizement and which don't include the "D" word or the "A" word. So I've been encouraging my colleagues in the World Values Survey to think about statements like, in the event of an emergency, the president should be able to suspend the Constitution.
Or the press, in the case of a national crisis, should support the governing party. So these are things which don't cue you in a particular way. And I believe they're also things which are often with authoritarian ramifications. If you go along with that, it's basically all the liberal aspects of democracy can be questioned.
But really, a lot of people might agree with them, particularly in countries where they need to have and they prioritize stability because there's instability through a variety of violence on the streets, or drug cartels, or a breakdown of the state, or a variety of other factors. So I think it's actually getting seriously at the culture of authoritarian norms and practices, which is where I'd like a lot of survey work to go, and maybe ask less about the "D" word.
And we're getting our data together. We've already done a number of surveys in different countries. I've just got the first results, actually, this couple of months. And we're going to get over 60 countries, hopefully, where we can ask this. And as I said, the United States is one of those countries.
So hopefully we can move ahead the agenda. And I very much agree with Daniel that people don't understand much about democracy. They do understand Schumpeterian minimalist electoral democracy. That's kind of basic. But we've also had-- we have a knowledge battery in the existing world value survey which asks people in every part of the world, are the following characteristics of democracy? Rights for women? Yeah, that's a characteristic people get, although frankly, it's not actually necessarily totally aligned with democracy.
But then we ask them about other things. For example, does democracy mean that the army takes over in the case of instability? And people agree, yeah, that's democracy as well. So people can be very confused if you have no tradition of democracy and you don't really understand it. It's a technical term.
So people may give lip service to it. But I think in the earlier evidence which I showed you, there is a genuine case which is simply not only liberals in America who are concerned about democracy, I think there are genuine concerns about Republicans. And they need to be really listened to and somehow accommodated as part of our broader understanding of the meaning of the election.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Well, I'd like to turn to another round of questions. I'm mindful of the fact that Josh actually has to leave to teach a class on US foreign policy. So let me throw out a couple questions. If you have time, Josh, maybe you can jump in first. And I did want to-- and they're actually a little bit more domestically oriented. So maybe let me quickly throw in a kind of foreign policy question.
And one of our participants asked about the nature of foreign policy with folks like the North Korean leader. So in the past, we've seen Trump use a kind of personalized approach to his relations with foreign leaders. And what do we expect in the way he's going to approach leaders like the head of North Korea and others? And what are the ramifications for foreign policy in other countries? So maybe let me just throw that at you, and then I'll turn to Daniel and Pippa with other questions.
JOSH KERTZER: Yeah, I apologize for-- today is NATO and alliance day in American foreign policy, so there'll be a lot to talk about. So for the North Korea case-- so I was in Seoul around the same time that there were those visits with President Moon as well. And my sense in general-- so Trump, on the one hand-- I mean, Trump gets along quite well with strong leaders. So Erdogan, Kim Jong Un, Putin, Xi to some extent.
I think one thing that both Trump and Biden have in common in a way is a belief-- a confidence in their ability to use their own personal talents to accomplish things in foreign policy. This is also Biden's-- one of the solutions he was talking about when he was on the campaign trail for overcoming partisan polarization in the US. He was this creature of the Senate-- knew the other side, knew how to get things done.
And I think similarly, there's a sense for Trump that he can talk to these folks, man to man, and they can work something out. The challenge is that American foreign policy is about more than just one person.
And there are ways in which these-- the broader structural issues that are at play here. I noticed someone was name dropping Mearsheimer in the chat at one point as well. We think about these broader structural theories, these structural dynamics. It can be pretty hard to overcome.
And let me make one point here to make it concrete. So the one thing that's interesting about Trump's foreign policy is that there's this real emphasis on volatility. He's unpredictable. This is something that he prides himself on. You're not sure what he's going to say next, what he's going to do next. And this keeps people on their toes, and it keeps people online is the argument.
The challenge is, if we think about how deterrence works-- so the idea behind deterrence is that there's something that I don't want you to do. And so I say, if you do x, then I will do y. So deterrence is based both on a threat and a promise. The threat is that you need to believe, when I say I'm going to do y if you do x, that I'm serious. And that might be something that Trump is very good at.
But you also need to believe that if you don't do x, I'm not going to do y. And the promise side of deterrence is something that leaders who engage in the volatile strategies and these unpredictable strategies usually end up not doing super well with because there's simply no reason why the other side has any reason to believe why they can-- you can overcome this time inconsistency problem going forward. And I have plenty more to say, including Canadian election. I saw that in the chat as well. But I will-- I think Poilievre will take it.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Josh. I'm going to throw out a couple more questions. I'm mindful of the fact that we only have two minutes left. So let me throw out a few more questions. Feel free to just say a few words as you prefer. So one question would be-- and maybe this is now retrospective-- why didn't more actors in American politics with influence speak
Of course, business is not monolithic. It's sectorally divided and so forth. So there's business actors with different perspectives on this. But one might expect business to have spoken up because pretty much uniformly, including economists who align themselves with Trump, have expressed concern about the impact of tariffs, among other things.
So why didn't more people from the business community speak up? Likewise, other actors. The media. There's some questions about social media. What was the role of social media in this election, particularly that we have the Elon Musk factor, who aligned himself closely with Trump, controls X, and so forth.
And then what about the role of values? So one participant asked about values-- not necessarily normatively positive values-- like racism, misogyny, exclusive forms of nationalism, prejudice against sexual minorities, et cetera, et cetera. How does this play in here? We hear sometimes about the backlash against identity politics.
So is that part of the story here, and is that a kind of global phenomenon as well? So I will leave it to Daniel and Pippa to say some closing remarks. Feel free to ignore whatever you don't want to touch.
DANIEL ZIBLATT: I'll just talk on a couple. I can imagine which ones Pippa might want to answer. So very quickly, I realized I didn't answer your question about was the selection of Kamala Harris through the primary an undemocratic-- something undemocratic?
And I guess the way I think about this-- to very quickly-- the way political parties choose their candidates varies all around the world. Actually, the US has among the most open processes in the sense that our voters-- and actually, it's a pretty recent post-1972 world in which voters select their own candidates. Usually, candidates are selected by party leaders. It's a kind of closed process.
I mean, increasingly countries have opened up the process a bit. So we're not really off too far in one direction or the other, actually, with our current system. Probably more Democratic in some sense. But the thing about the way she was selected is that, in the end, she didn't have any rivals.
Everybody else stepped down. And one may suspect there was some like behind the scenes maneuvering, maybe, but there's no direct evidence of that. I mean, essentially all of her potential rivals stepped down and endorsed her. And so this is why we ended up-- and I think this will open up a discussion.
A lot of people were saying on the eve of the election, ah, this shows we don't need primaries. And I'm not a big fan of primaries. I think it's a kind of broken process. We could have just done this all in a month. We should do this next time around.
I kind of wonder now after this result whether the Democratic Party will go back to the drawing board on that and have a more open process. So that's one thing. Very quickly, on-- now I'm forgetting your second point. I really wanted to answer the-- oh, the business-- so yeah, business and so on.
Yeah, I think it's a very-- I mean, tragically in some way, if you think that the Trump presidency is a threat to economic stability and so on, this was a very calculated risk-- hedging of risk. Some businesses spoke up, but a lot of people basically thought, well, it's looking like Trump might win, and so why get myself on the wrong side of this, especially given his style of rule?
If I don't come out and Kamala-- I mean, this is a sort of disadvantage, in a certain way-- or an advantage that authoritarian people like Viktor Orban have, certainly, is that the Democrats-- you're not really worried about if the Democrat comes gets elected. They're not going to punish business for having stayed silent. But if they speak out and so on-- if an authoritarian comes into office, then they will-- there's fear of punishment. They're going to lose their kind of contracts and so on.
And there's a really direct connection between democratic backsliding and crony capitalism. And so I think it was a kind of self-interest narrowly understood. And what we really need-- and we've seen this in other parts of the world-- in Germany, in Brazil. Part of the reason Bolsonaro is gone from the scene is business leaders came out and had a understanding of their self-interest-- rightly understood, or more broadly understood, that they need to survive in a stable political regime. And having somebody who seems not fully committed to the democratic order is going to unleash instability. And so I think it's a kind of myopia in a certain way. That's how I would describe it.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. And I leave the last word to Pippa.
PIPPA NORRIS: So at the end of our Cultural Backlash book written in 2018, we considered three strategies that you could use to try to oppose authoritarian populists. And the first one was simply mobilize. Get together in elections. Get your grass roots active. Make sure that you get a good get out the vote, et cetera, et cetera.
And clearly, in the light of the last election, then there are real problems about that unless you also combine vision and a broad sense of where you're going, which I think was still somewhat sotto voce with that sense of grassroots mobilization. It's not enough. And again, I think when Daniel said we need to have organizations in civic society and in different states checking the executive, absolutely. But it's not enough.
The second strategy was economic policy. And if it's the problem of the grievances, and the lack of economic opportunity for the working class, and the manufactured industry, dah, dee, dah, then of course, you can try and do that. And of course, that was essentially Bidenomics. And immense amounts of dollars were spent. And of course, what it produced was inflation, because the problems of actually getting product on the shelf. And that, therefore, backfired and created, in some ways, many of the key problems.
And the real successes weren't even that visible because nobody championed the things that were still-- the bridges which are being built, and the infrastructure which is developing even on where I am right now. So economics is a problem if you think that's a solution to these issues, because you can-- basically, it can turn around. The third thing we suggested was that you need to counter some of the cultural values which are out there, and not simply by doubling down on your own side on some of the issues.
So in particular, we said that we need to think about things like migration policy, and think about whether the US policy needs to be revised to think about it more like the German one, or more like the Canadian one, and really rethink some of our basic progressive ideas in order to make them more acceptable to many in America. And one of the most striking demographic changes which I noticed in the exit poll-- it was, of course, many Hispanics who swung quite dramatically towards Trump.
Why? Because they're often social conservatives. They often come from cultures where marriage is important, family is important, and the idea of binary gender identity is important. And therefore, they actually were attracted by a lot of the social conservative values.
And the fact also that African-Americans swung and Blacks swung towards Trump-- a smaller proportion, but it was still important, particularly amongst the men and the young men. That says that Democrats can't simply continue with some of the cultural policies and values. They really have to look into their own house and think, how can we make these core values, which I think are important, and which many of us think are important, somehow more palatable.
You can't simply adopt a moral absolutism. And unless you're somewhat more open to a dialogue and open to other views on some basic issues, then I'm afraid you're not going to recapture those voters that lay at the edge, which basically Trump enjoyed. So that's my two cents for that one.
Is racism, and misogyny, and nativism absolutely important for conservatives? Yes, it is. But you can't simply dismiss it out of hand. You've got to work out why those are attractive to some people, and therefore try to think about how we can revise some of our cultural values to make them more palatable.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Well, on that note, I think we're out of time. I very much appreciate all of your comments and wisdom. And thank you for taking the time to share your perspectives with us and some of your research. And go forth. And we'll face this new chapter in the new world that we've woken up to today. Thank you all.
PIPPA NORRIS: Thanks, Melani. Thanks for it. Thanks, Daniel. Thanks.
DANIEL ZIBLATT: Yes, thank you, Pippa. Thank you, Melani. Bye-bye.
PIPPA NORRIS: Bye.