The Daily Show: Ears EditionJon Stewart Calls BS On The GOP's Performative Patriotism | Steven Levitsky
Jon Stewart unpacks Biden’s fired-up State of the Union and Sen. Katie Britt’s disastrous GOP kitchen rebuttal, then calls bulls**t on conservatives branding themselves the party of “true American patriots” and wrapping themselves in the Constitution, while their leader Trump's rhetoric sounds more like that of an undemocratic king. And Harvard University professor Steven Levitsky, co-author of the bestsellers “Tyranny of the Minority” and "How Democracies Die," joins Jon to talk about how the Founding Fathers shaped elected democracy through improvisation, the challenge of constitutional reform, and the importance of improving and evolving democratic institutions.
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This is the Daily Shot with your host Short Steward.
Showtime wavering to Dawn Show.
My name is John Short. We have a fabulous show here tonight.
I'm not you know what I'm not gonna do tonight.
I'm not gonna overthink it. Honestly, I'm just gonna come out here like Pacino.
At the Oscars.
I'm just gonna mumble a few words there and eventually you'll figure out what.
I was getting at.
It's fine.
The big event we need to talk about, it's the Oscars of politics, the State of the Union address.
Last Thursday night, Joseph raising A.
Biden the club.
He had the unenviable task of having to lay out his vision for the nation whilst also demonstrating that he is not too old, not too tired to be the President of the United States, and that he wouldn't rather just tie thousands of balloons to the White House and had to paradise balls. And so President Biden entered the House Chamber, navigating through our divided Congress and barely barely barely getting past the bridge troll who guards the bodio?
What say you, sir?
I say to the American people, when.
America gets knocked down, we get back up. My message of President Putin, I've known for a long time is simple. We will not walk away betting books.
It's wrong.
I say, stop it, stop.
It, stop it, stop it, pass universal background.
Check, Send me to border Bill.
Now, the state of our unit is strong and getting stronger.
Which one of you princks wants to fight? Put up your dukes Biden's back, baby. I know that all the haters have been out there talking their shit.
He's too old, he's too weak. He can't make it. He won't be understand. Oh, I see you haters. I know who you are really.
You know. We said in rehearsal, can you give me a prettier mirror at boy boy?
Did they deliver?
That? Is?
Of course?
By the way, the state of the Union was just the Democratic message. Would that message survive? Would that message survive? A concise and intelligent rebuttal, go ahead of it? What happens to happen on Thursday? I should read the whole thing, though I should. Would it survive a concise and intelligent rebuttal from the GOP or whatever it was that Alabama Senator Katie Britt.
To the batman, Our families are hurting. Our country can do better. President Biden's border policies are a disgrace. Mister President, enough is enough, end this crisis and stop the suffering. We see you, we hear you, and we stand with you.
If you're if you're going to stand with me, could you stand a little bit further away. I imagine one of her kids just came downstairs and was like, I'm sorry, Mom, I just came down to get a bowl of cereal. I didn't realize you were losing your mind. I'll come back when the Zannies kick in.
Now.
Look, everybody's had a bit of a go at Senator Britt because her rebuttal was objectively terrible.
But there was one moment in a rebuttal that didn't.
Get as much attention that I thought was quite interesting.
We are the party of hard working parents and families, So I am asking you, for the sake of your kids and your grandkids, get into the arena. Never forget we are steeped in the blood of patriots who overthrew the most powerful empire in the world.
Two things, One who smiles when they say the line steeped in the blood of patriots? And number two, this is just one more entry in the report publican mythology that they are the inheritors of the American revolutionary tradition, that they somehow are more american y than non Republican Americans.
We are the party of the real American.
People, real America, where people work hard, they're patriotic.
They don't want to transform America like the Democratic Party wants to.
Do this liberal bubble in New York or you know, in California that don't understand where real Americans are at.
The Democrat elite very simply hate America.
I don't think they hate America. They hate room temperature. Yoga is really Yoga's posed to me very hot, just out of curiosity.
What is it about the Republican Party that makes it Americanier than the rest of us.
We're the party and ideol of the Constitution.
Every decision that I make starts with asking the questions is this constitutional?
I believe in this document.
I carry it with me next to my heart because I refer to it daily.
As we all know, the Constitution starts with the three most important words outside the Bible, we the people, the power of we the people, We the people.
The Constitution. We believe in it. They do not.
Why do you rip it up?
That was your copy. You said that that's what they do. When you did it, you ripped it off like.
Shinad O'Connor is like I believe in the Pope. But oh yes, it's an article of faith that Republicans love the Constitution. They give speeches in front of the Constitution. They cover their buses in the Constitution. They dress up like the people who wrote the Constitution.
Do you communists with your unconstitutioned buses and zero cornered hats.
That's why these patriots love Donald Trump, for he alone will restore the rule of law in our constitutional republic.
Trump's lawyer claimed the president has a legal license to murder his American political rivals.
Just gonna just gonna check my get them. It's gonna check time.
I actually keep my heart next to my constant.
To that's how important. My hands are shaking. I'm some nervous.
I don't see anything in here about assassinating your political rivals. Here it is hold on, I asked, it says the president must faithfully execute. Well, I think we're done here. Sorry, the laws of the land. Never mind why. I don't want to be a nitpicker, but I do not remember the assassination episode of Schoolhouse Rock under the constitution, wouldn't you get in some trouble for that?
I feel that as a president you have to have immunity.
Very simple.
Yes, it is the bedrock American constitutional principle. The president must be above the law, out of reach of the law. Look forget the constitution accountability. So the law of the land is basic magna cartas shit. Keep a tiny magna carta in my you know what. I'm sorry, this is just a flip book. Hold on, Oh, dog's never going to catch that car. Maybe they like Trump because he's more of a Bill of rights guy.
President Trump attacking the First Amendment and freedom of the press.
You take the writer and or the publisher of the paper, a certain paper, you know, and you say who is the laker national security?
And they say we're not going to tell you. They say, that's okay, You're going to jail.
And when this person.
Realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner. I believe it was Thomas Jefferson who won. Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, though obviously, as with any right, there is some wiggle room for non consensual aspect. Don't blame me, that's Jefferson. He said that, Thomas Jefferson.
Look it up. Hold on, let me get But that's the press, the press or the enemy of the people. How does Trump feel about freedom of assembly? He says, can't you just shoot them?
Just shoot them in the legs or something, And he's suggesting that we should do that.
We should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters. The commander in chief was suggesting that the US military shoot protesters. Yes, in the streets America or Nations capital. That's right.
Well, they'd still be freedom assemble, just the assembly would be more of a pile. But that's just hearsay from Trump's secretary of Defense at the time.
Look, how about the Fifth Amendment? Due process?
Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.
What the fuck are we doing?
You know, I'm pretty sure that shooting a guy on suspicion of stealing a pair of Khakis violates not only the Constitution, but the Ten Commandments and the Gap Employee Handbook. All right, I promise you that is the end of the things in my jacket. Now we've had our fun dancing around the former president's rather eccentric interpretations of our country's founding document.
May I offer you something more explicit.
I only want to be a dictator for one day.
Just so you know, that is how it starts. I'm not saying anybody has.
To do the arm salute.
Let's just start with a few people doing the arms saluke, and we'll see if the armed salute catches on. Ignoring the Bill of Rights, tearing up the Constitution, pining for a brief stint as a dictator, well that settles it. When the good, patriotic, constitution loving real Americans hear Trump's disrespect and disdain for our sacred constitutional principles, they will be outraged.
I'd really have Donald Trump is a dictator for four years. Absolutely, this country needs a dictator. I hate to say that, but it's the truth.
He could stand on the front steps of the Waite House and commit murder and I'm with you, but he.
Says it and I'll go with it. And if he wants to be a dictator, then so be it.
This is it the Thomas Nast cartoon, Patriots festooned in American flags co signing dictatorship.
Remember we the people? You know.
There's more words after that, right, smaller font, still binding. Look, if you want to love Trump, love them, go to the rallies, buy the sneakers. You want to give him absolute power. You want them to be the leader uber aalis. You want him to have the right of kings. You do you, but stop framing it as patriotism, because the.
One thing you ft out, Sail.
Is that Donald Trump is following the tradition of the founders. He is advocating for complete and total presidential immunity his words, not mine. That is monarchy shit, and it's your right to support it. But just do me a favor for historical accuracy. Next time you want to dress up at the rallies, wear the right colored coats.
That's what you are.
And I just want to call you out, and I want you to know we see you.
Here.
You no, when we come back to scylet Stephen Levitt, he will go on down the tall figure out.
What about the doll till I got tonight.
A professor of government at Harvard University. He is the co author of two best selling books, How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. Please welcome to the program. Stephen Levitzky, sir, let's go.
What are bad boy? The book is called The Tyranny of the Minority. What is so? You wrote How Democracies.
Die, a recipe to kill our democracy, and now Tyranny the Minority. What is Tyranny the Minority about?
Well, we wrote How Democracies Died many years ago, now before it seemed so imminent to some of the Americans that that democracy is in danger. We wanted to write a book that described for Americans what it looks like when a democracy gets into trouble. I studied Latin America. My CA author Daniel studies Europe and the interwar period. So we've we've seen democracies getting in trouble. We've seen the democras die, and we wanted to describe to Americans what this looked like so they would be worn. After we wrote the book, we got a lot of questions about what the hell do we do?
How do we get out of this?
Mess.
And so the book is an effort, first of all, to better understand how we got into this mess, but also to think a bit about how to get out.
So how when you're talking about how we get into the mess, the Constitution is really our you know touchstone, is that the document that actually got us into this mess.
The Constitution, i should say, is a brilliant document.
Is the world's don't head, sir.
It is the world's oldest written constitution. Has done us a lot of good, but it is also part of the problem today. We a majority of Americans support democracy, A majority of Americans support the really interesting experiment with multi racial democracy that we are evolving into in the twenty first century.
A majority of Americans, every day since Donald.
Trump came down the Golden Escalator have opposed Trump. But we have a constitution that protects, that enables, and that empowers an authoritarian minority party.
And that's problem.
But isn't that The very nature of the Constitution was the contradiction at its.
When it was being written.
All men are created equal, black people are three fifths. I mean, it's a mathematical equation that from the get go was absurd.
It was absurd Now, in some fairness to the founders, the elites across the world were on democratic in the eighteenth century, but over the course of two hundred plus years, democracies across the world have gone about fixing the original citizen.
So you're saying that the Constitution was a balance between that ideal and the practicalities of well, how do we let the southern states who have less population not be steamrolled by a pure democracy?
Right?
It was a couple things.
First of all, it was a document created by people who feared democracy, who feared the majority rule, because the majority rule didn't exist in the world.
What did they think if it wasn't kings, what did they think it was going to be?
They didn't know.
They were in completely new terrain. There had never been a republic like this before. We'd never had an elected leader before. The electoral college was a third choice. It wasn't Madison's first choice. Madison designed a system that would have looked more like Europe's parliamentary democracies.
That was shut down.
A number of folks in the Convention pushed for direct election of the president, which is what all other presidential democracies in the world today do.
That got voted down, just out because.
Not even for a unitary executive, didn't they push for the executive would be a panel, would be a group of individuals.
There were that was that was one suggestion. But so they were, they were, they were scrambling, right, they did. They couldn't they couldn't reach a majority, and they didn't know how to elect a president. So the electoral college was an improvisation as an experiment.
Was it an improvisation to bring a compromise to the southern states? Is that because the North and smaller industrialized and the South and the smaller states, Right, Look, so this was the compromise to bring the union together.
Yeah, I mean this was this was a really tough problem, right, they wo'd We had thirteen colonies that were and there was a fear that they that they were apart, that there might be civil war, that there might be violence. The Articles of Confederation had failed miserably, and there was a real fear that if if we didn't hang together, the Brits or the French would would would would come in and make things very difficult for us. The whole project could be blown to bits. So these guys had to forge a compromise, and they made concessions that were imperfect in fact, George Washington, let me just say this, George Washington, just weeks after the Philadelphia evensu wrote a letter to his nephew describing the Constitution as an imperfect document and saying that it would be up to future generations to improve upon it.
But do you think it's strange then that a lot of the Constitution really is a practical matter, sort of a pragmatic document that is very much nuts and bolts of how do we do this mechanically, logistically, and yet we infuse such almost religious dogma. We almost view the founders now in a kind of a fundamentalist way of it was spoken through them from God. It was they were absolutely sure this is scripture, right.
We didn't always see it that way. For much of you.
As history, Americans, both politicians and American citizens of all types have worked to make our system more democratic. The expansion of suffers, construction reforms, the progressive Euroa.
Oftentimes that was brought through violent upheaval.
I mean, the Civil War is what brought that about.
Suffragette, even the Vietnam War when they lowered the voting age. If there hadn't have been the draft, people hadn't have gone to Vietnam, I don't think you would have seen the expansion of voting to eighteen year olds.
Constitutional reform is tough, it's costly, it takes work, but we've done it throughout our history. And it's really only the last fifty years, only in our lifetimes, that we've kind of stopped thinking about how to make our system more democratic. We stopped doing the work of improving our democracy.
Let me ask you, and this is a slightly different point than some. Maybe it's the design of the constitution that allows for rural states to have maybe an outsized influence, especially in the Senate, which is a relatively minoritarian body to begin with, one person can blue slip something that people can constantly stop things as one person and that person is always and Paul no. But is there also an issue that, as the world changes so rapidly, is democracy foundationally an analog system and that in an increasingly digital and fast world it's unwieldy even in its best iteration.
And is that what also.
Gives a kind of shine to the idea of dictatorship or authoritarian principles where things can be mobilized more quickly, decisions can be made. You know, democracy is painstaking. It's a grind, it is.
And this is not the first time we've been around this bent right in a century ago, whether it was the Russian Revolution or the rise of fascism, during a period of dramatic change, industrialization, the entry to the modern era, people looked around and said, yeah, Stalin, that that works better, Hitler Mussolini, that.
The trans run on time.
Turns out in the long run there are costs to dictatorship, and that dictatorships don't They may shine for a while, but in the long run you don't much like the results. So we always have to be Uh, we've got old institutions and we constantly have to be thinking about how to improve them. But the basic idea of electing our governments and electing our governments in a context in which we enjoy a wide range of individual liberties, I don't think that's.
Outdated, right, That stays no matter what the kids say on I'm going to say Instagram.
I think the kids are kids get a bad rap.
Sometimes they are among our strongest defenders.
Well, you teach them in college, so you see them. I see them. I find them to be fascinating.
You know, there's there's always that Millennias or later or whatever.
There's I don't find that another one.
You're going to save are emerging multiracial.
Day better, somebody's got to the trinity of the minority.
It's noble right now. Stephen Levitski, thank you so much for being here.
Hi, everybody that goes over tonight.
Before we go, we're gonna check in with your co host for the rest of this week. Does he lie again? Michael Costa? Everybody burn so excited? What do you guys get planned for the week? John will be the latest possible legislat Democrats. I'm hoping we'll to other social media for the Biden campaign. You guys are gonna be doing that all week, but talking at the same.
Time, of course, not John, that would be ridiculous.
Looking forward to it. Does he like to get out?
Everybody?
Week?
Hope?
Week? Here it is a moment is out?
And what does President Biden do well? He bans TikTok for government employees, but creates an account for his own campaign. Y'all, you can't make this stuff up.
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