The Last ArchiveIn a special, all-new episode of ‘The Returns,’ host emerita Jill Lepore returns to talk about the post-truth moment we find ourselves in and what it means for the 2024 election.
Pushkin. I feel like we got to start with the Archive intro. Do you want to do it?
What do you imagine? Imagine a place in our world where the known things go a quarridor of time bookshelves lined with old ballots, political campaign posters, and television ads. Step over a threshold to the Electoral College as if it were an actual place, a university of knowledge about the past of American politics, at.
Place many people hate. Not actually surprisingly, application numbers are dropping this year. It's a very staid old college.
It used to be held in such high esteem electoral call. Yeah, and now it's ratings have fallen.
Yeah. Well, we're here to talk about the twenty twenty four election in the context of history, but also in the context of these three Last Archive episodes we've brought back from the archives. But I thought maybe to start, we could talk about how the Last Archive was kind of born out of an election. It kind of came from the twenty sixteen election and the panic over fake news, alternative facts, the kind of Trump era epistemological crisis. And I guess now that we're eight years past that moment, those concerns you had when you started the show, like what do you think about them now? Like, how do they fit into this election cycle?
H Yeah, So when we came up with the idea you and I for the last archive, it drew a lot from a course that I'd been teaching at the Harvard Law School on the history of evidence that looked at changing ideas and standards of proof in history, the law, science, and journalism since the Middle Ages, of the kind of invention of trial by jury and the what historians call the cult of the fact, And that course maybe itself kind of came out of the the sort of two thousand and five Stephen Colbert coining of truthiness and the kind of panic in the first decade of the twenty first century and the aftermath of the non existent weapons of mass destruction, and the idea that was pursued that somehow truth had died if the Second Push administration was willing to present to the American people essentially fabricated evidence to call for a war. But like any historian watching that, did you not read the Pentagon papers? What part of how the Vietnam War was also a war that depended on wholesale misrepresentation of conditions in the other on other parts of the world to the American people. So the class was an attempt to kind of historicize a panic, and then the podcast was.
Like, wait, the panic is even greater, and it's not.
Like it's a misplaced panic, right, Like there are all kinds of reasons to think about the kind of crisis of truth. The last archive was kind of an attempt to say, well, here's a way to calm down. Not that it's comforting, but like, let's try to historicize this and have fun thinking about the history of some of these ideas over the course of a century, at least, not looking back five centuries or six centuries, but just looking in the last one hundred years of American life. What has been the kind of trajectory of our shared ideas about evidence and proof and truth. And I remember, like our big commitment was we didn't want to go after the usual suspects, Like we didn't want to have a podcast that attempted to prosecute Mark Zuckerberg or Trump ultimately prosecute. Yeah, I'd much rather prosecute Mark zucker work. Yeah, what was the third big postmodernism?
I've also got to.
Mention y yeah, yeah, yeah, So we didn't do the best job steering clear of our easy.
Villains, but still, I mean, they are kind of mentioned on the side, but I do think it amounts to a more textra portrait of the thing.
Yeah, I hope so. Well.
One thing I was thinking about when I was listening back to Project X, it's like all about polling and forecasting, and I feel like if the Trump era is kind of like the mainstreaming of the panic about truthiness and the epistemological crisis. One of the first experiences of that for people, I think, was like, how could the polls be so wrong? That was like the same moment as Brexit. It's like, oh, we miscalled Brexit. You really miscalled the twenty sixteen election and the like. There was you know, that Princeton professor who was so certain that it would be a Clinton victory that he was like, I'll eat an insect on television and then you'll eat a cricket on CNM. It was like that everybody was eating crickets. Basically post twenty sixteen, a panic I now feel has sort of vanished, Like you still hear this kind of like oh well, like maybe Trump vhoters just don't answer polls. But when we don't really know. We might be still under representing his support. But Project X feels like a kind of early history of some of that. We can predict the future with these new machines. We don't even really need to run the election anymore. And I was wondering if you could contextualize our poll crisis if it still exists in that historical context, like what is the promise of polling originally?
Yeah, I remember that in the twenty fifteen primary season. For the twenty sixteen election, I did a lot of reporting for The New Yorker, which I don't, you know, often just do researched pieces from archives. And I had said, you know, I really want to kind of go out and repreests. So I went to, you know, rallies in New Hampshire during the New Hampshire primary, and I ended up going to both conventions. And one of the things I did is I went to one of the debates and I remember there going into I think it was like a CNN media tent or something. I mean it's like a jed. Those places like a circus, like with all the kind of outbuildings that are popped up, and they were doing kind of live polling through the whole debate sort of moment by moment, and it was like, wait, this is everything that is wrong with our political culture and life. Like it was a like a Piranha like frenzy on the America. That's what you think? What do you think?
You know, I'm gonna eat your own head.
Like it was just it was it was just so mannic and crazy and fruitless, and was.
Just people with like dials like well yeah, I don't know like.
What methods they were using. Was like a kind of like instapule web calling thing, and like it just defied it possible scientific method around public opinion surveying, which is a legitimate social science that has, you know, real standards of evidence. And it was completely unhinged. And I wrote a piece that year called Politics and the New Machine that was about how data science is replacing polling because you couldn't just call landlines. People don't have landlines. The people own landlines don't represent most of the population. You know, they tend to be really older, moral whiter. Like it's just not you can't get a good sample of the electric if you ever get a hold of like a young Hispanic man on a landline. You have to wait that person's opinion like seven thousand times because that person has to represent like all young male Hispanics, whereas you know, you talk to an old white woman, it's just her, like she just represents one person. So it's just a real field of distortion. So I wrote a piece about that because I just was really surprised at the incongruity of it all that the worst polling got, like the less reliable polling seemed to be getting, the more our political arrangements were dependent on it. So that was the year that for the first time when Fox News they hosted the first of the GOP primary debates, where they used polling an average of I think four polls to decide who would stand where, and they had try to stand in the middle. And it was really early on, and there had been very little coverage of anything, but Trump's name was better known. He's a guy who had add like a television show for years, and a lot of the most reputable polling agencies I think you know, Gallop and Pew and NBC, Wall Street Journal refused to participate. They're like, you can't use our national polls that are like two hundred and ninety days before the election to determine who gets the most because where you stand on the stage determines how many questions you get and how much camera coverage you get. So you're just propping up a candidate. You know, you're just deciding what would get you the best audience. It's like one poll driving another poll. Right. That's around when I was working on this piece, and you know, the reputable polling people are like, yeah, this is unconscionable, like, and then the polling organizations that did participate in that had the least reliable polls, right, Like there were the you know, least principled ones. But so I know, it's like a trendy thing to talk about the Overton window, but you do really kind of see even with the history of polling, right, polling's not gotten better since then, and it's only made our politics messier and lousier. So I don't know, I mean to go back to your question of historicizing it. One of the things that's different about say, in nineteen forty eight, when famously Gallop predicted that Dewey would win and then the Chicago Tribune Prince Dewey beats Truman and then you see that this is a photograph of Truman holding up the paper with this giant you know, grin polling really righted itself from that. There was a big invest mitigation. The I think his social sciences counsel did an investigation. Gallup investigated itself. You know, there was a kind of reckoning with that because there were still in place institutional guardrails against like a real failure. But even that, even that, like if you look at the history of that, Gallup had said, So Gallup, George Gallup, who's not an academic, but he opens this organization called the American Public Opinion Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, so that it can so that people will think it's part of Princeton University. So his address is Princeton. It's very canny. I mean, he has guys a piece. Yeah, it is a town, so listen not you know, he had a PhD. Like the guy was a real quantitative social scientist. But he's trying to sort of cloak his endeavor in the venew year of academic legitimacy when really he's a syndicated newspaper column. It's like that's what he's kind of churning out, but in order to get newspapers to pick up his column because the people like, who cares what you say? Like with the American people believe about that, Like we have reporters to go out on the street and they talk to people in pubs and they go to pta meetings. We have like man on the street stories all the time. We know it are the people in our town, in our city, whatever our newspaper is. We know what they're reporting on, what they believe. We have reporters to do that work. Why would we take your calum or like you had, you know, you called people on telephone. How many people have phones? It's nuts. So he did this big gimmicky thing, which is he said that, you know what, our opinion research is so good that we can ask people who they're going to vote for and we will successfully predict the next president. And that's when they started doing it. And he said all the time, like this would be a really dangerous thing to do if we were doing this in order to guide candidates or you know, drive funding of candidates. So this is just to demonstrate that our public opinion research is sound. But then it was such a big hit. People love that horse race stuff that it kind of took on its own life. So it kind of then came to a crescendo of a crisis in nineteen forty eight, when like his whole business model had then become like no, no, no, no, My election predictions that were were making money, like that's how we're gaining subscribers from my syndicated column. But then so you kind of see a kind of writing of that ship. But then this guy Lindsay Rodgers writes this book right after that, or it comes out, you know, right after that, and he was like, I don't care whether the polling is accurate, interaccurate. It's bad for democracy. It's not how our democracy is supposed to work. And I it was surprising to me to discover how every critique that this political theorist Lindsay Rodgers offered in this book called The Pollsters in nineteen forty eight really still applies. And it's just it's a business model that's extremely successful, and there's not really a way you can say. And every generation has its you know grouch like me who comes along and says, wait, this stuff's actually really bad for our political culture. But it's like, well, white sugar is really bad, but all the food in the supermarket is laced with it. Like it's not going to be like saying that sugar's not so great for you. It's not going to stop it.
Yeah, it's funny because there was did you listen to the Nate Cone interview recently where he talks about finding a historical precedent for the twenty twenty four election, and the one he finds is nineteen forty eight because Truman suffered from high inflation, high prices and had actually successfully managed them and the lead up to the election. But the thing that's like not mentioned in his account is that after nineteen forty eight there's a huge crisis. It's funny, and then that ties into the Project XT thing where it's like the reason they don't share the UNIVAC prediction is because they're like, poles were so oft in forty eight, we can't come out with this landslide prediction early in the evening because it's just who knows. But I guess, like from the episode perspective, I mean, you talk about responsible polling, people who understand what the limitations of polling actually are, what the appropriate use of it is. It seems like it's a media demand or like a voter demand. People want to know how things are going to turn out, or even like a Wall Street demand, people want to be able to project forward. Like there's already all this attention given to predicting the next election because it's going to bear on how the markets do. It has a lot to do with futures in an economic sense and also in a kind of like entertainment sense. But in the Project X version of this has all of those things. It's got the sort of like we're making a show out of projections, but it also has the behind the scenes blurring of the line between how the campaign is being run, which is Rosser Reeves making the ad spots based on the gallop polling about what are people most concerned with, you know, like Miami gets after me about high prices. The Dwight Eisenhower thing. Is that the moment that those things really come together, or is it like the thirties campaigns inc moment.
Or well, I think the nineteen fifty two story remains deeply resonant because it's kind of the superbolification of election night. So, you know, when we talk to Archanoi and his work. You know, he kind of relays these tremendously interesting stories about early technologies of reporting results, like yeah, we'll have the New York Times building the you know, the the will light up red if it's going this way and green if it's going that way. They have this like yeah, like we'll blink, you know, we'll blink fast if the Democrats are ahead, and like just crazy, like it's lighthouses and it's no one really knows and they're kind of out in the street. Only in the city. Maybe you would get like any kind of updates. But in nineteen fifty two they do all this elaborate setting up of cables, right, Like they have the studio and that's got all these reports going on, and they have this map, and you know, Kronkite's gonna go to the map, and then they have the guy with the UNIVAC, the fake UNIVAC, and then there's also the real UNIVAC, and they have people are calling in with precinct results and they're trying to do tabulation, and they have punch cards and and it's a whole sort of fun circus to watch, and the clock is in the background and we'll have new results at the top of the hour, and they're trying desperately to make people watch television instead of listen to the radio. And there's very little to report. They're just not going to have the results into the morning, but they're trying to you know what we call must watch television, right, and they're really pretty successful. People are like, well, this is fun. I mean, if what else are you gonna do? It's like a Tuesday night in the vent it's very cold outside much of the country, Like it's you know, it's a civic lesson for your kids. It is pretty interesting, Like what are all these machines the TV's and brand new? It's exciting that you even have one. And oh, it's like it's like you're in the war room at the White House, Like it's like you're part of a campaign. You're wrapped into the drama of it all and there's really nothing else quite like it. And it's really successful for them, their Project X. And then there's a kind of a level raising, like you have to up your game every four years. You have to come up with a more exciting election.
We have to invent both flits there, yeah, coman.
So like you know, and if then I write about when the cinematics company is hired to go do election prediction uh in nineteen sixty by CBS, and it's just mayhem. No one knows how to program the mainframes. There's all these women trying to type in you know, who are the computers trying to type in the results that are coming in by phone, and people are falling down tripping over the cables and it's a comedy of hers. But yeah, it's still great television. And it also obscures, you know, the reality of like knocking on doors and driving people to the polls and what election day is really about. That's why I'm making the case that that's nineteen fifty two Project X is more resonant than ever before. Is because what happened in twenty twenty two, twenty twenty. In twenty twenty, remember it was the pandemic. Most people did not want to go to the polls and wait in those lines or go indoors. And you know, the best news organizations said every once in a while, like Orson Welles saying in nineteen thirty eight at War of the World's weally this is not real, you know, and they would say, like we won't really know the results tonight because mail in ballots and absentee ballots are not going to be counted over to the next few days. And right now really looks like, you know, Republicans are winning all over the country and Trump's going to win enough electoral votes. But this is a red mirage. It's you know, most people expect this to change in the coming days or even weeks as the late coming votes are counted. But you know, they said that, look maybe once every two hours. And meanwhile, except for the like thirty seconds every two hours that they're pointing out that their results are completely useless and meaningless, like really truly meaningless, the most meaningless Election night results probably ever in American history. They're selling the whole thing to keep their audience is if they have to watch second by second because the election is about to be called, and then they start calling it. And so, I mean, this is where like one can exert a lot of sympathy for Americans to believe the election was stolen because they watched that coverage and look, we watched, you know, we watched though John King he had the panels and the thing flipped and then the color turned and then we looked like this state was going this way in Arizona, in Michigan, Pennsylvania. And then you know, I went to bed and then they're like no, we no, no, no no, And then they've called it for Biden, No that was stolen. Like I'm like, I know, it's just an incredible amount of perfidy in terms of the planning up to the election, that Trump knew he was going to lose, that his supporters expected, you know, his inside like team knew he was going to lose, and they came up with these cockamamie plans to pursue a contest of the results they knew in advance. Like, I don't mean to diminish the nefariousness of their planning, but in terms of well people being willing to believe it, when he said the election was stolen.
No one is ever held.
I'm not talking about the pollsters, but the television producers accountable for what happened that night, you know, why not say and you don't even hear this now. And there's a ton of mail and we would expect a lot of mail in voting in November. We would also, I think expect really low turnouts in a lot of places that I have and I couldn't really would be really hard to account for with your polling results. And we are not going to hear an election night people saying we've decided tonight that we are gonna re examine the results of the twenty twenty election and investigate our own coverage as a public service to the American voter, and explain one the ways in which we as a news organization contributed to the chaos and American political life over the last four years. We'll be getting back to you tomorrow night. We'll have full coverage of amended election results, but for tonight, we're going to set that aside and we're going to do what we think is right. Maybe that would be bad television. I think that'd be awesome television. But I think that reckoning and accountability is genuinely required. Like I just can't even picture like Jake Tapper or whoever, like, and I don't know, these are the best people, right, like saying we really screwed up, like we are in big part responsible. It's just much easier to do something different.
Yeah, I mean, they're working within the framework that's established in fifty two, which is received and can't be changed, so they're not going to question it. I totally buy that the election night coverage contributed to this, but it does seem to me like over the last decade, you have so many crazy lies that are just convenient lies that people just like take up and believe just because.
No I mean, in the campaign, you know, the false selectors that like this. I thought about this a lot when I was asked to write a review of the January sixth report from the House Select Committee.
You're like, could have been more fun?
Could? Yeah? Like it was like a I don't know, fifteen hundred perce long, you know, I read every word of it and that I wrote this piece, but I was and it's in many ways, you know, an excellent report, and it served basically as the bill of indictment for the federal prosecution of Trump and other conspirators, and so really meaningful kind of bill of indictment against Trump. But it is laser focused on Trump, and it is a list of really indictable allegations about Trump. And you know, that was a decision that the committee made, you know, I think partly to accommodate, largely to accommodate Liz Cheney, who did not want to be indicting other Republicans aside from Trump, and who did not want to lose sight of Trump as the leader of the conspiracy. But among the things that that committee had done in its hearings, which I think are barely in the public eye at all, was investigating the role of the media, and there was another investigation into social media. And none of that stuff is in the report. And so you read that report and you're just like, wow, single handedly Trump and you know the occasional like Giuliani, Sidney Powell, other lunatic you know, you see their villainy, their outright criminality. Could there have been like three paragraphs about you know, networking cable television on election night and how it made it harder to undo that, like because you kind of you do kind of puzzle over all. Right, there were sixty one different court cases and Trump lost sixty of them, and the one that he won had no consequences in terms of a recount. Like, there's so many ways in which there's just such abundant evidence that strikes down, you know, the criminal misrepresentations and lies of Trump and his lackeys. Remember, like people remembers of the Republican parties still have not essentially conceded the election to Biden and were, you know, very close to the next election. So and you're like, why they clearly don't want to disappoint their followers. They think their constituents believe this, so they need to defy their constituents. But why would their constituents keep believing this has been disproven in every possible forum where we arbitrate truth, and like, it's among the places where we might consider asking for some accountability would be news organizations.
Especially because in twenty sixteen, that is what happened with social media. There was like an attempt at that kind of reckoning, and you don't really see any of that in twenty twenty. It is interesting to think about Project X as like a comparison for the twenty twenty election. I was thinking about framing it as they are like two separate epistemological crises. Twenty sixteen election, we no longer can predict the future because we just don't understand what's happening anymore, and then twenty twenty we lose faith in elections. But I think it's compelling the idea that they are linked in this way. I do wonder, though, to what extent do you think voters earnestly believe the election was stolen? And do you think it's going to have an impact in twenty twenty four beyond how Trump campaigns.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm not a you know, inside Beltway DC reporter. I would love to talk to someone who does that kind of work, you know, like a Susan Glasser from the New York or Dan Baltz from the Washington Post and say, are people preparing for the election denihalism? Like what is in place? Not only preparing for you know, assuring election integrity. I feel like, you know, the states and down to the municipal and town level actually do a ton of that stuff in place, Like that's why the twenty twenty election actually went so well as in terms of the election, the country is really reliable reporting of results and you know, any audits were revealed just really tremendously impressive accuracy with the counting. So I'm not worried about the election results, but everybody should be worried about the election denialism that is likely coming. And I still think honestly, when we talk about we're talking about polling that you know, if we had a national popular vote, polling would be more reliable than any When people do those national polls, they just don't talk about the electoral college. So there's like so many ways in which we are not positioned to know who is going to win an election. And this is likely to be an extremely close election. I don't think that we can expect anything other than extremely close elections at the presidential national level anytime soon. And surely the Trump campaign is thinking of all kinds of ways to undermine the outcome of the election. If Trump loses, which she's pretty likely to do, He's pretty likely to have been convicted of a felony by then, which is at least expected to cut some dent in his support among independents at least. So I'm sure they have a really elaborate plan in place for exactly what to do. And Eve, I don't know. I think it's really worrying.
Do you remember so one of the episodes that we've rerun is Hush Rush, which is the Rush Limbaugh al Franken episode, And I was remembering when I listened back to it that one of the things we read for that, but then didn't include in the episode. Was that David Posen the Columbia Law Scholars that awesome article Transparency's ideological Drift, and one of the claims in that essay that I had never seen before, and it really stuck with me. So we think of transparency laws like the progressive era in the sixties and seventies, as these like super liberal progressive reforms, but then actually they have these right wing functions when you like Foia, the EPA to death or whatever. But another way that they contribute to dysfunction and government is when you have everything broadcast on c SPAN. Everything is accessible to lobbyists and private interests especially, but like really just everybody. You have to keep acting as if the things you do as campaign strategies or the things you think your constituents want from you are like exactly how you believe and behave, and you refuse to make any kind of compromises. And that I think it speaks to that idea of we might have plenty of Congress people who don't for a second and believe that the election was stolen, but they have to act as if because this is one of the consequences of the like everything's a culture war because you can see everything behind the scenes. Do you think a way of answering the kind of crisis in the media is to take some of the work of governing offline or would that just create a whole other raft of problems.
I mean, I think there is a lot offline, but we are kind of offered the illusion that we can see at all. So you hear all the time, if you know anybody involved in politics or you know members of Congress that like, oh, yeah, these guys who still say that publicly that Trump won the election, privately they'll laugh and laugh and laugh at him and like, obviously he totally lost. The guys a complete fraud, and they want you to kind of forgive them privately, to allow them to kind of make amends by being honest with you. You know, that they can kind of feel like they're acting in good faith because really, you know, it's like a kind of weird penance for like I hear, I've heard this multiple times, like to kind of confess and try to like almost like erase your public persona by insisting yes, like to kind of have a camaraderie around that privately, and it's it's incredibly contemptible, right, Like I you can think of more sinister ways to act as a politician, like to vote for a war that you know, for you know, new caster vote in Congress to declare a war when you don't believe in it, or to withhold funding for something that is a crucial kind of humanitarian aid in order to gain some you know, really self serving pork for your state, or like things that kind of compromises that people make surely all the time that largely involve money. And yeah, you can think of worse things, but it's a pretty short list.
Yeah, it's just like you have this performance personality or there's this like unreality to the way you behave and everybody accepts it. But then it's like the only way you're behaving in public, so it becomes real. Which is this like reality TV phenomenon which is very trumpy.
But is it trumpy because I think regress is it's the whole version of that. Like the progressives are really trumpy too, Like that that's that's the that's the difference between twenty sixteen and twenty twenty four. Right, the American political style across the board imitates Trump.
Yeah, but that is like part of the premise of the last archive is that this thing that appears to have taken this this thing that like you might think Trump has caused, is actually just like he's the man for the moment because he fits all of the structures we have in place, which are these varying degrees of unreality and like right fantasies we have about the That's.
Why you know, when you look at Rush Limbo and then you look at Al Frank and you're like, I really wish Frank and were significantly different, And no he's not. He's different. You know, he's not nearly as bad. But there's you know, a real leaning in that direction of you know, let me kick you in the crotch.
Like the entertainment, like politics is entertainment, which is the CBS Election Night thing too. Yeah, well, I guess part of the point of this conversation is to find precedence for the twenty twenty four election, which is kind of funny because I feel like a lot of the narrative of the selection is that it's totally unprecedented, you know, like Trump having so many criminal cases, Biden's age, like two candidates who are historically old, And I guess maybe that's a place to start in trying to think about how you historicize these things that feel like they come out of nowhere or like they've never happened before. So like maybe to begin with the age questions, And we don't need to think about this in terms of like should Biden be the nominee for the Democratic Party, but more just like how did we get to this place where we have two historically old candidates and the bigger picture thing behind that the tear intocracy? Where does that come from? What does it mean for democracy?
Right? So, one of the reasons that I wanted to do the last archive in the first place is because as a historian, the rhetoric of the unprecedented development was really driving me crazy. Like by the time we started, I mean, I guess I really noticed that after Bush v. Gore in two thousand, which you know was unprecedented, there's like on an eighteen seventy six moment you could point to, but the it became a very lazy journalistic move for journalists writing about pretty much anything in American politics to call their rolodex American presidential historians, right, which is like five people that like you'd see David Gergan and Michael beschlass Endors, Karns Goodwin, pretty much every story commenting on whether this whatever it was, was unprecedented, and like it's a stupid question, is the thing, And there's no answer that can be satisfying because every answer reduces the past to you know, like an ice cube training like you pop out an ice cube. This one would be good with this drink like it just it's like a meaningless thing. So you know, when the two thousand and eight financial crisis happened, I remember, because then you know I would start getting these is this is this financial crisis unprecedented? And you know, how does it compare it to nineteen thirty one, nineteen thirty two? And what are you talking about? It is like nothing, there's nothing in common between two thousand and eight and nineteen thirty one nineteen thirty two, Like we're not eating our shoes. This is a completely different set of problems with finance and globalism and like and chicanery among financiers.
Like it's a that's the argument that it is unprecedented, that like everything is new because everything is a totally different set of.
Com Yes, well, they're always you could always call upon say, well, would actually be really quite interesting to compare two thousand and eight to nineteen thirty two, But it's an act of extended comparison.
There are some things that are similar. And one of the things that as a historian you're interested in doing is measuring the distance between two points and then trying to figure out what's the engine that drives you from point day to point b. You know, is it is it changes in the economy, is it US foreign policy? Is it changing to technology? Is it the circulation of goods due to new transportation infrastructure? Like, there are a lot of interesting questions you could ask, but you can't ask those questions and answer them in you know, a three minute phone call with a reporter or popping up on MSNBC or something like. It's very hard to offer up an account of the relationship between the past and the present to the media as it is currently configured. So the past is really flattened. It's like available for the occasional bond mo oh fgr once said, you know, this reminds me of something that Kennedy did, like what like as the history, especially because everything becomes narrative presidential action. So all those accounts fall prey to what historians call presidentialism, right, just just inflating the presidency as the sole mover of all events in the United States, like, oh, the economy's down, Well it's President Biden, Like what the hell did he do? I don't know, Like it's a weird. But then since the go to people among historians are like these kinds of celebrity presidential biographers, it's not their fault that they're getting the phone calls, and their answer is going to involve something that a president said or a president did, and so those answers are just really not going to be illuminating, and they're going to distort American's perception of how change happens. There's nothing that's ever structural, and nothing's really driven by economic forces or technological forces. Everything is somehow driven from the White House, and it corrupts our sense of our own capacity as voters and as citizens to act right or as parents or as you know, children, or as school principles or whatever. Like somehow everything's nationalized and partisanized, so that like is this ever precedented? As that go to or even like you know, the swine flu panic or you know, the coronavirus, like everything has to answered that question. And it sort of drove me crazy because I don't know, Like it just seems like you would you call up a chemist and say, can we turn out, uh, you know, steal into gold? Like it just doesn't. It's like that's not how chemistry works, Like that's alchemy, Like that just doesn't. It defies the method of being a chemist. Why would you ask me such a question?
Because they want like unprecedented is another way of saying newsworthy, yeah, which is then like I have a peg. This has never happened before.
This happens before, Like so I get it, and I'm like I do there's I mean, like I'm I get why a journalist want to do that. But as a story, and there is a lot to be learned from the past, so you kind of want to say, like wait, but yeah, actually there's something and let me tell you about the election of eighteen seventy six. It's really different from this, but here's how that went. So anytime I was asked to do something because a story in like rhinesse or whatever about something in the present, and I had to be a way that something in the past illuminates it. But then to try to tell that story in a way that doesn't reduce the past to the prologue to the present, like everything is somehow explained by the past, and therefore we should either like get really worried or not worry at all. Like people want to talk about the lack of civility in Congress. Remember that guy who screamed out you lie to Obama during the State of the Union. And then there was all like everybody would call this history and at Yale Joan Freeman who'd written about the fisticuffs on the floor of Congress City in eighteen fifties and eighteen forties, and it was like, somehow, sure, that's important history. We should know that. But does it mitigate the cruelty and just vulgarity of members of Congress today? Does it make us sleep easier that people were crap in the past? I don't know, Like what's the I don't get. I don't even understand what that is meant to offer, Like as a citizen, I just actually want my members of Congress to being better. I get the fact that people bashed each other over the head in eighteen fifty six doesn't actually make me think it's okay to do it today.
Well, it is interesting to think about this in the context of the conversation we're having around polling though in sofar as they're I mean, they're both entertainment oriented products that are sort of like Newsy in a way, but they're also about conveying a sense of security, like if something is precedented, if it's happened before, we've seen this before, we know everything's gonna be okay in the future, saying if you think you can predict what the future is going to be. So there is this way in which they both serve to manage anxiety about shame.
But you know what it also did. It diminished the threat that was Trump because I don't know if you can mervous, but I have really strong people trying to come with like he's he's like thirty percent Goldwater, forty percent Nixon, and the other thirty percent is George Wallace, or you know, he's fifty percent P. T. Barnum and fifty percent Charles Lindberg. It'll be like what, like, yes, there are frogs and tycoons and showmen and want to be dictators in the American past. But wait, this guy's looking like he's gonna win. Like, this guy is a huge following, And I don't place myself outside of like diminishing what that was, or what his presidency might do, or his likelihood of getting elected. But it really was a disservice to people's ability to understand him, and like, as a voter, I would say to me, one of the great mistakes of that the twenty fifteen twenty sixteen moment was the Democratic Party deciding to defer to Hillary Clinton, to drum Bernie Sanders off of all possible stages, and to discourage anyone else from running. Elizabeth Warren wanted to run, right, I would have so loved to see, Okay, they have a lot of people lining up in these Republicans, and have the Democrats say to themselves, let's see who's out there, Like why Hillary Clinton, who was a terrible candidate and a terrible candidate to put off against who became the mentual nominee. But like that to your question of like, what the how do we get here to twenty twenty four with this gerontocracy? The from the Democratic point of view, you see that real lack of faith in the people's ability to discriminate and choose the best candidate, where the party has the party will anoint Hillary Clinton, or the party will you say, of course Joe Biden is going to run. No one. Everyone has to agree not to contest that, not to even publicly challenge it, but certainly not to run against him or to give money to someone who might run against him. It's completely anti democratic with a lower case D. And the fact that the Democratic Party is allegedly running as the Party of Democracy when they can't actually even tolerate a competition for the party's nomination for president is appalling. But I think that risk aversion is somewhat I think as you're kind of suggesting tied to that fetish around unprecedented, like, oh, well, because this is the most important election that's ever happened, you know, Hillary Clinton must be our candidate. She's you know, or whatever like that. Somehow the nature of the rig you have to be willing to lose. And yeah, I like, if you don't trust the voters or the voters in your own party, then you're not doing your job. I think the reasons that that what looks like as the moment we're talking that Trump and Biden will be the major party nominees. I think the reasons for their elevation to those positions are different, but I mean, they're both representations of many political failures, the chain of political failures, but the failures are different.
Along the way, we're talking last night about the calls for an open convention from people who are concerned about Biden's age, and it's kind of a lovely fantasy in some sense, but one of the big concerns I have about that is, like, do you really trust the Democratic Party to pick a candidate that meaningfully represents what the voting base would want? And it seems like twenty sixteen is a good example of why you might be suspicious that that's actually going to yield a result that they would be happy with.
But it's not. Unlike there's currently a pretty major effort on the part of Republicans of the kind of Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum armed the party to get enough state legislatures to call for a second constitutional convention that there would be one, And that's been going on for a number of years and they're getting closer year by year, and it has been the position of the left since the nineteen eighties to oppose such a convention on the theory that it would lead to results that liberals and progressives would not like. And you can keep doing that, but you can't then also call yourself the party of Democracy. And if there's going to be a convention, maybe you should prepare for it and actually have a plan and an agenda and a proposal for what the rules of such a convention would be, and have a wish list and have a platform. Start thinking about delegates, like maybe start initiating smaller convention like meetings that involve not just the party elites but actual voters. So a reason that you don't have a lot of faith in a democratic national convention choosing a candidate that you would be happy with is you've probably never been a participant in any kind of a convention of any kind. Whereas historically, you know, state constitutional conventions were held all the time, constitutional like constitution like conventions held in towns and cities for all kinds of activities. It was like the main mode other than voting, people participated as citizens and sometimes they're called citizen assemblies. But that very act of like gathering together with a bunch of random people to kind of make a decision about something. That's what polling replaced. So we now have this like weird now now it's like tech driven thing instead of getting together at the town library. You know, we're talking here in Vermont, where there's still our town meetings, but a lot of the town meetings have become zoom meetings. Like that was the kind of consequence of COVID and also of diminishing attendance at town meetings. But we just don't We're not in the habit of sitting in a room and arguing things out, building a coalition, arriving at some kind of decision. Excepting that nobody gets what they want. That compromises important. And so no one trusts the convention as a anymore than they trust elections. I think people trust conventions a lot less because they just don't even know what that means. Like there has not been a state constitutional convention in the United States since nineteen eighty six. Was Rhode Island like it was voted on in nineteen eighty four as a ballot initiative?
Why was that a ballid initiative for them?
So they have a regular they're a number of I think it's maybe ten states that it's it's in their constitution that the voters will be asked at a regular interval, would you like to hold a convention? So I think Rhode Islands is every ten years. So there there were some of these votes in twenty twenty two. They are going to be some in twenty twenty four. Voters keep saying no because they just don't trust conventions anymore because no one even even really knows what that means. Well, how do you picked delegates and how that happened? But like a convention. I would love to attend a convention, like like actually in a meaningful way to participate in one. But it's one of the biggest holes in our system of representative government because it's a major historically, it's like a major way that Americans involved themselves in political decision making. You know, no one's going to run for the legislature and first pulling and now like social media posting is somehow like you civic conusity. Yeah, and so I get that not trusting, like or if you were a Republican and they said, you know, we're going to have an open convention because Trump's in jail now or whatever. People would really freak out. It's not on either party, like it's across the board. People don't trust the idea of letting the people decide about.
Something there was I mean this, this connects to the pos and thing also because there's that Okay, sure you can put everything about everything Congress does is now on television, but like, who's actually watching. It's lobbyists, it's private interest groups, the people who actually have the time, which most of us don't. And it reminds me of two moments in the episodes that we just reran in Hush Rush. There's the Rush Limbok quote, something that effective. If you listen to me, you never have to read another newspaper, never have to read another magazine. I do it for you, and best of all, I tell you what to think about these very complicated issues. And there's the Eisenhower ad from the fifty sixth election that we love so much that we almost made the avatar of the last archive, that little cartoon guy who's surrounded by all his voices. High prices, low prices, unemployment like full employment. Why stop? I read the papers and the magazines, like you know, but who's right what's right? How can I tell like that that kind of increasing complexity, the like daily burden of democracy is heavier every day because it's a more and more complicated world.
And I mean, no, it's just a more and more nationalized political conversation. So I think if you were just do you participate, like in your neighborhood in a neighborhood council or in your borrow in New York in borough meetings, Like if you were doing those things, it wouldn't actually be that hard to keep up with what you needed to know, like, well, there's a new budget line about our public library and this.
Mole, you know, like.
We've most of us completely abandoned our responsibility to the civic institutions that are part of our local lives.
No, well, I mean we do do that, and it is like we want to reroute traffic on this street. Maybe, yes, that is still simple in a way that it was before. Although I do think I mean, especially with neighborhood determinations and building and things like that. There's environmental reviews, like my dad is on the conservation committee. I think it's called for the suburb where my parents live, and those are like they have to do these really intensive reviews, so like, in some way, I actually do think those things are more complicated now than they were before. But I guess I'm talking more about the you know, our season two, episode five and six moon Landing argument of like, there's just stuff now that you could not possibly understand on your own, both geopolitically and technologically. The scale of the problems we face, or at least the scale the we can now comprehend that perhaps we could not before, does feel master And if.
You really believe that, then then why does everybody get to vote?
Because I do still believe in people's capacity to understand these things. I'm just saying I think it takes more work, and I think one of the problems is you get all these shortcuts from doing the work, and some of them can be trusted and others of them can. But maybe there ultimately is no real substitution for like taking the time to think hard about these issues, and we've all just gotten comfortable with substitutions that we shouldn't be comfortable with.
Yeah, And I think that the sense though, of helplessness around do I even know enough to figure out how to vote?
Here?
In this you know from the Senate seat in my state is exacerbated by just a tremendous deterioration of support for local news organizations, which means that the kind of daily reporting about what's going on in your town, your neighborhood, your state, at your state house is really hard to find, and it's really hard it's hard to figure out who's going to pay for that. So, you know, in the absence of that local news coverage, people turn to the drama of the national news coverage, and they get kind of radicalized by their news sources. And you know, we can think of all kinds of problems that fall from that, but I don't think until we solve the problem of local news we can solve those larger problems.
Yeah, something that's interesting about twenty twenty four is it's the biggest selection year in history. You know, roughly four billion people are going to go to the polls this year. That's like about half the global population who are going to participate in self determination. That's an incredible thing. But then there's this sad undercurrent to that, which is that in so many of these elections there's this you know, cliched thing that's kind of true that democracy is on the ballot, And I guess it brings me to this question about twenty sixteen, in the panic around democratic norms, how do you actually promote a democratic cast of mind? Which we've talked about in the radio episodes too. What is your answer to that? How do we inculcate in voters the spirit of democracy, the tolerance for the complexity, and the daily work of it.
I think a lot of really smart people have thought about that like that. The new Zublett and Levitsky book on the Tyranny of the Minority really kind of spells out what the stakes are, but there have been some great efforts made at thinking through what the solutions are too. So one of my favorites is the report that the American Academy Arts and Sciences put out several years ago after like a multi year study involving, you know, hundreds of people all over the country. Was led by Daniel Allen, political theorist at Harvard, and among their recommendations were these kind of small steps, like the kind of obvious thing like election Day should be a national holiday, it should be held on Veterans Day. It would honor veterans to do so. Then you sort of kind of instead of election night being a television and social media spectacle, you could have the day itself as a kind of July fourth celebration of the act of voting and the great privilege that that is, and people wouldn't have to go to work, and you know, the sort of federal holiday piece of it. And so it was for instance, really discouraging to me personally when Biden's big move was to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. It was like, okay, you could have met you Like there was another that was like, this is this is a kind of real bipartisan project, Like there's not. It's like just there's really not a ton of objection to that. And the only objection is it would make it possible for more people to vote. So it's hard to state that as an objection publicly. You know, there should be a year or two of mandatory national service that could be civil or military, that would bring together people, you you know, serve with people from all over the country and it would sort of mix Americans up more. Like things like that that just seem they seem kind of you know, for giving student debt, it's gonna was always going to be challenging to enforce, to implement, to get through to defend budgetary grounds. But the National Service, which would have also provided funds for students to go to college, right like, in recompense of that, there're you know, there's just like a much better idea and it actually achieves in terms of support for college education for people that can't afford. It is a much better solution because it meets all these other civic goals, whereas the forgiving student debt is like become a really bad pub you know, partisan hot potato. Like. So it's frustrating to see these really good ideas not having been quite taken up yet. But that doesn't mean there aren't really good ideas out there. So in terms of how to implement those things or why they haven't been implement men did because they're you know, they've been supported by so many different people. I sidedly think you have to look at who's making money off of not implementing that stuff. If I think about twenty twenty four as the product of a series of political failures, and you have made the case for media accountability for some of those failures, I really just think historically, so much of the blame is going to be placed on the Republicans and the Senate who voted against convicting Trump of impeachment and the second of impeachment after the January sixth insurrection. That was just a complete abdication of their constitutional duty as members of the Senate. It was a completely clear cut case. And among the arguments that you now see, For one thing, you know, Mitch McConnell famously said, oh, you know, he's subject to criminal indictment and prosecution, and that's the way this should happen. He's immune from criminal proscription. But for another, you know, when you read memoirs of people like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney, you learned that a lot of those members of the Senate who voted against conviction did so because they had been subject to threats of violence against their wives and young children. And as terrifying as that isn't as terrible as that is, as itself, as you know, the symptom of the pathology of our politics. You are a member of the Senate and your obligation is to cast the correct vote. And it is like a trial by jury. It is a trial by jury, is it? It is our constitutional trial by jury? And you can't choose to vote not to convict out of fear and and and and stand by that. And I mean, I just think when we think about all the things, all the kinds of compromises to what is true and what is not true, how do people know what is true? How are we to know who to believe? At the end of the day, those guys, the guys who voted not to convict Trump in the Senate, I think they're the heaviest burden for you know, the New York catastrophe that is our current political culture.
Yeah, to wrap up, We've talked about a lot of sort of bad habits of American democracy, and I think one of them is this idea that the election is all that matters. And it's hard to escape that idea in an election year. And obviously it is an extremely important thing, but it's not the only thing. If you were to come up with three rules for keeping your head during an election year, what would they be.
Yeah, I think that the rules that I live by are just like completely unpalatable. Most people never ever go on social media, just refuse to participate, and it is bad for the human condition. I've just never heard a really powerful defense of social media as being good for you psychologically, emotionally, politically, culturally. So that's me though I can't like, that's not a prescription. People don't live that way, Like that's just my own quirkiness. But I think, come up with some decision for yourself about what amount of that or what exposure to that, or what participation in that seems to you defensible and where does it cross the line. This is good. I feel good about this. This is how I learn about new music, this is how I stay in touch with these people. Whatever it is. That's good. But I think to think really carefully about where to draw the line yourself between what's good for you politically and not just good for you, good for your community, for the polity to which you belong, good for our political culture. More more people make more responsible decisions about that, things would things would better. I mean, you know, going to the neighborhood council meetings, getting involved in the local convening of whatever kind of convening it is. You know, the suggestion like join a knitting group, like honestly, like figure out a way to meet with other people in each other's houses and talk about what you're going to do next, Like are we going to knit a sweater? We gonna We're gonna work on a hat next time.
Like just a massive campaign.
I just disagree with people about something with very low stakes and accept that how compromises work, and like just kind of exercise those muscles around, like being with a group of people that are not your own family and not your workmates and which you make some decisions like don't really matter. You know, we're a book club or whatever, like get together, you know, talk about the podcast. I don't know, it doesn't really matter what you do, as so long as you like meet with other people like in person and make decisions that involve compromises. Like that's just a good place to be in terms of figuring out like what do you actually believe in? In terms of like if people get together and decide things together and consent to them as a group, was that a good outcome? I think the reason people are so vulnerable to authoritarianism is they have very little experience of civic participation any longer. Or you know, it's the declining church membership, right, Like if you were going to your church board meetings all the time, and many people do, but many people don't. You'd have a model for like, yeah, actually, when we get together with a bunch of other people and we argue it out, like we usually come up with a good app Like you have to find some way to have to be a part of your life. Yeah.
It goes to the like at the end of the Epiphany episode when you're talking to Steve Shapin and he reads that passage from the Social History of Truth. Yeah, where a knowledge is a collective good. This kind of like bears on our social relationships. It bears on trusting people, and to trust somebody you have to know them, not just in the way you might know someone at a distance online.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so you know there has to be a way. Is it not that hard to put that back into your life if you had it once, or to find it if you don't have it yet. Third role, Oh oh, my third role is it's like actually expose yourself to ideas that you think you really disagree with and try to understand why they are persuasive to other people. It's you know, that's not a it's not a bold or new idea, but it's still that's I think that's much harder for people to do.
Yeah, well this was awesome.
Happy twenty twenty four, man, Yeah.
Happy twenty twenty four. Maybe live to see twenty twenty five.
