M1: From Kerkow media, have you been trying to make sense
M1: of all the insanity coming out of our politicians lately?
M1: Me too. So today we may just shed some light
M1: on what's really happening rather than focus on all the
M1: noise of the day.
F7: Here again. But there again. Here again and again.
M9: OK, so it's better. The new administration is, well, governing
M9: for a change, but maybe we're not quite in happy
M9: days yet. The first time that song was played at
M9: a Democratic convention was for FDR in 1932. Politics were
M9: complicated then, but we survived and in fact we flourished.
M9: And that song is played over and over again in
M9: conventions ever since. Today, our politics feel angry, impossibly complicated.
M9: We're still partisan and we're even more and more divided.
M9: That's why you're listening to politics. Meet me in the middle.
M9: I'm Bill Kurtis.
M4: What are you going to do about it? Perhaps you've
M4: heard the renowned Yale law professor Jack Balkan describe cycles
M4: in a democracy when the republics become less representative and
M4: less devoted to common good. We'll explain that later.
M2: A time when decay is brought on by increasing economic
M2: inequality and loss of trust, which threatens our constitutional system.
M2: So he calls it a constitutional right. In his book
M2: about the subject, he actually offers a message of hope,
M2: saying American democracy has weathered these cycles before and we'll
M2: get through them again. And in his book, The Cycles
M2: of Constitutional Time, he explains our democracy as we move
M2: through the rise and fall of dominant political parties. Sound familiar?
M2: The waxing and waning of political polarization? Does that sound familiar?
M2: And then the alternating episodes of constitutional right and constitutional renewal.
M2: Notice that end on an up note. He explains why
M2: American politics seem especially fraught right now. It's because, well,
M2: we asked him to join us so he could explain.
M2: This isn't a rehash of the news you've been consuming
M2: over the last week. This is important. This is an
M2: explanation as to why we're living through what we're living
M2: through and what exactly comes next. So stick around.
M1: Meet our much smarter co-host back from last season. First,
M1: Jane Albrecht has been a member of the U.S. Supreme
M1: Court bar and an international trade attorney who for a
M1: decade protected First Amendment rights for the film industry. Welcome, Jane.
M1: Nice to have you back.
F1: Good to see you. Good to be back.
M1: And of course, Ed Larson, our Pulitzer Prize winning historian,
M1: best selling author and worldwide lecturer. How are you doing? Ed,
M1: thanks for zooming in.
M12: Hey, I'm also a member of the Supreme Court bar.
M1: Sorry about that, Jack Balkan. He's the night professor of
M1: constitutional law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School.
M1: He's the founder and director of Yale's Information Society Project,
M1: and he's authored numerous books and over 100 articles and
M1: areas like Constitutional Theory, Internet law, freedom of speech, reproductive rights.
M1: You've likely read his stuff in The New York Times,
M1: The New England Journal of Medicine, The Atlantic. He's got
M1: degrees from Cambridge and a couple from Harvard, where he
M1: was also a visiting professor. In July of 20-20, Jack
M1: Bokan was elected to the American Law Institute. We're honored
M1: that he could join us here. Hey, Jack, thanks for
M1: coming in. Pleasure. A pleasure. So before we dive in,
M1: I want to ask you a personal question. Is that OK? Sure.
M1: Personal questions. Why not? OK, what's the end goal? Are
M1: you looking for actions to be taken as a result
M1: of people reading your book?
M5: I want people to understand how we got here, why
M5: things look so bad today. And I want people to
M5: understand that if they can take the long view, there
M5: is hope, there is the possibility of renewal. But that
M5: renewal will require mobilization, commitment, devotion to the common good.
M5: But if people have that, then we can get through this.
M1: And do your students read the book?
M6: Yeah, some of them out there very interested in the
M6: future because they're going to have to live in it.
M1: Yep. Yep, absolutely. So let's dive in. You've been quoted
M1: saying that America is nearing the end of the Republican
M1: Party's long political dominance. Yeah. Can you describe that?
M3: So let me tell you an interesting feature about our system,
M3: which makes it different in a parliamentary system like, say,
M3: in Britain or Canada. So we have a system that's
M3: designed to make it very hard to get all of
M3: the levers of power that was part of the original
M3: design of our Constitution. So we separate state and federal
M3: power with separation of powers. We're staggered election terms. A
M3: president is four years the House to the Senate six
M3: and that staggered life tenure for justice. So that means
M3: it's very hard to get your arms around the whole government.
M3: But when you do when a party manages to do that,
M3: it tends to remain dominant for a very long period
M3: of time. That's because it's hard for the other party
M3: to basically climb up the hill and displace it. So
M3: American politics is organized in terms of regimes in each regime.
M3: There's a dominant party. When I grew up, I was
M3: born 1956. The Democrats were the dominant party. It's what
M3: I call the New Deal civil rights regime. Coalition, by
M3: around 1980 or so, the Republican Party became the dominant party,
M3: and it's a party which the conservative movement has been
M3: the dominant force in American politics. Is it always a pendulum?
M3: It depends. No party stays dominant forever. Every party ascends,
M3: its coalition becomes winning, wins most of the elections, but
M3: not all of them. But it basically sets the tone
M3: for politics. And then eventually it fades away. It dies
M3: out just like all things got really interesting. So the
M3: Republican Party has done it for about 40 years and
M3: now it's running on empty.
F1: What causes a political party to die and can they
F1: really die? These days?
M6: The Democratic Party doesn't die off after the New Deal
M6: coalition collapse. Rather, it just doesn't win that many elections anymore.
M6: It doesn't control Congress as often. It doesn't win the
M6: presidency as often, and it doesn't set the basic tone
M6: of politics. What I mean to say is that the
M6: Republican coalition is breaking apart and that the party's dominance
M6: is going away. We can spend some time talking about
M6: the future Republican Party. It's very interesting and it's very
M6: different than what happened to the Democrats in the 80s,
M6: because lots of things are different.
M1: They certainly do seem to be sidetracked, Jack.
M5: Well, they're in the middle of a civil war. So
M5: when I first started doing this research, they were already
M5: started the Civil War. It was during the time that
M5: the rise of the Tea Party. So there was a
M5: civil war between Tea Party folks and establishment folks. And
M5: then Trump came along and from Albany papered over all
M5: the differences. And then once he left, the civil war
M5: started over again, although on different terms. Now now it's
M5: not Tea Party versus establishment. It's sort of Trump versus establishment.
M5: But they're in the middle of a bitter struggle among themselves.
M5: And that is also weakening their position. But their coalition
M5: had been decaying for many years before that.
M9: You've said that America is at the height of a
M9: long cycle of political polarization. Clearly, we're all feeling that.
M9: Is this what you mean about constitutional? Right. Give us
M9: some examples of it, though. What do you mean by that?
M6: Well, no polarization are not the same thing. What happens
M6: with the Voting Rights Act in 65 and the discovery
M6: by the Republican Party that cultural issues are the way
M6: to break apart the New Deal coalition? What happens with
M6: those two things is that you start to get increasing polarization,
M6: American politics, and it gets worse in the 70s and
M6: it gets worse in the 80s and it really gets
M6: bad in the 90s and nobody can imagine to get
M6: any worse. And then it gets worse again in the
M6: 2000s and then nobody can imagine it any worse. Nothing
M6: it does. It gets worse in the 2010s. And now
M6: we're at levels of mutual bitterness and enmity we haven't
M6: seen since the civil war. That's the story of polarization
M6: in America.
M1: OK, so where does this constitutional challenge come in?
M5: Constitutional rock is a feature of a republic. There's this
M5: famous line by Ben Franklin. You've all heard of a
M5: woman asking what kind of constitution you've given us. He says,
M5: a republic, madam, if you can keep it. Very famous line.
M5: But everybody focuses on a republic. But actually, the key
M5: words are, if you can keep it. The framers understood
M5: that republics are very delicate. They require commitment to the
M5: common good. They require power, what they used to call
M5: civic virtue. They require people to put their country over party.
M5: They require cooperation. They are not demanding everything that's yours,
M5: but working for the good of a democracy as a whole.
M5: And when that's happening, you have a well functioning republic,
M5: but that doesn't stay that way forever.
M1: So, Ed, let me bring you in for a second.
M1: I've always felt like the Constitution was not supposed to
M1: be like a railroad track. It's supposed to be a guide,
M1: a general guide for how we operate as a civilized society.
M1: Do you think that we're accomplishing that?
M8: I agree with Jack and you that it is a rough,
M8: very short framework that's designed to spread power among different
M8: sources to maintain a balance, because the people who drafted
M8: it believed deeply in the Enlightenment idea of you didn't
M8: want to consolidate power in any one source, be an
M8: oligarchy or a monarchy, you wanted to spread it out.
M8: The constitution is really a very, very rough framework.
M12: You have just the outline of how a government will
M12: work and how it will spread power. But the result
M12: is when anybody gets a really strong head of steam
M12: up like a president and wants to break those boundaries,
M12: it's very hard to corral them. We saw that with FDR.
M12: We saw that with Lincoln. We saw that with Trump
M12: because it's so rough. The whole thing works on what
M12: Washington or Franklin would have called Republican virtue with a
M12: smaller it's really the virtue of the players and the
M12: players include the people. It also includes the office holders,
M12: and it truly works on their goodwill and their virtue.
M1: Jack, the framers didn't really plan for the idea that
M1: one of the branches of government could simply ignore the Constitution.
M1: It didn't actually plan for a president, for example. That
M1: would go their own way. Oh, I think it did.
M1: How did that protect us in this last administration? We
M1: didn't really have the balance of power and didn't really
M1: have checks and balances.
F1: There are checks and balances and they didn't work as
F1: they should because you had a Senate in particular who
F1: wasn't willing to exercise this power, but. One reason that
F1: the democracy survived in this last election was the decentralization
F1: of power and the decentralization of our elections. We had
F1: people currently in power who are trying to keep power
F1: through dishonest and unconstitutional means, but it is very hard
F1: to control 50 states and that's in the end why
F1: they failed.
M6: I want to connect with James. I don't want to
M6: think about this idea. You have a party that's been dominant.
M6: It's losing power. It sees the demographics are against it.
M6: It sees that its political program is unpopular, but it
M6: wants to stay in power. Now, that desire to stay
M6: in power, even when majorities don't support you, is anti
M6: Republican with a smaller. It's related to Ed's point about
M6: how our Constitution was designed. Our Constitution is representative, but
M6: representatives are supposed to represent majorities. But there's an enormous temptation.
M6: People like power, they want to keep power. And so
M6: what they do is they try to cut corners and
M6: engage in all sorts of schemes to stay in power.
M6: And when they do, they threaten the foundations of a
M6: republic that is representative democracy. Now, ordinarily, if you believe
M6: in democracy and Republicanism, you have virtue of the sort
M6: Ed was talking about. When you basically allow rotation in office,
M6: you all retain power. But when you get right, that
M6: is corruption. The failure to believe in the possibilities of republics,
M6: the desire to have everything for yourself and not cooperate
M6: with anyone else, then you resort to these schemes. And
M6: that's what we saw in the last several months.
F1: I agree with your analysis, Jack. I wouldn't term it
F1: constitutional right. It's political rot and institutional rot. But I
F1: don't think there's anything really wrong with our Constitution. I
F1: think it's still a great document is still very workable.
F1: I don't think the fix lies in amending the Constitution
F1: at this point. I think the fix lies in getting
F1: at the right in our institutions that are politics.
M3: I would love to have a show just on whether
M3: or not we should amend the Constitution.
M1: Actually, we had one of those shows with Sandy not
M1: too long ago.
M3: We did with Sandy Levin tonight, if I can. But
M3: I agree with you. Between me and Sandy, I tend
M3: to be more of the Pollyanna about our designs. The
M3: thing is, our Constitution, no matter how well it's designed,
M3: it's designed to keep the good times going, designed to
M3: keep politics running. It's designed to basically make democracy possible.
M3: But it requires commitment. It requires norms. It requires cooperation.
M3: When those things fade away, then it's like a car
M3: where you've taken out all the oil.
F1: Question is, how do you fix it?
M3: Well, there are lots of different ways of fixing it,
M3: but one way to do it is through the cycle
M3: of regimes, that is to say, through a new dominant party,
M3: basically getting its arms around the government and basically reforming
M3: and renewing politics. That's happened many times before. I think
M3: that's going to happen again.
M4: Jack, we're going to take a really quick break. We'll
M4: be right back. Before you can, fast forward with Yale
M4: law professor Jack Bokan.
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M1: OK, we're back in, Jack, I'd like to ask you
M1: to drill down into the cycles of constitutional time, what
M1: you mean by that, constitutions are constantly changing.
M5: It's like, you know, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who can
M5: step into the same river twice the Constitution and practice
M5: the norms, the practices, the rules, the institutions. These are
M5: constantly changing, even though the basic framework of the constitution
M5: is fixed, it doesn't change. But all the things that
M5: make a constitution work, those things are constantly changing. Political
M5: coalitions are constantly changing, too. So where to study constitutional
M5: development is to ask how different features of our constitutional
M5: system are changing over time and how they interact with
M5: each other. So I call that process constitutional time and
M5: that's what the book is about.
M1: Can you outlined some of those different cycles? And with
M1: each one, let's dive into what's going on now, how
M1: it applies to your cycles.
M6: There are three cycles to talk about the book. One
M6: is the rise and fall of dominant parties and the
M6: regimes that they lead. And the second is the increase
M6: and decrease of polarization, political polarization. And the third is
M6: episodes of constitutional rot and renewal, political renewal.
M1: Can we start with a second? Yeah, sure. Polarization. You're
M1: saying decrease of polarization. How does that happen?
M6: Polarization around the turn of the 20th century happened for
M6: a lot of reasons. One is because the party coalitions
M6: changed because of waves of immigrants who became American citizens
M6: and their children became American citizens. And they scrambled the
M6: party coalitions also because of decrease in income inequality. That
M6: came because politicians overplayed their hand during the Gilded Age.
M6: It also happened for reasons that I go into more
M6: detail in the book. It has to do with the
M6: fact that party coalitions are always the victim of their
M6: own success.
M1: And what do you mean by victims? What is the
M1: ramifications of that?
M5: Well, let me give you an example that the Reagan coalition,
M5: Reagan coalition is the coalition that's basically dominant from the
M5: 1980s forward, is a coalition that was based on the
M5: idea of ending the Cold War to America's favor, lowering taxes,
M5: shrinking the size of government and convincing everyone that government
M5: was the problem, not the solution to whatever ails America.
M5: So that was its basic program. In its early years,
M5: it was remarkably successful, and the Cold War ended on
M5: terms favorable to the United States.
M7: Taxes went way down from where they had been in
M7: the 60s and 70s. The coalition didn't really reduce the
M7: size of government, but it did slow it in significant ways.
M7: And it did instill an ideology that you don't look
M7: to government to solve the problems that America faces. The
M7: problem with that is that if you keep saying the
M7: same things over and over again, lower taxes don't rely
M7: on government to solve problems. Then you face a new
M7: series of crises, an opioid crisis, problems with education, problems
M7: of structural unemployment, a pandemic, the Great Recession, the contractions
M7: that followed the pandemic. All of these problems occur. And
M7: the same statement, oh, I don't care what the problem is,
M7: just lower taxes and deregulate and it will solve it eventually.
M7: That's just not an adequate solution. And eventually people figure
M7: out is not an adequate solution.
M9: In the case of the Great Depression, how did we
M9: get away from partisanship in order to heal?
M6: You should understand that by the time you have the
M6: Great Depression, 1932, politics already become too polarized. This is
M6: what I mentioned before in our previous segment that depolarization
M6: really begins around the turn of the 20th century. So
M6: by the time you get to the 30s, both Republican
M6: and Democratic parties are incoherent ideologically. They have lots of
M6: different folks with different views in both parties. And so
M6: it was possible to do a different kind of politics,
M6: not the kind of politics you can do today.
F1: There's one factor that's present today that wasn't present at
F1: the end of the Gilded Age, and that is mass
F1: misinformation and disinformation, which leads to and has achieved mass indoctrination.
M6: You're exactly wrong, Jane. In fact, that's exactly what the
M6: press was during the day. Have you ever heard the
M6: term yellow journalism?
F1: Yes, I'm aware of that. That is from the late
F1: Gilded Age. I realize that, but I don't think it
F1: had the same massive impact as we have today.
M3: Well, I'll tell you a story and then you tell
M3: me if this could never happen again. But this is
M3: the way it was. So what happened during the Gilded
M3: Age was that the cost of producing newspapers went way
M3: down so that it became much cheaper to engage in
M3: mass communication, cheaper than had ever been before. And that
M3: meant there were many, many players and the players felt
M3: that what they really needed was eyeballs. They needed circulation.
M3: They needed to grab attention. So in order to grab attention,
M3: what they did is they hired lots of reporters and
M3: they told them, we're not really very interested in whether
M3: what you say is true or not. What we care
M3: about is whether we can increase circulation. And, of course,
M3: this kind of media ecology would never happen today. But
M3: that's the way it was in the 80s, 90s. And
M3: so the result is the reporters would just make up stuff.
M3: And the more engaging and the more outrageous doesn't sound
M3: like we've gone very far from that as this is
M3: the point I'm trying to make. I'm being ironic that,
M3: in fact, if you look at the media ecology of
M3: the late Gilded Age has many of the same problems
M3: as our media. Ecology, of course, is not exactly the same.
M3: The other thing that's really important about the golden age,
M3: it's full of demagogue. Racist demagogues, too, I should just
M3: tell you, and nobody trusts the newspapers and the newspapers,
M3: of course, they're not trustworthy. In fact, the forms of
M3: journalism that we associate today with the profession of journalism,
M3: those arise in the middle of 20th century.
M8: And underlining Jack's point about how there's precedent for it,
M8: everything he describes became even worse in the 1930s with
M8: the rise of radio. You had conspiracy theories. Heck, half
M8: the people sounded as crazy as that congresswoman from Georgia.
M8: They were talking about the Protocols of Zion. They were
M8: attacking anti-Semitism. They were talking about the Rothschilds. At that time,
M8: Rothschilds were damned a lot more than starting wildfires in California.
M3: Did the Rothschilds have a space laser in those days?
M8: Oh, they were even worse. Oh, well, they were undermining everything.
M8: And it was partly because of the rise of radio
M8: where Jack was talking about the rise of yellow journalism
M8: and of cheap newspapers. So what we're seeing is a
M8: parallel in these conspiracy theories rising to amazing extent.
M1: Jack, have we had a time before where we basically
M1: replaced all forms of governance with forms of partisan politics?
M1: It doesn't seem like we've got any governance going on.
M1: We've got to pay homage to the new administration and
M1: how hard they're working to put things into a positive
M1: spin or at least a positive motion. But still, politically,
M1: our government is all wrapped up in the politics and
M1: spending very little time governing.
M3: It's the Gilded Age. I mean, I tell you, when
M3: we're in the second Gilded Age, the Gilded Age is
M3: a period in which the political parties are essentially stagnant
M3: in terms of what they're able to do. They're basically
M3: paralyzed and frozen. And part of the reason why they're
M3: paralyzed and frozen is that polarization is very high and
M3: they won't cooperate with each other. Income inequality is rising.
M3: There are these vast new fortunes of new millionaires created
M3: these huge corporations that are basically undermining democracy. The politicians
M3: are basically in the pockets of the very wealthy. OK,
M3: none of this would ever happen again today, but that's
M3: the way it is in the Gilded Age. It's a
M3: time of deep corruption and a deep despair about democracy.
M3: And because of deep, high inequality and party polarization, there's
M3: just no way to get anything through Congress.
M1: Jack, you say that we're slowly moving toward a second
M1: progressive era. There's hope that we're actually going to become
M1: more productive and some of this nonsense is going to
M1: fall away.
M5: Yes, I mean, it's not certain. I can't promise you certainty.
M5: But in the book, I say that in five or
M5: 10 years, we'll know whether we really turn the corner.
M5: Right now, it's very much on a knife's edge. I mean,
M5: after all, we're only a month away from an insurrection
M5: attempting to prevent the Electoral College votes should be counted
M5: in Congress. It's very serious. We're basically rotting away. That's
M5: our situation. But there are signs that, in fact, things
M5: are going to change. And that has to do with
M5: the possible emergence of a new political regime organized around
M5: a different set of ideas and a different set of interests.
M1: A new political regime under current party, or do you
M1: see a new party?
M5: The dominant party in the new regime is probably going
M5: to be the Democratic Party. We'll be back in a second.
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M2: Hi, we're back.
M1: So, Jack, being that we call this meet me in
M1: the middle, sometimes I have to take some some partisan
M1: views just to have the conversation. If you look at
M1: the Democrats and their actions right now with lots of issues,
M1: we got to deal with covid. We've got to deal
M1: with the economy. We've got to deal with a whole
M1: bunch of international relationships that need some healing. And here
M1: we are focusing on impeachment. Even there's a question about
M1: whether there should be an impeachment after the president leaves
M1: the office, even while there's like a ninety nine point
M1: nine nine nine percent chance that that will not get
M1: all the way through because of the lack of Republican votes.
M1: So how do you see that fitting in to a
M1: Democratic Party that is moving us forward in governing?
M5: I see it as a disturbing and unfortunate necessity. I
M5: would rather have to deal with this mess. He wants
M5: to solve the covid issue. He wants to deal with
M5: the economic contraction. He knows that the the success of
M5: his coalition, whether Democrats get elected in 2022 and 2024,
M5: doesn't count on impeachment. It depends on whether or not
M5: he solves the problems with the pandemic and the contraction.
M5: But here's the problem. There was the insurrection. The president,
M5: the United States led an insurrection against Congress. What do
M5: you do about that? You just hope nothing happened.
M1: Now you got to do something about it, but they're
M1: going to do something about it and it's going to
M1: fail and actually feed right into the Republicans mantra.
M6: Indeed it will. But the point is, if you don't
M6: do anything, then what you're basically telling people is that
M6: you can attack the foundations of democracy and there's no cost.
M6: Nobody will try to hold you accountable.
M1: So let's bring up an alternative, because Jane was talking
M1: to me about this the other day. Jane, you were
M1: talking about the 14th Amendment, Section three. Yeah. Can you
M1: bring that into bear here?
F1: Yeah. The 14th Amendment provides that Congress can prevent them
F1: from holding federal office ever again.
M1: Well, doesn't that accomplish everything that the Democrats are hoping
M1: to accomplish with the impeachment?
M6: It all depends on whether or not you get the
M6: exact same bellyaching. The idea that if the Democrats use
M6: censure or if they use 43, that suddenly the Republicans
M6: would all join in and say, oh, you're right, we
M6: need to reform our party. I think it's really important
M6: we do this. Absolutely not.
M1: But they're not going to do it either way. We're
M1: just going to give the Republicans a platform to pontificate,
M1: to call into question a philosophy of should you support
M1: one of America's greatest institutions, the election. And we're going
M1: to give that voice where otherwise we could just get
M1: on with things and use this 14th Amendment to accomplish
M1: our goals and not risk giving our president a chance
M1: to say, see, I was exonerated, I won again.
M7: Yeah, I should say that I don't think that the
M7: pros and cons of impeachment have anything to do with
M7: the question of whether or not Republicans will pontificate. I
M7: think that if you don't do impeachment, they'll pontificate. If
M7: you do do impeachment, they'll pontificate. If you try 14 three,
M7: they will. If you don't try 14 three, they will.
M7: The Republican Party at this point is beyond attempting to
M7: behave in a bipartisan fashion. They're not interested in that.
F1: I wouldn't call that bipartisan. I would call it beyond
F1: behaving in a manner that supports the Constitution. They've gone
F1: way beyond the Constitution in many respects.
M5: And by the way, I'm saying this to my Republican friends.
M5: They understand that their party is in a terrible position
M5: right now. They're in the middle of a civil war.
M5: It is not it just doesn't make sense for any
M5: of them at this point to blow their party out
M5: by basically joining with the Democrats on most things. They're
M5: going to have to work this out between them. And
M5: so there's really nothing Democrats can do that are going
M5: to get Republicans to behave at this point. They're in
M5: an internecine struggle. It's just like orthogonal to the question
M5: of impeachment.
F1: The point I was making with Bill the other night,
F1: it was a strategic choice. If the Democrats had gone
F1: forward under Article 43 rather than an impeachment trial where
F1: they knew they would lose and, quote, exonerate Trump, then
F1: I do think at that point you would have gotten
F1: more Republicans. You wouldn't have gotten a majority, by all means,
F1: to sign on with that, and it would have taken
F1: behind the scenes negotiations. I think afterwards it's still possible
F1: the Democrats could do censure. But I think it's going
F1: to be harder to get any Republicans or as many
F1: Republicans to sign on to a 14th Amendment resolution. So
F1: it was a strategic problem with the trial, Jack, is
F1: that a trial in American public's view is a trial
F1: just as it would be in the court? Article 14,
F1: Section three resolution or bill would never exonerate them. It
F1: also only requires a majority vote majority, except I believe
F1: there's at least some argument it still would be subject
F1: to the filibuster in the Senate. So you might need
F1: 60 votes as opposed to 51.
M5: I do have to say you make a very strong case, Jane.
M5: And the only thing I want to add is if
M5: you look at the actual use of 14 three following
M5: the Civil War, you'll see that it actually didn't accomplish
M5: very much and that a very few people were really.
M5: Deterred by it and that Congress removed disability for everyone
M5: within a generation or so, and so in effect, 14
M5: three turned out to be a failure.
F1: Well, actually, I disagree with you on that. Well, it
F1: was originally enacted for the U.S. after the Confederacy and
F1: it was used for Confederate generals. But there's really been
F1: no circumstance since then other than one case regarding World
F1: War One where it's been required. I think it was
F1: made for something like this. So I don't think it
F1: was a failure in that sense that I don't think
F1: the fact that it has been used since then is
F1: reason not to use it now.
M9: Jack, we seem to have a hundred Republican representatives that
M9: give the impression that they believe the election was stolen.
M9: Where does that fit into your cycles?
M10: That's right. That's what it means to be in a
M10: condition of deep and profound rot in an ordinary working,
M10: well functioning democracy. The losers from an election, no matter
M10: how close, would simply accept that they lost the election
M10: and then organize themselves to win the next election. What
M10: happened was that the Republican Party is devoted now to
M10: minority in government. That is, they want to stay in
M10: power even if they don't win elections. So they try
M10: to entrench themselves in situations that can't be dislodged and
M10: they try to shrink the electorate. That's been the strategy
M10: for the last 20 or so years. The next stage
M10: is to say any election we lose the stolen election.
M10: It's not a serious assertion, in my view, of electoral fraud.
M10: All the evidence we have suggests that the election was
M10: conducted pretty well. It's a desire not to lose power.
M10: And you can't have an effective democracy if one of
M10: the two major parties simply refuses rotation of power.
M1: Perhaps, Jack, you can you can shed some light and
M1: explain to me what the mob wanted when they were
M1: at the Capitol. They were angry. They were passionate. Was
M1: it just to win? Or if they were in control,
M1: what would they do about it?
M3: You're going to have to ask them. I have no
M3: idea what's in their minds.
M1: We're all talking about insurrection. We're talking about a challenge
M1: to our very principles of being America, our voting system.
M1: And look how powerful this has become in our news.
M1: And we really don't know why they did it.
M11: Why they did it is because the United States has
M11: been suffering from the attack on its system by a
M11: demagogue who has mastered the art of manipulation and deception
M11: and providing people with false beliefs about the way the
M11: world works. This person has destroyed and undermined features of
M11: our American system, and the BOP is the response that
M11: is produced by handing over the reins of power in
M11: our constitutional system to a demagogue. That's why it happened.
M1: I want to talk about the lunatic fringe for just
M1: a minute. Jack, if I listen to you and Ed,
M1: we've always had one, right? They've always been there.
M6: We've always had people that were radically on one side
M6: or the other of a question, yeah, don't confuse radicals
M6: with lunatics, two different animals to find them. Radicals or
M6: people who want to get to the root of things
M6: and change them lunatics comes from the term Luna Moon,
M6: meaning crazy. The fact that you want to get to
M6: the root of things and change it does not mean
M6: you're crazy. Conversely, the fact that you're crazy doesn't mean
M6: you actually want to reform anything. You might just want
M6: to blow things up.
M1: We've always had both right in our history, yes. But
M1: now here we are where the lunatics and the radicals
M1: have a new form of platform. They don't stand on
M1: a box anymore. They stand on Twitter and Facebook and
M1: Instagram and they have these very loud megaphones and they
M1: can influence many. How do we survive this new kind
M1: of social media and communication that gives them that kind
M1: of platform?
M5: Earlier we talked about the state of media in the
M5: 1930s and the state of media at the end of
M5: the Gilded Age. There are movements for professionalization and reform
M5: of media that occur throughout the 20th century.
M11: Currently, we have a new form of media, social media, organizing,
M11: public discourse, curating it, organizing it, making it possible. These
M11: media are based on business models, which give them bad incentives,
M11: give them incentives to basically undermine the quality of public discourse.
M11: What we need is not simply order them to act
M11: in one way or another with respect to content moderation.
M11: We need to engage in regulation of the basic business
M11: models of these companies so that their economic incentives are
M11: better aligned with their appropriate social function. The social function
M11: of these new companies now is to organize and facilitate
M11: democratic discourse. And right now, because they are essentially surveillance companies,
M11: their data collection, data monetization, surveillance companies, their business incentives
M11: are badly aligned with that function. If we want to
M11: cure the problems of social media, we have to look
M11: past the current debates over. Hanso culture de platforming, reform
M11: of Section 230 and all of the other related questions,
M11: and we have to focus instead on the business models
M11: of these companies, how they're organized their size, how they
M11: make money, how they do business, and if we can
M11: give them better incentives, they'll still be able to make money.
M11: They'll be able to play their corporate role in the
M11: digital public sphere. That's the key challenge.
M1: Jack Broken, thanks so much for joining us today. How
M1: do people follow you?
M6: Oh, well, if they keep trying to follow me, I'll
M6: have them arrested. Exactly.
M10: I have a blog called Balkinization, which they can visit,
M10: which is me and a bunch of other folks. I'm
M10: on Twitter every now and then, but Balkinization, I think
M10: it's the place.
M1: And can they buy the cycles of constitutional time? Is
M1: that at Amazon? It is on Amazon. Well, thank you,
M1: Jane Albrecht and Ed Larson, thanks so much for coming
M1: back again this season. One more thing, Jack, before you go.
M1: Are you familiar with the Sam party? Tell me about it.
M1: Save America party. David Jolly, a Republican governor from Florida,
M1: is now the executive chairman of the new Sand Party,
M1: Sam S.A.M..
M9: As in Michael, he said, show me a political party
M9: willing to recognize that health care can be strengthened through
M9: both a strong public option and a true and robust
M9: private option that public education deserves greater investment. But students
M9: and parents also deserve choice. That immigration policy can include
M9: border security, but also a pathway to dignity and citizenship
M9: for those who desire it, and that the rights of
M9: responsible gun owners and obligation to public safety can both
M9: be secured through greater regulation.
M2: Show me that political party and I'll show you a
M2: governing majority for the coming decade. Sounds upbeat, doesn't it?
M2: Sounds familiar. Could it sound anything like politics?
M6: Meet me in the middle. Yes. Actually, what you're describing
M6: is the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. So maybe
M6: Charlie should switch parties.
M2: Either that or perhaps they should. We'll talk about all
M2: of it. Our executive producer for this episode of Meet
M2: Me in the Middle is Stuart Halpern Show. Engineering and
M2: editing was by Joey Salvy and music for Meet Me
M2: in the Middle is composed and performed by Celeste Anorectic,
M2: mixing and sweetening by Steve Rexburg. Don't waste your time
M2: hunting around for our next episode. Hit that subscribe button. Well,
M2: we'll see you next week, folks.
F9: From Kerkow media media for your mind.