Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World | November 10th, 2020 INTRODUCTION Fareed Zakaria hosts Fareed Zakaria GPS for CNN Worldwide and is a columnist for The Washington Post, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, and a bestselling author. Since its debut in 2008, GPS has become a prominent television forum for global newsmakers and thought leaders. Interviews on Fareed Zakaria GPS have included U.S. President , French President Emmanuel Macron, Chinese Premier , Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Other past guests include military officials such as Gen. David Petraeus and Adm. Michael Mullen; corporate leaders such as Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi; and other public figures like Bill Maher and Bono. The program earned the prestigious Peabody Award in 2011 and has received multiple Emmy nominations. Zakaria has regularly hosted primetime specials for CNN Worldwide, such as “Blindsided: How ISIS Shook the World,” “Why Trump Won,” and “Putin: The Most Powerful Man in the World.” Prior to his tenure at CNN Worldwide, Zakaria was editor of Newsweek International, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, a columnist for Time, an analyst for ABC News, and the host of Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS. Zakaria serves on the boards of the Council of Foreign Relations and New America. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, a doctorate in political science from Harvard University , and has received numerous honorary degrees. WHY DO I CARE? I am SUPER EXCITED to have Fareed Zakaria on Hidden Forces. What an honor. I first read Dr. Zakaria’s work as a junior politics major in college. The book my professor had us read was “Illiberal Democracy,” which was actually prescient in many ways for the types of concerns it highlighted almost twenty years ago. I don’t want to spend too much time prefacing my questions today, because I spent so much time writing and thinking through this conversation. My goals in this conversation are (1) to learn some things about Fareed that I didn’t know before and that most people didn’t know about him, (2) to drill him in areas of foreign affairs about which he is such an expert, (3) hold his feet to the fire about globalism and what he believes the role of elite institutionalists is and should be and what their record has been, (4) what he sees for the future of the US & the world, (5) his views on society & culture, and (6) how he feels digital technology has changed media, what that means for someone like him, and what types of people, businesses, and forms of content will be most successful in the years to come.

1 BACKGROUND: Identity — I’m curious to understand how someone becomes a “Fareed Zakaria.” Q: How would you describe yourself, what you do, and your place in the world to someone that doesn’t know you? Beginnings — Q: Can you tell me about your early life? Q: Did you have any notion of what you wanted out of your life, what you wanted to do, and what you felt would be a meaningful life for you? Q: If you were to look back now, how closely aligned is your life today with what you had envisioned for yourself as a young man? Book — Q: When, how, and why did you get the idea to write this book? Q: What is the book about? COVID-19 & IT’S CONSEQUENCES: Pandemic’s Consequences — Q: What are the consequences of this pandemic? Q: Could we be exaggerating the consequences of this pandemic? Q: Could the Covid effect be smaller than imagined? Emotional Resilience — Q: What does our emotional response to this pandemic say about our resilience as a society? Q: Does it say anything about our relationship to death and morbidity? Transition to Digital Economy — Q: When and how did we transition into this so-called “digital economy?” Q: How has this manifested during the pandemic to enable an economy in lockdown that would have been simply unimaginable in 1918? Q: How will life and family life change post- coronavirus? Therapeutics — Q: What sort of expectations should we have about therapeutics and ways to treat this virus going forward? Q: Do world health authorities have a general idea about what it means to “live with this virus?” Q: How long is the expectation that we will need to live in this way? Job Transformation — Q: What jobs, professions, & services has coronavirus most transformed? Rise of Socialism — Q: Do you believe that the pandemic could serve as a catalyst for the rise of socialism in the United States? UBI — Q: Do you believe that calls for universal basic income, universal medical coverage, and other possible forms of social benefits will eventually become policy? Q: What are your thoughts on UBI? Post-Pandemic Cities — Q: What is the future of cities post-pandemic? Q: Why do you say that it’s a myth that cities are particularly susceptible? Future of Globalization — Q: Why do you say that “globalization isn’t dead, but we could kill it?” The Choice of a New Cold War — Q: Why do you say that “bipolarity is inevitable. A cold war is a choice?” 2 IMPROVEMENTS & RESPONSES: Symptoms of Human Scale — Q: In what ways is this pandemic a symptom of unsustainable patters of growth and human expansion into more and more of the natural world? Q: How does this relate to our “fast and open” society? *** e.g. dustbowl and topsoil Actions to Prevent the Next Pandemic — Q: What kind of action is required at the present time to stem the impact of this pandemic? Q: How do we prevent the next pandemic? Q: How do we balance speed with stability? Quality over Quantity — You point out in your book that “what seems to have mattered most in this crisis was the quality of government,” not its quantity. Q: Can you elaborate on this? Build Better — Q: Why do some states have governments that work well and others don’t? Q: What have been historical catalysts for positive change in government? Q: How do we make government work better? (i.e. book’s suggestions seem squishy) America can Learn from the World — You write that “now, America needs to learn from the world. And what it most needs to learn about is government—not big or small but good government.” Q: Can the United States learn anything from the rest of the world? (hint: good government) ROLE OF SCIENCE, EXPERTS, & ELITES: Role of Science — There is a part in the book where you discuss the role and place of science. Q: Do you feel that the word “science” is misunderstood by a large part of society, both on the ideological left and right? Q: What do you feel is the mainstream perception of science? Q: What is it in actuality? The Experts — Q: Are people justified in feeling fed-up with “the experts” given that they and their scientific credentials seem to be often cloaked with unwarranted amounts of prestige and authority? Science, after all is a mode of inquiry. Q: Is there a better way for these so-called “experts” to

3 engage the public so that when they are wrong that it doesn’t feel like a betrayal (perhaps more humility and less hypocrisy)? Q: Could it be that rather than simply make policy, these experts have sought to impose their values onto society as well, and that this is why so many people now hate them? ***Over the past 60 years, according to David Shor, college graduates have gone from being 4 percent of the electorate to being more like 35 percent. This has meant that Democratic elites can now campaign on the things they’d always wanted to, but which had previously been too toxic. This means that the divide between college educated and non-college educated people may arguably be just as powerful for determining elections as wealth or racial identity. Established Antipathy — Q: Is the antipathy towards experts the same force that is driving populism and an antipathy towards the “establishment” and the “ruling elite? Q: What do we mean when we talk about “the ruling class” or “the deep state?” Q: Is this are attempt to grasp at a powerful force that we cannot put a name or a face to? Power vs. Wealth — You quote Michael Lind in your book during a passage dealing with the subject of power and who yields it. Q: How important is the power dynamic in society today? Q: Is it more important than the disparity in wealth and income? Epistemological Crisis — Q: Are we facing a crisis of epistemology in western society, where the tools for reasoned inquiry and investigation are no longer perceived to provide access to a consensus view of truth? Q: That objective truth itself has come into question? Power of Narrative — One of the characteristics of modern society is that narratives seem to be able to spread faster, mobilize more people, and inflame passions more intensely than at any other point during my life time. Q: How has the proliferation of mobile phones, social media, and immersive experiential technologies transformed the power and ubiquity of narrative? Q: What sort of influence do you believe that narrative plays today relative to science? Q: How does this compare to other points in our history? (e.g. wartime propaganda)

4 GENERAL QUESTIONS: Bioterrorism — Q: Why do you believe that bioterrorism is the most under-discussed danger facing humanity? Q: Why are suggestions that the coronavirus was engineered in a laboratory rejected out of hand whenever they are raised? International Cooperation’s Imperative — Q: How important is it that we find ways to cooperate on an international scale? Security Guarantor — Q: Can the United States continue to play the role of security guarantor for Europe and Asia, given its division at home and relative economic decline? Q: Will American voters continue to accept the financial burden associated with such a guarantee? Inevitability of Multipolarity — Q: Was it always inevitable that the American led, liberal international order was going to come undone given the limits of American power and the willingness, or lack thereof of Americans to support endless security guarantees? Seismic Events — Q: Why do you identify the 9/11 attacks, the 2008 crash, and the coronavirus as the most enduring seismic events of the post-war period? Q: How would you rate our response to the first two? Q: Why should we expect that our response to Covid-19 will not be equally wrong- headed? Rise of Illiberalism in the World — Q: Is there a rise in illiberalism around the world? Q: What accounts for this? Q: Is there a yearning for a father figure? Internationalism vs. Nationalism: Striking a Balance — Q: How do we strike a balance between internationalism and nationalism that (1) preserves the unique characteristics that make America “great,” (2) ensure direct accountability to the American people through their representative bodies, and (3) are in line with the values and desires of the American people so that they do not rebel against it (e.g. see BREXIT) Illiberal Democracy — In illiberal democracy, you wrote that what is “distinctive about the American system is not how democratic it is but rather how undemocratic it is, placing as it does multiple constraints on electoral majorities.” Q: Are calls to eliminate the electoral college wise? Q:

5 Is more democracy the cure to what ails America? Q: Is adding more justices to the court the solution? Q: Is the left’s woke censorship an example of illiberalism at work? TRUMP 2020-2024: Lame Duck Surprises? — Q: What can we expect from the last two months of the Trump administration? Q: Can you imagine any major policy changes like pulling troops out of South Korea or some other, unthinkable alteration to mainstay US policy? Trump Post-Mortem — Q: What do you think the last 4 years was really about? Q: What do you think laid the foundation for the election of someone like Trump, only 8 years after the country elected its first African American president? Q: What do you think the congress and senate may do in order to try and prevent a populist demagogue from taking power again? Citizen Trump — Q: Where will Trump go after he leaves? Q: Will he be pardoned by Biden? Q: Will he be prosecuted for anything? Q: Will he create his own media company and become an important force in exile? Q: Will he be able to command as much attention in 2024 as he did in 2016? GOVERNING PARTY DIAGNOSIS & FUTURE PROGRESSION: Democrat Ideology — The Democratic Party’s ideological plank rests strongly on this notion that white supremacy and patriarchy is the primary ordering force in our social universe and the primary source of social discontent. Q: Do you agree with this characterization of the party’s position? Q: If so, how accurate do you feel that this framing is? Q: How effective do you feel that is as a strategy for winning elections? Q: How effective is it as a strategy for building governing coalitions? Senate Control —Q: Do you have any views on the likelihood that Democrats might be able to flip both senate races in Georgia and take control of the US Senate? Q: What will that mean in terms of policy initiatives and legislation in the first two years? Divided Government —Q: Would Democrats prefer a divided government for the first two years in order to help them focus on putting their own house in order?

6 Republican Rebirth — Q: Could the next four years offer an opportunity for republicans to remake a party that was essentially defined by Donald Trump and right-wing populism in the last four years? Q: What do you think would be both (1) a winning strategy for republicans, but also one (2) that addresses the deeper needs of the country? Rise in Censorship — Q: Do you believe, as many on the right have alleged over the last four years, that we have seen a rise in censorship disproportionately targeting people who do not hold strict views on new leftish social justice issues like race, gender, etc.? Q: Are you concerned more generally that private, online platforms have the power to censor people, including American politicians and presidents? New Media Titans & Centers of Power — Q: What are your views on the rise of new media titans and influencers like Joe Rogan, who command larger audiences than any other major news program and who millions of Americans put their trust into? Bitcoin & Millennial Betrayal — Q: Do you have an opinion on Bitcoin? Q: Do you see any relationship between the overwhelming popularity of cryptocurrencies among Millennials and the failures of government officials to hold our public institutions, especially our central banks, accountable for the selective bailouts and policies that they have enacted in the last few decades? Modern Civil War — Q: What would a modern civil war look like if it didn’t actually involve a literal war like we had in the early 1860’s? Q: Are you concerned that we may see escalations in violence among extremists on both the Left and the Right in the next few years? Q: Do you feel that leftist violence has been underappreciated by our media and politicians? BIDEN PRESIDENCY: Biden Priorities — Q: What do you feel should be the priorities of a new Biden administration?

7 Biden Cabinet — Q: Who will be the key cabinet members in a new Biden administration, and how do those names change based on who controls the Senate? Biden Policy — Q: What are the first things you expect a Biden administration to do if we have divided government? Q: What will Democrats pass in the first few years if they control the Senate? Biden Repair — Q: What can Biden do to repair America’s relationships with traditional allies? Q: Where do you think a Biden administration will fall on China? Q: Where do you fall on China? Biden’s Geopolitical Challenges — When Obama left the Whitehouse in 2016, he identified North Korea as like the most difficult and urgent geopolitical challenge facing the incoming administration. Q: What are the most pressing Geopolitical challenges facing an incoming Biden administration? *** The Biden foreign policy agenda will place the United States back at the head of the table BOOK QUOTES: There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen. — Vladimir Lenin People in this country have had enough of experts. — Michael Gove, British MP ...this ugly pandemic has created the possibility for change and reform. It has opened up a path to a new world. It’s ours to take that opportunity or squander it. Nothing is written. — Fareed Zakaria After the Cold War, the world settled into a new international system marked by three forces, one geopolitical, one economic, and one technological—American power, free markets, and the Information Revolution. — Fareed Zakaria The Balkan wars, the Asian financial collapse, the 9/11 attacks, the global financial crisis, and now Covid-19. … They are all asymmetric shocks—things that start out small but end up sending seismic was around the world. This is particularly true of the three things that will be judged as the most enduring—9/11, the crash of 2008, and the coronavirus. — Fareed Zakaria The French started calling influenza grippe, from the word for “seizure,” likely referring to the tightness felt in the throat and chest. Ever since 1990, sudden, massive seizures have gripped the world—about one every ten years—with cascading effects. We will have more. They don’t happen by conscious design, but neither are they entirely accidental. They seem to be an inherent element of the international system we have built. We need to understand that system—in other words, understand the world in which we live—in order to see the emerging post-pandemic world. — Fareed Zakaria It turns out that in any system, of these three characteristics—open, fast, stable—you can have only two. An open and fast system, like the world we live in, will be inherently unstable. A fast and stable one will tend to be closed, like China. If the system is open and stable, it will likely be sluggish rather than dynamic. Think of the nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires: vast, open, diverse—and decaying. This “trilemma” is an adaption of an idea of Jared Cohen’s, the 8 technologist, who observed that computer networks must choose two of three qualities: openness, speed, and security. Economists have their own version of this idea, the “policy trilemma,” which posits that countries can have two of the following three: free-flowing capital, independent central banks, and a fixed exchange rate. They’re a bit wonkish, but all these trilemma’s get at a simple notion—if everything is open and fast-moving, the system can spin dangerously out of control. — Fareed Zakaria We have created a world that is always in overdrive. — Fareed Zakaria One of my earliest episodes on Hidden Forces was with philosopher Mark C. Taylor on the subject of his book “Speed Limits.” The argument he put forward is that life is moving too quickly and human beings are demanding too much of themselves, each other, and their environment and that this is unsustainable. It’s literally, in his view, causing the icecaps to melt. Q: Do you believe that on both a physical and psychospiritual level that our current lifestyle is unsustainable? I’m also reminded of Geoffrey West’s episode on Scale in physical vs. socioeconomic systems. Q: Do we ask more of our environment than it can physical bare? We are not doomed. The point of sounding the alarm is to call people to action. The question is, What kind of action? — Fareed Zakaria BOOK QUOTES: Unable to cope with the loss of the presidency, unable to accept that he was beaten, Trump will now shield himself from the reality of defeat by pretending it didn’t happen. His personal need to live in a perpetual fantasyland, a world where he is always winning, is so overpowering that he will do anything to maintain it. In his narcissistic drive to create this alternative reality, he will deepen divisions, spread paranoia, and render his supporters even more fearful of their fellow citizens and distrustful of their institutions. This is a president who never had America’s interests at heart. — Anne Applebaum I suspect that the Republican leadership is sanguine, if not happy, about Trump’s loss…what’s not to like? The Supreme Court is solidly in their corner; they will likely retain control of the Senate; House Republicans won more seats than they were projected to; and they are looking at significant

9 gains in state Houses as well, giving them control over redistricting for the next decade. Even better for their long-term project, they have diversified their own coalition, gaining more women candidates and more support from nonwhite voters. — Zeynep Tufekci The attempt to harness Trumpism—without Trump, but with calculated, refined, and smarter political talent—is coming. And it won’t be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president. He will not be so clumsy or vulnerable. He will get into office less by luck than by skill. — Zeynep Tufekci The failures of the past aren’t to be yearned for. They’re to be avoided and, crucially, understood and fixed. There will be arguments about how to rebuild a politics that can appeal to the moment, and how to mobilize for the future. There should be. Our American crisis cannot be resolved in one sweeping article that offers easy solutions. But the first step is to realize how deep this hole is for democracies around the world, including ours, and to realize that what lies ahead is not some easy comeback. — Zeynep Tufekci At the moment, the Democratic Party risks celebrating Trump’s loss and moving on—an acute danger, especially because many of its constituencies, the ones that drove Trump’s loss, are understandably tired. A political nap for a few years probably looks appealing to many who opposed Trump, but the real message of this election is not that Trump lost and Democrats triumphed. It’s that a weak and untalented politician lost, while the rest of his party has completely entrenched its power over every other branch of government: the perfect setup for a talented right-wing populist to sweep into office in 2024. And make no mistake: They’re all thinking about it. — Zeynep Tufekci The question of whether Trumpism has a long-term future in the GOP will be debated at length in the coming months. What’s certain is that it won’t be vanquished by Trump’s impending defeat alone—if anything, his most devoted supporters may be further radicalized. — McKay Coppins If Biden resembles any recent figure in political history, it’s George H. W. Bush, who arrived in the Oval Office as a member of the Washington establishment in good standing. … Where Bush had to contend with the rise of evangelicals and firebrands like Newt Gingrich, who shifted the Republican Party away from his variety of moderation, Biden will preside over a Democratic Party undergoing its own profound ideological transformation. That similarity suggests both a danger for Biden and an opportunity. — Franklin Foer After the destruction of the Trump era, the nation is desperate for a parental figure to cultivate renewal amid ruin; shattered institutions will require an almost irrational faith in healing. With so many crises demanding simultaneous attention, what’s needed is the urgency of someone watching time as it melts away. — Franklin Foer …the composition of Trump’s followers, with a large minority of Latino voters and a nontrivial number of Black voters, makes their motivations more various and complicated than the single, somehow reassuring cause that progressives settled on after 2016: racism. — George Packer

10 Many of the most influential journalists and pollsters continue to fail to understand how most of their compatriots think, even as these experts spend ever more of their time talking with one another on Twitter and in TV studios. The local and regional newspapers around the country that could fill in the picture of who we are with more granular human detail continue to die out. All of us, professionals and otherwise, are to some extent prisoners of impermeable information chambers, in which the effort to grasp contrary narratives is morally suspect. — George Packer The possible exits—gradual de-escalation, majority breakthrough, clean separation, civil war—are either unlikely or unthinkable. We have to live and govern ourselves together, but we still don’t know how. Winning in this state becomes a chimera. Whoever takes the presidency, all Americans will remain the losers. — George Packer The depolarization of race will make it harder for Democrats to count on demography as a glide path to a permanent majority. It should make them think hard about how a president they excoriate as a white supremacist somehow grew his support among nonwhite Americans. But in the long run, racial depolarization might be good for America. — Derek Thompson Driving both the polarization of place and the depolarization of race is the diploma divide. Non- college-educated Latino and Black Americans are voting a little bit more like non-college-educated white Americans, and these groups are disproportionately concentrated in sparser suburbs and small towns that reliably vote Republican. Meanwhile, low-income, college-educated 20- somethings, many of whom live in urban areas, are voting more like rich, college-educated people who tend to live in the inner suburbs that are moving left. Demographics were never destiny. Density and diplomas form the most important divide in American politics. At least for now. — Derek Thompson Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. — David Shor But that’s not what happened. The actual mechanical reason was that the Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college- educated professionals. And as a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes. But the problem was mechanical, and less about the vulgar Marxist interests of all of the actors involved. — David Shor When you take the results of the 2012 and 2016 elections, and model changes in Democratic vote share, you see the biggest individual- level predictor for vote switching was education; college-educated people swung toward Democrats and non- college-educated people swung toward Republicans. But, if you ask a battery of “racial resentment” questions — stuff like, “Do you think that there are a lot of white people who are having trouble finding a job because nonwhite people are getting them instead?” or, “Do you think that white people don’t have enough influence in how this country is run?” — and then control for the propensity 11 to answer those questions in a racially resentful way, education ceases to be the relevant variable: Non-college-educated white people with low levels of racial resentment trended towards us in 2016, and college-educated white people with high levels of racial resentments turned against us. — David Shor Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them to vote for us. — David Shor There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones. Some people responded to media coverage of that paper by saying, “Oh, people are just answering these surveys randomly, issues don’t matter.” But that’s not actually what the paper showed. In a separate section, they tested the relevance of issues by presenting voters with hypothetical candidate matchups — here’s a politician running on this position, and another politician running on the opposite — and they found that issue congruence was actually very important for predicting who people voted for. So this suggests there’s a big mass of voters who agree with us on some issues, and disagree with us on others. And whenever we talk about a given issue, that increases the extent to which voters will cast their ballots on the basis of that issue. — David Shor Non-college-educated whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics; they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration. — David Shor If you look at long-term trends in support for gay marriage, it began linearly increasing, year over year, starting in the late 1980s. But then, right when the issue increased in salience during the 2004 campaign, it suddenly became partisan, and support declined. After it stopped being a campaign issue, support returned to trend. — David Shor Campaigns just can’t effect those kinds of long-term changes. They can direct information to partisans who trust them, and they can curry favor with marginal voters by signaling agreement with them on issues. But there isn’t much space for changing marginal voters’ minds. — David Shor

12 One way to think about electoral salience and the effects of raising the salience of given issues, is to look at which party voters trust on a given issue, not just what their stated policy preference is. So if you do a poll on universal background checks for guns, you’ll find that they’re super-popular. But then, politicians who run on background checks often lose. In the same way, if you poll comprehensive immigration reform, it’s super-popular, even among Republicans. But then Republicans can run on anti-immigrant platforms and win. So how do you square that circle? — David Shor …even if voters acknowledge the massive systemic inequities that exist in the U.S., discussion of them normally happens in a context where conservatives can posit a trade-off with safety, or all these other things people trust Republicans on. What’s powerful about nonviolent protest — and particularly nonviolent protest that incurs a disproportionate response from the police — is that it can shift the conversation, in a really visceral way, into the part of this issue space that benefits Democrats and the center left. Which is the pursuit of equality, social justice, fairness — these Democratic-loaded concepts — without the trade-off of crime or public safety. So I think it is really consistent with a pretty broad, cross-sectional body of evidence (a piece of which I obviously tweeted at some point) that nonviolent protest is politically advantageous, both in terms of changing public opinion on discrete issues and electing parties sympathetic to the left’s concerns. — David Shor The research isn’t consistent with that. It’s more about the proportions. Because the mechanism here is that when violence is happening, people become afraid. They fear for their safety, and then they crave order. And order is a winning issue for conservatives here and everywhere around the world. The basic political argument since the French Revolution has been the left saying, “Let’s make things more fair,” and the right saying, “If we do that, it will lead to chaos and threaten your family.” — David Shor I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out, you know, “Where did things go wrong?” You see Matt Stoller and Ryan Grim do this, where you try to pinpoint the moment in time when Democratic elites decided to turn their backs on the working class and embrace neoliberalism. Maybe it was the Watergate babies. Maybe it was the failure to repeal Taft-Hartley. Maybe it was Bill Clinton in 1992. But then you read about other countries and you see that the same story is happening everywhere. It happened in England with . It happened in Germany with Gerhard Schröder. The thing that really got me was reading about the history of PASOK, the Social Democratic Party in Greece. And you’re reading about an election in the 1990s where it’s like, “the right-wing New Democracy party made gains with working-class 13 voters,” and you realize there are broader forces at work here. So why is this happening? The story that makes the most sense to me goes like this: In the postwar era, college-educated professionals were maybe 4 percent of the electorate. Which meant that basically no voters had remotely cosmopolitan values. But the flip side of this is that this educated 4 percent still ran the world. Both parties at this point were run by this highly educated, cosmopolitan minority that held a bunch of values that undergirded the postwar consensus, around democracy and rule of law, and all these things. Obviously, these people were more right wing on a bunch of social issues than their contemporary counterparts, but during that era, both parties were run by just about the most cosmopolitan segments of society. And there were also really strong gatekeepers. This small group of highly educated people not only controlled the commanding heights of both the left and the right, but also controlled the media. There were only a small number of TV stations — in other countries, those stations were even run by the government. And both sides knew it wasn’t electorally advantageous to campaign on cosmopolitan values. So, as a result, campaigns centered around this cosmopolitan elite’s internal disagreements over economic issues. But over the past 60 years, college graduates have gone from being 4 percent of the electorate to being more like 35. Now, it’s actually possible — for the first time ever in human history — for political parties to openly embrace cosmopolitan values and win elections; certainly primary and municipal elections, maybe even national elections if you don’t push things too far or if you have a recession at your back. And so Democratic elites started campaigning on the things they’d always wanted to, but which had previously been too toxic. And so did center-left parties internationally. — David Shor Other research has shown that messaging centered around the potential for cooperation and positive-sum change really appeals to educated people, while messaging that emphasizes zero- sum conflict resonates much more with non-college-educated people. Arguably, this is because college-educated professionals live really blessed lives filled with mutually beneficial exchange, while negative-sum conflicts play a very big part of working-class people’s lives, in ways that richer people are sheltered from. But it manifests in a lot of ways and leads to divergent political attitudes. — David Shor Black voters trended Republican in 2016. Hispanic voters also trended right in battleground states. In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of the country, nonwhite voters trended

14 Republican. In Florida, Democratic senator Bill Nelson did 2 or 3 points better than Clinton among white voters but lost because he did considerably worse than her among Black and Hispanic voters. We’re seeing this in 2020 polling, too. I think there’s a lot of denial about this fact. — David Shor American politics used to be very idiosyncratic, because we have this historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and all of these things that don’t have clear foreign analogues. But the world is slowly changing — not changing in ways that make racism go away or not matter — but in ways that erode some of the underpinnings of race-based voting. So if you look at Black voters trending against us, it’s not uniform. It’s specifically young, secular Black voters who are voting more Republican than their demographic used to. And the ostensible reason for this is the weakening of the Black church, which had, for historical reasons, occupied a really central place in Black society and helped anchor African-Americans in the Democratic Party. Among Black voters, one of the biggest predictors for voting Republican is not attending church. So I think you can tell this story about how the America-centric aspects of our politics are starting to decay, and we’re converging on the dynamics that you see in Europe, where nonwhite voters are more left wing than white voters, but where they vote for the left by like 65 to 35 percent, rather than the 90-10 split you see with African-Americans. — David Shor There’s this sense in left-wing politics that rich people have disproportionate political influence and power. Well, we’ve never had an industrialized society where the richest and most powerful people were as liberal as they are now in the U.S. You know, controlling for education, very rich people still lean Republican. But we’re at a point now where, if you look at Stanford Law School, the ratio of students in the college Democrats to students in the college Republicans is something like 20- to-1. Harvard students have always been Democratic-leaning, but only like three or four percent of them voted for Donald Trump. So there is now this host of incredibly powerful institutions — whether it’s corporate boardrooms or professional organizations — which are now substantially more liberal than they’ve ever been. … If you look at small donors — which, to be clear, are still mostly rich people — Democrats got around 54 percent of small donors in 2012. In 2018, we got 76 percent. People like to chalk that up to ActBlue or technology or whatever. But 2018 was also the first year where super-PACs, as a spending group, gave more to Democrats than Republicans. So these constituencies that previously did a lot to uphold conservative power are now liberal. I don’t know what all of the consequences of that are. But Democrats are now better funded than they were. And the media is nicer to us. There’s a lot of downstream consequences. — David Shor David Broockman showed in a recent paper — and I’ve seen this in internal data — that people who give money to Democrats are more economically left wing than Democrats overall. And the more money people give, the more economically left wing they are. These are obviously the non- transactional donors. But people underestimate the extent to which the non-transactional money is now all of the money. This wasn’t true ten years ago. — David Shor

15 Why do so many moderate Democrats vote for center-right policies that don’t even poll well? Why did Heidi Heitkamp vote to deregulate banks in 2018, when the median voter in North Dakota doesn’t want looser regulations on banks? But the thing is, while that median voter doesn’t want to deregulate banks, that voter doesn’t want a senator who is bad for business in North Dakota. And so if the North Dakota business community signals that it doesn’t like Heidi Heitkamp, that’s really bad for Heidi Heitkamp, because business has a lot of cultural power. I think that’s a very straightforward, almost Marxist view of power: Rich people have disproportionate cultural influence. So business does pull the party right. But it does so more through the mechanism of using its cultural power to influence public opinion, not through donations to campaigns. — David Shor So I think people underestimate Democrats’ openness to left- wing policies that won’t cost them elections. And there are a lot of radical, left-wing policies that are genuinely very popular. Codetermination is popular. A job guarantee is popular. Large minimum-wage increases are popular and could literally end market poverty. All these things will engender opposition from capital. But if you focus on the popular things, and manage to build positive earned media around those things, then you can convince Democrats to do them. So we should be asking ourselves, “What is the maximally radical thing that can get past Joe Manchin.” And that’s like a really depressing optimization problem. And it’s one that most leftists don’t even want to approach, but they should. There’s a wide spectrum of possibilities for what could happen the next time Democrats take power, and if we don’t come in with clear thinking and realistic demands, we could end up getting rolled. — David Shor So the other positive thing is that age polarization has also gone up. It’s not just that every new generation is more Democratic. Something much weirder has happened. People who were 18 years old in 2012 have swung about 12 points toward Democrats, while people who were 65 years old in that year have since swung like eight points toward Republicans. Right now, that’s a bad trade. Old people vote more than young people. But the age gap has gotten so large that cycle-to- cycle demographic changes are actually worth something now. On the Obama campaign in 2012, I calculated that demographic change between 2008 and 2012 — holding everything else constant — would gain Democrats like 0.3 points. Now, I think that number is probably two-to-three times higher. Young white people are now very liberal. And that’s going to be important. The bad news is, over the next ten years, our institutions’ structural biases against Democrats are going to become very large. People say this a lot, but I don’t think they truly appreciate how bad things are. The Electoral College bias is now such that realistically we have to win by 3.5 to 4 16 percent in order to win presidential elections. Trump is historically unpopular, so this year we can maybe pull that off. But for the past 30 years or so, most presidential elections have been pretty close. So the fact that we need to win by four points is going to decrease the amount of time we hold the presidency. People like to say things like, “Oh, but the Sun Belt will trend towards us” — I think if you actually go and simulate things, barring some large realignment, the Electoral College bias is probably going to hold steady over the next decade. — David Shor That’s the core of the problem. There used to be a lot of randomness down ballot, and there also used to be very strong incumbency advantages. In 2004, being an incumbent was worth about 11 points of vote share. Now it’s about three points. And with an incumbency advantage that low — and correlation with presidential vote that high — it’s just not possible for Democrats to win in all these states that used to be the backbone of our Senate majorities. We won an open race in North Dakota in 2012. It’s true that the bias is getting higher, and that that’s made things worse. But 90 percent of the story is that ticket-splitting used to be common and now it’s rare. And that’s not a Trump thing. Ticket-splitting was declining in the Bush era, and accelerated under Obama. And that trend line probably isn’t going to change. — David Shor The Senate was always a really fucked-up, anti-majoritarian institution. But it was okay because people in Nebraska used to vote randomly. But now they have the internet, and they know that Democrats are liberal. — David Shor As in 2016, tens of millions of Americans will look at the results knowing that their compatriots voted for a candidate whose campaign was premised on their mere presence in the United States being an existential threat to the country. For many of them, the sense of relief they find in a Trump defeat will be coupled with the understanding that much of the electorate does not recognize them as truly American, and that the faction that supports Trumpism has not only grown, but grown more diverse than it was in 2016. The outcome is ultimately bittersweet—not only because of the institutional obstacles to any lasting change, but because America’s rebuke of Trumpism was paired with a reminder of the ideology’s lingering potency. — Adam Serwer *** Trump is not “an ideology” …what sustains Trumpism is cynicism about the workings of government and the promises of democracy. If every politician is a crook, if every program is a boondoggle, if every initiative is graft, then absolutely nothing is lost by elevating a strongman who seeks to stuff his own pockets. Perhaps, unlike the crooks currently in charge, he could get something done. — Adam Serwer 17 Democracy in order to live must become a positive force in the daily lives of its people. It must make men and women whose devotion it seeks, feel that it really cares for the security of every individual. — F.D.R. Whether or not he escapes punishment, Trump could be a kingmaker of sorts. Over the past five years, he’s forged an emotional bond with his base that isn’t about to vanish; after all, millions of Americans likely accept his self-serving verdict that the election was stolen. Some Republican candidates will still look to him as the party’s de facto leader. They’ll trek to Mar-a-Lago for endorsements and position themselves as heirs to the movement he rode to power. He showed that there’s an appetite for an inward-looking nationalism, and that pumping out mistruths and conspiracy theories can have more rewards than costs. — Peter Nicholas If Trump’s abuse of social media persists, tech companies may consider “terminating his account,” Leonard Niehoff, who teaches the First Amendment and media law at the University of Michigan Law School, told me. “Once he’s no longer president, when everything he says is a matter of public interest, then you get into a fairness argument. If he’s abusing the platform, why give him more opportunities for abuse than anyone else gets?” — Peter Nicholas One way Trump can guarantee his continued relevance and keep his supporters enthralled is to flirt with the notion of running for president again. He’s done it before, teasing presidential runs in past decades only to hold back in the end. He wouldn’t need to be serious about the idea; floating a comeback would be enough to commandeer attention. — Peter Nicholas In “Common Sense,” the revolutionary pamphlet in support of American independence, Thomas Paine argued that there was “something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.” At the time, of course, he was referring to England’s rule over America. Paine likely could never have imagined that America might one day be the geopolitical island governing the European Continent—its leaders forced to petition the great U.S. sovereign for protection. This reality is what European political elites, particularly those in the Continent’s three biggest countries, are rebelling against. —Tom McTague To a cynical British ear, Macron has not rethought anything, but simply restated the Gaullist dogma that France must be seen to strain on the leash of American power without ever actually leaving the kennel. —Tom McTague

18 Particular disquiet permeated Downing Street during the Obama administration over the perceived lack of recompense for Britain’s loyalty: As one figure close to Boris Johnson told me, speaking on condition of anonymity, Britain had fought and bled alongside the U.S. for almost two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq, and had consistently invested more in defense than any other NATO member. What did it get in return? —Tom McTague Today, whatever Trump’s faults, there has been no Singaporean cataclysm for any of the countries that rely on the U.S. security guarantee: Russia has not territorially tested America’s commitment to NATO, nor has China tried its protection of Taiwan. But speak with European diplomats, officials, and foreign-policy analysts, and they s hare at least a perception that American commitment is fraying at the edges. —Tom McTague Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus international-relations professor at King’s College London, told me that the difference between the Australian and Greek crises of the 1940s and that of America’s allies today is that American supremacy after the Second World War established a ready-made alternative to British security. Today, American allies have no such alternative. China has “spectacularly failed” to use the unpopularity of the Trump presidency to step into the void and make friends, Freedman said, while the EU has struggled to agree on sanctions over a crackdown in Belarus, let alone summon the will, institutional instruments, and defensive capability to develop a functioning foreign policy of its own. —Tom McTague One of Biden’s real difficulties is going to be keeping the left and centre from battling with one another constantly. … All of the elements are here for turmoil and internecine warfare and infighting of all sorts. — Larry Sabato

19